The Science of Short Wave
What we say to Europe is to be an incitement to revolution, a promise
of liberation, a hope of a decent, orderly, comfortable living, in
freedom; but it must be as hard and real and un-dreamlike as the
Declaration, which was our first word to the people of the world.
We have to begin by telling all the peoples of Europe, our friends and
our enemies, what they have done for America, and what America has
done for them. We have to destroy the slander that the Italians were
kept at digging ditches, the Yugoslavs in the mills, the Hungarians
and Poles and Czechs in the mines and at the boilers, the Greeks at
the fruit stands; we must destroy the great lie that all the "lesser
races" whom Hitler now enslaves were first slaves to our economic
system. We can begin by reading the roster of the great names, the men
who came to America and were liberated from poverty and prejudice, and
made themselves fame or wealth, and deserved well of the Republic, and
were honored.
_38 Million Freemen_
Directly after the great names, we have to tell the story of the
nameless ones, the thirty-eight million who came here and suffered the
pains of transportation, but took root and grew, understanding freedom
as it came to them, making their way in the world, becoming part of
America, deprived of no civil rights, fighting against exploitation
with other Americans, free to fight against oppression, and with a
fair chance of winning.
There is no need to prettify the record; the record, as it stands, in
all its crude natural colors, is good enough. The immigrant was
exploited, greedily and brutally; and twenty years later he or his
sons exploited other immigrants in turn, as greedily and brutally as
the law allowed.
The ancient passions of race and ritual were not dead in America; but
they were never embodied into law, nor entirely accepted by custom;
and as the unity of America was enriched by the blood of more races
and nations, prejudice had to be organized, it had to be whipped up
and put on a profit basis, as the Klan did, or it would have died
away.
_The New World was New_
For nearly a hundred and fifty years the peoples of Europe wanted to
come to America; they knew, from those who were already here, what the
plight of the foreigner was in Pittsburgh or in Tontitown, on Buzzards
Bay or Puget Sound. They knew that outlanders were sometimes mocked
and often cheated; that work was hard in a new land; that those who
came before had chosen the best farms and worked themselves into the
best jobs; they knew that for a time life would be strange, and even
its pleasures would be alien to them. They knew, in short, that
America was not the New Eden; but they also knew that it _was_ the New
World, which was enough. We have no apologies to make to the
immigrant; except for those incivilities which people often show to
strangers. Our law showed them nothing but honor and equity. The
errors we made were grave enough; but as a nation we never committed
the sin of considering an immigrant as an alien first, and then as a
man. The economic disadvantages he suffered were the common
misfortunes of alien and native alike. We could have gained more from
our immigrants if we and they were not in such haste to slough off the
culture they brought us. But we can face Europe with a clear
conscience.
What we have to say to Europe is not only that "we are all the
descendants of immigrants"; we go forward and say that the hunkie, the
wop, the bohunk, the big dumb Swede, the yid, the Polack, and all the
later immigrants, created billions of our wealth, built our railroads
and pipe lines and generators and motor cars and highways and
telephone systems; and that we are getting our laws, our movies, our
dentistry, our poems, our news stories, our truck gardening, and a
thousand other necessities of life, from immigrants and from first
generation descendants of immigrants; and that they are respected and
rewarded, as richly as a child of the DAR or the FFV's would be in the
same honored and needed professions; we have to give to Europeans
statistical proof of their fellow-countrymen's value to us, and cite
the high places they occupy, the high incomes they enjoy, the high
honors we give them; all these things are true and have to be said, so
that Europe knows why America understands her people, why we can,
without smugness or arrogance, talk to all the people of Europe.
