United...?
When I began to write this book the unity "made in Japan" was
beginning to wear thin; when I finished people were slowly accustoming
themselves to a new question: they did not know whether an illusion of
unity was better than no unity at all.
We know now that we were galvanized into common action by the shock of
attack; but to recoil from a blow, to huddle together for
self-protection, to cry for revenge--are not the signs of a national
unity. Before the war was three months old it was clear that we were
not united on any question; while we all intended to win the war, the
new appeasers had arrived--who wanted to buy themselves off the
consequences of war by not fighting it boldly; or by fighting only
Japan; or fighting Japan only at Hawaii; we disagreed about the
methods of warfare and the purpose of victory; there were those who
wanted the war won without aid from liberals and those who would
rather the war were lost than have labor contribute to victory; and
those who seemed more interested in preventing profit than in creating
munitions; it was a great chance "to put something over"--possibly the
radicals could be destroyed, possibly the rich; possibly the President
or his wife could be trapped into an error, possibly a sales tax would
prevent a new levy on corporations, possibly labor could maneuvre
itself into dominance; the requirements of war could be a good excuse
for postponing all new social legislation and slily dropping some of
the less vital projects; and the inescapable regimentation of millions
of people, the necessary propaganda among others, could be used as an
opportunity for new social experiments and indoctrination. In these
differences and in the bitterness of personal dislike, people
believed that the war could not be won unless their separate purposes
were also fulfilled; our activities were not designed to fit with one
another, and we were like ionized particles, held within a framework,
but each pulling away from the others.
The attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the pacifists; not even the most
misguided could suggest that the President had maneuvred Japan into
the attack; the direct cause of the war, including the war which Italy
and Germany declared on us, was self-protection. We were not fighting
for England, for the Jews, for the munition makers. But did we know
what we _were_ fighting for? The President had said that we did not
intend to be constantly at the mercy of aggressors; and the Atlantic
Charter provided a rough sketch of the future. But we did not know
whether we were to be allied with Britain, reconstruct Europe, raise
China to dominance in the Far East, enter a supernational system,
withdraw as we did at the end of the last war, or simply make
ourselves the rulers of the world.
Matching our casual uncertainty was the dead-shot clear-minded
intention of our enemies--to conquer, to subjugate, to rule; by
forgetting all other aims, eliminating all private purposes; by
putting aside whatever the war did not require and omitting nothing
necessary for victory; by making war itself the great social
experiment, using war to destroy morals, habits and enterprises which
did not help the war, destroying, above all, the prejudices, the
rights, the character of civilized humanity as we have known them.
Have we a source of unity which can oppose this totality? According to
Hitler, we have not: we are a nation of many races and people; we are
a capitalist country divided between the rich and the poor; we break
into political parties; we reject leadership; we are given up to
private satisfactions and do not understand the sacrifices which unity
demands.
Therefore, in the Hitlerian prophecy, America needs only to be put
under the slightest tension and it will fall apart.
The strains under which people live account for their strength as well
as their weakness; we are strong in another direction precisely
because we are not "unified" in the Nazi sense. Actually the Nazis
have no conception of unity; their purpose is totality, which is not
the same thing at all. A picture or a motor has unity when all the
_different_ parts are arranged and combined to produce a specific
effect; but a canvas all painted the same shade of blue has no
unity--it is a totality, a total blank; there is no unity in a
thousand ball-bearings; they are _totally_ alike.
If the Nazi argument is not valid, why did we first thank Japan for
unity, and then discover that we had no unity? Why were we pulling
against one another, so that in the first year of the war we were
distracted and ineffective, as France had been? If outright pacifism
was our only disruptive element, why didn't we, after we were
attacked, embrace one another in mutual forgiveness, high devotion to
our country, and complete harmony of purpose? Months of disaster in
the Pacific and the grinding process of reorganizing for production at
home left us unaware of the sacrifices we had still to make, and at
the mercy of demagogues waiting only for the right moment to start a
new appeasement. Perhaps next summer, when the American people won't
get their motor trips to the mountains and the lakes; perhaps next
winter when coal and oil may not be delivered promptly; perhaps when
the first casualty lists come in....
