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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Proclaim Liberty!
+
+Author: Gilbert Seldes
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34890]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROCLAIM LIBERTY! ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Curtis Weyant, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                                       |
+    |                                                           |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has     |
+    | been preserved.                                           |
+    |                                                           |
+    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For     |
+    | a complete list, please see the end of this document.     |
+    |                                                           |
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
+
+
+
+
+ALSO by GILBERT SELDES
+
+On Related Subjects
+
+      Your Money and Your Life
+      Mainland
+      The Years of the Locust
+      Against Revolution
+      The Stammering Century
+      The Seven Living Arts
+      The United States and the War
+          (London, 1917)
+      This is America
+          (Moving Picture)
+
+AND
+
+      The Movies Come From America
+      The Movies and the Talkies
+      The Future of Drinking
+      The Wings of the Eagle
+      Lysistrata (A Modern Version)
+
+
+
+
+_Proclaim_
+
+LIBERTY!
+
+_By_
+
+GILBERT SELDES
+
+Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
+inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them....
+                                      Leviticus xxv, 10.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE GREYSTONE PRESS
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.
+RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
+
+
+
+
+      TO THE CHILDREN
+      who will have
+      to live in the world
+      we are making
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
+
+
+Thanks are given to the Macmillan Company for their permission to
+quote several paragraphs from Arthur Koestler's _Darkness at Noon_ in
+my first chapter. _The Grand Strategy_ by H.A. Sargeaunt and Geoffrey
+West, referred to in chapter two, is published by Thomas Y. Crowell
+Co.
+
+                                                             G.S.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+   CHAPTER I  TOTAL VICTORY                                    13
+
+  CHAPTER II  STRATEGY FOR THE CITIZEN                         29
+
+ CHAPTER III  UNITED...?                                       44
+
+  CHAPTER IV  "THE STRATEGY OF TRUTH"                          61
+
+   CHAPTER V  THE FORGOTTEN DOCUMENT                           77
+
+  CHAPTER VI  "THE POPULATION OF THESE STATES"                 92
+
+ CHAPTER VII  ADDRESS TO EUROPE                               111
+
+CHAPTER VIII  THE SCIENCE OF SHORT WAVE                       119
+
+  CHAPTER IX  DEFINITION OF AMERICA                           129
+
+   CHAPTER X  POPULARITY AND POLITICS                         156
+
+  CHAPTER XI  THE TOOLS OF DEMOCRACY                          163
+
+ CHAPTER XII  DEMOCRATIC CONTROL                              170
+
+CHAPTER XIII  THE LIBERTY BELL                                199
+
+
+
+
+PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Total Victory
+
+
+The peril we are in today is this:
+
+For the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong
+enough to destroy us.
+
+This book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies--where
+it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. It is not about
+munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to
+create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of
+America, what it has been and is and will be. And since character is
+destiny, this book is about the destiny of America.
+
+The next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. With the
+best of motives, and the worst results, Americans for months after
+December 7, 1941, said that Pearl Harbor was a costly blessing because
+it united all Americans and made us understand why the war was
+inevitable. A fifty-mile bus trip outside of New York--perhaps even a
+subway ride within its borders--would have proved both of these
+statements blandly and dangerously false. American unity could not be
+made in Japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a
+cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and
+recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of
+anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those
+of our enemies.
+
+What follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist.
+For some twenty years I have observed the sources of American unity
+and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future
+of American liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as
+it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children
+will live in the world we are now creating. I am therefore not
+writing frivolously, or merely to testify to my devotion; I am
+writing to persuade--to uncover sources of strength which others may
+have overlooked, to create new weapons, to stir new thoughts. If I
+thought the war for freedom could be won by writing lies, I would
+write lies. I am afraid the war will be lost if we do not face the
+truth, so I write what I believe to be true about America--about its
+past and present and future, meaning its history and character and
+destiny--but mostly about the present, with only a glance at our
+forgotten past, and a declaration of faith in the future which is, I
+hope, the inevitable result of our victory.
+
+We know the name and character of our enemy--the Axis; but after
+months of war we are not entirely convinced that it intends to destroy
+us because we do not see why it has to destroy us. Destroy; not
+defeat. The desperate war we are fighting is still taken as a gigantic
+maneuvre; obviously the Axis wants to "win" battles and dictate "peace
+terms". We still use these phrases of 1918, unaware that the purpose
+of Axis war is not defeat of an enemy, but destruction of his national
+life. We have seen it happen in France and Poland and Norway and
+Holland; but we cannot imagine that the Nazis intend actually to
+appoint a German Governor General over the Mississippi Valley, a
+Gauleiter in the New England provinces, and forbid us to read
+newspapers, go to the movies or drink coffee; we cannot believe that
+the Axis intends to destroy the character of America, annihilating the
+liberties our ancestors fought for, and the level of comfort which we
+cherished so scrupulously in later generations. In moments of pure
+speculation, when we wonder what would happen "at worst", we think of
+a humiliating defeat on land and sea, bombardment of our cities,
+surrender--and a peace conference at which we and Britain agree to pay
+indemnities; perhaps, until we pay off, German and Japanese soldiers
+would be quartered in our houses, police our streets; but we assume
+that after the "shooting war" was over, they would not ravish our
+women.
+
+
+  _Victory_ (_Axis Model_)
+
+All this is the war of 1918. In 1942 the purpose of Axis victory is
+the destruction of the American system, the annihilation of the
+financial and industrial power of the United States, the reduction of
+this country to an inferior position in the world and the enslavement
+of the American people by depriving them of their liberty and of their
+wealth. The actual physical slavery of the American people and the
+deliberate taking over of our factories and farms and houses and motor
+cars and radios are both implied in an Axis victory; the enslavement
+is automatic, the robbery of our wealth will depend on Axis economic
+strategy: if we can produce more _for them_ by remaining in technical
+possession of our factories, they will let us keep them.
+
+We cannot believe this is so because we see no reason for it. Our
+intentions toward the German and Italian people are not to enslave and
+impoverish; on the contrary, we think of the defeat of their leaders
+as the beginning of liberty. We do not intend to make Venice a
+tributary city, nor Essen a factory town run by American government
+officials. We may police the streets of Berlin until a democratic
+government proves its strength by punishing the SS and the Gestapo,
+until the broken prisoners of Dachau return in whatever triumph they
+can still enjoy. But our basic purpose is still to defeat the armed
+forces of the Axis and to insure ourselves against another war by the
+creation of free governments everywhere.
+
+(Neither the American people nor their leaders have believed that a
+responsible peaceable government can be erected _now_ in Japan. Toward
+the Japanese our unclarified intentions are simple: annihilation of
+the power, to such an extent that it cannot rise again--as a military
+or a commercial rival. The average citizen would probably be glad to
+hand over to the Chinese the job of governing Japan.)
+
+Fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes on; as we
+fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our
+effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to
+think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting.
+The vengeful articles of the treaty of Versailles were written after
+the Armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created
+during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been
+accepted by Americans if the United States had fought longer and
+therefore thought longer about them.
+
+We shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. But
+we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an Axis peace
+means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field
+and revolution at home, the Axis powers had to go to war on the United
+States.
+
+If we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on Pearl
+Harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by Axis
+standards, Pearl Harbor was the final incident of one series of
+events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose,
+the destruction of American democracy--which, so long as it endured,
+undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers.
+
+Why? Why are Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo insecure if we survive? Why
+were we in danger so long as they were victorious? The answer lies in
+the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the
+_reason_ has to be found in the character of those involved; the war
+is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of
+our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it
+was inevitable--and how we will win.
+
+Our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our
+present crisis, and so creates our future. That is the sense in which
+character is Destiny.
+
+We know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war
+began we knew the treachery of the Japanese military caste, the jackal
+aggression of Mussolini, the brutality and falseness of Hitler; and
+the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these
+leaders.
+
+But these things do not explain why we are a danger to the Axis, and
+the Axis to us.
+
+
+  "_Historic Necessity_"
+
+The profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of
+fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new,
+but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as
+the Feudal Order. Democracy destroyed Feudalism; and Feudalism,
+returning in a new form as Fascism, must destroy democracy or go down
+in the attempt; the New Order and the New World cannot exist side by
+side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one
+another and only one will survive. We might blindly let the new
+despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force
+since 1776; but it cannot let us live. We could co-exist with Czarism
+because it was a shrinking force; or with British Imperialism because
+its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. We could
+not have lived side by side with Trotskyite Communism because it was
+as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the German Nazis.
+
+As it happened, Stalin, not Trotsky, took over from Lenin; Socialism
+in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". Stalin made a
+sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of
+propaganda; he allowed German Communism to be beaten to death in
+concentration camps; and, as Trotsky might have said, the "historical
+obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the
+bearded old Marxian enemies of Capital, but by Capital's own young
+sadists, the Storm Troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and
+manufacturers of Italy and Germany. That is why, since 1932, realist
+democrats have known that the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It
+was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees
+of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force
+of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew
+factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from
+the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally
+of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding.
+The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking
+semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact
+with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography
+demanded a continent for a military base.
+
+The destruction of America was a geographical necessity, for Hitler;
+and something more. Geographically, the United States lies between
+Hitler's enemies, England and Russia; we are not accustomed to the
+thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for
+England's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a
+threat to Germany. Look at the other side: we are a potential
+transpacific base for Russia; our fleet can supply the Soviets and
+China; Russia can retreat toward Siberian ports and join us. So we
+dominate the two northern oceans, and with Russia, the Arctic as well.
+That is the geographic reason for Hitler's attack on us.
+
+The moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of
+the United States must be destroyed, its future must turn black and
+bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on
+its foundations until Democracy perishes from the earth.
+
+So long as a Democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living)
+survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that
+propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and
+security. In order to have security, says Hitler, you must give up
+will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be
+disciplined and ordered--because the modern world is too complex to
+allow for the will of the individual. The democracies insist that the
+rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom and
+that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet
+outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private
+life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. The essential democratic
+belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in
+the desirability of _change_; and we, democratic people, believe that
+the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that
+progress will be made. The terror of change in which dictators live is
+shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only
+thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. It
+does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death.
+
+So long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution,
+and prosperity without regimentation, the Nazi states are in danger.
+In a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love
+poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next
+twenty years are critical. Unless we, the democratic people, are
+destroyed now, the fascist adults of 1940 to 1960 will still know that
+freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery.
+
+So much--which is enough--was true even before the declaration of war;
+since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend
+themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce
+engines of war, cannot win victories. And we are equally compelled,
+for our own safety, to destroy the _principle_ which tries to destroy
+us. The alternative to victory over America is therefore not
+defeat--or an inconclusive truce. The alternative is annihilation for
+the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party
+men. They will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will
+no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the
+organization of victory.
+
+The fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their
+subordinates, they can control the world. And the purpose of their
+military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of
+the world. Even for the "self sufficient" United States, this means
+that the standard of living must go down--drastically and for ever.
+
+The policy is not entirely new. It develops from tariff barriers and
+subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best
+friends--under the Stevenson Act regulating rubber prices, for
+instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to
+Germany or when our tariff laws kept Britain and France out of our
+markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. This
+means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have
+defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could.
+
+
+  _Revolution in Reverse_
+
+The new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private
+business, buying and selling. As trade is the basic activity of our
+time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there
+is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution.
+The Communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the
+world--a house, a car, a job--shied away from the uncertainty of the
+future. But the reactionary revolution of Mussolini and Hitler
+instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not
+a mere protection against the Reds, it was a positive return to the
+days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and
+fifty years of Democracy, it blotted out the French and American
+Revolutions, it erased the names of Napoleon and Garibaldi from
+Continental European history, leaving the name of Metternich all the
+more splendid in its isolation. The manufacturers of motor cars and
+munitions were terrified of Reds in the factories; the great bankers
+and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced
+fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the
+World War--which was first political and then economic democracy.
+
+This was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but
+it had to destroy capitalism with it. The idiots who ran the
+financial and industrial world in the 1920's proved their incompetence
+by the end of 1929; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were
+exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by
+its own confessed character had to destroy them. It is a pleasant
+irony that ten minutes with Karl Marx or Lenin or with a parlor pink
+could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide.
+
+Only an enemy can really appreciate Karl Marx. The faithful have to
+concentrate on the future coming of the Communists' Millenium; but the
+sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which Marx arrived
+at his criticism of the Capitalist System. In that analysis Marx
+simplifies history so:
+
+No economic system lives for ever.
+
+Each system has in it the germ of its own successor.
+
+The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its
+geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others
+broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and
+Luther through the social and religious barriers.)
+
+With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the
+successor to Feudalism.
+
+From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his
+followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in
+the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see
+all its results--the enormous increase in the number of prosperous
+families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised
+to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into
+Communism. But to the sceptic only one thing in the Marxian prophecy
+is important. He says that in the later stages of Capitalism, it will
+become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of
+production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change
+into a _new_ system. (According to Marx, this new system will be
+Communism.)
+
+There were moments under the grim eyes of Mr. Hoover when all the
+parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. There are
+apparently some Americans who wish that the New Deal had not
+interposed itself between the Gold Standard and the Red Flag.
+
+These are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have
+studied Marx before flirting with the fascists. For even the
+rudimentary analysis above shows that Capitalism cannot _grow into_
+fascism; fascism moves _backward_ from democratic capitalism, it moves
+into the system which democracy destroyed--the feudal system. The
+capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on
+as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world
+it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has
+no future if it goes back to the past. And fascism is the discarded
+past of capitalism.
+
+We think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have
+declared war on us. Now we see how natural is the alliance between the
+European states who wish to restore feudalism and the Asiatic state
+which never abandoned it. Now we recognize the Nazi or Fascist party
+as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see
+the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. But we do not yet
+see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free
+state--and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as Hitler is to
+destroy democracy.
+
+We strike back at Japan because Japan attacked us, and fight Germany
+and Italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war
+until we understand that the Axis had to attack us and that we must
+destroy the system which made the attack inevitable.
+
+
+  _Walled Town and Open Door_
+
+At first glance, the feudal nature of fascism seems unimportant. In
+pure logic, maybe, feudal and democratic systems cannot co-exist, but
+in fact, feudal Japan did exist in 1830 and the United States was
+enjoying Jacksonian democracy. There must be something more than
+abstract hostility between the two systems.
+
+There is. Feudalism is a walled town; democracy is a ship at sea and a
+covered wagon. The capitalist pioneer gaps every wall in his path and
+his path is everywhere. The defender of the wall must destroy the
+invader before he comes near. In commercial terms, the fascists must
+conquer us in order to eliminate us as competitors for world trade. We
+can understand the method if we compare fascism at peace with
+democracy at war.
+
+In the first days of the war we abandoned several essential freedoms:
+speech and press and radio and assembly as far as they might affect
+the conduct of the war; and then, with more of a struggle, we gave up
+the right to manufacture motor cars, the right to buy or sell tires;
+we accepted an allotment of sugar; we abandoned the right to go into
+the business of manufacturing radio sets; we allowed the government to
+limit our installment buying; we neither got nor gave credit as freely
+as before; we gave up, in short, the system of civil liberty and free
+business enterprise--in order to win the war.
+
+Six hundred years ago, all over Europe the economy of peace was
+exactly our economy of war. In the Middle Ages, the _right_ to become
+a watchmaker did not exist; the guild of watchmakers accepted or
+rejected an applicant. By this limitation, the total number of watches
+produced was roughly governed; the price was also established (and
+overcharging was a grave offense in the Middle Ages). Foreign
+competition was excluded; credit was for financiers, and the
+installment system had not been invented.
+
+The feudalism of six hundred years ago is the peace-time fascism of
+six years ago. The fascist version of feudalism is State control of
+production. In Nazi Germany the liberty to work at a trade, to
+manufacture a given article, to stop working, to change professions,
+were all seriously limited. The supply of materials was regulated by
+the State, the number of radios to be exported was set by the State
+in connection with the purchase of strategic imports; the State could
+encourage or prevent the importation of coffee or helium or silk
+stockings; it could and did force men and women to raise crops, to
+make fuses, to learn flying, to stop reading. It created a feudal
+state far more benighted than any in the actual Middle Ages; it was in
+peace _totally_ coordinated for production--far more so than we are
+now, at war.
+
+The purpose of our sacrifice of liberty is to make things a thousand
+times faster than before; to save raw materials we abolish the cuff on
+our trousers and we use agate pots instead of aluminum; we work longer
+hours and work harder; we keep machines going twenty-four hours a day,
+seven days a week--all for the single purpose of maximum output.
+
+For the same purpose, the fascist state is organized _at peace_--to
+out-produce and _under-sell_ its competitors.
+
+The harried German people gave up their freedom in order to recover
+prosperity. They became a nation of war-workers in an economic war. A
+vast amount of their production went into tanks and Stukas; another
+segment went into export goods to be traded for strategic materials;
+and only a small amount went for food and the comforts of life. Almost
+nothing went into luxuries.
+
+
+  _Burning Books--and Underselling_
+
+That is why the _internal_ affairs of Germany became of surpassing
+importance to us. Whether we knew it or not, we were in competition
+with the labor battalions. When we denounced the Nazi suppression of
+free speech, the jailing of religious leaders, the silencing of
+Catholics, the persecution of Jews, we were as correct economically as
+we were ethically; the destruction of liberty had to be accomplished
+in Germany as the comfort level fell, to prevent criticism and
+conflict. Because liberals were tortured and books burned and Jews and
+Catholics given over to satisfy a frightful appetite for hatred, the
+people of Germany were kept longer at their work, and got less and
+less butter, and made more and more steel to undersell us in Soviet
+Russia or the Argentine; they made also more and more submarines to
+sink our ships if we ever came to war. Every liberty erased by Hitler
+was an economic attack on us, it made slave labor a more effective
+competitor to our free labor. The concentration camp and the
+blackguards on the streets were all part of an _economic_ policy, to
+create a feudal serfdom in the place of free labor. If the policy
+succeeds, we will have to break down our standard of living and give
+up entirely our habits of freedom, in order to meet the competition of
+slave labor.
+
+It means today that we will not have cheap motor cars and presently it
+may mean that we will not have high test steel or meat every day.
+Victory for the Axis system means that we work for the Germans and the
+Japanese, literally, actually, on their terms, in factories bossed by
+their local representatives; and anything less than complete victory
+for us means that we work harder and longer for less and less, paying
+for defeat by accepting a mean standard of living, not daring to fight
+our way into the markets of the world which fascism has closed to us.
+
+Readers of _You Can't Do Business With Hitler_ will not need to be
+convinced again that the two systems--his and ours--are mutually
+incompatible. Fortunately for us, they are also mutually destructive.
+The basis of fascism is, as I have noted, the feudal hope of a fixed
+unchangeable form of society which will last forever; the basis of
+democracy is change (which we call progress). Hitler announces that
+nazism will last a thousand years; the Japanese assert that their
+society has lasted longer; and the voice of Mussolini, when it used to
+be heard, spoke of Ancient Rome. We who are too impatient of the past,
+and need to understand our tradition, are at any rate aware of one
+thing--it is a tradition of change. (Jefferson to Lincoln to Theodore
+Roosevelt--the acceptance of change, even of radical change, is basic
+in American history.)
+
+We might tolerate the tactics of fascism; the racial hatred, the false
+system of education, the attack on religion, all might pass if they
+weren't part of the great strategic process of the fascists, which is
+our mortal enemy, as our process is theirs. They exclude and we
+penetrate; they have to _destroy_ liberty in order to control making
+and buying and selling and using steel and bread and radios, and we
+have to _create_ liberty in order to create more customers for more
+things. They have to suppress dissent because dissent means difference
+which no feudal system can afford; we have to encourage criticism
+because only free inquiry destroys error and discovers new and useful
+truths.
+
+These hostile actions make us enemies because our penetration will not
+accept the Axis wall thrown up around nations normally free and
+friendly to us; and the Axis must make us into fascists because there
+can be no exceptions in a system dedicated to conformity. The whole
+world must accept a world-system.
+
+In particular, we must be eliminated because we do expose the fraud of
+fascism--which is that liberty must be sacrificed to attain power.
+This is an open principle of fascism, as it is of all dictatorships
+and "total" states. It is very appealing to tyrants and to weaklings,
+and the ruthlessness of the attack on liberty seems "realistic" even
+to believers in democracy--especially during the critical moments when
+action is needed and democracies seem to do nothing but talk. The
+truth is that our Executive is tremendously prompt and unhampered in
+war time; the appeaser of fascism does not tell the truth; he wants an
+end to talk, which is dangerous, because he is always at war and the
+secret fascist would have to admit that his perpetual war is against
+the people of the United States. So he says only that in modern times,
+liberty is too great a luxury, too easily abused; he says that a great
+State is too delicately balanced to tolerate the whims and
+idiosyncrasies of individuals; if the State has discovered the best
+diet for all the citizens, then no citizen can "prefer" another diet,
+and no expert may cast doubt on the official rations. To cause
+uncertainty is to diminish efficiency; to back "wrong" ideas is
+treason.
+
+One of the best descriptions of this state of mind occurs in a page of
+Arthur Koester's _Darkness at Noon_. It is fiction, but not untrue:
+
+     "A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with
+     thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion
+     that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is
+     all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be
+     liquidated as _saboteurs_. In a nationally centralized
+     agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of
+     enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.
+     If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him, and the
+     execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he
+     was wrong....
+
+     "It is that alone that matters: who is objectively in the
+     right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another
+     problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he
+     recommended nitrogen. If he was not, according to their ethics
+     he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that
+     nitrogen would have been better after all. If he was in good
+     faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue
+     making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be
+     ruined by it....
+
+     "That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of
+     subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong
+     must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the
+     law of historical credit; it was our law."
+
+Intellectual fascists are particularly liable to the error of thinking
+that this sort of thing is above morality, beyond good and evil. The
+"cricket-moralists" are people like ourselves and the English, who are
+agitated because "innocent" men are put to death; the hard-headed ones
+answer that innocence isn't important; effectiveness is what counts.
+Yet the democratic-cricket-morality is in the long run more realistic
+than the tough school which kills its enemies first and then finds out
+if they were guilty. The reason we allow a scientist to cry for
+nitrates after we have decided on potash is that we have to keep
+scientific investigation alive; we cannot trust ourselves for too long
+to the potash group. In five years, both nitrate and potash may be
+discarded because we have found something better. And no scientist
+will for long retain his critical pioneering spirit if an official
+superior can reject his research. (An Army board rejected the research
+of General William Mitchell and it took a generation for Army men to
+recover initiative; and this was in an organization accustomed to
+respect rank and tradition. In science, which is more sensitive, the
+only practical thing is to reward the heretic and the explorer even
+while one adopts the idea of the orthodox.)
+
+This question of heresy, apparently so trifling, is critical for us
+because it is a clue to the weakness of Hitlerism and it provides us
+with the only strategy by which Hitlerism can be destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Strategy for the Citizen
+
+
+There is a tendency at this moment to consider Hitler a master
+strategist, master psychologist, master statesman. His analysis of
+democracy, however, leaves something unsaid, and the nervous strong
+men who admire Hitler, as well as the weaklings who need "leadership",
+are doing their best to fill in the gaps. The Hitlerian concept of
+totality allows no room for difference; an official bread ration and
+an official biochemistry are equally to be accepted by everyone; in
+democracy Hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing
+and to encourage deviations from the established principles of
+biochemistry. This, he says, weakens the State; for one thing it leads
+to endless discussion. (Hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of
+letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a
+world-scale, immense in space, enduring for all time, has the same
+terrific concentration on himself.) Hitler's admirers in a democracy
+take this up with considerable pleasure; in each of his victories they
+see an argument against the Bill of Rights. Then war comes; sugar is
+wanting and we accept a ration card; supreme commands are established
+in various fields; and the sentiment spreads that "we can only beat
+Hitler by becoming a 'total' State". (No one dares say "Nazi".)
+
+Hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into
+every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. He has
+tried to turn dissent into disunion--and he has been helped by some of
+the most loyal and patriotic Americans almost as much as he has been
+helped by bundists.
+
+We have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the
+causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of
+human action in which difference is vital with the areas in which
+difference is a mortal danger.
+
+The moment we saw the direction of Hitler's drive, which was to
+magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively
+intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more
+we were at odds. The results were serious enough.