And when that is said, we have to say one thing, harder to say
honorably and modestly and persuasively:
_That all these great things were done because the Europeans who did
them were free of Europe, because they had ceased to be Europeans and
become Americans._
_The Soil of Liberty_
This is the true incitement to revolution. Not that nations need
Americanize themselves; the image of Freedom has many aspects, and the
customs in which freedom expresses itself in France need not be the
same as those in Britain or Germany. But the base of freedom is
unmistakable--we know freedom as we know pure air, by our instincts,
not by formula or definition. And it was the freedom of America which
made it possible for forty million men and women to flourish, so that
often the Russian and the Irish, the Bulgar and the Sicilian, the
Croatian and the Lett, expressed the genius of their country more
completely in America than their contemporaries at home; because on
the free soil of America, they were not alien, they were not in exile.
One can ask what was contributed to medicine by any Japanese who
remained at home, comparable to the work of Noguchi or Takamine in
America; or whether any Spaniard has surpassed the clarity of a
Santayana; any Czech the scrupulous research of a Hrdlicka; any
Hungarian the brilliant, courageous journalism of a Pulitzer; any Serb
the achievements of Michael Pupin. The lives of all peoples, all over
the world, are incalculably enriched by men set free to work when they
came to America, And, it seems, only to America. The warm hospitality
of France to men of genius did not always work out; Americans and
Russians and Spaniards and English flocked to Paris and became
precious, or disgruntled; they felt expatriated; in America men from
all over the world felt repatriated, it was here they became normal,
and natural, and great.
Beyond this--which deals with great men and is flattering to national
pride--we have to say to the men and women of Europe that their own
people have created democracy, proving that no European need be a
slave. The great lie Hitler is spreading over the world is that there
are "countries which love order", and that they are by nature the
enemies of the Anglo-Saxon democracies. It is a lie because our
democracy was created by all these "order-loving" peoples; America is
Anglo-Saxon only in its origin; the answer to Hitler is in what all
the people of Europe have created here.
They have also annihilated the myth of race by which Hitler's Germany
creates a propaganda of hatred. _All_ the peoples of Europe have lived
together in amity in America, all have intermarried. Nothing in
America--not even its crimes--can be ascribed to one group, nation, or
race. Even the KKK, one suspects, was not 100% Aryan.
As the world has seen the German people, for the second time in twenty
years, support with enthusiasm a regime of brutal militarism, a
sinister retrogression into the bestiality of the Dark Ages, people
have wondered whether the German people themselves may not be
incapable of civilization. Their eagerness to serve any master
sufficiently ignorant, if they can brutalize people weaker than
themselves, is a pathological strain. Their quick abandonment of the
effort at self-government is sub-adolescent. So it seems.
_Germans As Freemen_
If it is so, then the great triumph of America is that in America even
the Germans have become good citizens, lovers of liberty, quick to
resent dictation. They have fought for good government from the time
of Carl Schurz; for freedom of the press since the days of Zenger;
they have hated tyranny and corruption since the time of Thomas Nast;
they have fought for the oppressed since the time of Altgeld. Of the
six million Germans who emigrated, the vast majority were capable of
living peaceably and serviceably with their fellowmen. Of these six,
one million fled from reactionary governments after the democratic
revolution of 1848 had failed, millions of others came to escape the
harsh imperialism of victorious Germany after 1870. To them, the
Germany of the Kaiser was undesirable, the Germany of Hitler
unthinkable. Yet their countrymen, left behind, tolerated one and
embraced the other with sickening adulation. It is as if America had
drawn off the six million Germans capable of understanding and taking
part in a democratic civilization, leaving the materials for Hitlerism
behind.
In any case, the Germans in America have proved that Hitler lies to
the Germans; they are neither a superior race nor a people incapable
of self-government; they will not rule the world, nor be a nation of
slaves.
_The Brotherhood of the Oppressed_
We can say this to the Germans, destroying their illusions and their
fears at one stroke. How much more we can say to the great patient
peoples whom Germany now enslaves! They have seen the German conquest
of Continental Europe; the ascendancy of the Teutonic-Aryan is
complete. What can the Norwegian or the Bulgar or the Rumanian
believe, except that there is a superior race--and it is not his own?