We were not a united people and were not mature enough, in war years,
to face our disunion. When we become mature we will discover that
unity means agreement as to purpose, consent as to methods, and
willingness to function. All the parts of the motor car have to do
their work, or the car will not run well; that is their unity; and our
unity will bring every one of us jobs to do for which we have to
prepare. We can remember Pearl Harbor with banners and diamond clasps,
but until we forget Pearl Harbor and do the work which national unity
requires of us, we will still be children playing a war game--and
still persuading ourselves that we can't lose.
_The Background of Disunion_
In the urgency of the moment no one asked how it happened that the
United States were not a united people. No one wondered what had
happened to us in the past twenty years to make religious and racial
animosities, political heresy-hunts, and class hatreds so common that
they were used not only by demagogues, but by men responsible to the
nation. No one asked whether the unity we had always assumed was ever
a real thing, not a politician's device, for use on national holidays
only. And, when the disunion of the people's leaders began to be
apparent, and the people began to be ill-at-ease--then they were told
to remember Pearl Harbor, or that we were all united really, but were
helping our country best by constructive criticism. The fatal
circumstance of our disunity we dared not face. No one who _could_
unite the people was willing to work out the basis of unity--and
everyone left it to the President, as if in the strain of battle, a
general were compelled to orate to the troops. The President's work
was to win over our enemies; it should not have been necessary for him
to win us over, too.
The situation is grave because we have no tradition of early defeat
and ultimate victory; we have no habit of national feeling, so that
when hardships fall on us we feel alone, and victimized. We do not
know what "all being in the same boat" really signifies; we will, of
course, pull together if we are shipwrecked; but the better way to win
wars is to avoid shipwrecks, not to survive them.
We cannot improvise a national unity; we can only capitalize on gusts
of anger or jubilation, from day to day--these are the tactics of war
propaganda, not its grand strategy. For our basic unity we have to go
where it already exists, we have to uncover a great mother-lode of
the true metal, where it has always been; we have to _remind_
ourselves of what we have been and are, so that our unity will come
from within ourselves, and not be plastered on like a false front. For
it is only the strength inside us that will win the war and create a
livable world for us when we have won it.
We have this deep, internal, mother-lode of unity--in our history, our
character, and our destiny. We are awkward in approaching it, because
in the past generation we have falsified our history and corrupted our
character; the men now in training camps grew up between the Treaty of
Versailles and the crash of 1929; they lived in the atmosphere of
normalcy and debunking; of the Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism; of boom
and charity; and it is not surprising that they were, at first,
bewildered by the sudden demands on their patriotism.
_Losing a Generation_
We have to look into those twenty years before we can create an
effective national unity; what we find there is a disaster--but facing
it is a tonic to the nerves.
What happened was this: for the first time since the Civil War,
progressivism--our basic habit of mind--disappeared from effective
politics. The moral fervor of the Abolitionists, the agrarian anger of
the Populists, the evangelical fervor of William J. Bryan, the
impulsive almost boyish Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt, the
studious reformism of Woodrow Wilson, all form a continuity of
political idealism; from 1856 to 1920 a party, usually out of office,
was bringing the fervor and passion of moral righteousness into
politics. The passion was defeated, but the political value of
fighting for morally desirable ends remained high; and in the end the
wildest demands of the "anarchists" and enemies of the Republic were
satisfied by Congresses under Roosevelt and Wilson and Taft.
This constant battle for progressive principles is one of the most
significant elements in American life--and we have unduly neglected
it. James Bryce once wrote that there was no basic difference in the
philosophy of Democrats and Republicans, and thousands of teachers
have repeated it to millions of children; intellectuals have neglected
politics because the corruption of local battles has left little to
choose between the Vare machine in Philadelphia, the Kelly in Chicago,
the Long in Louisiana. For many years, in the general rise of our
national wealth, politics seemed relatively unimportant and "vulgar";
and the figure of the idealist and social reformer was always
ludicrous, because the reformers almost always came from the land,
from the midwest, from the heart of America, not from its centers of
financial power and social graces.
So constant--and so critical--is the continuity of reformist politics
in America, that the break, in 1920, becomes an event of extreme
significance--a symptom to be watched, analysed and compared. Why did
America suddenly break with its progressive tradition--and what was
the result?