+
+No policy governing production had been accepted by industry;
+
+No policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that
+it was operating smoothly;
+
+No great stock of vital raw materials was laid up;
+
+No great stock of vital war machinery had been created;
+
+No keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an
+integrated part of American thought;
+
+No awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an
+integrated part of military and naval thought.
+
+To this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had
+brought us--but it had, none the less, failed. For the purpose of
+disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from
+entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter
+the war.
+
+What we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a
+source of strength. It is the counterpart of the great scientific
+methods of exploration, comparison, proof. Our dissents mean that we
+continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement
+after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this
+"dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost
+daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the
+error of _change before production_ which stalled our aircraft program
+of 1917 was not repeated.)
+
+
+  _Why We Can't Use Hitler_
+
+If we "need a Hitler" to defeat Hitler, we are lost, at this moment,
+irretrievably, because the _final_ triumph of Hitlerism is to make us
+need Hitler. The truth is we cannot use a Hitler, we cannot use
+fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the
+one field where totality has always existed, which is war. So far as
+war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's
+ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field;
+but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a
+matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be
+manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (The
+United States Army has officially declared against complete
+regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the
+history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it,
+because "the War Department considers that every American soldier
+should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.")
+
+We cannot use a Hitler because we lack the time. We cannot catch up
+with Hitler on Hitlerism. We cannot wait ten years to re-condition the
+people of America, the ten vital years which Hitler spent enslaving
+the German mind were spent by us in digging the American people out
+from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in 1929. We
+are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New
+Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual,
+argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps
+in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an
+American-type dictator, a Huey Long; in wartime, when people undergo
+incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and
+the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. Otherwise
+people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. That is
+why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator.
+
+The alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which Hitler
+calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential
+substance of unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of
+one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different
+aeroplane engines. I mean the combination of elements, as they are
+combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are
+combined in the people we are.
+
+We have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always
+allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of
+this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of
+our State; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not
+by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two
+things--the standard and the variant.
+
+Now we face death--called totality. For us it is death; and we can not
+avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by
+destroying whatever is deadly to us.
+
+It is hard for a layman to translate the "strategy of variety" into
+terms of production or naval movement. The translation is being made
+every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they
+follow the technique of variety because it is natural to them. All the
+layman can do is to watch and make sure that out of panic we do not
+betray ourselves to the enemy.
+
+It is not a matter of military technique, but of common sense that we
+can only destroy our enemy out of our strength, striking at his
+weakness; we can never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm
+against his strongest. And our strong point is the variety, the
+freedom, the independence of our thought and action. Hitler calls all
+this a weakness, because he has destroyed it in his own country; and
+so gives us the clue to his own weak spot.
+
+
+  _Has Hitler a Weakness?_
+
+In the face of the stupendous victories of Germany, it is hard to say
+that Hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take London or
+Moscow in its first attempts, nor Suez. Somewhere in this formidable
+strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by
+us if we are intimidated into imitation. We have to be flexible,
+feeling out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging
+forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being
+fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough
+today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting
+steadily on the production front, intermittently on the V (or
+foreign-propaganda) front, on the front of domestic stability, on the
+financial front (in connection with the United Nations); and the war
+front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and
+transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most
+effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight
+on the ones our enemies have chosen.
+
+Every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other;
+every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights
+rises out of the kind of nation it is. This is the form of strategy
+which the layman has to understand--in self-defense against the
+petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last
+war, or will scrap everything in order to imitate the enemy. The
+layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. He
+knows that the tank and the Stuka and the parachute troop were
+separate alien inventions combined by the German High Command; but
+combinations of various arms is not an exclusively German conception.
+The new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a
+nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration
+on offensive striking power. All of these are successful against
+broken and betrayed armies in France, against small armies unsupported
+by tanks and planes; they are not entirely successful against huge
+armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love,
+an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and
+an incalculable production power on the other. Possibly the Soviet
+Union has discovered one weakness in the German war-strategy; it may
+not be the weakness through which we can strike; we may have to find
+another. We have to find the weakness of Japan, too--and we are not so
+inclined to imitate them.
+
+There is a famous picture of Winston Churchill, hatless in the street,
+with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in Antwerp in
+1914 and Churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the
+sky--an omen of things to come. At Antwerp Churchill had tried to head
+off the German swing to the sea, but Antwerp was a defeat and
+Churchill returned to London, still looking for some way to refuse the
+German system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. He
+tried it with the tank; he tried it at Gallipoli; finally the Allies
+tried it, half-heartedly, at Salonika. The war, on Germany's terms,
+was a stalemate and Germany might have broken through; the war ended
+because the balance was dislocated when America came in and,
+simultaneously, both England and America began to fight the war also
+on the propaganda level. By that time Churchill was "discredited"; he
+had tried to shorten the war by two years and the British forces, with
+success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the
+one more battleship, the one more division which would have insured
+victory--because Kitchener and the War Office and the French High
+Command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the German way.
+
+
+  _Escape from Despair_
+
+The desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought
+of fighting the military machines of Germany and Japan is justified
+_only_ if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they
+propose to us. Analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which
+war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). White opens with Queen's
+pawn to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or
+decline. If he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on
+that basis, but Black can also reject White's plan of campaign. The
+good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other
+tries to impose.
+
+We have felt ourselves incapable of fighting Hitler because we hate
+Hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act
+as he does--with more horror, more cruelty, more debasement of
+humanity, in order to defeat him. And the public statements of our
+leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we
+have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implying our
+acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect
+is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. If this were all,
+it would still leave us fighting the fascist war.
+
+The civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of
+considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's
+authoritative and decisive objection to the Hitlerian strategy of
+propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers our native
+natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be
+constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of
+inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under
+the spell of the enemy's tactics. That is why it is important for the
+citizen to know that he is right. _We do not have to fight Hitler in
+his way_; that is what Hitler wants us to do, because _if we do we can
+not win_. There is another way--although we may not have found it yet.
+
+In its celebrated "orientation course" the United States army explains
+the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them
+strategists, but to make them better soldiers. The civilian needs at
+least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of
+luck or too cast down by disaster. The jokes about amateur strategists
+and the High Command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism
+are both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on
+tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. They needed
+desperately to know in February, 1942, why General MacArthur was
+performing a useful function in Bataan and why bombers were not sent
+to his aid; and this information came to them from the President. But
+the President is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it
+takes to transport a division and put it into action; how air and sea
+power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts
+which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some
+sense of the importance of his work. The civilian in war work or out
+of it should know something about war, and in particular he should
+know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and
+appropriate and effective for us.
+
+
+  _Military Mummery_
+
+It might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military
+strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose
+lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is
+happening to them. The military mind, aided by the military expert,
+loves to use special terms; until recently the commentator on strategy
+was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from
+the field as obscure as prescriptions in Latin. It is supposed that
+doctors wrote in Latin not only because it was an exact and universal
+language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it gave
+mystery and authority to their prescriptions. Latin is still not
+understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast
+amount of business for the doctors because ads in English persuaded
+the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary
+medicines, without consulting the doctor.
+
+A rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are
+now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to
+millions by radio. They cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank
+and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of
+head tones. But they can expound the fundamentals--and so expose the
+military leadership to the _criticism it desperately needs_ if it is
+to function properly. The essentials of warfare are dreadfully
+simple--the production manager of any great industrial concern deals
+with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment;
+train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at
+chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the
+right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force
+at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for
+chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right
+chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have
+to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. The
+terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of
+instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by
+the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is
+shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or
+the good platoon leader from the second rate. The civilian, without
+information, cannot decide what to do; but, as Britain's _civilian_
+courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions
+have been made. He can tell as well as the greatest commander, that
+indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the Dardanelles
+impossible in 1916; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made
+the wreck of France certain in 1940. The civilian American who has
+taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely
+military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial American need
+not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply.
+We can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we
+are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as
+the wrong prescription.
+
+I believe that we will have to strip the false front from
+international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited
+"mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have
+to bring these things up to date because our lives depend on them, we
+can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the
+diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a
+nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different
+strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and
+thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and
+Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and
+found pretexts for good wars.
+
+We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics--not without
+help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a
+thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract
+thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we
+know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like
+ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep
+people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to
+keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The
+very fact that we are now _all_ critics of spending is a great
+advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics
+of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with
+other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that
+we are all fighting.
+
+As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about
+tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if
+I knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold
+together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is
+a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who
+organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national
+character.
+
+I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of
+variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field.
+I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a
+name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling
+that an American (or United Nations) strategy need not be--and must
+not be--the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his
+bosom, for comfort.
+
+
+  _A Variety of Strategies_
+
+The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in
+time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook;
+it is called _Grand Strategy_; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a
+specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian;
+and Geoffrey West, biographer and student of politics; both British.
+Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this
+book is a revelation--particularly it shows the connection between war
+and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own
+words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with
+progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its
+own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French
+revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a
+history of the nineteenth century--and into this war.
+
+The authors have their own names for each kind of war--each is a
+"solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to
+the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor
+rises from the country which uses it--from its methods of production,
+its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and
+its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the
+revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the
+intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering,
+throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic
+self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French,
+by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and
+small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.
+
+Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the British
+opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength
+of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of
+Napoleon. They would not come out (until they were ready at Waterloo)
+and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force.
+Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came
+years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force,
+Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of
+attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the
+enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could
+withdraw to take up positions and fight again."
+
+Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the
+average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he
+would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But
+the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a
+triumph because Wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to
+the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn
+toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the
+British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover,
+this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous
+manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the
+merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern
+England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy,
+its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms--all rise from
+the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.
+
+For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke,
+increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under
+Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the
+impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness
+and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development
+under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under
+Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale
+and initiative". Sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of
+London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations--a bullet
+is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves
+again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go
+through--unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or
+blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The
+defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of
+sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others,
+regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain
+death. _Every_ person--not merely the trained minority. This happened
+at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small
+yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were
+taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders;
+some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the
+transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth,
+without stop--the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.
+
+These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of
+warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the
+nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain
+constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the
+methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won)
+colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended
+(so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women
+are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political
+illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has
+occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social change
+affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for
+ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is
+trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be
+left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is
+to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by
+minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both--by
+pulling back into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a
+battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the
+correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas,
+he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and
+planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a
+totally different military style, the only completely Communist style
+on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist
+society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools,
+manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same
+time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated
+itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory,
+reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the
+beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for
+hundreds of thousands.
+
+The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the Japanese are another
+example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of
+China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the
+cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them,
+the armies remained. Japan's attack on Britain and ourselves began
+with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the
+islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the
+psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there
+was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making
+war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their
+requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of
+other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and
+outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber;
+ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target;
+they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another
+try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man
+should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an
+army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by
+victory. So in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate
+the Japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final
+moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned
+bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or
+death.
+
+Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have
+to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games,
+read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the
+function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a
+practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the
+physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field.
+Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we
+know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to
+keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.
+
+The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into
+terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+"The Strategy of Truth"
+
+
+The consequences of building on a unity which does not exist are
+serious. We have discovered that all war is total war; we have also
+found that while our enemies lie to us, they do not lie to their High
+Commands.
+
+Total war requires total effort from the civilian and we have assumed
+that, in America, this means enthusiasm for our cause, understanding
+of our danger, willingness to sacrifice, confidence in our leaders,
+faith in ultimate victory. We may be wrong; total effort in Germany is
+based more on compulsion and promise than on understanding. But we
+cannot immediately alter the atmosphere in which we are living. If we
+could, if our leaders believed that total effort could be achieved
+more quickly by lies than by truth, it would be their obligation to
+lie to us. In total war there is no alternative to the most effective
+weapon. Only the weapon must be effective over a sufficient length of
+time; the advantage of a lie must be measured against the loss when
+the lie is shown up; if the balance is greater, over a period of time,
+than the value of the truth, the lie still must be told. If we are a
+people able to recognize a lie too fast for it to be effective, the
+lie must not be used; if we react "correctly" to certain forms of
+persuasion (as, say, magazine ads and radio commercials), the
+psychological counterparts of these should be used, at least until a
+new technique develops.
+
+This is a basis for "the strategy of truth" which Archibald MacLeish
+set in opposition to the Nazi "strategy of terror". The opposition is
+not perfect because the Nazis have used the truth plentifully in
+spreading terror, especially by the use of moving pictures. Their
+strategy, ethically, is a mixture of truth and lies, in combination;
+practically speaking, this strategy is on the highest ethical plane
+because it saves Nazi lives, brings quick victory, protects the State
+and the people. It is, however, ill-suited to our purposes.
+
+
+  _Ethics of Lying_
+
+Mr. MacLeish is being an excellent propagandist in the very use of the
+phrase, "strategy of truth", which corresponds to the President's
+"solemn pact of truth between government and the people"; there are a
+hundred psychological advantages in telling us that we are getting the
+truth; but propaganda has no right to use the truth if the truth
+ceases to be effective. Lies are easier to tell, but harder to handle;
+in a democracy they are tricky and dangerous because the conditions
+for making lies effective have not been created; such conditions were
+created in Germany; they came easily in other countries where no
+direct relations between people and government existed.
+
+Before propaganda can lie to us, safely and for our own preservation,
+honorably and desirably, it must persuade us to give up our whole
+system of communication, our political habits, our tradition of free
+criticism. This could be done; but it would be difficult; no
+propagandist now working in America is cunning and brutal enough to
+destroy our civil liberties without a struggle which would cost more
+(in terms of united effort) than it would be worth. We cannot stop in
+the middle of a war to break down one system of persuasion and create
+another; the frame of mind which advertising men call "consumer
+acceptance" is, as they know, induced by a touch of newness in a
+familiar framework; the new element catches attention but it has to
+become familiar before it is effective.
+
+Our propagandists, therefore, must use the truth, as they incline to
+do, but they have to learn its uses. We gain prestige by advertising
+the truth, even though the use of truth is forced upon us; but we have
+not yet won approval of the suppression of truth. It is good to use
+truth as flattery ("You are brave enough to know the truth") but truth
+also creates fear which (advertisers again know this) is a potent
+incentive to action. Finally, the use of truth requires the
+canalization of propaganda; it is too dangerous to be handled by
+everyone.
+
+The propagandists of our cause include everyone who speaks to the
+people, sells a bond, writes, broadcasts, publishes, by executive
+order or private will; they vary in skill and in detailed purpose;
+they blurt out prejudices and conceal information useful to the
+citizen. They have not, so far as any one has discovered, lied to the
+people of America, contenting themselves at first with concealing the
+extent, or belittling the significance, of our reverses; presently the
+same sources began to abuse the American people for not being aware of
+the danger threatening them; and no one officially recognized the
+connection between ignorance and concealment.
+
+
+  _Maxims for Propagandists_
+
+It is easy to mark down the detailed errors of propaganda. The more
+difficult work is to create a positive program; and it is possible
+that we have been going through an experimental period, while such a
+program is being worked out in Washington. A few of the requirements
+are obvious.
+
+_Propaganda must be used._ Our government has no more right to deprive
+us of propaganda than it has to deprive us of pursuit planes or
+bombers or anti-aircraft guns or antitoxin. Propaganda is the great
+offensive-defensive weapon of the home front; if we do not get it, we
+should demand it. If what we get is defective, we should protest as we
+would protest against defective bombsights.
+
+_Propaganda must be organized._ Otherwise it becomes a diffused babel
+of opinion.
+
+_Propaganda must be unscrupulous._ It has one duty--to the State.
+
+_Propaganda must not be confused with policy._ If at a given moment
+the Grand Strategy of the war absolutely requires us to offer a
+separate peace to Italy or to make war on Rumania, propaganda must
+show this need in its happiest light; if the reverse is required,
+propaganda's job does not alter. Policy should not be made by
+propagandists and propagandists should have no policy.
+
+_Propaganda must interact with policy._ If at a given moment, the
+Grand Strategy has a free choice between recognizing or rejecting a
+Danish Government-in-exile, the action which propaganda can use to
+best advantage is the better.
+
+_Propaganda must have continuity._ The general principles of
+propaganda have to be worked out, and followed. The principle, in
+regard to direct war news, may be to tell all, to tell nothing, or to
+alter the dosage according to the temper of the people. The choice of
+one of these principles is of the gravest importance; it must be done,
+or approved, by the President. After the choice is made, sticking to
+one principle is the only way to build confidence. Except for details
+of naval losses, the British official announcements are prompt and
+accurate; the British people generally do not go about in the fear of
+hidden catastrophe. The Italian system differs and may be suited to
+the temper of the people; the Russian communiques are exactly adapted
+to Stalin's concept of the war: the Red soldier is cited for heroism,
+in small actions, the Germans are always identified as fascists, the
+vast actions of the entire front are passed over in a formal opening
+sentence. The German method has its source in Hitler; the
+announcements of action are rhetorical, contemptuous, and sometimes
+threatening; the oratory which accompanies the official statements
+has, for the first time, had a setback, since the destruction of the
+Russian Army was announced in the autumn of 1941, but no one has
+discovered any serious reaction as a result. The German people have
+been conditioned by action; and action has worked with propaganda for
+this result. The concentration camp, the death of free inquiry, and
+the triumph of Munich have been as potent as Goebbels' lies to prepare
+the German people for total war; so that they have not reacted against
+Hitler when a prediction has failed or a promise gone sour.
+
+Each of these methods has been consistently followed. Our
+propagandists on the home front began with the knowledge that a great
+part of the country did not want a war; a rather grim choice was
+presented: to frighten the people, or to baby them. The early
+waverings about Pearl Harbor reflected the dilemma; the anger roused
+by Pearl Harbor gave time to the propagandist to plan ahead. The
+result has been some excellent and some fumbling propaganda; but no
+principle has yet come to light.
+
+_Propaganda must supply positive symbols._ The symbol, the slogan, the
+picture, which unites the citizen, and inspires to action, can be
+created by an individual, but can only be made effective by correct
+propaganda. The swastika is a positive symbol, a mark of unity
+(because it was once a mark of the revolutionary outcast); we have no
+such symbol. Uncle Sam is a cartoonists' fiction, too often appearing
+in comic guises, too often used in advertising, no longer
+corresponding even to the actuality of the American physique. The
+Minute-man has an antique flavor but is not sufficiently generalized;
+he is a brilliant defensive symbol and corresponded precisely to the
+phase of the militia, an "armed citizenry" leaping to the defense of
+the country. With my prejudice it is natural that I should suggest the
+Liberty Bell as a positive symbol of the thing we fight for. It is
+possible to draw its form on a wall--not to ward off evil, but to
+inspire fortitude.
+
+_Propaganda must be independent._ It is a fighting arm; it has (or
+should have) special techniques; it is based on researches,
+measurements, comparisons, all approaching a scientific method. It
+should therefore be recognized as a separate function; Mr. Gorham
+Munson, preceded by Mr. Edward L. Bernays in 1928, has proposed a
+Secretary for Propaganda in the Cabinet, which would make the direct
+line of authority from the Executive to the administrators of policy,
+without interference. The conflicts of publicity (aircraft versus Navy
+for priorities, for instance) will eventually force some organization
+of propaganda. The confusion of departmental interests is a constant
+drawback to propaganda, even if there is no direct conflict.
+
+_Propaganda must be popular._ Since the first World War several new
+ways of approaching the American people have been developed. These
+have been chiefly commercial, as the radio and the popular illustrated
+magazine; the documentary moving picture has never been popular,
+except for the March of Time, but it has been tolerated; in the past
+two years a new type, the patriotic short, has been skilfully
+developed. The full length picture has hardly ever been used for
+direct communication; it is a "morale builder", not a propaganda
+weapon.
+
+_Propaganda must be measured._ At the same time the method of the
+selective poll has been developed in several forms and a quick,
+dependable survey of public sentiment can be used to check the
+effectiveness of any propaganda. Recent refinements in the techniques
+promise even greater usefulness; the polls "weight" themselves, and,
+in effect, tell how important their returns should be considered. The
+objections to the polling methods are familiar; but until something
+better comes along, the reports on opinion, and notably on the
+fluctuations of opinion, are not to be sneered away. To my mind this
+is one of the basic operations of propaganda; and although I have no
+evidence, I assume that it is constantly being done.
+
+
+  _Who Can Do It?_
+
+An effective use of the instruments is now possible. We may blunder in
+our intentions, but technical blunders need not occur; the people who
+have used radio or print or pictures are skilled in their trade and
+they can use it for the nation as they used it for toothpaste or
+gasoline. And the people of America are accustomed to forms of
+publicity and persuasion which need not be significantly altered.
+Moreover, we can measure the tightness of our methods in the field,
+not by rejoicing over "mail response", or newspaper comment, but by
+discovering exactly how far we have created the attitude of mind and
+the temper of spirit at which we aim.
+
+The advertising agency and the sampler of public opinion can supply
+the groundwork of a flexible propaganda method. They cannot do
+everything, because certain objectives have always escaped them. But
+they are the people who have persuaded most effectively and reported
+most accurately the results of persuasion. They cannot create policy,
+not even the policy of propaganda; but they can propagandize.
+
+All of this refers to propaganda at home. It need not be called
+propaganda, but it must _be_ propaganda--the organized use of all
+means of communication to create specific attitudes, leading to--or
+from--specific action.
+
+
+  _What Is Morale's Pulse?_
+
+This is, of course, another way of saying that morale is affected by
+propaganda. I avoid the word "morale" because it has unhappily fallen
+into a phrase, "boosting morale", or "keeping morale at a high level."
+We have it on military authority that morale is an essential of
+victory, but no authority has told us how to create it, nor exactly to
+what high level morale should be "boosted". The concept of morale
+constantly supercharged by propaganda is fatally wrong; it confuses
+morale with cheerfulness and leads to the dangerous fluctuations of
+public emotion on which our enemies have always capitalized.
+
+Morale should be defined as a desirable and effective attitude toward
+events. As despair and defeatism are undesirable, they break up
+morale; as cheerfulness leads at times to ineffectiveness, it is bad
+for morale. To induce cheerfulness in the week of Singapore, the
+burning of the Normandie, and the escape of the German battleships
+from Brest, would have been the worst kind of morale-boosting; to
+prevent elation over a substantial victory would have been not quite
+so bad, but bad enough.
+
+There is a "classic example" of the effect of belittling a victory.
+The British public first got details of the Battle of Jutland from the
+German announcement of a naval victory, including names and number of
+British vessels sunk. The first British communique was no more subdued
+than usual, but coming _after_ the German claims and making no
+assertions of victory, taking scrupulous care to list _all_ British
+losses and only positively observed German losses, the announcement
+pulled morale down--not because it gave bad news, but because it put a
+bad light on good news; it did not allow morale to be level with
+events. The best opinion of the time considered Jutland a victory
+lacking finality, but with tremendous consequences; and Churchill was
+called in as a special writer to do the Admiralty's propaganda on the
+battle after the mischief was done. The time element was against him
+for a belated explanation is never as effective as a quick capture of
+the field by bold assertion and proof. Mr. Churchill was himself
+belated, a generation later, when he first defended the Navy for
+letting the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst escape and then, a day later,
+asserted that the ships had been compelled to leave Brest and that
+their removal was a gain for the British. The point is the same in
+both cases: the truth or an effective substitute may be used; but it
+has to correspond to actuality. The Admiralty underplayed its
+statement at Jutland. Churchill over-explained the situation at Brest.
+Both were bad for morale.
+
+
+  _The Hypodermic Technique_
+
+The "shot-in-the-arm" theory of morale is a confession of incompetence
+in propaganda. For the healthy human being does not need sudden
+injections of drugs, not even for exceptional labors; and the
+objective of propaganda is to create an atmosphere in which the
+average citizen will work harder and bear more discomfort and live
+through more anxiety and suffer greater unhappiness _without
+considering his situation exceptional or abnormal_.
+
+To "boost morale", to give the public a shot of good news (or even a
+shot of bad news), is an attempt to make us live above our normal
+temperature, to speed up our heart-beat and our metabolism. War itself
+raises the level; and all we have to do for morale is to stay on the
+new level.