Fortunately for us, the European has never ceased to believe in
America, in us. Not as a military race, not as a race at all; but as
people of incredible good fortune in the world. And we can say to
every man who has bowed his head, but kept his heart bitter against
Hitler, that we have the proof of the equal dignity of every man's
soul, a proof which Hitlerism can never destroy. We can say to the
Greeks who see the swastika over the Parthenon and the Norwegian whose
bed is stripped of its comforters, and to the Serb still fighting in
the mountain passes, the one thing Hitler dares not let them
believe--that they are as good as other men. We have the proof that
under liberty Croats and Finns and Catalans and Norwegians are as good
as Germans--because they are men, because under liberty there is no
end to what they and their children may accomplish.
If we ever again think that this is oratory, we shall lose our
greatest hope of a free world. The orators were too often promising
too much because they were betraying America on the side; still they
could not falsify the truth which the practical men and the poets both
had discovered: _America means opportunity_. Now we can see the vast
implications of the simple assertion. Because America meant
opportunity, we can incite riot against Hitler in the streets of Oslo
and Prague and even in Vienna; we have proved that given opportunity,
freed of artificial impediments, men walk erect, do their work,
collaborate to rule over and be ruled by their fellowmen; and that
there is no master race, no master class.
This is our address to the people of Europe--that we believe in them,
because we know them. We know they can free themselves because they
have shown the instincts of free men here; we know they are destined
to create a free Europe.
The people of Europe have to know that we are their friends. It will
be hard for us to make some of them believe it--as the French did not
believe it when we failed to break the British blockade in their
favor. But we must persuade them--we have their brothers and mothers
and sons here to speak for us.
It was not easy for Woodrow Wilson to speak to the Germans and the
Austrians. He had no radio; his facilities for pamphleteering were
limited. But he succeeded. Our task is formidable enough; because the
radio is so guarded, it may be harder for us to reach the captured
populations. But it can be done and will be, as soon as we see how
necessary the job is.
_Our First Effective Front_
We have a job with Germans and Italians, too. Not with Germany and
Italy, which must be defeated; not with their rulers who must be
annihilated; but with the people, the simple, ignorant masses of
people, the day laborers and the housewives; and with the intelligent
section of the middle class which resisted fascism too little and too
late, but never accepted it. We have to revive the spirit of moderate
liberation which fell so ignominiously between Communism and fascism;
and we have to restore communication with the Socialists in Dachau,
the Communist cells in Italy and Germany.
I am not trying to predict the form of our propaganda. We shall
probably try to scare our enemies and to cajole them; to prove them
misled; to promise them security if they revolt. None of these things
will be of much use if we forget to tell _the people_ that their
brothers are here with us--and that we are not enemies. It has seemed
to us in the past year that we have a quarrel with more of the German
people than we had in 1918; we are contemptuous of the Italians; but
it is still our business to distinguish between the Storm Troopers and
their unfortunate victims, between the lackeys of fascism and the
easy-going Italian peasant who never knew what had hit him. There are
millions of Germans and Italians in America, who were once exactly
like the Germans and Italians in Europe; they have undergone the
experience of liberty while their brothers have been enslaved; but we
must be hard-headed enough to know that our greatest potential allies,
next to the embittered captives of the Nazi regime, are the Italians
and Germans who could not come to America in the past twenty years.