The break occurred because the reformist, comparatively radical party
was in power in 1918 when the war ended; all radicalism was
discredited by the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, with its implied
threat to the sanctity of property. Disappointment in the outcome of
the war, Wilson's maladroit handling of the League of Nations, and his
untimely illness, doomed the Democratic Party to impotence and the
Republicans to reaction, which is often worse. So there could be no
effective, respectable party agitating for reform, for a saner
distribution of the pleasures and burdens of citizenship; in the years
that followed, certain social gains were kept, some laws were passed
by the momentum gained in the past generation, but the characteristic
events were the Ohio scandals, the lowering of income taxes in the
highest brackets, the failure of the Child Labor Amendment, and the
heartfelt, complete abandonment of America to normalcy--a condition
totally abnormal in American history.
It is interesting to note that the only reformer of this period was
the prohibitionist; the word changed meaning; a derisive echo clings
to it still. The New Deal hardly ever used the word; and the reformers
of the New Deal were called revolutionists because reform was no
longer in the common language--or perhaps because reforms delayed
_are_ revolutionary when they come.
The disappearance of liberalism as an active political force left a
vacuum; into it came, triumphantly, the wholly un-American normalcy of
Harding and Coolidge and, in opposition, the wholly un-American
radicalism of the Marxists; the Republicans gave us our first touch of
true plutocracy and the Reds our most effective outburst of debunking.
Between them they almost ruined the character of an entire generation.
For 150 years the United States had tried to do two things: first,
allow as many people as possible to make as much money as possible and,
second, prevent the rich from acquiring complete control of the
Government. As each new source of power grew, the attempt to limit kept
pace with it; under Jackson, it was the banking power that had to be
broken; under Lincoln the manufacturing power was somewhat balanced if
not checked by the grant of free land; the Interstate Commerce
Commission regulated rates and reduced the power of the railroads; the
Sherman Act, relatively ineffective, was directed against trusts;
changes in tariff laws occasionally gave relief to the victims of
"infant industries". Under Theodore Roosevelt the railroads and the
coal mine owners were held back and a beginning made in the recognition
of organized labor; under Wilson the financial power was seriously
compromised by the Federal Reserve Act, and industrial-financial power
was balanced, a little, by special legislation for rural banking; under
Taft the Income Tax Amendment was passed and an effort made to deduct
from great fortunes a part of the cost of the Government which
protected those fortunes.
_Robbers and Pharisees_
The era of normalcy was unique in one thing, it made the encouragement
and protection of great fortunes the first concern of Government.
Nothing else counted. Through its executives and administrators,
through cabinet members and those closest to the White House, normalcy
first declared that no moral standard, no patriotism, no respect for
the dead, should stand in the way of robbing the people of the United
States; and so cynically did the rulers of America steal the public
funds, that the people returned them to power with hardly a reproach.
The rectitude of Calvin Coolidge made his party respectable; his dry
worship of the money power was as complete a betrayal as Harding's. He
spoke the dialect of the New England rustic, but he was false to the
economy and to the idealism of New England; his whole career was an
encouragement to extravagance; he was ignorant or misled or
indifferent, for he watched a spiral of inflated values and a fury of
gambling, and helped it along; he refused even to admonish the people,
although he knew that the mania for speculation was drawing the
strength of the country away from its functions. Money was being
made--and he respected money; money in large enough quantities could
do no harm. Even after the crash, he could not believe that money had
erred. When he was asked to write a daily paragraph of comment on the
state of the nation, he was embarrassed; he had been the President of
prosperity and he did not want to face a long depression; he asked his
friends at Morgan and Company to advise him and they told him that the
depression would be over almost immediately, so he began his writings,
admitting that "the condition of the country is not good"; but the
depression outlasted his writing and his life. By the usual process of
immediate history, this singularly loquacious, narrow-minded,
ignorant, and financially destructive President stands in public
memory as the typical laconic Yankee who preached thrift and probably
would have prevented the depression if we had followed his advice.
His successor was a reformed idealist. He had fed the Belgians, looked
after the commercial interests of American businessmen, and promised
two cars in every American garage. At last plutocracy was to pay off
in comfort--but it was too late. Not enough Americans had garages, not
enough cars could be bought by the speculators on Wall Street, to make
up for the lack of sales among the disinherited.