+
+The principle that the citizen must not consider his situation
+exceptional is one of the few accepted by democratic and autocratic
+States alike. Hitler announces that until the war is over he will wear
+a simple soldier's uniform; Churchill refuses to accept a hoard of
+cigars; the President buys a bond. In every case the conspicuous head
+of a nation does what the average citizen has to do; and because each
+citizen is like his leader, all citizens are like one another. A unity
+is created.
+
+
+  _Re-Uniting America_
+
+This completes the circle which began with our need for unity, and
+proceeded through propaganda to morale. For the foundation of our war
+effort has to be unity and the base of good morale is the feeling of
+one-ness in the privations and in the triumphs of war. We can now
+proceed to some of the reasons for the breaks in unity, which
+propaganda has not seen, nor mended.
+
+First, the propagandists have rejected certain large groups of
+Americans because of pre-war pacifism; second, they have failed to
+recognize the use to which isolationism can be put; third, they have
+not thought out the principles of free criticism in a democracy at
+war. To rehearse all the other forms of separatist action would be to
+recall angers and frustrations dormant now, just below the level of
+conscious action. Moreover, a list of the causes of separation, with a
+remedy for each, would repeat the error of civilian propaganda in the
+early phases of the war--it would still be negative, and the need now
+is to set in motion the positive forces of unity, which have always
+been available to us.
+
+_The accord we need is for free and complete and effective action, for
+sweating in the heat and crying in the night when disaster strikes,
+for changing the face of our private world, for losing what we have
+labored to build, for learning to be afraid and to suffer and to
+fight; it is an accord on the things that are vital because they are
+our life: what have we been, what shall we do, what do we want--past,
+present, future; history, character, destiny._
+
+The propaganda of the first six months of the war was not directed to
+the creation of unity in this sense; it was not concerned with
+anything but the immediate daily feeling of Americans toward the day's
+news; the civilian propagandists insisted that "disunity is ended"
+because all Americans knew what they were fighting for, so that it
+became faintly disloyal to point out that reiteration was not proof
+and that disunity could end, leaving mere chaos, a dispersed
+indifferent emotion, in its place. The end of dissension was not
+enough; unity had to be created, a fellow-feeling called up from the
+memory of the people, binding them to one another because it bound
+them to our soil and our heroes and our myths and our realities; and
+the act of creation of unity automatically destroyed disunion; when
+the gods arrive, not only the half-gods, but the devils also, depart.
+
+
+  _Myth and Money_
+
+Faintly one felt a lack of conviction in the propagandists themselves.
+They were afraid of the debunkers, under whose shadow they had grown
+up. They did not venture to create an effective myth. Myth to them was
+Washington's Cherry Tree, and Lincoln's boyish oath against slavery
+and Theodore Roosevelt's Wild West; so they could not, with rhetoric
+to lift the hearts of harried men and women, recall the truth-myth of
+America, the loyalty which triumphed over desertion at Valley Forge,
+the psychological miracle of Lincoln's recovery from self-abasement to
+create his destiny and shape the destiny of the New World; the health
+and humor and humanity of the west as Roosevelt remembered it. At
+every point in our history the reality had something in it to touch
+the imagination, the heart, to make one feel how complex and fortunate
+is the past we carry in us if we are Americans.
+
+The propagandists were also afraid of the plutocrats--as they were
+afraid of the myth, they were afraid of reality. They did not dare to
+say that America was an imperfect democracy whose greatness lay in the
+chance it gave to all men to work for perfection; they did not dare to
+say that the war itself must create democracy over again, they did not
+dare to proclaim liberty to this land or to all lands; in the name of
+unity they could not offend the enemies of human freedom.
+
+Moreover, the propagandists for unity had to defend the
+Administration. The rancor of politics had never actually disappeared
+in America, during wars; it was barely sweetened by a trace of
+patriotism three months after the war began. As a good fight needs two
+sides, defenders of the President were as happy as his opponents to
+call names, play politics, and distress the country. The groundwork
+for defeating the nation's aims in war was laid before those aims had
+been expressed; and one reason why we could make no proclamation of
+our purpose was that our purpose was clouded over; we had not yet gone
+back to the source of our national strength; and we had not yet begun
+to use our strength to accomplish a national purpose.
+
+We were effecting a combination of individual capacities--not a unity
+of will. We were adding one individual to another, a slow process: we
+needed to multiply one by the other--which can only be done in
+complete union of purpose.
+
+Some of the weakness of propaganda rose from its mixed intentions: to
+make us hate the enemy, to make us understand our Allies, to harden us
+for disaster, to defend the conduct of the war, to make us pay, to
+assure us that production was terrific, and then to make us pay more
+because production was inadequate; to silence the critics of the
+Administration, to appease the men of violence crying for Vichy's
+scalp or the men of violence crying for formulation of war aims. All
+these things _had_ to be done, promptly and effectively. They would
+have to be done no matter how unified in feeling we were; and they
+could not be done at all unless unity came first.
+
+
+  _Call Back the Pacifists_
+
+Small purposes were put first because the propagandists suffered from
+their own success. They had gone ahead of all and had brilliantly been
+teaching the American people the meaning of the European war; they
+were among the President's most potent allies and they deserve well of
+the country; the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and
+the other active interventionist groups were a rallying point for the
+enemies of Hitler, and a strong point for attack by all the pacifists.
+But the moment the aim of these committees was accomplished and war
+was declared, the first objective must have been the re-incorporation
+of the pacifist 40% of our population into the functioning national
+group. The actual enemies of the country soon declared themselves; the
+hidden ones could be discovered. The millions who did not want to go
+to war had to be persuaded first of all that _we_ understood why
+_they_ had been pacifists; we could not treat them as cowards, or
+pro-Germans, or Reds, or idiots. We needed the best of them to unite
+the country, and all of them to fight for it.
+
+Our propagandists did not know how to turn to their advantage the
+constant, native, completely sensible pacifism of the American people,
+especially of the Midwestern Americans. If the history of the United
+States has meaning, the pacifism of the Midwest is bound to become
+dominant; our part in the first World War achieved grandeur because
+the people of the Middle West, at least, meant it to be a war to end
+war, a war to end pacifism also, because there would be no need for
+it. The people of the Middle West want our position in the world to
+keep us out of the wars of other nations; they saw no wars into which
+we could be drawn. They were wrong--but their instincts were not
+wrong. They do not believe that the wars of the United States have
+been like the wars of other nations; nor that the United States must
+now look forward to such a series of wars as every nation of Europe
+has fought for domination or survival. This may be naive, as to the
+past and the future; but it is a naivete we cannot brush aside. It
+rises from too many natural causes. And the people of the Middle West
+may, if need be, fight to make their dream of peace come true; they
+will have to fight the American imperialists, whom they have fought
+before; and this time they will have new allies; for the pacifist of
+the Midwest will be joined by the pacifists of the industrial cities;
+and the great hope of the future is that the pacifists of America will
+help to organize the world after the war.
+
+_They will not help if they remain isolationists; and they will remain
+isolationist, in the middle of a global war, until they are certain
+that a world-order they can join is to be the outcome of the war._
+Again, our propagandists have to understand isolationism, an historic
+American tradition in one sense, a falsehood in another. Our dual
+relation to Europe is expressed in two phrases:
+
+    We _came from_ Europe.
+    We _went away from_ Europe.
+
+For a time we were anti-European; now we are non-Europe; if Europe
+changes, we may become pro-European; but we can never be part of
+Europe. Isolation is half our story; communication the other. On the
+foundation of half the truth, the isolationist built the fairy tale of
+physical separation; the interventionist, on the basis of our
+communication with Europe, built more strongly--the positive overbore
+the negative. Yet the whole structure of our relation to Europe has to
+be built on both truths, we have to balance one strength with the
+other. We cannot make war or make peace without the help of the
+isolationists; and to jeer at them because they failed to understand
+the mathematics of air power and sea-bases is not to reconcile them
+to us; nor, for that matter, is it peculiarly honest. For few of those
+who wanted us to go to war against England's enemy warned us that we
+should have to fight Japan also; and none, so far as I know, told us
+that the task of a two-ocean war might be for several years a burden
+of losses and defeat.
+
+The defeat of pacifist isolationism was not accomplished by the
+interventionists, but by Japan. The interventionists, because they
+were better prophets, gained the appearance of being truer patriots;
+they were actually more intelligent observers of the war in Europe and
+more passionately aware of its meaning. But they can be trusted with
+propaganda only if they recognize the positive value of their former
+enemies, and do not try to create a caste of ex-pacifist
+"untouchables." That is the method of totality; it is Hitler declaring
+that liberals cannot take part in ruling Germany, and Communists
+cannot be Germans. Unity does not require us to destroy those who have
+differed with us, it requires total agreement as to aims, and
+temporary assent as to methods; we cannot tolerate the action of those
+who want Hitler to defeat us, just as the body cannot tolerate cells
+which proliferate in disharmony with other cells, and cause cancer. We
+cannot afford the time to answer every argument before we take any
+action, so temporary assent is needed (the Executive in war time
+automatically has it because he orders action without argument). In
+democratic countries we add critical examination after the event, and
+free discussion of future policy as correctives to error. None of
+these break into unity; none requires the isolation of any group
+except the enemies of the State.
+
+The purpose of unity is effective action--more tanks and planes,
+delivered more promptly; more pilots, better trained; more people
+helping one another in the readjustments of war. It is part of the
+groundwork of morale; in a democracy it is based on reconciliation,
+not on revenge.
+
+
+  _The Limits of Criticism_
+
+The pacifists and the isolationists are being punished for their
+errors if their legitimate emotions are not recognized as part of the
+natural composition of the American mind. Criticism presents a problem
+more irritating because it is constantly changing its form and because
+no principle of action has been evolved.
+
+At one of the grimmest moments of the war, a correspondent of the _New
+York Times_ wrote that "for a while not politics but the war effort
+appeared to have undergone an 'adjournment'". At another, the
+President remarked that he did not care whether Democrats or
+Republicans were elected, provided Congress prosecuted the war
+energetically, and comment on this was that the President wanted to
+smash the two-party system, in order to have a non-critical Congress
+under him as he had had in 1933.
+
+Both of these items suggest, that propaganda has not yet taught us how
+to criticize our government in war time. The desirable limits of
+criticism have not been made clear. Every attack on the Administration
+has been handled as if it were treason; and there has been a faint
+suggestion of party pride in the achievements of our factories and of
+our bombers. Neither the war nor criticism of the war can be a
+party-matter; and no party-matter can be tolerated in the path of the
+war effort. All Americans know this, but the special application of
+this loyalty to our present situation has to be clarified. It has been
+left obscure.
+
+For the question of criticism is connected with the problem of unity
+in the simplest and most satisfying way. The moment we have unity, we
+can allow all criticism which rises from any large group of people.
+Off-center criticism, from small groups, is dangerous. It does not ask
+questions in the public mind, and its tendency is to divert energies,
+not to combine them; small groups, if they are not disloyal, are the
+price we pay for freedom of expression in war time; it is doubtful
+whether, at present, any American group can do much harm; it is even a
+matter of doubt whether Eugene V. Debs or several opposition senators
+were a graver danger to the armies of the United States in 1917. Small
+groups may be tolerated or, under law, suppressed; large groups never
+expose themselves to prosecution, but their criticism is serious and
+unless it is turned to advantage, it may be dangerous.
+
+The tendency of any executive, in war time, is to consider any
+criticism as a check on war effort. It is. If a commanding officer has
+to take five minutes to explain an order, five minutes are lost; if
+the President, or the head of OPM, has to defend an action or reply to
+a critic, energy is used up, time is lost. But time and energy may be
+lost a hundred times more wastefully if the explanation is not given,
+if the criticism is not uttered and grows internally and becomes
+suspicion and fear. Freedom of criticism is, in our country, a
+positive lever for bringing morale into logical relation to events.
+The victims of criticism can use it positively, their answers can
+create confidence; and best of all, it can be anticipated, so that it
+can do no harm.
+
+But this is true only if the right to criticize is subtly transformed
+into a duty; if, in doing his duty, the citizen refuses to criticize
+until he is fully informed; if the State makes available to the
+citizen enough information on which criticism can be based. Then the
+substance and the intention of criticism become positive factors in
+our fight for freedom.
+
+Since it is freedom we are fighting for.
+
+Freedom, nothing else, is the source of unity--our purpose in the war,
+our reason for fighting. On a low level of survival we have forgotten
+some of our differences and combined our forces to fight because we
+were attacked; on the high level which makes us a nation we are united
+to fight for freedom, and this unites us to one another because it
+unites us with every American who ever fought for freedom. Most
+particularly our battle today unites us with those who first
+proclaimed liberty throughout the land.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The Forgotten Document
+
+
+To distract attention, to put people's minds on useless or bewildering
+projects is a bit of sabotage, in a total war. It is well enough to
+divert people, for a moment, so that they are refreshed; but no one
+has the right to confuse a clear issue or to start inessential
+projects or to ask people to look at anything except the job in hand.
+
+For five minutes, I propose a look at the Declaration of Independence,
+because it is the one document essential to our military and moral
+success; it is the standard by which we can judge the necessity of all
+projects; and although our destiny, and the means to fulfill it, are
+written into it, the Declaration is the forgotten document of American
+history. We remember the phrases too often repeated by politicians and
+dreamers; we do not study the hard realistic plan of national action
+embodied in every paragraph of the instrument.
+
+The famous phrases at the beginning give the moral, and revolutionary,
+reason for action; the magnificent ground plan of the character and
+history of the American people is explained in the forgotten details
+of the Declaration; and nothing in the conservative Constitution could
+do more than delay the unfolding of the plan or divide its fruits a
+little unevenly.
+
+I suggest that the Declaration supplies the _motive_ of action for
+today; the moment we understand it, we have a definition of America, a
+specific blueprint of what we have been, what we are, and what we can
+become--and the action necessary for our future evolves from this;
+moreover the unnecessary action is likewise defined. Our course before
+we were attacked and our plans for the world after the war may seem
+the mere play of prejudice and chance; but the destiny of America
+will be determined not by the affections of one group or the fears of
+another, nor by hysteria and passion; our fate will be determined by
+the whole course of our history--and by our decision to continue its
+direction or to reverse it.
+
+The rest of this book flows out of this belief in the decisive role of
+the Declaration, but it does not attempt to indicate a course of
+action in detail. For the sake of illustration I cite these instances.
+
+_Q._ Should the U.S. try to democratize the Germans or accept the view
+that the Germans are a race incapable of self-government?
+
+_A._ The history of immigration, based on the Declaration, proves that
+Germans are capable of being good and great democratic citizens.
+
+_Q._ Can the U.S. unite permanently with any single nation or any
+exclusive group of nations?
+
+_A._ Our history, under the Declaration, makes it impossible.
+
+_Q._ Can the U.S. join a world federation regulating specific economic
+problems, such as access to raw materials, tariffs, etc.?
+
+_A._ Nothing in the Declaration is against, everything in our history
+is for, such a move.
+
+_Q._ Can the U.S. fight the war successfully without accepting the
+active principles of the Totalitarian States?
+
+_A._ If our history is any guide, the only way we can _lose_ the war
+is by failing to fight it in our own way.
+
+I have already indicated the possibility that our whole military grand
+plan must be based on variety, which is the characteristic of America
+created by specific passages in the Declaration; I am sure that the
+whole grand plan of civilian unity (the plan of morale and propaganda)
+has to return to the leading lines of our history, if we want to act
+quickly, harmoniously and effectively; and the peace we make will be
+another Versailles, with another Article X in the Covenant, if we make
+it without returning to the sources of our strength.
+
+So, if we want to win in the field and at home, win the war and the
+peace, we must be aware of our history and of the principles laid down
+in 1776 and never, in the long run, betrayed.
+
+
+  _To Whom It May Concern_
+
+The Declaration is in four parts and all of them have some bearing on
+the present.
+
+The first explains why the Declaration is issued. The words are so
+familiar that their significance is gone; but if we remember that days
+were spent in revision and the effect of every word was calculated, we
+can assume that there are no accidents, that the Declaration is
+precise and says what it means. Here is the passage:
+
+     "_When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
+     one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
+     them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,
+     the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and
+     of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
+     of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
+     impel them to the separation._"
+
+The first official utterance of America is based on _human
+necessity_--not the necessity of princes or powers.
+
+It is the utterance of a people, not a nation. It invokes first Nature
+and then Nature's God as lawgivers.
+
+It asks independence and equality--in the same phrase; the habit of
+nations, to enslave or be enslaved, is not to be observed in the New
+World.
+
+And finally "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; the first
+utterance of America is addressed not to the nations of the world, but
+to the men and women who inhabit them.
+
+_Human--people--Nature--Nature's God--mankind._
+
+These are the words boldly written across the map of America. A
+century and a half of change have not robbed one of them of their
+power--because they were not fad-words, not the catchwords of a
+revolution; they were words with cold clear meanings--and they
+destroyed feudalism in Europe for a hundred and sixty years.
+
+The practical application of the preamble is this: whenever we have
+spoken to the people of other nations, as we did in the Declaration,
+we have been successful; we have failed only when we have addressed
+ourselves to governments. The time is rapidly coming when our only
+communication with Europe must be over the heads of its rulers, to the
+people. It does not seem practical; but we shall see later that, for
+us, it has always been good politics.
+
+
+  _The Logic of Freedom_
+
+The next passage in the Declaration is the one with all the
+quotations. There can be little harm in reprinting it:
+
+     "_We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
+     created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
+     certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
+     and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
+     Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
+     powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form
+     of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
+     Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
+     new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
+     organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
+     likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,
+     will dictate that Governments long established should not be
+     changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
+     experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to
+     suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
+     abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
+     long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the
+     same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute
+     Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off
+     such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
+     security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these
+     Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them
+     to alter their former System of Government The history of the
+     present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries
+     and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment
+     of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let
+     Facts be submitted to a candid world._"
+
+Starting off with a rhetorical device--the pretense that its heresies
+are acceptable commonplaces, this long paragraph builds a philosophy
+of government on the unproved and inflammatory assumptions which it
+calls "self-evident". The self-evident truths are, in effect, _the
+terms agreed upon by the signers_. These signers now appear for the
+first time, they say "_we_ hold", they say that, to themselves,
+certain truths are self-evident. The first three of "these truths" are
+some general statements about "all men"; the fourth and fifth tell why
+governments are established and why they should be overthrown. These
+two are the objective of the first three; but they have been neglected
+in favor of adolescent disputation over the equality of men at birth,
+and they have been forgotten in our adult pursuit of happiness which
+has often made us forget that life and liberty, no less than large
+incomes, are among our inalienable rights.
+
+The historians of the Declaration always remind us of John Locke's
+principle that governments exist only to protect property; when States
+fail they cease to be legitimate, they can be overthrown; and Locke is
+taken to be, more than Rousseau, the inspiration of the Declaration.
+The Declaration, it happens, never mentions the right to own property;
+but the argument for revolution is essentially the same: when a
+government ceases to function, it should be overthrown. The critical
+point is the definition of the chief duty of a government. The
+Colonists, in the Declaration, said it is to secure certain rights to
+all men; not to guarantee privileges granted by the State, but to
+protect rights which are born when men are born, in them, with
+them--inalienably theirs.
+
+So the Declaration sets us for ever in opposition to the totalitarian
+State--for that State has all the inalienable rights, and the people
+exist only to protect the State.
+
+The catalogue of rights is comparatively unimportant; once we agree
+that the State exists to secure inherent rights, the great
+revolutionary stride has been taken; and immediately we see that our
+historic opposition to Old Europe is of a piece with our present
+opposition to Hitler. The purpose of our State is not the purpose of
+the European States; we might work with them, side by side, but a
+chemical union would result only in an explosion.
+
+There is one word artfully placed in the description of the State; the
+Declaration does not say that governments derive their powers from the
+consent of the governed. It says that governments instituted among men
+to protect their rights "derive their _just_ powers from the consent of
+the governed". Always realistic, the Declaration recognizes the
+tendency of governors to reach out for power and to absorb whatever the
+people fail to hold. The idea of consent is also revolutionary--but the
+moment "inalienability" is granted, consent to be governed _must_
+follow. The fascist state recognizes _no_ inalienable right, and needs
+no consent from its people.
+
+It is "self-evident", I think, that we have given wrong values to the
+three elements involved. We have talked about the "pursuit of
+happiness"; we have been impressed by the idea of any right being ours
+"for keeps", inalienable; and we have never thought much about the
+fundamental radicalism of the Declaration: that it makes government
+our servant, instructed _by us_ to protect our rights. The chain of
+reasoning, as the Declaration sets it forth, leads to a practical
+issue:
+
+  All men are created equal--their equality lies in their having
+    rights;
+
+  these rights cannot be alienated;
+
+  governments are set up to prevent alienation;
+
+  power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people
+    to the government;
+
+  and if one government fails, the people give the power to
+    another.
+
+So in the first three hundred words of the Declaration the purpose of
+our government is logically developed.
+
+
+  _Blueprint of America_
+
+There follows first a general and then a particular condemnation of
+the King of England. This is the longest section of the Declaration.
+It is the section no one bothers to read; the statute of limitations
+has by this time outlawed our bill of complaint against George the
+Third. But the grievances of the Colonials were not high-pitched
+trifles; every complaint rises out of a definite desire to live under
+a decent government; and the whole list is like a picture, seen in
+negative, of the actual government the Colonists intended to set up;
+and the basic habits of American life, its great traditions, its good
+fortune and its deficiencies are all foreshadowed in this middle
+section. Here--for the sake of completeness--is the section:
+
+"_He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary
+for the public good._
+
+"_He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and
+pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his
+Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly
+neglected to attend them._
+
+"_He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large
+districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of
+Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and
+formidable to tyrants only._
+
+"_He has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual,
+uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public
+Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with
+his measures._
+
+"_He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with
+manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people._
+
+"_He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause
+others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of
+Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise;
+the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of
+invasion from without, and convulsions within._
+
+Here I omit one "count", reserved for separate consideration.
+
+"_He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his
+Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers._
+
+"_He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of
+their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries._
+
+"_He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of
+Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance._
+
+"_He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without
+the Consent of our legislatures._
+
+"_He has affected to render the Military Independent of and superior
+to the Civil power._
+
+"_He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign
+to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent
+to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For quartering large bodies of
+armed troops among us: For protecting them by a mock Trial from
+punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants
+of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the
+world: For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by
+jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended
+offenses: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a
+neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government,
+and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and
+fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these
+Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable
+Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For
+suspending our own Legislatures and declaring themselves invested with
+power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever._
+
+"_He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his
+Protection and waging War against us._
+
+"_He has plundered our seas, ravished our Coasts, burnt our towns, and
+destroyed the lives of our people._
+
+"_He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries
+to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun
+with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
+most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized
+nation._
+
+"_He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high
+Seas to bear Arms against friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves
+by their Hands._
+
+"_He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored
+to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
+Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction
+of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions
+We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated
+Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose
+character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is
+unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in
+attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to
+time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable
+jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of
+our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native
+justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our
+common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably
+interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf
+to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore,
+acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold
+them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace
+Friends._"
+
+The eighteen paragraphs of denunciation fall into seven general
+sections:
+
+  The King has thwarted representative government;
+
+  he has obstructed justice;
+
+  he has placed military above civil power;
+
+  he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed;
+
+  he has abolished the rule of Law;
+
+  he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity
+    of the Colonies;
+
+  he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war
+    on them.
+
+So the bill of complaint signifies these things about the Founders of
+our Country:
+
+  They demanded government with the consent, by the
+    representatives, of the governed.
+
+  They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not
+    tolerate any power superior to law--whether royal or military.
+
+  They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats,
+    wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the
+    establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.
+
+  They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no
+    restraints on commerce and industry.
+
+  They intended to be prosperous.
+
+  They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.
+
+These were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in
+England or France; they were the practical application of Locke and
+Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and the Roundheads. Little in the
+whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies;
+troops had been quartered in Ireland, trial by jury suspended in
+England, tyrants then as now created their Praetorian guard or Storm
+Troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early
+time had been considered as tributaries of the Mother Country.