The golden opportunity of talking to the people of Europe before we
went to war has been missed. Now it is harder for us, but it is not
impossible. We have to counter the despair of Europe with the hope of
America. The desperation of the occupied territories rises from the
belief that the Germans are invincible and that they themselves are
doomed to servility; to that we reply with the argument of war--but in
the first part of our war, the argument will be hard to follow; we
shall be pushed back, as the British were, because we are not yet
ready for the offensive; so for a year perhaps our very entrance into
the war will tend to increase the prestige of our enemies. Therefore,
in this time, we must use other powers, our other front, to touch
sources of despair: our counter-propaganda must rebuild the
self-respect of the Europeans, of those who resisted and were
conquered and even of those who failed to resist. We can send them the
record of heroism of their fellow-countrymen in our armies; if we can
reach them, we should smuggle a sack of flour for every act of
sabotage they commit; and we should send them at once a rough sketch,
if not a blueprint, of a post-war world in which they will have a
part--with our plans for recovering what was stolen from them,
rebuilding what was destroyed, and restoring the liberty which in
their hearts they never surrendered.
And there is a special reason why we must speak promptly. We have to
declare our unity to Europe in order to destroy the antagonisms which
our enemies will incite at home. It will be good fascist propaganda to
lead us to attack Americans of German and Italian birth or parentage;
our enemies will say that the unity of America is a fraud, that we
have only welcomed Italians and Germans to make them support the
Anglo-Saxon upper classes--and that "good Europeans" can never become
good Americans. The moment we give any pretext for this propaganda,
our communication with _all_ of Europe is lost.
_Short Wave to Ourselves_
We cannot afford to lose our only immediate weapon. We have to
anticipate the Italo-German blow at our national unity by our own
attack, led by Italians and Germans who are Americans. We have to
remain united so that we can deal effectively with Europe and every
time we speak to Europe, we can reinforce the foundations of unity at
home. We have not achieved a perfect balance of national elements, and
in the past few years we have tolerated fascist enemies, we have seen
good Americans being turned into fascists and bundists while our
leaders made loans to Mussolini or dined with Goering and came back to
talk of peace. It is possible that a true fifth column exists and,
more serious, that a deep disaffection has touched many Americans of
European birth. We have to watch the dangerous ones; the others have
to be re-absorbed into our common society--and we can best take them
in by the honesty and the friendliness of our relation with their
fellowmen abroad. We have to tell the Italians here what we are saying
to the Umbrian peasant and the factory worker in Milan and the clerk
in a Roman bank whose movements are watched by a German soldier; the
Germans, too. And what we say has to be confident and clear and
consistent. For months the quarrel about short wave has continued and
Americans returning from Europe have wept at the frivolity and
changeableness and lack of imagination in our communications to men
who risk their lives to hear what we have to say; it was incredible to
them that this vital arm of our attack on Hitler should have been left
so long unused, that anyone who could pay could say something to
someone in Europe, within the limits of safety, to be sure, but not
within the limits of a coordinated policy. One could advise the
Swedes to declare war or assure them that we understood why they did
not; one could do almost as much for France.
Short wave to Europe is a mystery to the average citizen; he does not
pick it up, and would be only mildly interested if he did. In his
mind, that sort of propaganda should be left to the experts; as it is
in other lands. But in our case, there are re-echoes at home. Not a
"government in exile" speaks from America, but we have here part of
many nations, emigrated and transformed, but still with understanding
of all that was left behind. We have to think of the Norwegians in
Minnesota when we speak to the Norwegians in the Lofotens; the Germans
in Yorkville and the Poles in Pittsburgh should know what we say to
Berlin and to Warsaw. Our words have to help win the war, and to begin
the reconciliation of Europe without which we are not safe. That
reconciliation we have turned into a positive thing, a cooperative
life which has made us strong; we have to tell Europe what we have
done, how Europe has lived in us. We may have to promise and to
threaten, too; but mostly we will want to destroy the myth of
America-Against-Europe by showing the reality of Europe-in-America; we
will want to destroy the lie of an Anglo-Saxon America by letting all
the voices be heard of an American America; we will want to destroy
the rumor of a disunited America by uniting all the voices in one
declaration of ultimate freedom--for Europe and for ourselves.
Europe will ask, if it can reach us, what freedom will mean, how we
will organize it, how far we mean to go. If we want to answer
honestly, we will have to take stock quickly of what we have--and can
offer.