_No More Ideals_
Normalcy was a debasement of the normal instincts of the average
American; it deprived us of political morality, not only because it
began in corruption, but because it ended with indifference; normalcy
destroyed idealism, particularly the simple faith in ideals of the
common man, the somewhat uncritical belief that one ought "to have
ideals" which intellectuals find so absurd.
In the attack on American idealism, our relations with Europe changed
and this reacted corrosively on the great foundations of American
life, on freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, on the
political equality of man. By the anti-American policy of Harding and
Coolidge we lost the great opportunity of resuming communication with
Europe; a generation grew up not only hostile to the nations of Europe
("quarrelsome defaulters" who "hired the money") but suspicious of
Europeans who had become Americans. The Ku Klux Klan, Ford's and
Coughlin's attacks on the Jews, Pelley's attacks on the Jews and the
Catholics, and a hundred others--were reflections in domestic life of
our withdrawal from foreign affairs.
_Left Deviation_
Parallel to normalcy ran the stream of radicalism, its enemy. Broken
from political moorings by the collapse of Wilsonian democracy,
progressives and liberals drifted to the left and presently a line was
thrown to them from the only established haven of radicalism
functioning in the world: Moscow. Not all American liberals tied
themselves to the party line; but few found any other attachment. The
Progressive Party of LaFollette vanished; the liberal intellectuals
were unable to work into the Democratic Party; and, in fact, when
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and called his election a
victory for liberals, no one was more impressed than the liberals
themselves. That the new President was soon to appear as a
revolutionary radical was unthinkable.
What had happened to the constant American liberal tradition? What had
rendered sterile the ancient fruitful heritage of American radicalism?
The apoplectic committees investigating Bolshevism cried aloud that
Moscow gold had bought out the American intellectuals, which was a
silly lie; but why was Moscow gold more potent than American gold, of
which much more was available? (American gold, it turned out, was busy
trying to subsidize college professors and ministers of God, to
propagandize against public ownership of public utilities.)
It was not the gold of Moscow, but the iron determination of Lenin
that captivated the American radical. At home the last trace of
idealism was being destroyed and in Russia a new world was being
created with all the harshness and elation of a revolutionary action.
The direction in America was, officially, _back_ (to normalcy; against
the American pioneering tradition of forward movement); the direction
of Russia was forward--to the unknown.
Few reached Moscow; few were acceptable to the stern hierarchy of
Communism; but all American liberal intellectuals were drawn out of
their natural orbit by the attraction of the new economic planet. Most
of them remained suspended between the two worlds--and in that unhappy
state they tried to solace their homelessness by jeering at their
homeland.
The American radical's turn against America was a new thing, as new as
the normalcy which provoked it. In the 19th century a few painters and
poets had fled from America; the politicians and critics stayed home,
to fight. They fought for America, passionately convinced that it was
worth fighting for. The Populists and later the muck-rakers and
finally the Progressives were violent, opinionated, cross-grained and
their "lunatic fringe" was dangerous, but none of them despised
America; they despised only the betrayers of America: the railroads,
the bankers, the oil monopolies, the speculators in Wall Street, the
corrupt men in City Hall, the bribed men in Congress. It was not the
time for nice judgments, not the moment to distinguish between a
plunderer like Gould and a builder like Hill. What Rockefeller had
done to _save_ the oil industry wasn't seen until long after he had
destroyed a dozen competitors; what the trusts were doing to prepare
for large-scale production and mass-distribution wasn't to be
discovered until the trusts themselves were a memory.
So the radicals of 1880 and 1900 were unfair; they usually wanted easy
money in a country which was getting rich with hard money; they wanted
the farmer to rule as he had ruled in Jefferson's day, but they did
not want to give up the cotton gin and the machine loom and the reaper
and the railroads which were transferring power to the city and the
factory. The radical seemed often to be as selfish and greedy as the
fat Republicans who sat in Congress and in bankers' offices and
juggled rates of interest and passed tariffs to make industrial
infants fat also.
Yet the liberal-radical until 1920 was a man who loved America and
wanted only that America should fulfill its destiny, should be always
more American, giving our special quality of freedom and prosperity to
more and more men; whereas the radical-critic of the 1920's wept
because America was too American and wanted her to become as like
Europe as we could--and not a living Europe, of course. The Europe
held before America as an ideal in the 1920's was the Europe which
died in the first World War.