+
+
+  _The Practical "Dream"_
+
+The American Colonists were about to break the traditions of European
+settlement, and with it the traditions of European government. And,
+with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence,
+they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one
+specification which had never been made before, and _could_ never have
+been made before:
+
+"_He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for
+that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
+refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
+raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands._"
+
+This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on
+representative government; it is so important that it comes before the
+items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor
+in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to
+understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our
+systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our
+mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the
+act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this
+unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its
+basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be.
+
+This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two
+processes by which America was made:
+
+    Immigration
+    Pioneering
+
+With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which
+means political equality, in between the two other factors.
+Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth,
+the new thing in the new world, that one could _become_ what one
+willed and worked to become--one could, regardless of birth or race or
+creed, _become an American_.
+
+So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of
+populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had
+no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the
+habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their
+prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to
+Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to
+America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in
+Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not
+a dream, but something grander and greater--citizenship, equality
+under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his
+ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the
+colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many
+lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands
+from the Appalachians to the Mississippi--or as much of it as they
+could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763,
+the Crown took over _all_ title to the 250,000 square miles of land
+which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the
+best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man
+could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no
+common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America,
+uninterrupted since 1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move
+westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become
+Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the
+forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was
+one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not
+across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had
+taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was
+broken; they were cut off from Europe, forbidden to bring over its
+men, forbidden to send over their goods. For the first time America
+was isolated from Europe.
+
+So the British Crown touched every focal spot--and bruised it. The
+outward movement, to and from Europe, always fruitful for America, was
+stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. The
+energies of America had always expressed themselves in movement; when
+an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then
+the explosion of forces we call the Revolution.
+
+And nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the
+Revolution created. The thing that people afterward chose to call "the
+American dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the
+substantial fabric of American life--a systematic linking of free
+land, free trade, free citizenship, in a free society.
+
+A grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the
+Declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the
+Constitution. As Charles Beard is often made the authority for this
+economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of
+the Declaration may be cited in evidence:
+
+  the great estates were broken up;
+
+  the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally
+    broken;
+
+  in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted
+    and it disappeared steadily from the old.
+
+And the Ordnance of 1787, last great act of the Continental Congress,
+inspired by the Declaration, created the Northwest Territory, the
+heart of America for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and
+intelligence which the Constitution in all its wisdom did not surpass.
+
+That is what the Declaration accomplished. It set in action _all_ the
+forces that ultimately made America. The action rose out of the final
+section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as
+"Representatives of the United States of America", the signers declare
+that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and
+Independent States...." In this clear insight, the Declaration says
+that the things separating one people from another have already
+happened--differences in experiences, desires, habits--and that the
+life of the Colonies is already so independent of Britain that the
+purely political bond must be dissolved.
+
+"_WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America,
+in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the
+world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by
+authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and
+declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be,
+Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all
+Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection
+between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally
+dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full
+Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
+Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States
+may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm
+reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to
+each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor._"
+
+So finally, as a unity of free and independent States, the new nation
+arrogates to itself four specific powers:
+
+    To levy war
+      conclude peace
+      contract alliances
+      establish commerce.
+
+Only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a
+vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant
+that they had to be separately written down; three of
+them--war--peace--alliances--are wholly international; the fourth,
+commerce, at least partly so. The signers of the Declaration made no
+mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain
+independent, they were fighting _against_ isolation.
+
+The error we must not make about the Declaration is to think of it as
+a purely domestic document, dealing with taxes and election of
+representatives and Redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our
+national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our
+life out of English hands; and the moment this is done, the
+Declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations,
+and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of Europe.
+
+At this moment our intercourse with the nations of Europe is a matter
+of life and death--death to the destroyer of free Europe or death to
+ourselves; but if we live, life for all Europe, also. Like parachute
+troops, our address to Europe must precede our armies; we have to know
+what to say to Europe, to whom to say, how to say it. And the answer
+was provided by the Declaration which let all Europe come to us--but
+held us independent of all Europe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"The Population of These States"
+
+
+In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and
+it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to
+generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation
+it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to
+prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to
+the picture it distorts.
+
+
+  _English-Speaking Aliens_
+
+The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic,
+Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her
+husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying
+beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly
+false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the
+most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the
+bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly
+_one third of all_ the immigrants to the United States, were
+English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was
+from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal
+sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one
+finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years;
+Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement
+to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one
+of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably
+was the principal source for thirty years more--from 1790 until
+1820--during which time no official figures were kept.
+
+Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve
+spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the
+tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from
+British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all
+knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions
+fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or
+political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends
+already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the
+country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their
+upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and
+willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without
+causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the
+national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new
+nation.
+
+It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants;
+they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they
+helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by
+abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even
+when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain
+British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of
+change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the
+minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an
+American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the
+man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a
+Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America
+in the mold of his old country.
+
+
+  _Who Asked Them to Come?_
+
+The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it
+makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the
+foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later
+the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to
+America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals
+as well as saints. The picture is false not only in perspective, but
+in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the
+middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United
+States actively desired and solicited immigration.
+
+Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell
+off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who
+had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder
+brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first
+years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens
+into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the
+railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the
+Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age
+and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and
+again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for
+shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.
+
+Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any
+restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might
+demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner
+(the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a
+fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The
+only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not
+lower the totals.
+
+
+  _America Was Fulfilment!_
+
+The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact
+without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was
+the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did
+not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to
+the only poverty which is degrading--the poverty which is accepted as
+permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden
+mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas,
+brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steamship
+agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its
+immigrants--the promise and hope of better things for their children.
+America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.
+
+No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that
+the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater
+comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a
+projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction
+against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with
+luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income,
+in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and
+disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others.
+The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much.
+At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the
+Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen
+other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they
+had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand
+transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the
+new world.
+
+And this confidence--which was always justified--became as much a part
+of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system,
+our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our
+passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other
+essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from
+all other nations.
+
+The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself
+there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he
+could _become_ an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute
+specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of
+the country.
+
+As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the
+native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political
+rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the
+government placed anything in the way of social equality; the
+immigrant's life was his own to make.
+
+This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or
+Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or
+brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the
+life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six
+generations, get along without him.
+
+
+  _America Is Various_
+
+During the years in which big business solicited immigration and
+organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an
+unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was
+"working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people
+who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were
+wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived,
+forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with
+an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at
+the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly
+foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of
+unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization;
+sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately
+isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be
+kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of
+comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and
+Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories,
+living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to
+the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming
+in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with
+America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in
+Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it
+is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ...
+a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ...
+dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized
+Europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious
+leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could
+accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood"
+difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)
+
+The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from
+South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs
+and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over
+"assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's
+existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find
+a place--not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding
+uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as
+typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him,
+seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety
+the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of
+religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a
+universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country
+out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw
+infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and
+admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action
+was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit
+that the important action of creating America had come to an end.
+James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future
+"could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in
+an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far
+better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better
+world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one
+ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof
+of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and
+cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it
+politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us
+against the totalitarians who were yet to come.
+
+This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more
+practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something
+celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done _to_ the
+foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to
+be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but
+consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not
+become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as
+Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience
+of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the
+America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native
+born and the older immigrants wept because _their_ America and their
+way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them
+by; America had to be reborn.
+
+So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and
+the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and
+prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not
+observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and
+relatively unimportant.
+
+The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social
+discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to
+slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good
+land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions;
+second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took
+scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty
+work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.
+
+But the practical people forgot the great practical side--which is
+also the mystical side--of our immigration. For the first time since
+the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made
+possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As
+Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through
+faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the
+eyes of God, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom
+spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a
+Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or
+alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their
+faith could make of them true Americans.
+
+The instant practical consequences of this new element in human
+history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of
+early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and
+explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans
+into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to
+Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and
+energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and
+Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of
+trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.
+
+This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical
+as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation
+stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a
+practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration
+invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality,
+snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy
+life--and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was
+as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had
+other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep
+under the roots of the European system--and loosened them so that a
+tremor could shake the system entirely.
+
+
+  _Change and Status_
+
+For the European system stood against _becoming_; its objective was to
+remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of
+time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady
+long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it
+possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons,
+its symbols, its systems--including the symbols and the systems by
+which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious
+complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men
+from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over
+Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations
+waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors
+thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably
+Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and
+Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or
+hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts
+came--the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In
+each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each
+country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted.
+And in each country one class--the same class--ruled, and all other
+classes served.
+
+By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established
+church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but
+the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his _station_
+in life, his civil _status_, the _standing_ of his family in the
+financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo
+remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a
+middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while
+an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment
+imagined that he could become an Englishman--any more than a Scot. The
+English knew that names change; men do not.
+
+_Only when they came to America, they did._
+
+They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming
+American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive
+nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established
+religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.
+
+To the familiar European systems of damnation--by original sin, by economic
+determinism, by pre-natal influence--has been added a new one--damnation by
+racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth
+of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born
+German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the
+inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to
+its loftiest point.
+
+We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal.
+The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and
+into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably
+suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled
+with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there
+is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor,
+huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both
+capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human
+beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we
+look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations.
+What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human
+liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human
+liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change
+and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our
+system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation
+excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant
+citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but
+we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it
+in _our_ schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate,
+but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the
+ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we
+abandon it, we nazify ourselves--and destroy the foundation of the
+Republic.
+
+
+  _Americans All_
+
+Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good
+Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our
+settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of
+fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the
+language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought
+from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second
+generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have
+encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss
+in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are
+being made to create a general American interest in the separate
+cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not
+lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for
+the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of
+Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their
+country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be
+interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that
+Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding
+to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant
+danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the
+supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense
+100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done
+to help all the others.
+
+Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of
+Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the
+President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that
+we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added
+"and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.)
+Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in
+American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All
+series and, especially, from the difficulties encountered, as well as
+from one special element of success.
+
+I set down some basic principles: that the programs would not
+_glorify_ one national group after another; that the interrelation of
+each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast
+obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would
+be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered
+if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be
+paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making
+of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the
+special contribution of any single group.
+
+These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was
+knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group
+would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious
+was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to
+the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own.
+We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national
+sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently
+ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's
+own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of
+the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American
+backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole
+problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested
+in America.
+
+On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More
+than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and
+women who were _not_ descendants of the national group presented that
+week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were
+from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the
+other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and
+Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and
+Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects
+of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were
+so much better Americans than anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred
+thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit;
+the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a
+fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to
+us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.
+
+Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the
+immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and
+that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for
+ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United
+States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American"
+will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater
+significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid
+down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government
+has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the
+colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant
+"colonies" as spies.
+
+If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the
+legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost
+in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be
+safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars,
+degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish
+itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with
+variations).
+
+
+  _Are We Anglo-Saxon?_
+
+At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American"
+become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions
+about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as
+Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the
+Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth
+and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with
+Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status, not
+on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor
+of those who did most for our history.
+
+There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which
+is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots--and the
+Scots-Irish--founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards
+to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain
+basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were
+good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were
+great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty
+and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War
+of Independence.
+
+Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and
+everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and
+purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in
+George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick
+but not in Eleuthère Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing
+and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his
+associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in
+Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as
+un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's
+test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was
+destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have
+to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz
+and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul
+Robeson and Jonas Lie.
+
+When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to
+belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For
+the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic
+manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the
+earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and
+presently they and their children were troubling about education, or
+civil service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free
+association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special
+fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will
+be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the
+settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples--and when
+they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged
+America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be
+destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make
+us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe
+(especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to
+destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.
+
+That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the
+help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never
+was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and
+Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and
+Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers,
+Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots,
+Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians.
+In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six
+nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots,
+Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many
+Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.
+
+
+  _The Creative Anglo-Saxon_
+
+The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America--the gift
+greater than all their other great gifts--was the conception of a
+state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By
+the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the
+Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they
+destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of
+Independence, the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was
+not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in
+England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality;
+on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were
+becoming American, even before a new nation was born.
+
+All that followed--the vast complexity of creating America, would have
+been impossible without that first supreme act of creative
+self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period
+established the principles of statehood and naturalization and
+citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they
+ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English
+and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still
+some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from
+New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the
+Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere;
+but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw.
+Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could
+_become_ equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of
+that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this
+country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else.
+With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives
+and sacred honor that it would happen again.
+
+So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations
+contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have
+to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the
+others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was
+theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.
+
+In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an
+immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will
+change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and
+starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order
+in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some
+of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have
+learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are
+powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be
+left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.
+
+But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the
+great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization--the idea
+of men making themselves over--as for a century and a half they have
+made themselves into Americans.
+
+
+  _An Experiment in Evolution_
+
+NOTE: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined it as it
+defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to
+mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us,
+we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential
+affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.
+
+Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a
+particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain
+foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for
+all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are
+basically haters of all foreigners will say that the _law_ accepts
+citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.
+
+It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and
+people are often the truest words about America; and one of the
+profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet
+or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly
+true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.
+
+In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we
+are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments.
+We can observe and compare. Under the inspiration of the eminent
+anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as
+it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans.
+Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they
+walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend
+to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm
+or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or
+standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.
+
+The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture.
+The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of
+Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American
+mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant).
+The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew
+is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the
+other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and
+one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the
+other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign";
+and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are
+foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself.
+The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American
+gesture takes its place.
+
+And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing
+in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as
+certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature
+changes in the atmosphere of liberty--as the mind and the spirit
+change.
+
+The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind
+(under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in
+America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom
+declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any
+race because they knew that the men of all races would become
+Americans. Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved
+today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in
+action.
+
+It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now
+have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in
+Europe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Address to Europe
+
+
+The communications of America and Europe have always run in two
+channels: our fumbling, foolish diplomacy, our direct, candid,
+successful dealings with the people.
+
+Our first word was to the people of Europe; the Declaration of
+Independence tried to incite the British people against their own
+Parliament; and the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" refers
+to citizens, not to chancelleries. The Declaration was addressed to
+the world; it was heard in Paris and later in a dozen provinces of
+Germany, and in Savoy and in Manchester, and presently along the
+Nevski and the Yellow River. Since 1776, the people of the world have
+always listened to us, and answered. We have never failed when we have
+spoken to the people.
+
+After the Declaration, the American people spoke to all the people of
+Europe in the most direct way: they invited Europeans to come here,
+offering them land, wages, freedom; presently our railroads and
+steamship lines solicited larger numbers; and the policy of the
+government added inducements. Free immigration, and free movement,
+demanded in the Declaration, made possible by laws under the
+Constitution, were creating America. In domestic life we saw it at
+once; but the effects of immigration on our dealings with Europe were
+not immediate.
+
+We need only remember that for a hundred and twenty years the peoples
+of Europe and the people of the United States were constantly writing
+to one another; not merely doing business together, but exchanging
+ideas, mingling in marriage, coming together as dispersed families
+come together. Whatever went on in the Mississippi Valley was known
+along the fjords and in the Volga basin and by the Danube; if sulphur
+was discovered in Louisiana it first impoverished Sicily--then brought
+Sicilians to Louisiana; Greeks knew that sponges were to be found off
+Tampa. And more and more people in America knew what was happening in
+Europe--a famine, a revolution, a brief era of peace, a repressive
+ministry, a reform bill. The constant interaction of Europe and
+America was one beat of our existence--it was in counterpoint to the
+tramp of the pioneer moving Westward; immigration and migration meshed
+together.
+
+Our government from time to time spoke to the governments of Europe. A
+tone of sharp reproof was heard at times, a warm word for
+revolutionaries was coupled with indignation against tyrants: Turkey,
+the Dual Monarchy, the Tsar, all felt the lash--or Congress hoped they
+felt it; in the Boer War, England was the victim of semi-official
+criticism; and whenever possible, we were the first to recognize
+republics, even if they failed to maintain themselves on the ruins of
+monarchy. We fluttered official papers and were embarrassed by
+protocol, not believing in it anyhow, and were outwitted or
+out-charmed by second-rate diplomatists of Europe.
+
+
+  _People and Protocol_
+
+The campaign platforms always demanded a "firm, vigorous, dignified"
+diplomacy; the diplomacy of Europe was outwardly correct, inwardly
+devious, shifting, flexible, and in our opinion corrupt. But our
+address to the _people_ of Europe was, in all this time, so candid, so
+persuasive, that we destroyed the chancelleries and recaptured our
+losses. The first great communication, after 1776, was made by
+Lincoln--it was not a single speech or letter, it was a constant
+appeal to the conscience of the British people, begging them, as the
+Declaration had done, to override the will of their rulers. And this
+appeal also was successful; few events in our relations with England
+are more moving than the action of the starving Midlanders. Their
+government, like their men of wealth and birth, like their press and
+parliament, were eager to see America split, and willing to see
+slavery upheld in order to destroy democracy. But the men and women of
+Manchester, starved by the Northern blockade of cotton, still begged
+their government not to interfere with the blockade--and sent word to
+Lincoln to assure him that the _people_ of Britain were on the side of
+liberty, imploring him "not to faint in your providential mission.
+While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let
+the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to
+spring up and work fresh misery to your children." Nor did Lincoln
+fail to respond; Americans who could interest Britain in the northern
+cause were unofficial ambassadors to the people; and our minister,
+Charles Francis Adams labored with all sorts and conditions of men to
+make the government of Britain accept the will of the British people.
+The Emancipation Proclamation was a final step in the domestic
+statesmanship of the war; it was also a step in the diplomacy of the
+war, for it insured us the good will of the British people; and that
+good will was vital to the success of the Union. The North was coming
+close to war with the _government_ of Britain, and the people's open
+prejudice in favor of Lincoln and freedom kept England from sufficient
+aid to the Confederacy.
+
+The next address of the United States to the people of Europe is a
+long tragedy, its consequences so dreadful today that we can barely
+analyze the steps by which the great work for human freedom was
+destroyed.
+
+
+  _Wilson to the World_
+
+Following the precedent of the Declaration, Woodrow Wilson began in
+1916 to address himself to the people of the nations at war in Europe.
+To ministries, German and British both, Wilson was sending
+expostulations on U-boats and embargos; to the peoples of Europe he
+addressed those speeches which were made at home; presently he wrote
+inquiries to the ministers which they were compelled to make public
+(since publication in neutral countries was certain). Then, after the
+Soviets of Russia had gone over the heads of the Foreign Offices, to
+appeal to the workers of the world, Wilson carried his own method to
+its necessary point and, after we entered the war, began the masterly
+series of addresses to the German people which were so effective in
+creating the atmosphere of defeat.
+
+They created at the same time the purposes of allied victory. The war
+ended and one of the magnificent spectacles of modern times occurred:
+the people of Europe were for a moment united, and they were united by
+an American declaring the objectives of American life. The moment was
+so brief that few knew all it meant until it had passed; in the
+excitement of spectacles and events, of plots and processions, this
+moment when Europe trembled with a new hope passed unnoticed.
+
+What happened later to Woodrow Wilson is tragic enough; but nothing
+can take away from America this great moment in European history--to
+which every observer bears testimony, even the most cynical. The
+defeated people of Germany saw in America their only defence against
+the rapacity of Clemenceau, the irresponsible, volatile opportunism of
+Lloyd George, the crafty merchandising of Orlando; the first "liberal"
+leader, Prince Max, had deliberately pretended acceptance of the
+fourteen points in order to embarrass Wilson; but he spoke the truth
+when he said that Wilson's ideals were cherished by the overwhelming
+majority of the German _people_; and quite correctly the Germans saw
+that nothing but American idealism stood between them and a peace of
+vengeance. The enthusiasm of the victorious peoples was less selfish,
+but it was equally great; a profound distrust of their leaders had
+grown in the minds of realistic Frenchmen and Britons, they sensed the
+incapacity of their leaders to raise the objectives of the war above
+the level of the "knockout blow" or the _revanche_. As the Germans
+cried to be protected in their defeat, the victorious people asked to
+be protected from such fruits of victory as Europe had known for a
+thousand years. The demagogues still shouted hoarsely for a noose for
+the Kaiser and the old order in Germany began to plan for the next
+time--but the people of Europe were united; they had gone through the
+same war and, for the first time in their history, they wanted the
+same peace. It was the first time that an American peace was proposed
+to them.
+
+
+_How Wilson Was Trapped_
+
+Woodrow Wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the
+time he returned to Paris for the actual business of the peace, he had
+become the spiritual leader of the world. He was not, however, the
+political leader of his own country--he had lost the Congressional
+elections and he allowed the diplomats of Europe to make use of this
+defeat. They began to cut him off from the people of Europe; he fell
+into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secret sessions, the
+quarrels and departures; once he recovered control, ordered steam up
+in the George Washington to take him home; but in the end he was
+outguessed--in the smart word, he was outsmarted. He had imagined that
+he could defeat the old Europe by refusing to recognize its intrigues.
+He had, in effect, declared that secret treaties and all commitments
+preceding the fourteen points couldn't exist; he had hoped that they
+would be cancelled to conform to his pious pretence of ignorance. And
+Clemenceau and Lloyd George kept him quarreling over a mile of
+boundary or a religious enclave within a racial minority; they stirred
+passions; they starved German children by an embargo; they rumored
+reparations; they promised to hang the Kaiser; they drew Wilson deeper
+into smaller conferences; they promised him a League about which their
+cynicism was boundless, and he let them have war guilt and reparations
+and the betrayal of the Russian revolution and the old European system
+triumphant. They had fretted him and tried him and they had made their
+own people forget the passionate faith Wilson had inspired; they made
+Wilson the agent of disillusion for all that was generous and hopeful
+in Europe. They could do it because the moment Wilson began to talk to
+the premiers, he stopped talking to the people. From the moment he
+allowed the theme of exclusive war guilt to be announced, he cut
+himself off from all Germany; he did not know the temper of the
+working class in Europe, and he refused to listen to the men he
+himself had sent to report on Russia, which did not help him with the
+radical trade unions in France or the liberals in England. One by one
+the nations fell back into their ancient groove, the Italians sullenly
+nursing a grievance, the French whipping up a drama of revenge and
+memory in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the British "isolating"
+themselves in virtual control of the Continent, everybody frightened
+of Russia--and everyone still listening for another word of honest
+truth from Wilson, who was silent; for America was starting on a long
+era of isolation from Europe (the first in a century), an aberration
+in American life, against all its actual traditions, in keeping only
+with its vulgar oratory.
+
+
+  _The Excommunication of Europe_
+
+The United States had no obligations to the nations which emerged out
+of the Treaty of Versailles, only a human obligation to their people
+to keep faith with them. The people of Germany believed in all fervor
+that they had gained an armistice and sought peace on the basis of the
+fourteen points; the people of France and England believed that their
+own governments had accepted the same points. And the same people
+might have been stirred to insist on a peace of reconciliation--not
+with princes and ministers, but with peoples--if Wilson and the
+Americans had continued to communicate with them.
+
+We withdrew into a stuffy silence. Just as we played a queer game of
+protocol and refused to "recognize" the USSR, so we sulked because the
+old bitch Europe wasn't being a gentleman--the only communication we
+made to Europe was when we dunned her for money. We have seen how the
+years of Harding and Coolidge affected our domestic life; they were
+not only a reaction against the fervor of the war months; they were a
+carefully calculated reaction against basic American policy at home
+and abroad; they betrayed American enterprise, delivered industry into
+the hands of finance, degraded government, laughed at corruption, and
+under the guise of "a return to normalcy" attempted to revive the dead
+conservatism of McKinley and Penrose in American politics.
+
+In this period, it is no wonder that we failed to utter one kind word
+to help the first democratic government in Germany, that we trembled
+with fear of the Reds, sneered at British labor until it became
+respectable enough to send us a Prime Minister, and excluded more and
+more rigorously the people of Europe whose blood had created our own.
+
+Slowly, as the depression of 1929-32 squeezed us, we began to see that
+our miseries connected us with Europe; it was a Republican president
+who first attempted to address Europe; but Mr. Hoover's temperament
+makes it difficult for him to speak freely to anyone; the talks with
+Ramsay MacDonald were pleasurable; the offer of a moratorium was the
+first kindness to Europe in a generation of studied American
+indifference. It failed (because France still preferred to avenge
+herself on Germany); and thereafter we had too many unpleasant things
+to do at home.
+
+
+  _One Good Deed_
+
+We had, in the interval, spoken once to all the world. On the day the
+Japanese moved into Manchuria we had, in effect, notified the British
+that we chose not to accept the destruction or dismemberment of a
+friendly nation. The cynical indifference of Sir John Simon was the
+first intimation of the way Europe felt about American "idealism". It
+was also the first step toward "non-intervention" in Spain and the
+destruction of Europe at the hands of Adolf Hitler. When we were
+rebuffed by Downing Street, we sulked; we did not attempt to speak to
+the people of Asia, or try to win the British public to our side. We
+had lost the habit. We were not even candid in our talks with the
+Chinese whose cause we favored because we had Japan (and American
+dealers in oil and scrap iron) to appease.
+
+In 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected leader of a Germany which had been
+out of communication with us for a generation. The United States which
+had been in the minds of generations of Germans, was forgotten by the
+people. In a few years Hitler had overthrown the power of France on
+the Continent, challenged Communism as an international force, and
+frightened the British Empire into an ignoble flutter of appeasement.
+
+To that dreary end our failure of communication had tended. We were
+the one power which might have held Europe together--in a League, in a
+mere hope of friendship and peace between nations, in the matrix of
+the fourteen points if nothing more. The moment we withdrew from
+Europe, its nations fell apart, not merely into victors and
+vanquished, but into querulous, distrustful, and angry people, each
+whipped into hysteria by demagogues or soothed to complaisance by
+frightened ministers.
+
+The obligation to address Europe is no longer a moral one. For our own
+security, for the cohesion of our own people, for victory over every
+element that works to break America into hostile parts--now we have
+the golden opportunity again, to speak to Europe, and to ask Europe to
+answer. As we look back on our ancient triumphs with the peoples of
+Europe and the sour end to which we let them come, this new chance is
+heaven-sent, undeserved, as if we could live our lives over again. And
+it is nearly so--for if we want to have a life to live in the future,
+if it is still to be the confident, secure life of a United America,
+we must speak now to Europe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Definition of America
+
+
+We have two prodigious victories to gain--the war and the world after
+the war. The chatter about not "defining war aims" because specific
+aims are bound to disturb us, is dangerously beside the point, because
+the kind of world we will create depends largely on the kind of war we
+wage. If we nazify ourselves to win, we will win a nazified world; if
+we communize ourselves, we will probably share a modified Marxian
+world with the Soviets; and if we win by intensification of our
+democracy, we will create the only kind of world in which we can live.
+And, as noted in discussing the strategy of the war, the chances are
+that we can only win if we divine the essential nature of our people
+and create a corresponding strategy.
+
+In addition to the direct military need for knowing what kind of
+people we are, there is the propaganda need, so that we can create a
+national unity and put aside the constant irritation of partisanship,
+the fear of "incidents", the wastage of emotional energy in quarrels
+among ourselves. And there is a third reason for an exact and candid
+review of what we are: it is our future.
+
+When this war ends we will make, in one form or another, solemn
+agreements with the nations of the world, our allies and what is left
+of our enemies. We know almost nothing about any of them--we, the
+American people. Our State Department knows little enough; what it
+knows, it has not communicated to us; and we have never been
+interested enough to make discoveries of our own. We are about to
+commit a huge international polygamy, with forty picture brides, each
+one in a different national costume.
+
+Some conditions of this mass marriage are the subject of the next
+section of this book. Here I am concerned with the one thing we can do
+to make the preliminary steps intelligent. We cannot learn all we need
+to know about all the other nations of the world; but we can reflect
+on some things within ourselves, we can know ourselves better; and on
+this knowledge we can erect the framework into which the other nations
+will fit; or out of which they will remain if they choose not to fit.
+We can, by knowing a few vital things about ourselves, learn a lot
+about South America and Europe and Asia and Australia; what _we_ are
+will determine whom we will marry, whom reject, and whom we will set
+up, if agreeable, in an unsanctified situation. The laws of man, in
+many states, require certificates of eligibility to marry, the
+services of the church inquire if an obstacle exists. Before we enter
+into compacts full of tragic and noble possibilities, we might also
+make inquiries. Something in us shies away from the pomp of the old
+diplomacy--what is that something? We used to like revolutionaries and
+never understood colonial exploitation--how do these things affect us
+now? Are we prepared to deal with a government in one country and a
+people in another? Is it possible for us to ally ourselves to
+Communists, reformed fascists, variously incomplete democracies,
+cooperative democratic monarchies, and centralized empires, all at the
+same time? Is there anything in us which requires us to make terms
+with Britain about India, with Russia about propaganda, with Sweden
+about exports, before we make a new world with all of them? Can we,
+honorably, enter any agreement, with any state or with all states,
+while they are ignorant of our character--as ignorant, possibly, as we
+are of theirs?
+
+The difficulty we are in is nicely doubled, because introspection is
+no happy habit and we say that we _know_ all about America, or we say
+that America cannot be known--it is too big, too varied, too
+complicated. And these two opposite statements are in themselves a
+beginning of a definition. America, by this testimony, is a country,
+large, varied, complex, inhabited by people who either understand
+their country perfectly or will not make an effort to understand it. I
+would not care to rest on this definition--but it shows the need of
+definition.
+
+
+  _Mathematics of Character_
+
+By "definition of America" I mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we
+are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from
+others. We are, for instance, the only country lying between the
+Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 25° 35' and 49° north latitude. This
+definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a
+criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact,
+the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied
+climate, our resources, our bigness with _its_ consequences in the
+temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical _fact_.)
+
+Not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in
+mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of
+jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a
+superiority. Moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put
+on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other
+what is exclusively ours--and make a comparison, a guide to
+international conduct "on scientific principles". We would know how
+far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm
+basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or
+made compromise impossible.
+
+We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social
+boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we
+can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a
+diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics
+can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the
+hope of a better life--the number who came can be written down, the
+intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination
+can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by
+those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of
+men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far
+as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the
+great complex of our national character.
+
+We are defined by events--immigration was an event. But immigrants
+came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England.
+When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us.
+It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both
+absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries
+or has all our habits, because none has had our history--that is the
+base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with
+us, but we differ from each relatively--in some degree. This would not
+be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and
+were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted
+that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The
+corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.
+
+
+  _The Revolution in Property_
+
+When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most
+important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The
+ruling class in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become
+poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as
+in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the
+thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of
+land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable
+area was only the fringe, the shore line, of Continental America; the
+Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the
+French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which
+unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.
+
+Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution
+in the deepest instincts of man had taken place--land became a
+commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe,
+land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal
+Houses were founded on land); land was _real_ estate, everything else
+was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws,
+laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and
+foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law
+governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to
+property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and
+marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the
+Prince (or _Princeps_) was often the first man in the land because he
+was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent
+thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur;
+in it they were buried.
+
+The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the
+clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and
+complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond
+the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a
+House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia
+tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to
+buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed
+(often legally, often by squatters' right--which is the right of work,
+not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and
+went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.
+
+There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move
+which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal
+instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock,
+reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European
+cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in
+themselves--or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied
+so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has
+beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his
+"rape of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's
+positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's
+advice to seek Nature "in a wise passiveness"--advice based on the
+poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then
+as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped
+his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". Our more
+familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for
+wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who
+wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what
+he was doing.
+
+He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did.
+The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and
+position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine--which is
+wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the _industry_ of
+one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not
+by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to
+alter--for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a
+criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became
+respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was
+divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few
+generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable--but
+not responsible.
+
+
+  _The Consequences of Free Land_
+
+This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had
+astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the
+land--in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The
+European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn,
+nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the
+soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a
+younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate
+unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. This may be
+morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result:
+the American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil
+exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but
+escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant
+class. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite
+forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant
+virtues, the peasant sturdiness and all the rest of the good qualities
+which go with slavery to the soil.
+
+So the physical definition of America leads to these opening social
+definitions:
+
+  we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and
+    power;
+
+  we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil;
+
+  we were supremely the great wasters of the world;
+
+  we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant class.
+
+From this beginning we can go on to other effects:
+
+  our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war
+    against neighboring states;
+
+  we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger
+    could find more and better land);
+
+  the national center of gravity was constantly changing as
+    population moved to take up new land;
+
+  we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were
+    constantly opening new frontiers;
+
+  our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;
+
+  we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and
+    education, for instance) at the same time;
+
+  we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning
+    and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of
+    political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.
+
+The effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant
+psychological factor in America; the obvious effects are that the land
+invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer--who between them
+created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of
+character. In addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at
+home and peaceful abroad. Once we felt secure within our territorial
+limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of
+the Spaniards in Cuba to bring us into our first war against a
+European nation since 1814. This pacifism was more intense in the more
+agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific
+Scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than
+ours. Pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from Germany
+and Russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service
+(for their children, if not for themselves). In revenge for this
+un-European pacifism we created a purely American lawlessness--and a
+toleration of it which is the amazement of Nazi Germany, where the
+leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized
+Europe, having lived through duels and massacres, is still shocked by
+our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in
+pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new
+citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs.
+
+
+  _America on the Move_
+
+One more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and
+all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers
+struck inland from Plymouth and upland from Jamestown) have not
+altered us. The voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a
+generation; but the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon was moving into the
+Northwest Territory as soon as the Revolution was over; then New
+England began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails
+broken by outriders to the western ocean; the Gold Rush pulled men
+through the wintry passes or around the Horn, and by then our passion
+for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the Clipper ship;
+after the Civil War the Homestead Act started a new move to the West,
+and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular
+and abundant. If the 1870's were not marked by great migrations of
+men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of
+cattle, north from Texas in the summer, south from Wyoming as winter
+threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines
+and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to
+the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City. We were moving a bit more
+slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest
+was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no
+more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in Europe,
+developed as a common tool for the average family, and America was
+mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a
+satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of
+activity which has not been sufficiently studied--the tin can tourist,
+the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. This search for the
+sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established
+habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new
+ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required
+initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was
+only a new beginning.
+
+The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World
+War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost
+tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost
+entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that
+one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quantity-production
+of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor
+mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities,
+small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks,
+busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away
+from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the
+conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country
+known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a
+small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million
+Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road.
+Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy
+came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside
+cabin.
+
+"Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car";
+that was left for dictators to promise--without fulfilment. The cars
+made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new
+models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a
+more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors,
+widely remarked. That the motor car could be used--was being used--as
+a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war
+threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which
+had rested there for thirty years--but might still be good for
+transport.
+
+In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near
+frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European
+_governments_ subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were
+not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two
+things--making planes in mass production, and getting millions of
+people to use them. The present war has anticipated normal progress in
+methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a
+downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train;
+but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic
+American pattern of machines for mobility.
+
+
+  "_The Richest Nation on Earth_"
+
+From free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast
+amount of wealth in America. Because land could not be the exclusive
+base of riches, wealth in America began to take on many meanings and,
+for the first time in history, a wealthy people began to emerge,
+instead of a wealthy nation.
+
+We were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. The
+overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities
+are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the gods;
+of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we
+have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and
+clothing, we can always have enough; from South America, we can get
+foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few
+strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing;
+except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be
+poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw
+materials serviceable to all of us. So that our power to work, our way
+of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on
+the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth.
+
+We have a tradition about wealth, too. The Government, to some degree,
+has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the
+people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any
+artificial bar to enterprise.
+
+
+  "_Rugged Individuals_"
+
+Government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million
+Americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the
+Hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first New
+Deal. Perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real Americans"
+would reject Federal aid--a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks
+about Valley Forge. It was forgotten that the men who froze and swore
+at Valley Forge demanded direct Government aid the moment the Republic
+was established; and that the Cumberland Road, the artery from
+Fredericksburg, Maryland to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was built by the
+Government of the United States for its citizens. Government gave
+bounties and free land; Government gave enormous sums of money to
+industry by way of tariff, and gave 200 million acres of land to
+railroads. There was never a time when the Federal Government was not
+giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. The
+outcry when Government attempted to save _all_ the citizens indicated
+an incomplete knowledge of our history. In particular, the steady
+reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for
+them to start again. The country, for all its obedience to financial
+power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. After the era
+of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was
+ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished--and not
+pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty--the almost
+universal condition of man throughout the world--was not enough for
+America.
+
+It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the
+stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark
+in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large
+nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing
+wealth. The Axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is
+possible that Hitler has already succeeded, for like the
+Administration in 1931, Hitler can say that no one dies of starvation.
+Our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure
+that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived,
+and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. This
+may betray a low liking for riches--but it has its good points also.
+It has helped to keep us free, which is something.
+
+
+  "_Ye Shall Live in Plenty_"
+
+Wealth--and the prospect of wealth--are positive elements in the
+American makeup. We differ from large sections of Europe because we
+take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we
+spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that
+for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed
+in business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and
+spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness.
+
+The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to
+do with forming the American character, because no one took it too
+seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they
+could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium--they were
+disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed
+the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to
+some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the
+facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the
+frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the
+facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve
+equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon
+domestic reform to concentrate on the war.
+
+Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of
+sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we
+accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living
+and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of
+America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert
+Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to
+renounce, but to enjoy".
+
+Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been
+people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material
+goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have
+their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations,
+most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to
+get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the
+world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America
+it is assumed that all will get a great deal.
+
+The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought
+of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are
+intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.
+
+
+  _America Invented Prosperity_
+
+In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device
+of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can
+now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment;
+without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to
+become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still
+is--and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For
+it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money
+is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as
+if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our
+invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.
+
+For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity
+is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.
+
+The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the
+Constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a
+prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have
+often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to
+run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create
+either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with
+one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten
+times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it.
+As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it
+would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the
+country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The
+people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government;
+they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing
+economic controls--a highly concentrated government over a single, not
+a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did
+not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act
+while Congress was not in session; they erected no system of national
+courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy,
+could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When
+this system of Confederation broke down, the Constitution was
+carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of
+the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make
+their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did
+not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.
+
+The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Constitution to their own
+advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances
+of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of
+property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of
+the Constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time
+... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly
+fulfilled."
+
+The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time;
+poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually
+also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States
+was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the
+reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and
+Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle
+down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of
+intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the
+expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a
+_constant_ in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in
+1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things
+in the mind of the lower classes. The idea of class and the idea of a
+"station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted
+after _all_ the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in
+America the Revolution set out to--and did--destroy the principle of
+natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty,
+and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been
+publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and
+what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we
+failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which
+did not accept poverty as inevitable.
+
+This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world.
+We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became
+optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We
+enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us
+preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that,
+for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold,
+and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or
+Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.
+
+
+  _Our Fifty Years of Class War_
+
+From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of
+government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the
+children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy--the
+system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to
+displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on
+prosperity.
+
+The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent
+movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for
+generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich
+and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our
+political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the
+combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of
+extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under
+Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried
+to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself.
+Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had
+begun to _limit_ enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a
+peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not
+repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal
+Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the
+safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.
+
+We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not
+become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are
+a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more
+important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money
+counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way
+back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal
+principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and
+concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we
+are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is
+required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our
+purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our
+capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.
+
+
+  _Labor Troubles_
+
+The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that
+we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are
+hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we
+were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of
+life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had
+exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests
+were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed
+revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through
+the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of
+organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.
+
+The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all
+concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of
+labor too often unfit. Like other organized groups, labor unions did
+not always consult the public good and criminals were found among
+them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production
+or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long
+traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their
+ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic
+self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing
+from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing
+legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the
+labor unions.
+
+The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass,
+the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country
+backward in the _habits_ of organized dealing between management and
+labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic
+hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of
+becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new
+wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled
+principles--to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.
+
+Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain
+his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the
+basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not
+represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient
+wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in
+Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we
+create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans
+have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of
+labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border
+clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces
+capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send
+the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal
+mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide
+them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as
+that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became
+bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost
+when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as
+the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty
+years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the
+Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the
+settlement of all disputes.
+
+Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor
+disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly
+because we shall remain for some time behind the other great
+industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a
+British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did;
+and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the
+future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false
+unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes,
+no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations
+Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and
+worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we
+have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without
+self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for
+statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor
+situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities,
+and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we
+could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy
+could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the
+Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.
+
+
+  _The Danger of Godlessness_
+
+I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their
+sources, as a guide to conduct--particularly the conduct of the war
+(which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian
+propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our
+habits. I have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook
+which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and
+from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor
+and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I
+come now to items which are no less potent because they are
+impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of
+America into play must count also on these.
+
+We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we
+are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from
+our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not
+constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to
+Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a
+connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or
+see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and
+disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our
+fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.
+
+The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of
+material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a
+functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man
+from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any
+sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private
+purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the
+mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic"
+itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is
+now associated with flummery and hoax.
+
+We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical
+world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good
+intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in
+our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of
+cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek
+his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.
+
+This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a
+practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves linked through
+God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any
+job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic
+countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to
+the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to
+universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a
+deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to
+abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in
+war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep
+universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute
+for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious
+actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already
+have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are
+enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear
+and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of
+religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether
+the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling"
+which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past
+was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as
+vain as our hope for better.
+
+
+  _The Alger Factor_
+
+The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the
+departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against
+wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our
+Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic
+appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of
+the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference
+of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in
+America by an intense and confident appeal to _action_, in the faith
+that action will bring far better things than have been known. The
+vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a
+childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger
+or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this
+because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of
+poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern
+history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the
+minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have
+rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other
+peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the
+wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints--but we have also
+rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to
+which they tend.
+
+The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it
+must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What
+aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands
+reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the
+scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine
+covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona
+Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but
+the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music
+popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty
+years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the
+greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible
+that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic
+standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire
+year. And both of these instances have another special point of
+interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that
+pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and
+music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.
+
+I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a
+"lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American
+expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by
+twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably,
+without servants hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three
+flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes
+to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't
+think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy
+themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and
+it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget
+about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.
+
+
+  _The Morals of Plenty_
+
+We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that
+nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is
+based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than
+his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those
+who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for
+a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry
+and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry
+clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation;
+Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were
+preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we
+never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and
+living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are
+usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what
+is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money
+beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient
+and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most
+moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it
+adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality
+denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be
+made by mass production). Mass production put an end to the old
+complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub--mass
+production of tubs and central heating in apartments. The morality of
+scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be
+considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the
+chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men
+born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create
+equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this
+was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the
+practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of mass
+production; it was a working morality.
+
+
+  _Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime_
+
+We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of
+spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse;
+cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the
+five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate
+time. We may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time
+when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully
+as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the
+process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that
+substituted the _goods_ of the many for the good of the few.
+
+The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it
+remains a distinguishing mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist
+us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to
+a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened
+to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have
+never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the
+five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive
+presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds
+cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the
+five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.
+
+In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon;
+characteristic of the twentieth century as the crossroads general
+store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone
+and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is
+impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods
+and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally
+held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French
+bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the
+five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.
+
+
+  _Prosperity and Politics_
+
+Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of
+Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in
+conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free
+land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to
+emancipate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in
+the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because
+in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of
+watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers;
+sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that
+we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political
+party, or a generation--but America did not forget. Each time we
+forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic
+means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time
+we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come
+back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years
+when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the
+redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing;
+and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that
+America could create the materials for a high standard of life,
+although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified
+supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society
+wealthy"; and we did it so handsomely as to leave questionable his
+further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it
+can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than
+the capitalist system can."
+
+We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives
+comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and
+immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quantity system
+into action; and all of them required the same thing--equality of
+political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of
+education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free
+speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people,
+aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future,
+capable of earning and not afraid to spend--these are the customers
+required by mass production. And the same freedom, the same intention
+to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the
+future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its
+iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men
+from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that
+individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for
+Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in
+politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to
+our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their
+prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely
+a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest
+spenders.
+
+The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be
+understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it
+failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them
+move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our
+own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national
+well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen,
+our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our
+fulfilment of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements
+in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical
+life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts
+with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at
+least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out
+of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we
+breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Popularity and Politics
+
+
+There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so
+significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and
+examined briefly by themselves.
+
+In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an
+average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie
+admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least
+once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses,
+juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses
+are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines
+are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families
+take their cars and go driving.
+
+These are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there
+are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady,
+attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most
+part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for
+information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication.
+
+Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had
+because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks
+did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are
+actually making their own fun. The same ignoble but useful desire for
+money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance
+halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves.
+Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore
+Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even
+withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.
+
+
+  _Means of Communication_
+
+The other elements I have mentioned, movies, radio and a new
+journalism, are the products of our immediate time. Although the
+moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular
+just before the first World War, and was promptly recognized as a
+prime instrument of propaganda by Lenin as he began to build the
+Socialist State in 1917; the moving picture may have been colossal
+then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of
+incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered.
+
+By that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established
+itself in its present commercial base. Radio was first conceived as an
+instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless
+telegraphy, when the Soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the
+heads of their governments--although this appeal still had to be
+printed, the radio receiver did not exist. When the necessary
+inventions were working (and the tinkering American forced the issue
+by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to
+serve the public. Among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the
+election results in the Harding-Cox campaign, crop reports, and music.
+The entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of
+1929 the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the
+business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to
+fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals
+of the community.
+
+By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in
+the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication
+had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture,
+devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old
+straight fiction magazine had offered.
+
+These three new means of mass communication are revolutionary
+inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of
+statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the
+first move of a _coup d'etat_ is to take over the radio and the next
+is to divert the movies into propaganda.
+
+Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be
+understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated.
+
+
+  _Words and Pictures_
+
+Of the fact and picture publications _Life_ and _Look_ are the best
+examples; _Time_ and _News-Week_ are fact and illustration magazines
+which is basically different, although their success is also
+important. The appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be
+adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; _Time_
+and the _Readers' Digest_ become the great magazine phenomena of our
+time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of
+their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing
+themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their
+faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public
+services.
+
+The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its
+chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and
+image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development
+in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue
+the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and
+conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and
+newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of
+quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively
+small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting
+developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the
+book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the
+Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old
+methods and the artiness of book "shoppes" which always got in the
+way of good book-sellers.
+
+The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is
+especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The
+art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and
+isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the
+visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have
+been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by
+the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in
+process of being formed.
+
+Until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for
+this new language is great. For neither the movies nor radio can be
+used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the
+listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation.
+Radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with
+the right materials; but when President Roosevelt asked his audience
+to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of
+the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could
+not do. The movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered
+none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the
+immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to
+the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving
+picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be
+over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group
+presence. By this the movies also gain when they use the right
+materials.
+
+The use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the
+tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a
+mobile reserve of propaganda. When the radio and the movies have
+established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final
+battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is
+carried to the ward meeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore
+soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory--where the action is
+determined by men and women in private discussion.
+
+
+  _Universal Languages_
+
+Radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies,
+which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great mass
+inventions of America. The patents may have been taken out elsewhere,
+but it was in America that these two forms of mass communication were
+instantly placed at the service of all people. The errors of judgment
+have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies
+were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of
+the hands of the bureaucrat. For a generation we deplored the
+vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and
+discovered that the only other effective movies were made by
+dictators, to falsify history, as the Russians did when the miserable
+Trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every
+film made by Hitler. For a generation we wept over the commercialism
+of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an
+audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was
+the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under
+compulsion.
+
+The intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. Some
+great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by British radio
+(which is government owned, but not government operated); some
+exceptional and important films were made for the few. But the
+dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea--movies and the
+radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to
+soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking
+of _all_ the people. This universality lies in the nature of the
+instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited
+reception of the broadcasts; and only Hitler and Stalin and the
+sponsors have been happy to understand this.
+
+Like all those who are habituated to the movies, I have suffered much
+from Hollywood, my pain being all the greater because I am so devoted;
+like all those who work in radio, I am acutely conscious of its
+faults; but the faults and the banalities are not in question now. Now
+we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our
+purposes. We have to discover what the ignoramus in Hollywood and the
+businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for.