_Working Both Sides of the Street_
The radical attack on America completed the destruction begun by the
plutocrats; they played into each other's hands like crooked gamblers.
The plutocrat and the politician made patriotism sickening by using it
to blackjack those who saw skullduggery corrupting our country; and
the radical critic made patriotism ridiculous by belittling the
nation's past and denying its future. The politicians supported
committees to make lists of heretics, and tried to deny civil rights
to citizens in minority parties; and the intellectuals pretended that
the Ku Klux Klan was the true spirit of America; the plutocrats and
the politicians murdered Sacco and Vanzetti and the radicals acted as
if no man had ever suffered for his beliefs in France or England or
Germany or Spain. The debasement of American life was rapid and
ugly--and instead of fighting, the radical critic rejoiced, because he
did not care for the America that had been; it was not Communist and
not civilized in the European sense--why bother to save it?
In 1936 I summed up years of disagreement with the fashionable
attitude under the (borrowed) caption, _The Treason of the
Intellectuals_. Looking back at it now, I find a conspicuous error--I
failed to bracket the politician with the debunker, the plutocrat with
the radical. I was for the average man against both his enemies, but I
did not see how the reactionary and the radical were combining to
create a vacuum in American social and political life.
The people of the United States were--and are--"materialistic" and in
love with the things that money can buy; but the ascendancy of
speculative wealth in the 1920's was not altogether satisfying. More
people than ever before gambled in Wall Street; but considering the
stakes, the steady upswing of prices, the constant stories of success,
the open boasting of our great industrialists and the benign, tacit
assent of Calvin Coolidge--considering all these, the miracle is that
eight out of ten capable citizens did not speculate. The chance to
make money was part of the American tradition--for which millions of
Europeans had come to America; but it did not fulfill all the
requirements of a purpose in life. It wasn't good enough by any
standard; it allowed a class of disinherited to rise in America, a
fatal error because our wealth depended on customers and the penniless
are not good risks; and the riches-system could not protect itself
from external shock. Europe began to shiver with premonitions of
disaster, a bank in Austria fell, and America loyally responded with
the greatest panic in history.
Long before the money-ideal crashed, it had been rejected by some of
the American people. It would have been scorned by more if anything
else had been offered to them, anything remotely acceptable to them.
The longest tradition of American life was cooperative effort; the
great traditions of hardship and experiment and progressive liberalism
and the mingling of races and the creation of free communities--all
these were still in our blood. But when the plutocrat and politician
tried to destroy them by neglect or persecution, the intellectual did
not rebuild them; he told us that the traditions had always been a
false front for greed, and asked us to be content with laughing at the
past; or he told us that nothing was good in the future of the world
except the Russian version of Karl Marx.
_We L'arn the Furriner_
The crushing double-grip of the anti-Americans of the Right and Left
was most effective in foreign affairs. Normalcy wanted back the money
which Europe had hired, as President Coolidge said; and normalcy
wanted to hear nothing more of Europe. At the same time the radical
was basically internationalist; the true believer in Lenin was also
revolutionist. Sheer isolationism didn't work; we were constantly on
the side lines of the League of Nations; we stepped in to save Germany
and presumably to help all Europe; we trooped to the deathbed of old
Europe (with the exchange in our favor); the sickness made us uneasy
at last--but we could not break from isolation because normalcy and
radicalism together had destroyed the common, and acceptable, American
basis of friendly independent relations with Europe.
Internationalism, with a communistic tinge, was equally unthinkable;
and presently we began to think that a treaty of commerce might
somehow be "internationalist". Europe, meanwhile, broke into three
parts, fascist, communist, and the victims of both, the helpless ones
we called our friends, the "democracies". By 1932 economics had
destroyed isolation and Hitler began to destroy internationalism. The
American people had for twelve years shrunk from both, now found that
it had no shell to shrink into--America had repudiated all duty to the
world; it had tried to make the League of Nations unnecessary by a few
pacts and treaties; it had flared up over China and, rebuffed by
England, sunk back into apathy. It was uninformed, without habit or
tradition or will in foreign affairs; without any ideal around which
all the people of America could gather; and with nothing to do in the
world.