+
+The one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. We have to
+learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never
+could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and
+why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation;
+and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to
+accomplish an end. Moreover, we have to study the field so that we
+know when _not_ to use these instruments, what we must not take from
+them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal.
+
+A coordinated use of _all_ the means of persuasion is required; to let
+the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the
+movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste
+time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or
+most effectively on the air. There are many things to be done; we need
+excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come
+haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and
+history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other.
+If we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one
+ill-timed, but brilliantly made, documentary on production rendered
+futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one
+ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. When the
+means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we
+have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have
+to use all of them together.
+
+The movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem
+to rise on the international horizon of the 1920's, to have no link
+with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world.
+With these, it is true, we return to the universals of human
+expression and communication. But what we have done with them is
+unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based
+on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. That is
+why I have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have
+enormous inertia, the slightest error may accumulate tremendous
+consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most
+complete protection against disaster at home.
+
+We have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been
+completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have
+to remind the American people of other tools and instruments they have
+neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a passion with us to invent
+the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use
+against us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The Tools of Democracy
+
+
+The tools of democracy are certain civil actions, certain inventions,
+certain habits. They can be used against us--but only if we fail to
+use them ourselves.
+
+The greatest tools are civil liberties which we have been considering
+as "rights" or "privileges". The right to free speech is a great one;
+free speech probably was originally intended to protect property; it
+preserves liberty; the rights of assembly, of protest for redress, of
+a free press all have this double value, that they guarantee the
+integrity of the private man and protect the State.
+
+The great debate on the war brought back some long forgotten
+phenomena: broadsides, street meetings, marches, and brawls. Before
+they began, virtually _all_ the civil rights were being used either by
+newcomers to America or by enemies of the American system. The poor
+had no access to the radio; they used a soap box instead and genteel
+people shrank away; the Bundist and the American Communist assembled
+and protested and published and spoke; the believers in America waited
+for an election to roll around again, and then did nothing about it.
+The enemies of the people sent a hundred thousand telegrams to
+Congressmen, signing the names of dead men to kill the regulation of
+utilities, but the believer in the democratic process didn't remember
+the name of his Congressman. Bewildered aliens got their second papers
+and were inducted into political clubs; the old line Americans never
+found out how the primaries worked.
+
+
+  _Public Addresses_
+
+A dangerous condition rose. No families from Beacon Street spoke in
+Boston Common; therefore, whoever spoke on the Common was an enemy of
+Beacon Street; all over America the well-born (and the well-heeled)
+retired from direct communication with the people, and all over
+America the privilege of talking to the citizens fell into the hands
+of radicals, lunatics, and dangerous enemies of the Republic--so that
+in time the very fact that one tried to exercise the right of free
+speech became suspect; and Beacon Street and Park Avenue could think
+of no way to protect themselves from Boston Common and Union
+Square--except to abolish free speech entirely. They did not dare to
+say it, but the remarkable Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City, said it
+for them: "Whenever I hear anyone talk about civil liberties, I know
+he's not a good American".
+
+The dreadful humiliation was that it came so close to the truth. The
+Red and the Bundist, clamoring or conspiring against America, were
+almost the only ones doing what all Americans had the right to do. We
+hated cranks, we did not want to be so conspicuous, we hadn't the
+time, the police would attend to it, if they didn't like it here let
+them go back ... we allowed our most precious rights to atrophy. When
+suddenly they were remembered, as they were by the bonus marchers of
+1932, we yelled revolution and the President of the United States
+called out the troops to shoot down the defenders of our country. It
+was the first time that a petition for redress had been offered by
+good citizens, by veterans, by men of notable American stock--and it
+frightened us because they were doing what "only foreigners" or
+"dangerous agitators" used to do; they were in fact being Americans in
+action.
+
+What is not used, dies. The habit of protecting our freedom was dying
+in the United States. There was no conspiracy of power against us;
+there was no need. We were carrying experimental democracy forward so
+far on several planes--the material and social planes particularly--that
+we let it go by default on the vital plane of practical politics. We
+did not go into politics, we did not electioneer, we did not threaten
+ward bosses or county chairmen, we did not form third parties, we did
+nothing except vote, if it was a fair day (but not too fair if we meant
+to play golf). As for private action to defend our liberties, it was
+unnecessary and vulgar and bothersome.
+
+The depression scared us, but not into free speech; by that time free
+speech was Red; and the deeper we floundered in the mire of defeatism,
+the more intimidated we were by shouting Congressmen and
+super-patriots; it was only after the New Deal pulled us out of our
+tailspin that we saw the light: we too could have been obscure men
+speaking at street corners, we did not have to give all the soap boxes
+to men like Sacco and Vanzetti; we too could have published pamphlets
+like the dreadful Communists, and held meetings and badgered our
+Congressmen. Suddenly the people were reincorporated into their
+government; suddenly the people began to be concerned with government;
+and the tremendous revitalization of political anger was one of the
+best symptoms of democratic recovery in our generation.
+
+
+  _Return to Politics_
+
+The merciless pressure of taxation and then the grip of war have
+pushed us forward and in a generation we will be again as politically
+aware as our great-grandfathers were when they had one newspaper a
+week, and only their determination to rule themselves as a principle
+of action. Perhaps we shall take the trouble they took; they travelled
+a day's journey to hear a debate and discussed it for a fortnight;
+they thought about politics and studied the meaning of events. And
+they quite naturally did their duties as citizens; they dug their
+neighbors out of snow-blocked roads, they nominated their candidates,
+they watched and rebuked their representatives. It was not a political
+Utopia, but it was a more intelligent use of political power than ours
+has been. The usual excuse for the breakdown of political action in
+America is that so many "foreigners" came, to whom the politics of
+freedom were alien. This may have been true of some of the later
+arrivals; but the Irish were captivated by, and presently captured,
+city politics wherever they settled; the Germans were the steadiest of
+citizens and so were the Scandinavians, their studious earnest belief
+in our institutions shaming our flippant disregard. The Southern
+Slavs, the Russian Jews and the Italians were farthest removed from
+our political habits; but their passion for America was great. It
+could have been worked into political action, and often was worked
+into political skulduggery by bosses of a more political bent. Many of
+these immigrants came after the exhaustion of free lands; many were
+plunged into slums and sweatshops and steel mills on a twelve hour
+day; and they emerged on the angry side, as disillusioned with America
+as some of its most ancient families.
+
+That political action dwindled after the great immigrations is true;
+but it was not the immigrant who refused to act; it was the old family
+and the typical American; the grafting politicians and the sidewalk
+radical both kept politics alive; the real Americans were slowly
+smothering politics. We shall never quite repay our debt to Tammany
+Hall and the Communists; between them political machines and saintly
+radicals managed to keep the instruments of democratic action from
+rusting. Now we have to take them back and learn how to use them
+again. Fortunately we have no choice. We neglected our rights because
+we wanted to sidestep our duties; today the war makes our duties
+inescapable and we are already beginning to use our rights. For in
+spite of censorship and regimentation, we will use more of our
+instruments of democracy than ever; we will because we are fighting
+for them and they have become valuable to us.
+
+The radio, the movies, and popular print are the three tools by which
+we can create democratic action. The action itself will be appropriate
+to our time and our conditions; we will not travel ten miles to hear a
+debate, so long as the radio lasts; but we will have to form units of
+self-protection in bombed cities; we may need other associations, to
+apportion food, to house the homeless, to support the bereaved. We
+will have to learn how to live together, to share what was once as
+private as a motor car, to elect a village constable who may have our
+lives in his hands a dozen times a day. In the process we will be
+reverting to old and good democratic habits--in a city block in
+Atlanta or in a prairie village outside Emporia, or in a chic suburb
+along Lake Michigan. Something like the town-meeting is taking place
+in a thousand apartment houses where air-raid precautions and the
+disposal of waste paper are discussed and mothers who have to work
+trade time with wives who want to go to the movies; the farmers have,
+since 1932, been meeting; the suburbanites are discussing trains and
+creation of bus-routes. We are making the discovery that it is our
+country and we can decide its destiny. We are not to let others rule
+us; for in this emergency every man must rule himself; the man who
+neglects his political duty is as dangerous today as the man who
+leaves his lights on in a blackout.
+
+In the early months of the war our democratic processes were
+muscle-bound. We hadn't been doing things together; whenever we had
+organized, it was against some one else; we didn't fall naturally into
+a simple cooperative effort. And within two months we were breaking
+into hostile particles, until, in desperation, we discovered that men
+can work together. The obstructionist manufacturer and the stubborn
+labor leader could hold up an entire industry; but two men, one from
+each side, could set each factory going again. The creation of the
+labor-management committees of two was the first light in the darkness
+of our domestic policy.
+
+Still to come was the spontaneous outbreak of fervor and the cold
+organization for victory. We had forgotten the tools of democracy
+which we had to work together, as simply as men had to work on a
+snowbound country road together. In a small town of Ohio a pleasant
+event occurred which had a stir of promise; Dorothy Thompson's report
+was:
+
+"They got together in the old-fashioned American way: in the old opera
+house. They warmed and instilled enthusiasm and resolution into one
+another, by the mass of their presence, and by music, and prayer.
+
+"Mr. Sweet had put the F.F.A. (The Future Farmers of America and the
+older brothers of the Four-H clubs) to work, and they had made a
+survey of the existing resources of the community, in trucks, autos,
+combines, tractors. And he proposed to them that they use these
+resources, _as a community_, getting the greatest work out of them
+with the greatest conservation of them; organizing transportation to
+the factory where war production was going on, so that no auto
+travelled for its owner alone, but for as many workers as it could
+carry."
+
+
+  _Democratic Action_
+
+There is a field of endeavor in war time where this sort of
+spontaneous, amateur organization is best; and our Government will be
+wise if it prevents the inexpert from building bombers but lets them,
+as far as possible, get children to and from school by local effort.
+We want to feel that we are being used, that our powers are working
+for the common good. So far we have been irritated by sudden demands,
+and frightened by long indifference to our offers--until an angry man
+has done something, as Mr. Fred Sweet did in Mt. Gilead. A government
+determined to win this war will create the opportunities for
+democratic action without waiting for angry men. The combination of
+maximum control (the single head of production) and maximum dispersion
+(two men in each factory solving the local problem) is exactly what we
+understand; to translate civilian emotion into terms of maximum use is
+the next step.
+
+Already this is happening to us: on one side we are grouping ourselves
+into smaller units; on the other we are discovering that we are parts
+of the whole nation. It is a tremendous release of energies for us; we
+are discovering what we had hoped--that America is of indescribable
+significance to us and that we for the first time signify in
+America--we, not bosses or financiers or critics or cliques or groups
+or movements--but we ourselves. Something almost dead stirs again and
+we know that we shall be able to work with our fellowmen, and work
+with our Government, and watch those we chose to speak for us, and
+challenge corruption, and see to it that we, who are the people, are
+not betrayed. We may not revive the _forms_ of democracy as they
+existed in Lincoln's time, but we will never again let the _spirit_ of
+his democracy come so near to being beyond all revival.
+
+We will use the weapons we have and invent new ones; and we had better
+be prompt. Because we have a victory to win with these weapons and a
+world to make. We have to work Democracy because we have to create a
+world in which democracy can live. There is no time to lose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Democratic Control
+
+
+The shape of this war was created in dark back rooms of cheap saloons,
+in a lodging house in Geneva, in several prison cells, in small half
+secret meetings, up back flights of stairs, behind drawn shades, in
+boarding houses over the dining table, in the lobbies of movie-houses,
+at lectures attended by the idle and the curious and the hopeless, in
+the kitchen of a New York restaurant where waiters talked more about
+the future than about tips; it was molded also in British pubs and by
+the sullen lives of dole-gatherers; it took a definable shape and
+could have been re-formed but was not, so that its shape today is the
+result of the pressure of those who willed to act and the missing
+pressure of groups which failed to meet and talk and plan.
+
+The earth-shaking events of our time may have been created by the
+great and mysterious forces of history, but their exact form was fixed
+by obscure people: the Russian Revolution by Lenin and Trotsky,
+students, impractical men, and the homeless Stalin; and the war by
+Hitler, the house painter, the despised little man, the corporal who
+couldn't get over his military dreams. These were the leaders, the
+conspicuous ones. They planned--and wrote--and gathered a few even
+more obscure followers, and talked and lived in utter darkness until
+the time came for them to fight.
+
+For a thousand years the destiny of mankind will be shaped by what
+these men did in countries barely emerging into freedom--and we to
+whom the gods have given all freedom, sit by and hesitate even to talk
+about the future, folding our hands and piously saying that in any
+case it will be decided for us. That is the result of forgetting our
+democratic rights and duties; with them we have forgotten that the
+future is ours to make.
+
+It will not be made for us; it will not be made in our favor unless we
+make it for ourselves; the weapons with which we fight the war will be
+strong and terrible when we come to create the peace. And we will
+create it either by using the weapons or by dropping them and running
+away from our triumph, which is also our responsibility.
+
+We will not escape the responsibility by saying that we cannot control
+"the great forces", the "wave" of events. We can do what Hitler and
+Lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can
+work and wait and work again. We must not say that we are helpless in
+the face of international intrigue. We--not Churchill and
+Roosevelt--wrote the Atlantic Charter, and we can un-write it and
+write it over again; we the people, not Henry Cabot Lodge, crushed the
+League of Nations by our indifference; we, not Congressmen bribed by
+scrap-iron dealers, armed Japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let
+Hitler go ahead by our ignorance. We have done all these things
+without working; and the only thing we have not tried, is to put out
+our hands and take hold of our destiny. In the first dreadful crisis
+of our war, we saw China begin to plan the world after the war,
+preparing a democratic center of 800 million people in Asia, putting
+pressure on Britain to proclaim liberty for India, taking hold of the
+future with faith and confidence--while we said not one open word to
+Asia, and had barely spoken to our nearest friends, the oppressed of
+Europe, to tell them that our purpose was liberty.
+
+We cannot let the shape of the future be molded by other hands. The
+price of living as we want to live is more than sweat and blood and
+tears: we have to make the grim effort of thinking and take the risk
+of making decisions. A painful truth comes home to us: we are no
+longer the spoiled children of Destiny--our destiny is our action.
+
+
+  _Record of Isolation_
+
+For more than a hundred years the people of the United States did not
+have to act and avoided the consequences of Democracy in international
+affairs. Officially we had nothing to do with Europe, except on
+special occasions when we snapped at Britain, frightened the Barbary
+pirates, helped Napoleon I, drove Napoleon III out of Mexico. We had
+no continuing policy and the details of foreign affairs were not
+submitted to the voter. This was natural enough; the eyes of America
+turned away from the Atlantic seaboard toward the Mississippi Valley;
+turned back from the Pacific to Chicago and the east; turned again to
+Detroit and Birmingham and Kansas City.
+
+We have not yet got the habit of thinking steadily about other
+nations. Our post-war suspicion of the League, our terror of the USSR,
+our pious agreements with England and Japan, our weak dislike of
+Mussolini and Hitler, still left us unconcerned with _policy_. We
+remained in the diplomatic era of William Jennings Bryan while Europe
+marched back into the era of Metternich or Talleyrand.
+
+Yet the voters have, since 1893, determined some aspects of our
+foreign policy. They did not vote on a loan to China, but they did
+keep in power the party that made war in Spain, bought the
+Philippines, protected Cuba, and policed Central America. This
+tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the
+Republican Party had always a better one, which was prosperity. In the
+early twentieth century, the American voter only accepted, he did not
+directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook.
+
+Our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is
+another--the tradition of democratic control. It has not begun to
+operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to
+clear our minds of some romantic illusions.
+
+Our future lies balanced between Europe and Asia; the disagreeable
+certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that we cannot escape
+the world. We still think of participation in world affairs negatively
+as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as
+a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined
+from our shores. The prospect is disagreeable because we, the people,
+have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over
+diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. We have begun to
+send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we
+trust our ambassadors--because the journalists have begun to
+democratize diplomacy. They have told us more, they have often
+represented us more completely, and represented international business
+less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by
+the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart European
+capitals. The correspondents have taken the characteristic American
+democratic way of altering an ancient European institution, by
+shrewdly publicised disrespect. Whenever we have had a strong
+Secretary of State, something further has been done; but the permanent
+officials of our State Department have completely accepted the
+European style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and
+ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic sheets, that
+all the brash independence of America has been hushed; our leading
+career diplomats have never been Americanized by the middle west; they
+came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they
+represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented
+the East, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent
+America.
+
+On occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into
+the State Department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained
+professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for the
+_gaffes_ and _gaucheries_ of American diplomacy. These awkward
+Americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the
+chancelleries of Europe; but they were not falling into the hands of
+the European diplomats.
+
+Neither the fumbles of our occasional ignorant envoys nor the correct
+discretion of the career men gave us any habit of thinking about other
+countries. On the west coast there is a tradition of wariness about
+the Orient--but it rises from immigration, not international
+relations. We have no habit of hatred as the French had for Germany,
+no cultivated friendships except for the occasional visit of a prince.
+We are not susceptible to European flattery if we live beyond the
+Atlantic seaboard--or below the $50,000 income level; for crowds, a
+Hollywood star is at least as magnetic as a Balkan Queen; and it is
+not conceivable that we should ever treat the coming of a Russian
+ballet as a part of a political campaign, as the French, quite
+correctly, did in 1913.
+
+We are now paying for our quiet unfortified borders, for the broad
+seas so suddenly narrowed. We have to learn about foreign affairs,
+about our own Empire (we hardly know that we have one). And this is
+the hardest thing of all: that while we move in ignorance, _we have to
+re-work all the basic concepts of international affairs_, or they will
+destroy us. We will have some support in the people of Great Britain,
+in the governments of Scandinavia, and in the diplomatic habits of the
+USSR; but for the most part we must make our way alone.
+
+
+  _Debunking Protocol_
+
+Again, as in the case of military strategy, the average man must study
+the subject to protect himself. He can no longer risk his life, and
+the fortunes of his family, in the hands of a few career men in the
+State Department, working secretly, studying protocol, forgetting the
+people of the United States.
+
+The amateur statesman is as laughable as the amateur strategist, but
+the laugh is not always going to be on us. We will popularize
+diplomacy or it will destroy us. We have first of all to destroy the
+myth of "high politics". We have to examine Macchiavelli and
+Talleyrand and Bismarck and Disraeli with as much realism as we
+examine Benedict Arnold and James J. Hill and Edison and Kruger. We
+need journalist-debunkers to do the work, a parallel, by the way, to
+the process of simplifying military discussion, which is being done by
+newspaper and radio experts. We have to learn that the great tricks,
+the great arrangements of power, have been as shady as horse-trades,
+as ruthless as robbery, and often as magnificent as building a
+railroad--but in all cases they have represented the desires of
+certain groups, powerful enough at any given time to impose their
+wishes on the people. War, business, patriotism, medicine, sociology,
+religion, and sex have all been re-examined and debunked in the past
+two generations; but diplomacy which can destroy our satisfaction in
+all of them, still parades as the perfect stuffed shirt, with a red
+ribbon across it. At the moment no one can say whether Hitler has
+blasted the Foreign Office and our State Department; if he has, it is
+an achievement equal to taking Crete; and we ought to thank him for
+it.
+
+We should learn that diplomacy has swapped national honor, and
+betrayed it, and used it cynically for the advantage of a few--as well
+as protected it. We should examine the assertion of "national destiny"
+before the era of democracy, to see whether the private wealth of a
+prince and the starvation of a people actually are predestined,
+whether the mine-owners of France could have allowed German democracy
+to live, whether Locarno satisfied national honor less than Munich.
+
+And, above all, we should know that this great "game" of European
+statesmanship, going on from the Renaissance to our own time, is a
+colossal and tragic failure. At times it has brought incalculable
+wealth to a thousand English families, to a few hundred Frenchmen, and
+power to some others. But it has always ended in the desolation of
+war--and the suspicion holds that to make war advantageously has been
+the aim of statesmanship, not to avoid it with honor.
+
+We have to rid ourselves of the intolerable flummery of the diplomats
+because in the future foreign affairs are going to be connected by a
+thousand wires to our domestic problems, and we propose to see who
+pulls the wires. The old tradition of betraying a President at home
+while supporting any stupidity abroad will have to be scrapped; and we
+will be a more formidable nation, in external affairs, if we conduct
+those affairs in our way, not in the way of our enemies.
+
+
+  _A "Various" Diplomacy_
+
+It will not be enough to destroy the myth of high diplomacy and reduce
+it to its basic combinations of chicanery and power-pressure, its
+motives of pride and honor and greed. We have to take the positive
+step of creating a new diplomacy, based on the needs of America, and
+those needs have to be consciously understood by the American people.
+Out of that, we may create a layman's foreign policy executed by
+professional diplomats; just as we are on the way to create a layman's
+labor policy, executed by professional statisticians, mediators and
+agents. We have to recognize diplomacy as a polite war; and, as
+suggested in connection with actual war, we must not fight in the
+style or strategy of our enemies. We have always imitated in routine
+statesmanship; and only in the past twenty years have we begun an
+American style of diplomacy. The "strategy of variety" may serve us
+here as on the battlefield; it may not. But the strategy of European
+diplomacy is their weapon, and their strength; we are always defeated
+when we attempt it, as Wilson was, as Stimson was over Manchuria. Our
+only successes have been when we sidestepped diplomacy entirely and
+talked to people.
+
+The first step toward creating our own, democratic, diplomacy will be
+to convince the American people that they will not escape the
+consequences of this war. Many of us believe that we actually escaped
+the consequences of the first World War by rejecting the League of
+Nations; a process of re-education is indicated, for background. This
+education can begin with the future and move backward--for our
+relation to post-war Europe can be diagrammed almost as accurately as
+a fever chart. We withdrew from the League for peace and found
+ourselves in an alliance for war. It can hardly be called a successful
+retreat. Actually we were in Europe, up to our financial necks, from
+the moment the war ended to the day when the collapse of an Austrian
+bank sent us spiralling to destruction in 1929; we stayed in it,
+trying to recover the benefits of the Davis and Young plans by the
+Hoover moratorium. We did everything with Europe except recognize its
+first weak effort to federalize itself on our model.
+
+Decisive our part in this war will be, but if we withdraw as we did
+the last time, leaving the nations of Europe to work out their own
+destiny, we will, as a practical matter, destroy ourselves.
+
+The only other certainty we have is that the prosperity of the United
+States is better served by peace in the world than by war. This is
+true of all nations; the only difference for us is that the
+dislocation may be a trace more severe, and that we have no tradition
+of huge territorial repayments, or indemnities, by which a nation may
+recoup the losses of war, while its people starve.
+
+Given that basis, we can observe Europe and Asia after the present
+war.
+
+
+  _Phases of the Future_
+
+We ought at once to make a calendar. This war will probably not follow
+the tradition of the last one; it may not gratify us with an exact
+moment for an armistice; we may defeat our enemies piecemeal and miss
+the headlines and tickertape and international broadcasts and cities
+alight again and all the gaiety and solemn emotion of an end to war.
+This war breaks patterns and sets new ones, so the first date on our
+calendar is a doubtful one; but let us say that by a certain day we
+will have smashed Germany and Japan; Italy would have betrayed them
+long before.
+
+Our next step is the "peace conference" stage. Again this war may
+disappoint us; we may have a long armistice and a reorganization of
+the world's powers, without Versailles and premiers in secret
+conferences; perhaps by that time the peoples of Europe and America
+will have captured their diplomats. Still, let us say that an interim
+between armistice and world-order will occur.
+
+The phases of the future grow longer as we progress. We will celebrate
+the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year,
+because in that time we are going to create the organization which
+will bring us peace for a century--or for ever. This middle period is
+the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day
+after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin
+thinking of the future of the world--and at the same time think about
+demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get
+tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down
+capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next
+election--by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate
+crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into
+the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world--for which
+there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old
+one.