The New Deal repaired some of the destruction of normalcy, but it
could not allay the mischief and unite the country at the same time.
Loyalty to the Gold Standard and devotion to the principle of letting
people starve were both abandoned; the shaming moral weakness of the
Hoover regime, the resignation to defeat, were overcome. The direct
beneficiaries of the New Deal were comparatively few; the indirect
were the middle and upper income classes. They saw President Roosevelt
save them from a dizzy drop into revolution; a few years later the
danger was over, and when the rich and well-born saw that the
President was not going to turn conservative, they regretted being
saved--thinking that perhaps the revolution of 1933 might have turned
fascist, and in their favor.
These were extremists. The superior common man was not a reactionary
when he voted for Landon or Willkie. After the Blue Eagle was killed
by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court was saved by resignations,
the average American could accept ninety percent of the objectives of
FDR--and ask only for superior efficiency from the Republican Party.
The newspapers of the country were violent; Martin Dies was violent;
John L. Lewis was violent; but labor and radicals and people were
_not_ violent. We were approaching some unity of belief in America's
national future when the war broke out.
_Quarterback vs. Pedagogue_
The New Deal had no visible foreign policy, but President Roosevelt
made up for it by having several, one developing out of the other,
each a natural consequence of events abroad in relation to the state
of public opinion at home. To a great extent this policy was based on
the President's dislike of tyranny and his love for the Navy, a
fortunate combination for the people of the United States, for it
allied us with the Atlantic democracies and compeled us to face the
prospect of war in the Pacific. So far as we were at all prepared to
defend ourselves, we are indebted to the President's recognition of
our position as a naval power requiring a friend at the farther end of
each ocean, Britain in the Atlantic, Russia and China in the Pacific.
The President's policy, singularly correct, was not the people's
policy. It was not part of the New Deal; it was not tied into domestic
policies; it subsisted in a dreadful void. Mr. Roosevelt, who once
called himself the nation's quarterback, never had the patient almost
pedantic desire to teach the American people which was so useful to
Wilson. The notes to Germany, scorned at the time, were an education
in international law for the American people; by 1917 the people were
aware of the war and beginning to discover a part in it for
themselves. Mr. Roosevelt's methods were more spectacular, but not as
patient, so that he sometimes alienated people, and he faced a wilier
enemy at home; Wilson overcame ignorance and Roosevelt had to overcome
deliberate malice, organized hostility to our system of government,
and a true pacificism which has always been native to America. Racial,
religious, and national prejudices were all practised upon to prevent
the creation of unity; it was not remarked at the time that class
prejudice did not arise.
The defect of Roosevelt's method led to this: the American people did
not understand their own position in the world. The President had
appealed to their moral sense when he asked for a quarantine of the
aggressors; he appealed to fear when he cited the distances between
Dakar and Des Moines; but he had no unified body of opinion behind
him. The Republican Party might easily have nominated an isolationist
as a matter of politics if not of principle; and it was a stroke of
luck that politics (not international principles) gave the opportunity
to Wendell Willkie. Yet the boldest move made by Mr. Roosevelt, the
exchange of destroyers for bases, had to be an accomplished fact, and
a good bargain, before it could be announced. Even Mr. Willkie's
refusal to play politics with the fate of Britain did not assure the
President of a country willing to understand its new dangers and its
new opportunities.
Nothing in the past twenty years had prepared America; and the
isolationists picked up the weapons of both the plutocrat and the
debunker to prevent our understanding our function in a fascist world.
The grossest appeal to self-interest and the most cynical imputation
of self-interest in others, went together. There were faithful
pacifists who disliked armaments and disliked the sale of armaments
even more; but there were also those who wanted the profit of selling
without the risk; there were the alarming fellow travelers who wished
America to be destroyed until they discovered the USSR wanted American
guns. There were snide businessmen who wanted Hitler even more than
they wanted peace, and a mob, united by nothing--except a passion for
the cruelty and the success of the Nazis.
The spectacle of America arguing war in 1941 was painful and ludicrous
and one sensed changes ahead; but it had one great redeeming quality,
it was in our tradition of public discussion and a vast deal of the
discussion was honest and fair.
The war did not change Americans over night. The argument had not
united us; but in the first days we dared not admit this; we began a
dangerous game of hypnotizing ourselves.