+
+We can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of
+world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal
+nations, we will bring on an event in Europe beside which the rise of
+Hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act
+of destruction which Hitler began. And whatever comes out of it,
+fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years
+later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing
+the start of another European war, which will spread more rapidly to
+Asia and ourselves. Those of us who went through the first World War,
+and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire,
+may be resigned to a third act in the 1960's; but the men who fight
+this war may be as revolutionary in England and America as they turned
+out to be last time in Russia or in Germany. They may want assurance,
+the day after the war ends, that we have been thinking about them and
+the future of the world. They will give us the choice between world
+organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions
+will help us. We will have to choose and to act; fascism may be
+destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized
+world will not lack leaders; we can have modified Communism or
+super-fascism, all beautifully Americanized, if we have nothing
+better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. And by the
+time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad
+will mean starvation and plague and repression and death.
+
+
+  _Seven New Worlds_
+
+Forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of
+different alternatives to revolution and chaos. Some of these are
+based on political necessity or the desire to punish the Axis; some
+correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more
+inclusive. They can be summarized so:
+
+    Re-isolating America;
+    Collaboration with Fascism;
+    Collaboration with Communism;
+    Anglo-American domination;
+    American imperialism;
+    Revival of the League of Nations;
+    A federal organization of the world.
+
+To some people in the United States, none of these seems possible, all
+of them disastrous. If the confusion of propaganda continues, these
+people will fall back on the principle of isolation; it is a fatal
+backward step, but it is better than any of the seemingly fatal
+forward steps; it is in keeping with part of our tradition; and if
+Europe as always, with Asia now added, goes forward to another war,
+the centre and core of America will say "we want out", and mean it.
+But isolating America cannot be an immediate post-war policy; if we
+plan to withdraw, we virtually hand over the world to revolution and
+hand ourselves into moral and financial bankruptcy. Isolation can only
+be a constant threat to the world, that we will withdraw unless some
+of our basic terms are met. We have to know our terms, or our threat
+is meaningless.
+
+There is much to be said for isolation, or autarchy; I pass it over
+quickly because I am not attempting to criticise each sketch of the
+post-war world; only to note certain aspects of them all--notably
+their relation to the America which I have described in earlier pages.
+The next two programs are also easy to assay: they are at the opposite
+extreme; they rise from no part of our basic tradition, and
+collaboration with either fascism or communism would have to come
+either by revolution after defeat or by long skillful propaganda which
+would disguise the fact and make us think that we were converting the
+world to our democracy.
+
+It is, nevertheless, childish to assume that the thing can't happen.
+Given a good unscrupulous American dictator we could have made peace
+with the Nazis, and the Japanese, by squeezing Britain out of the
+Atlantic and Russia out of the Pacific; our gain would have been the
+whole Western Hemisphere; this would have gratified both the
+isolationists and the imperialists; it would have preserved peace and
+the Monroe Doctrine; the only disqualification is that it would
+destroy freedom throughout the world--which is the purpose of fascism.
+This was possible; it may become possible again. Unless Britain shows
+more intellectual strength in the final phases of the war than she did
+in the earlier ones, the chance to scuttle her will appeal to any
+anti-European American dictator; liquidate Hitler, make peace with the
+anti-Hitlerian Nazis, especially the generals, send our appeasers as
+ambassadors, and in five years we can re-invigorate a defeated Germany
+and start world-fascism going again.
+
+The alternative is not so remote. It is a distinct and immediate
+possibility.
+
+
+  _Red America_
+
+A Socialist England after the war is promised, in effect, by everyone
+except the rulers of the British Empire. Add a free China indebted to
+Communist armies; add Russia victoriously on the side of democracy;
+Red successor states will rise in Italy, Germany and the Balkans; and
+our destiny would be the fourth or fifth international.
+
+If we say these things are fanciful, we convict ourselves of inability
+to break out of our own mythology. Either collaboration is as likely as
+complete isolation; neither would shock us if a good American led us
+into it. Sir Stafford Cripps is certain that the USSR and the USA fight
+for the same ideals; and collaboration with Hitler's enemies is our
+standing policy today. So that a "revolution" in Germany would
+automatically lead us into friendly relations with the revolutionaries;
+they will be either fascist or communist, quite possibly they will be
+Hitler's best friends. Actually we may approach either a fascist or a
+Communist world order by easy steps, our little hand held by proud
+propagandists guiding us on our way.
+
+
+  _Parva Carta_
+
+The dominant American relation to Europe, now, is expressed in the
+Atlantic Charter which is not an alliance, not a step toward union,
+but a statement of principles. However, the Charter has been used as a
+springboard and been taken as an omen; so it must be examined and its
+true bearings discovered. It has, for us, two essential points:
+
+One of these is the Anglo-American policing of the world; it is a curt
+reminder that this war is not waged to end war; that future wars are
+being taken for granted and preparations to win them will be made. The
+Charter was, however, a pre-war instrument for us. Presently the
+necessities of war may force us to go further and declare our
+intention to prevent war entirely.
+
+The specific economic point in the Atlantic Charter promises "all
+States, great and small, victor and vanquished ... access, on equal
+terms, to the trade and the raw materials of the world which are
+needed for their economic prosperity."
+
+This is a mixture of oil and the mercantile philosophy of a hundred
+years ago. It has a moral value; it knocks on the head all theories of
+"rights" in colonies; a nation subscribing to the Atlantic Charter and
+attempting to isolate a source of bauxite or pitchblende, will have to
+be hypocritical as well as powerful. "Access to", even on equal terms,
+does not however imply "power to take and use". Lapland may have
+access to Montana copper, unhindered by our law; and copper may be
+deemed vital to Lapland's prosperity (by a commission of experts); but
+Lapland will not get our copper unless we choose to let her have it.
+
+In effect, the maritime nations, England and America, have said that
+if they can get to a port in the Dutch East Indies, they propose to
+trade there, for oil or ivory or sea shells; and they have also said,
+proudly, that Germany can trade there also, after Germany becomes
+de-nazified.
+
+No realistic attempt to face the necessity of organized production and
+distribution is even implied in this point. Instead, President
+Roosevelt was able virtually to write into an international document a
+statement of his ideals; as Woodrow Wilson wrote his League of Nations
+into the Fourteen Points.
+
+Mr. Roosevelt's freedoms are specific; people (not "nations") are to be
+free from want, from fear, from oppression. Freedom from want is the
+actual new thing in the world; want--need--hard times--poverty--from
+the beginning of European history these have been the accepted order,
+the lot of man, the inescapable fate to which he was doomed by being
+born.
+
+The Charter rose out of our history and out of England's need. Let me
+outline again the connection with our history. In 1776, the
+Declaration of Independence showed a way out of the poverty-labyrinth
+in the destiny of man; the Declaration declared for prosperity (then
+synonymous with free land) and offered it to all (citizenship and
+equal rights to the immigrant, the chance to share in this new belief
+in prosperity by becoming American). In a century and a half Europe
+has scoffed and sneered at this (relatively successful) attempt to
+break through economic damnation--and at the end, as Europe rocks over
+the edge of destruction, an American offers this still new and
+imperfect thing as a foundation stone of peace in the world: freedom
+from want. It has not yet been completely achieved in America; but we
+know it can be achieved; we have gone far enough on our way to say
+that it can be achieved in the whole world.
+
+The American standard is far above freedom from want. It is based, in
+fact, on wanting too many things and getting a fair percentage of
+them. But President Roosevelt's point does not involve "leveling"; it
+is not an equal standard of living all over the world (which is the
+implied necessity of international Communism). The negative freedom
+from want is not freedom from wanting; it is explicit, as the words
+are used: it means that men shall have food and shelter and clothes;
+and medicine against plague; and an opportunity to learn and some
+leisure to enjoy life; in accordance with the standards of their
+people.
+
+This is a great deal. It was not too much for the Soviet Republics to
+promise, and to begin to bring, to Kalmucks and Tartars and Georgians;
+it is more than we have brought to our own disinherited in the South,
+in mining towns, in the fruitful valleys of California. Our partial
+failure is a disgrace, but not a disaster; our success, though
+incomplete, is important. For we have carried forward in the light of
+the other great freedom which Communism has had to sacrifice, which is
+freedom from fear. All the specific freedoms--to think, to utter, to
+believe, to act, are encompassed in this freedom from fear. Our basic
+disagreement with Communism is the same as our attack on
+nazi-fascism--both are based on illegitimate power (not power
+delegated or given, not power with the consent of the governed): hence
+both live on domination; on their capacity to instil fear. The war
+will prove how far this fear penetrated in Russia and in Germany, and
+how much longer it will be the instrument of coercion in either
+country.
+
+The President's freedoms are a wide promise to the people of the
+world--a promise made, like Woodrow Wilson's promises, before entering
+any agreement with any foreign power. Into the Atlantic Charter, Mr.
+Roosevelt also injected his basic domestic policies and, by some
+astute horsetrading managed to make them _theoretically_ the basis for
+international agreement. This point promises improved labor standards,
+economic adjustment, and social security throughout the world.
+
+Improvement, adjustment, security--they are not absolutes; freedom
+from want is, in effect, security; any reasonable adjustment between
+owners and workers will be an improvement in most countries. But the
+principle behind the labor point is as clear as the inspiration of the
+points on raw materials and freedom: it is that wars are caused by the
+miseries of peoples; when the people rule, they will prevent wars
+unless their miseries are acute; if they are not in dire want, if they
+have a chance to work, if they are free of coercion and threat, they
+will not make war--nor will they fall under the hand of the tyrant and
+the demagogue.
+
+In plain practical statesmanship, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill
+apologized for Versailles, which denied Germany access to raw
+materials and prevented improvement in labor standards and drove
+millions of Europeans into want and fear; and at the same time they
+acknowledged the connection between high diplomacy and the food and
+shelter and comforts of the citizen. The eight points reiterate some
+of the fourteen; they withdraw from others; but the new thing is all
+American, it is the injection of the rights of the common man into an
+international document.
+
+But there the Atlantic Charter ends. As an instrument of propaganda
+and as a basis of making war and peace, it was outlawed by events; it
+is forgotten.
+
+
+  _What Is Lacking_
+
+The Charter could not carry its own logic beyond a first step: since
+we were not allied to Britain we could not discuss a World system--all
+we could say was that aggressors would be disarmed (by ourselves and
+Great Britain, neither gaining a military or naval predominance) and
+later we also might disarm--when the world seemed safe. This was on
+the power side; on the economic side, our role was gratifyingly vague.
+
+Out of the Atlantic mists a few certainties rose, like icebergs. We
+soon saw:
+
+  1. That Britain has no method of organizing Europe; its
+     tradition is isolation plus alliances.
+
+  2. That Britain has no system of production parallel to the
+     slave system of Germany, by which Europe would restore the
+     ravages of war.
+
+  3. That Britain cannot impose its relatively democratic habits
+     and relatively high level of comfort on the Continent.
+
+In effect, after an uprush of enthusiasm following the defeat of
+Hitler, the democratic countries will face with panic their tragic
+incapacity to do what the fascists have almost done--unify the nations
+of Europe.
+
+
+  _Slow Union-Now_
+
+It was not the function of the Charter to outline the new map of
+Europe. But the map is being worked over and the most effective of the
+workers are those led by Clarence K. Streit toward Union-now. Long
+before the Atlantic Charter was issued, Federal Union had proposed
+free access to raw materials, even for Germans if they destroyed their
+Nazi leaders; and the entire publicity, remarkably organized, has a
+tone of authority which makes it profoundly significant. I do not know
+that it is a trial balloon of Downing Street or of the White House;
+but in America a Justice of the Supreme Court and a member of the
+Cabinet recommend the proposal to the "serious consideration" of the
+citizens and it has equally notable sponsors in England.
+
+I believe that union with the British Commonwealth of Nations stands
+in the way of America's actual function after the war; I see it as a
+sudden reversal of our historic direction, a shock we should not
+contemplate in war time; it does not correspond to the living
+actualities of our past or present. But I think we owe the Unionists a
+great deal; they have incited thought and even action; they serve as
+the Committee to Aid the Allies did before last December, to supply a
+rallying point for enthusiasts and enemies; we are doing far too
+little thinking about our international affairs, and Federal Union
+makes us think.
+
+It has two aims: the instant purpose of combining all our powers to
+win the war, using the fact of our union as an engine of propaganda in
+occupied and enemy countries; and second, "that this program be only
+the first step in the gradual, peaceful extension of ... federal union
+to all peoples willing and able to adhere to them, so that from this
+nucleus may grow eventually a universal world government of, by and
+for the people". (It sounds impractical, but so did the Communist
+Manifesto and Hitler's "ravings".)
+
+As to the immediate program, it would instantly revive the latent
+isolationism of tens of millions who used to insist that the Roosevelt
+policy would end in the sacrifice of our independence; we should have
+a unified control of production, but some 40% of our producers would
+lose all faith in our government. In the midst of winning the war, we
+should have to re-convince millions that we had not intentionally
+betrayed them.
+
+Military and productive unity can be independent of political unity.
+Unified command was achieved in France in 1918 and in the Pacific in
+1942, without unions.
+
+As for effect abroad, propaganda could present a better case to
+Frenchmen who believe Britain let them down if complete Anglo-American
+union were not an accomplished fact; and the whole Continental and
+Russian and Asiatic suspicion of our motives might be allayed if we
+did not unite completely and permanently with "the people of Canada,
+the United Kingdom, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of
+South Africa" while we were not so fondly embracing the peoples of
+India, China, and the Netherlands East Indies. The abiding union of
+literate, superior, capitalist white men is not going to be taken as a
+first step to world equality by Slavs and Orientals; and much as the
+British Empire may wish not to acknowledge the fact, Communism has
+completely undermined the idea of white supremacy, and has given a new
+hope to Asia and Africa. It may have been a very bad thing to do, but
+we cannot stop for recriminations now. There are new soldiers for
+democracy in the world, and if they are fighting beside us, we cannot
+ignore them and fall into the arms of their traditional oppressors. We
+have a great work to do with the Chinese and the Indians, and all the
+other peoples who can stand against our enemy; we cannot begin to do
+it if our first move is accepting British overlordship in the East,
+uncritically, without pledges or promises.
+
+As a post-war program Federal Union is more persuasive. It begins with
+a Wilsonian peace offer--the influence is strong and supplies the deep
+emotional appeal of the organization. It guarantees free access to
+rubber and oil and gold; it accepts any nation whose people had
+certain minimal freedoms; it implies, of course, free trade--with new
+markets for our manufactured products, and no duties on British
+woolens; plans for the Union Congress "assure the American people a
+majority" at the start. (As between the United States and the British
+Commonwealth; as soon as "all peoples willing and able" to, enter, the
+200 million American and British Commonwealthers would be swamped by
+800 million Chinese and Indians and other Asiatics.)
+
+The average American pays a great tribute to the largeness of the
+concept of "Union-now"--he doesn't believe that anyone really means
+it. He thinks it is a fancy name for a war alliance, or possibly a new
+simplified League of Nations. The gross actuality of Iowa and
+Yorkshire ruled by one governing body, he cannot take in. And as the
+argument develops, this general scepticism is justified; for the
+American learns that while he may be ruled, he will not be over-ruled,
+and he wonders what Mr. Churchill and the man in the London street
+will say to that, or in what disguise this plan is being presented to
+the English or the Scots or the New Zealanders. So far no responsible
+British statesman has offered union to the United States, but Mr.
+Leslie Hore-Belisha has said that we need a declaration of
+inter-dependence and our Ambassador to the Court of St. James's told
+an international Society of writers that we need a sort of
+international citizenship. Mr. Wendell Willkie however has said that
+"American democracy must rule the world."
+
+
+  _Entry Into Europe_
+
+By union or by alliance, American or Anglo-American rule over the
+world will have some strange consequences for us, citizens not
+accustomed to worry over "foreign affairs". Perhaps the strangest
+thing is that the results will be almost the same whether we are
+partners with Britain or alone in our mighty domination, with England
+as a satellite. An American or Anglo-American imperium can only be
+organized by force; it is, in effect, the old order of Europe, with
+America playing Britain's old star part, Britain reduced to the
+supporting role of France or Holland or Portugal. In any controversy,
+we step in, with our vast industrial power, our democratic tradition,
+our aloofness from Europe, just as England used to step in with _her_
+power and traditions; the Atlantic is to us what the Channel or North
+Sea was to Britain. England's policy was to prevent the rise of any
+single Continental power, so she made an alliance with Prussia to
+fight France in 1814 and made an alliance with France to fight Prussia
+in 1914. In an Anglo-American alliance, England would be our European
+outpost, just as Prussia or France was England's Continental outpost.
+
+Our policy would still be the balance of power. Like England, we
+should be involved in every war, whether we take up arms or not--as
+she was involved in the Crimea and the Balkans, and South Africa and
+North Africa; we should have our Fashodas and our Algeciras and our
+Mafeking; our peace will be uneasy, our wars not our own.
+
+The Atlantic Charter suggests a "policing" of the world after the war;
+it holds off from anything further; it does not actually hint that a
+reorganization of power in the world is needed. Yet, at the same time,
+the creation of an oceanic bloc to combat the European land bloc is
+hinted. It is all rather like a German professor's dream of
+geo-politics; Russia becomes a Pacific power and Japan, by a miserable
+failure of geography, is virtually a Continental one, while the United
+States is reduced to two strips of ocean frontage, like a real estate
+development with no back lot, with no back country, with no background
+in the history of a Continent.
+
+The Sea-Powers unit is as treacherous as "the Atlantic group" or "the
+Democratic countries"; the intent is still to create a dominant power
+and give ourselves (and Britain) control of the raw materials and the
+trade of the world. No matter how naturally the group comes together,
+by tradition or self-interest, it becomes instantly the nucleus for an
+alliance; and as the alliance begins to form, nations we omit or
+reject begin to crystallize around some other centre, and we have the
+balance of power again, the race for markets and the race for
+armaments.
+
+This will be particularly true if we begin to play the diplomatic
+game with the stakes greater than those ever thrown--since we are the
+first two-ocean nation to enter world affairs. At the moment nothing
+seems more detestable than the policy of Japan; but diplomacy
+overcomes all detestation, and if we are going in for the game of
+dealing with nations instead of peoples, we can foresee ourselves
+years from now as the great balance between the Atlantic and the
+Pacific, between Japan and England, or Japan and Germany, perhaps the
+honest broker between the two sets of powers. In 1942 we are
+independent, fighting for freedom, helping all those who fight against
+tyranny; and we can do this because we have kept out of the groupings
+and combinations of the powers. But we are being pushed into a
+combination and we know now that there is only one way to avoid
+entanglement: we must prevent the combination from coming into
+existence.
+
+
+  _Our Historic Decision_
+
+In 1919 an attempt was made, by America, to put an end to all European
+combinations of power. That attempt was unanimously approved by the
+people of the United States, some of whom voted for the League while
+the others endorsed a Society of Nations, to which W.G. Harding
+promised our adhesion. The Society of Nations was never seriously
+proposed, and Harding betrayed the American people; at the same time
+it was monumentally clear that France, with England's help, had
+sabotaged the actual League by making it a facade for a punitive
+alliance. Between these two betrayals, the idea of world organization
+was mortally compromised.
+
+We may quarrel over the blame for the impotence of the League; did
+France invade the Ruhr because, without us in the League, she needed
+"protection"? or did we stay out of the League because we knew France
+would go into the Ruhr? That can be argued for ever. We know
+reasonably well why we kept out of the League; but no one troubles to
+remember how earnestly we wanted the League and prayed for it and
+wanted to enter, so that it remained always to trouble us as we tried
+to sleep through the destruction of Ethiopia or Spain or
+Czecho-Slovakia.
+
+The League was not a promise of security to the _people_ of the United
+States. Our Government may have felt the need of a world order; we did
+not; the war had barely touched us, yet even those whom it had touched
+least were enthusiasts for a new federation of nations. It was neither
+fear nor any abstract love of peace. The League, or any other
+confederation of Europe, corresponded to our American need, which was
+to escape alliance with any single power or small group; to escape the
+danger of Europe united against us; and to escape the devil's
+temptation of imperialism--_because the people of the United States do
+not want to rule the world_. There is an instinct which tells us that
+those who rule are not independent; they are slaves to their slaves;
+it tells us that we are so constituted that we cannot rule over part
+of Europe or join with any part to rule the rest; it is our instinct
+of independence which forbids us in the end to destroy the liberty of
+any other nation.
+
+This goes back to the thought of union with the British nations. If we
+unite, and we are dominant, do we not accept the responsibility of
+domination? The appetite for empire is great and as the old world
+turned to us in 1941, as the War of the Worlds placed us in the centre
+of action, as more and more we came to make the decisions, as
+Australia, Russia, China, Britain called to us for help--the image of
+America ruling the world grew dazzling bright. It was our duty--our
+destiny; Mr. Henry Luce recognized the American century, seeing us
+accepted by the world which already accepts our motor cars, chewing
+gum and moving pictures. To shrink from ruling the world is abject
+cowardice. Did England shrink in 1914? Or France under Napoleon? Or
+Rome under Augustus? Or Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus?
+
+No. No despotism ever shrank from its "destiny" to destroy the freedom
+of other nations.
+
+But the history of America will still create our destiny--and our
+destiny is _not_ to rule the world.
+
+_Our destiny is to remain independent and the only way we can remain
+independent is by cooperation with all the other nations of the earth.
+That is the only way for us to escape exclusive alliances, the pull of
+grandiose imperial schemes, the danger of alliances against us, and a
+tragic drift into the European war system which can destroy us._ There
+is an area of action in which nationality plays no part: like labor
+statistics--and this area is steadily growing; there is another area
+jealously guarded, the area of honor and tariffs and taxes. We have to
+mark out the parts of our lives which we can offer up to international
+supervision and the parts we cannot. It will surprise us to see that
+we can become more independent if we collaborate more.
+
+
+  "_Far as Human Eye Can See_"
+
+I have no capacity to describe the world order after the war. If, as I
+have said, the war is fought by us in accordance with our national
+character, we will create a democratic relationship between the
+nations of the world; and our experience added to that of Britain and
+the USSR will tend toward a Federation of Commonwealths; the three
+great powers have arrived, by three separate experiences, at the idea
+of Federation; two of them are working out the problems of sovereign
+independent states within a union; the third, ourselves, worked the
+problem out long ago by expunging States Rights in theory and allowing
+a great deal in practise. As a result of our experience, we
+dogmatically assert that no Federation can be created without the
+ultimate extinction of independence; we may be right. But the thought
+persists that independence was wanted for the sake of liberty; that
+independence without security was the downfall of Czecho-Slovakia and
+France; and that we have cherished independence because the rest of
+the world did not cherish liberty as we did. Profoundly as I believe
+independence to be the key to American action, I can imagine the
+translation of the word into other terms; we are allied to Britain and
+the Netherlands and the Soviets today, we have accepted alien command
+of our troops and ships; we are supplying arms to the Soviets and
+building a naval base in Ecuador and have accepted an agreement by
+which Great Britain will have a word in the creation of the most
+cherished of our independent creations, the tariff. Independence, so
+absolute in origin, is like all absolutes, non-existent in fact; we
+know this in private life, for the man of "independent means" may
+depend on ten thousand people to pay him dividends; and only the mad
+are totally independent of human needs and duties.
+
+We will not willingly give up our right to elect a President; we may
+allow the President to appoint an American member to an international
+commission to allocate East Indies rubber; in return for which we will
+allocate our wheat or cotton or motors--on the advice of other
+nations, but without bowing our neck to their rule. We have always
+accepted specific international interference in our affairs--the
+Alabama claims and the Oregon boundary and the successive troubles in
+Venezuela prove that our "sovereign right" to do what we please was
+never exercised without some respect for the opinion of mankind--and
+the strength of the British navy. Indeed recent events indicate that
+for generations our independence of action, the reality of
+independence, rested on our faith in the British fleet.
+
+The moment we become realistic about our independence we will be able
+to collaborate effectively with other nations. We got a few lessons in
+realistic dealings in 1941--lend-lease and the trade for the naval
+bases were blunt, statesmanlike but most undiplomatic--moves to
+strengthen the British fleet, to extend our own area of safety, and to
+give us time against the threat of Japan. They protected our
+independence, but they also compromised it; the British by any
+concession to Japan might have weakened us; we took the risk, and our
+action was in effect an act of defensive war against Germany. Like
+Jefferson, buying Louisiana to protect us against any foreign power
+across the Mississippi, President Roosevelt acted under dire necessity
+and as Jefferson (not Roosevelt) put it, was not too deeply concerned
+with Constitutionality. The situation in 1941 required not only the
+bases but the continued functioning of the British fleet in the
+Atlantic; and we got what we needed.
+
+The economic agreement of 1942 is probably a greater invasion of our
+simon-pure independence of action; although it empowers a post-war
+President to decide how much of lend-lease was returned by valor in
+the field, it specifically binds us to alter our tariff if Britain can
+induce its Commonwealth of Nations to give up the system of "imperial
+preference". All our tariffs are horsetrades and the most-favored
+nation is a sweet device; but heretofore we have not bartered our
+tariffs in advance. Certainly a post-war economic union is in the
+wind; certainly we will accept it if it comes to us piecemeal, by
+agreements and joint-commissions and international resolutions which
+are not binding, but are accepted and become as routine as the law of
+copyright which once invaded our sacred national right to steal or the
+international postal union which gave us the right to send a letter to
+any country for five cents.
+
+When we think of the future our minds are clouded by memory of the
+League; we are psychologically getting ready to accept or reject the
+League all over again. We are worried over the form--will it be Geneva
+again or will headquarters be in Washington; will Germany have a vote;
+will we have to go to war if the Supreme Council tells us to. These
+are important if we are actually going to reconstitute the League; but
+if we are not, the only question is what we want the new world
+organization to do. In keeping with our political tradition we will
+pretend that we want it to do as little as possible and put upon it
+all the work we are too lazy to do ourselves; but even the minimum
+will be enough.
+
+
+  _Our Standing Offer_
+
+Everything points to an economic council representing the free nations
+of the world; the lease-lend principles in time of peace may be
+invoked, as Harold Laski has suggested, to provide food and raw
+materials for less favored nations; and the need for "economic
+sanctions" will not be lost on the nation which supplied Japan with
+scrap-iron and oil for five years of aggression against China and then
+was repaid at Pearl Harbor.
+
+If there is any wisdom--in the people or in their leaders--we will not
+have a formulated League to accept or reject; we will have a series of
+agreements (such as we have had for generations) covering more and
+more subjects, with more and more nations. We have drawn up treaties
+and agreements with twenty South American States, with forty-six
+nations united for liberty; we can draw up an agreement with Russia
+and Rumania and the Netherlands so that England and the Continent and
+China get oil; and another agreement may give us tungsten; we may have
+to take universal action to stop typhus--and no one will be an
+isolationist then. If the war ends by a series of uprisings we may be
+establishing temporary governments as part of our military strategy.
+Slowly the form of international cooperation will be seen; by that
+time it will be familiar to us--and we will see that we have not lost
+our independence, but have gained our liberty.
+
+We began the war with one weapon: liberty. If we fight the war well,
+we will begin the long peace with two: liberty and production. With
+them we will not need to rule the world; with them the world will be
+able to rule itself. All we have to do is to demonstrate the best use
+of the instruments--and to let others learn.
+
+Before our part in the war began, it was often suggested that America
+would feed and clothe Europe, send medicine and machinery to China,
+and make itself generally the post-war stockpile of Democracy as it
+had been the arsenal and treasury during the war; and the monotonous
+uncrushing answer was about "the money". Realities of war have blown
+"the money" question into atoms; no sensible person pretends that
+there is a real equation between our production and money value; we
+can't in any sense "afford" bombers and battleships; if we stopped to
+ask where "the money" would come from, and if the question were
+actually relevant, we would have to stop the war.
+
+Another actuality of war relieves us of the danger of being too
+generous--the actuality of rubber and tin and tungsten and all the
+other materials critical to production in peace time. Since we will
+have to rebuild our stocks of vital goods, our practical men will see
+to it that we get as well as give; we may send food to Greece and get
+rubber from Java, but on the books we will not be doing too badly.
+
+Neither money nor the bogey of a balance of trade is going to decide
+our provisioning of Europe and Asia; the cold necessity of preventing
+revolution and typhus will force us to rebuild and re-energize; in the
+end, like all enlargements of the market, this will repay us. The rest
+of the world will know a great deal about mass production by the end
+of the war: Indians and Australians will be expert at interchangeable
+parts; but we will have the immeasurable advantage of our long
+experience on which the war has forced us to build a true productive
+system. We will jump years ahead of our schedule of increase and
+improvement because of the war; and we will be able to face any
+problem of production--if we want to, or have to. The choice between
+people's lives and the gold standard will have to be made again, as it
+was by many nations in the 1930's; only this time the choice is not
+without a threat. After wars, people are accustomed to bloodshed; they
+prefer it to starvation.
+
+
+  _Alternative to Prosperity_
+
+The greatest invention of democracy is the wealth of the people. We
+discovered that wealth rested more firmly on prosperity than on
+poverty and the genius of our nation has gone into creating a
+well-to-do mass of citizens. Unfinished as the job is, we can start to
+demonstrate its principles to others. In return they may refrain from
+teaching us the principles of revolution.
+
+Recovery and freedom are our concrete actual offer to the nations of
+Europe, counter to the offer of Hitler. Without this literal, concrete
+offer, we shall have to fight longer to defeat Hitler--and every added
+day costs us lives and money and strength inside ourselves which we
+need to create the new world; if we can defeat Hitler without the aim
+of liberty, our victory will be incomplete; we will not automatically
+emancipate France or Jugo-Slavia, or draw Rumania back into the orbit
+of free nations. Within each nation a powerful group profits by the
+Nazi-system; within each a vast population, battered, disheartened,
+diseased, wants only the meanest security, one meal a day, shelter
+only from the bitter days, something more than a rag for clothing--and
+an end to the struggle; these are not heroes, they are old people, men
+and women struck down and beaten and starved so that they cannot rise,
+but can drag down those who attempt to rise. These we may save only by
+giving them food and forgetfulness. On the other side there are the
+young--carefully indoctrinated, worked over to believe that the offer
+of fascism is hard, but practical; it is an offer of slavery and
+security; whereas they are told the offer of the democratic countries
+is an hypocrisy and--worse still--cannot be made good. We have to face
+the disagreeable fact that the Balkan peasant in 1900 heard of
+universal suffrage and high wages in America, and his grandchildren
+know more about our sharecroppers and race riots and strike breakers
+than we do--because the Goebbels machine has played the dark side of
+our record a million times. The first year of the war was bound to
+show the "superiority" of the German production technique over ours,
+since Europe will not know that we are still at the beginning of
+actual production. The mind of Europe knows little good of us; we
+have not yet begun to undermine the fascist influence by words, and
+our acts are not yet planned. Even after Hitler is destroyed, we will
+have to act to overcome impotence in political action which years of
+Nazi "conditioning" induces, and to compensate for the destruction of
+technical skill in the occupied areas. To us the end of the war is a
+wild moving picture of gay processions, swastikas demolished, prisons
+opened, and the governments-in-exile hailed at the frontiers; all of
+these things may happen, but the reality, after the parade, will be a
+grim business of re-making the flesh and the spirit of peoples. The
+children of Israel rejoiced and sang as they crossed the Red Sea; but
+they had been slaves. So Moses led them forty years in the wilderness,
+when he could have gone directly to the Promised Land in forty months,
+because he wanted a generation of slaves to die, and a generation of
+hardy freemen to be in full mature power.[A] The generation we will
+raise to power in the occupied countries will have great experience of
+tyranny, none of freedom; it will know all about our shortcomings and
+nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it
+will have seen the Nazis at work and know nothing of new techniques of
+production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote A: I have not traveled the route; but General Sir Francis
+Younghusband who had, gave me the figures--and the motive.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+The Liberty Bell
+
+
+Above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it
+as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the
+world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. We
+have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not
+forget--and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and
+people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is
+only a word. We do not need to convert the world to a special form of
+political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the
+peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us
+to help. We will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will
+make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will
+underwrite. For in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must
+also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that
+there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone
+among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man,
+freedom can destroy poverty.
+
+We have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric
+power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known
+before, not even to ourselves. For we have to create enough liberty to
+take up the shameful slack in our own country. We all know,
+indifferently, that people (somewhere--where was it?--wasn't there a
+movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. But we assume that Americans
+always have enough liberty. The Senate's committee report on the
+fascism of organized big-farming in California is a shock which
+Americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not
+understand that we have been weakened internally, as England was
+weakened by its distressed areas and its Malayan snobbery. We do not
+yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic
+system and calculated denials of liberty. We have denied liberty in
+hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain
+portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have
+started the counter-infection of communism. Most of the shameful
+occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war
+against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. Here are
+the facts in the California case, chosen because the documentation
+comes from official sources:
+
+     "Unemployment, underemployment, disorganized and haphazard
+     migrancy, lack of adequate wages or annual income, bad housing,
+     insufficient education, little medical care, the great public
+     burden of relief, the denial of civil liberties, riots, strife,
+     corruption are all part and parcel of this autocratic system of
+     labor relations that has for decades dominated California's
+     agricultural industry."
+
+The American people do not know that such things exist; no American
+orator has dared to say "except in three or four states, all men are
+equal in the eyes of the law"--or, "trial by jury is the right of
+every man except farm hands in California, who may be beaten at will."
+When the Senate's report is repeated to us from Japanese short-wave we
+will call it propaganda--and it will be the terrible potent propaganda
+of truth. We will still call for "stern measures", if a laborer who
+has lost the rights of man on American soil does not go into battle
+with a passion in his heart to die for liberty, and we will not
+understand that we have been at fault, because we have not created
+liberty. We have been living on borrowed liberty, not of our own
+making.
+
+We have not seen that some of our "cherished liberties" are heirlooms,
+beautiful antiques, not usable in the shape they come to us. We have
+the right to publish--but we cannot afford to print a newspaper--so
+that we have to create a new freedom of the press. We have the right
+to keep a musket on the wall, but our enemies have ceased to prowl,
+the musket is an antique, and we need a new freedom to protect
+ourselves from officious bureaucrats. We have the right to assemble,
+but men of one mind, men of one trade, live a thousand miles apart, so
+we need a new freedom to combine--and a new restriction on
+combination, too.
+
+Freedom is always more dangerous than discipline, and the more complex
+our lives, the more dangerous is any freedom. This we know; we know
+that discipline and order are dangerous, too, because they cannot
+tolerate imperfection. A nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free,
+but it can exist 90% free, especially if the direction of life is
+toward freedom; that is what we have proved in 160 years. But a nation
+cannot exist 90% slave--or 90% regimented--because every degree of
+order multiplies the power of disorder. If a machine needs fifty
+meshed-in parts, for smooth operation, the failure of one part
+destroys forty-nine; if it needs five million, the failure of one part
+destroys five million.
+
+That is the hope of success for our strategy against the strategy of
+"totality"; the Nazis have surpassed the junkers by their disciplined
+initiative in the field, a genuine triumph; but we still do not know
+whether a whole people can be both disciplined and flexible; we have
+not yet seen the long-run effect of Hitler's long vituperation of
+Bolshevism, his treaty with Stalin, and his invasion of Russia--unless
+the weakening of Nazi power, its failure to press success into victory
+at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad reflect a hesitation in the
+stupefied German mind, an incapacity to change direction.
+
+Whether our dangers are greater than those of fascism may be proved in
+war; it remains for us to make the most of them, to transform danger
+into useful action. We have to increase freedom, because as freedom
+grows, it brings its own regulation and discipline; the dangers of
+liberty came to us only after we began to neglect it or suppress it;
+freedom itself is orderly, because it is a natural state of men, it is
+not chaos, it begins when the slave is set free and ends when the
+murderer destroys the freedom of others; between the tyrant and the
+anarchist lies the area of human freedom.
+
+It is also the area of human cooperation, the condition of life in
+which man uses all of his capacities because he is not deprived of the
+right to work, by choice, with other men. In that area, freedom
+expands and is never destructive. The flowering of freedom in the past
+hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted
+extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create
+liberty, they destroy only what is already dead.
+
+I have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"--as if the freedom of
+man were a commodity; _and it is_. So long as we think of it as a
+great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we _make_ liberty it
+becomes a reality; the Declaration of Independence _made_ liberty,
+concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets.
+Liberty, like love, has to be made; the passion out of which love
+rises exists always, but people have to _make love_, or the passion is
+betrayed; and the acts by which human beings make liberty are as
+fundamental as the act of sexual intercourse by which love is made.
+And as love recreates itself and has to be made, in order to live
+again, liberty has also to be re-created, or it dies out. Whatever
+lovers do affects the profound relation between them, for the passion
+is complex; whatever we do affects our liberties, for freedom rises
+out of a thousand circumstances; and we have to be not only eternally
+vigilant, but eternally creative; we can no longer live on the liberty
+inherited from the great men who created liberty in the Declaration of
+Independence. All that quantity has been exhausted, stolen from us,
+misused; if we want to survive, we must begin to make liberty again
+and proclaim it throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof;
+and it shall be a jubilee unto them.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                    |
+    |                                                            |
+    | Page  54: "what the trust were" replaced with              |
+    |           "what the trusts were"                           |
+    | Page  83: "given by the the people" replaced with          |
+    |           "given by the people"                            |
+    | Page 156: enterprizes replaced with enterprises            |
+    |                                                            |
+    |            -------------------------------------           |
+    |                                                            |
+    | NOTE that on Page 85 there are words missing from the      |
+    | quoted section of the Declaration of Independence.         |
+    | The missing words "to our British brethren. We have warned |
+    | them" have been inserted in the paragraph that begins:     |
+    | "Nor have We been wanting in attention (to our British     |
+    | brethren. We have warned them) from time to time of        |
+    | attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable   |
+    | jurisdiction over us."                                     |
+    |                                                            |
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROCLAIM LIBERTY! ***
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+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes.
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+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Proclaim Liberty!
+
+Author: Gilbert Seldes
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34890]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROCLAIM LIBERTY! ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Curtis Weyant, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen" style="font-weight: bold;">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<br />
+<p class="noin">Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.</p>
+<p class="noin" style="text-align: left;">Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+For a complete list, please see the <span style="white-space: nowrap;"><a href="#TN">end of this document</a>.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h1>PROCLAIM LIBERTY!</h1>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h3>ALSO by GILBERT SELDES</h3>
+<br />
+<h4>On Related Subjects</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 35%;">
+      Your Money and Your Life<br />
+      Mainland<br />
+      The Years of the Locust<br />
+      Against Revolution<br />
+      The Stammering Century<br />
+      The Seven Living Arts<br />
+      The United States and the War (London, 1917)<br />
+      This is America (Moving Picture)</p>
+
+<br />
+<h3>AND</h3>
+<br />
+
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 35%;">
+      The Movies Come From America<br />
+      The Movies and the Talkies<br />
+      The Future of Drinking<br />
+      The Wings of the Eagle<br />
+      Lysistrata (A Modern Version)</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h1><i>Proclaim</i></h1>
+
+<h1>LIBERTY!</h1>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h3><i>By</i></h3>
+
+<h3>GILBERT SELDES</h3>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 35%;">Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the<br />
+inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them....</p>
+<p class="right" style="margin-right: 35%;">Leviticus xxv, 10.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/deco.png" width="10%" alt="Publisher's Mark" />
+</div>
+
+<h5>THE GREYSTONE PRESS<br />
+NEW YORK</h5>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA<br />
+BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.<br />
+RICHMOND, VIRGINIA</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4><span class="sc">To the Children</span><br />
+who will have<br />
+to live in the world<br />
+we are making</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h3>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</h3>
+<br />
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p>Thanks are given to the Macmillan Company for their permission to
+quote several paragraphs from Arthur Koestler's <i>Darkness at Noon</i> in
+my first chapter. <i>The Grand Strategy</i> by H.A. Sargeaunt and Geoffrey
+West, referred to in chapter two, is published by Thomas Y. Crowell
+Co.</p>
+
+<p class="right">G.S.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="toc" id="toc"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<br />
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="65%" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr" width="20%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl" width="60%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="20%" style="font-size: 90%;">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">TOTAL VICTORY</td>
+  <td class="tdr">13</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">STRATEGY FOR THE CITIZEN</td>
+  <td class="tdr">29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">UNITED...?</td>
+  <td class="tdr"> 44</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">"THE STRATEGY OF TRUTH"</td>
+  <td class="tdr">61</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">THE FORGOTTEN DOCUMENT</td>
+  <td class="tdr">77</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">"THE POPULATION OF THESE STATES"</td>
+  <td class="tdr">92</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">ADDRESS TO EUROPE</td>
+  <td class="tdr">111</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">THE SCIENCE OF SHORT WAVE</td>
+  <td class="tdr">119</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">DEFINITION OF AMERICA</td>
+  <td class="tdr">129</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">POPULARITY AND POLITICS</td>
+  <td class="tdr">156</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">THE TOOLS OF DEMOCRACY</td>
+  <td class="tdr">163</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">DEMOCRATIC CONTROL</td>
+  <td class="tdr">170</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></td>
+  <td class="tdl">THE LIBERTY BELL</td>
+  <td class="tdr">199</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h2>PROCLAIM LIBERTY!</h2>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+
+<h2>Total Victory</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The peril we are in today is this:</p>
+
+<p>For the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong
+enough to destroy us.</p>
+
+<p>This book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies&mdash;where
+it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. It is not about
+munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to
+create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of
+America, what it has been and is and will be. And since character is
+destiny, this book is about the destiny of America.</p>
+
+<p>The next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. With the
+best of motives, and the worst results, Americans for months after
+December 7, 1941, said that Pearl Harbor was a costly blessing because
+it united all Americans and made us understand why the war was
+inevitable. A fifty-mile bus trip outside of New York&mdash;perhaps even a
+subway ride within its borders&mdash;would have proved both of these
+statements blandly and dangerously false. American unity could not be
+made in Japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a
+cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and
+recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of
+anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those
+of our enemies.</p>
+
+<p>What follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist.
+For some twenty years I have observed the sources of American unity
+and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future
+of American liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as
+it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children
+will live in the world we are now creating. I am therefore not
+writing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>frivolously, or merely to testify to my devotion; I am
+writing to persuade&mdash;to uncover sources of strength which others may
+have overlooked, to create new weapons, to stir new thoughts. If I
+thought the war for freedom could be won by writing lies, I would
+write lies. I am afraid the war will be lost if we do not face the
+truth, so I write what I believe to be true about America&mdash;about its
+past and present and future, meaning its history and character and
+destiny&mdash;but mostly about the present, with only a glance at our
+forgotten past, and a declaration of faith in the future which is, I
+hope, the inevitable result of our victory.</p>
+
+<p>We know the name and character of our enemy&mdash;the Axis; but after
+months of war we are not entirely convinced that it intends to destroy
+us because we do not see why it has to destroy us. Destroy; not
+defeat. The desperate war we are fighting is still taken as a gigantic
+maneuvre; obviously the Axis wants to "win" battles and dictate "peace
+terms". We still use these phrases of 1918, unaware that the purpose
+of Axis war is not defeat of an enemy, but destruction of his national
+life. We have seen it happen in France and Poland and Norway and
+Holland; but we cannot imagine that the Nazis intend actually to
+appoint a German Governor General over the Mississippi Valley, a
+Gauleiter in the New England provinces, and forbid us to read
+newspapers, go to the movies or drink coffee; we cannot believe that
+the Axis intends to destroy the character of America, annihilating the
+liberties our ancestors fought for, and the level of comfort which we
+cherished so scrupulously in later generations. In moments of pure
+speculation, when we wonder what would happen "at worst", we think of
+a humiliating defeat on land and sea, bombardment of our cities,
+surrender&mdash;and a peace conference at which we and Britain agree to pay
+indemnities; perhaps, until we pay off, German and Japanese soldiers
+would be quartered in our houses, police our streets; but we assume
+that after the "shooting war" was over, they would not ravish our
+women.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Victory</i> (<i>Axis Model</i>)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All this is the war of 1918. In 1942 the purpose of Axis victory is
+the destruction of the American system, the annihilation of the
+financial and industrial power of the United States, the reduction of
+this country to an inferior position in the world and the enslavement
+of the American people by depriving them of their liberty and of their
+wealth. The actual physical slavery of the American people and the
+deliberate taking over of our factories and farms and houses and motor
+cars and radios are both implied in an Axis victory; the enslavement
+is automatic, the robbery of our wealth will depend on Axis economic
+strategy: if we can produce more <i>for them</i> by remaining in technical
+possession of our factories, they will let us keep them.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot believe this is so because we see no reason for it. Our
+intentions toward the German and Italian people are not to enslave and
+impoverish; on the contrary, we think of the defeat of their leaders
+as the beginning of liberty. We do not intend to make Venice a
+tributary city, nor Essen a factory town run by American government
+officials. We may police the streets of Berlin until a democratic
+government proves its strength by punishing the SS and the Gestapo,
+until the broken prisoners of Dachau return in whatever triumph they
+can still enjoy. But our basic purpose is still to defeat the armed
+forces of the Axis and to insure ourselves against another war by the
+creation of free governments everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>(Neither the American people nor their leaders have believed that a
+responsible peaceable government can be erected <i>now</i> in Japan. Toward
+the Japanese our unclarified intentions are simple: annihilation of
+the power, to such an extent that it cannot rise again&mdash;as a military
+or a commercial rival. The average citizen would probably be glad to
+hand over to the Chinese the job of governing Japan.)</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>on; as we
+fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our
+effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to
+think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting.
+The vengeful articles of the treaty of Versailles were written after
+the Armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created
+during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been
+accepted by Americans if the United States had fought longer and
+therefore thought longer about them.</p>
+
+<p>We shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. But
+we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an Axis peace
+means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field
+and revolution at home, the Axis powers had to go to war on the United
+States.</p>
+
+<p>If we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on Pearl
+Harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by Axis
+standards, Pearl Harbor was the final incident of one series of
+events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose,
+the destruction of American democracy&mdash;which, so long as it endured,
+undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers.</p>
+
+<p>Why? Why are Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo insecure if we survive? Why
+were we in danger so long as they were victorious? The answer lies in
+the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the
+<i>reason</i> has to be found in the character of those involved; the war
+is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of
+our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it
+was inevitable&mdash;and how we will win.</p>
+
+<p>Our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our
+present crisis, and so creates our future. That is the sense in which
+character is Destiny.</p>
+
+<p>We know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war
+began we knew the treachery of the Japanese military caste, the jackal
+aggression of Mussolini, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>brutality and falseness of Hitler; and
+the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these
+leaders.</p>
+
+<p>But these things do not explain why we are a danger to the Axis, and
+the Axis to us.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2">"<i>Historic Necessity</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of
+fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new,
+but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as
+the Feudal Order. Democracy destroyed Feudalism; and Feudalism,
+returning in a new form as Fascism, must destroy democracy or go down
+in the attempt; the New Order and the New World cannot exist side by
+side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one
+another and only one will survive. We might blindly let the new
+despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force
+since 1776; but it cannot let us live. We could co-exist with Czarism
+because it was a shrinking force; or with British Imperialism because
+its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. We could
+not have lived side by side with Trotskyite Communism because it was
+as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the German Nazis.</p>
+
+<p>As it happened, Stalin, not Trotsky, took over from Lenin; Socialism
+in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". Stalin made a
+sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of
+propaganda; he allowed German Communism to be beaten to death in
+concentration camps; and, as Trotsky might have said, the "historical
+obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the
+bearded old Marxian enemies of Capital, but by Capital's own young
+sadists, the Storm Troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and
+manufacturers of Italy and Germany. That is why, since 1932, realist
+democrats have known that the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It
+was not a choice <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees
+of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force
+of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew
+factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from
+the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally
+of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding.
+The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking
+semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact
+with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography
+demanded a continent for a military base.</p>
+
+<p>The destruction of America was a geographical necessity, for Hitler;
+and something more. Geographically, the United States lies between
+Hitler's enemies, England and Russia; we are not accustomed to the
+thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for
+England's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a
+threat to Germany. Look at the other side: we are a potential
+transpacific base for Russia; our fleet can supply the Soviets and
+China; Russia can retreat toward Siberian ports and join us. So we
+dominate the two northern oceans, and with Russia, the Arctic as well.
+That is the geographic reason for Hitler's attack on us.</p>
+
+<p>The moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of
+the United States must be destroyed, its future must turn black and
+bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on
+its foundations until Democracy perishes from the earth.</p>
+
+<p>So long as a Democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living)
+survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that
+propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and
+security. In order to have security, says Hitler, you must give up
+will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be
+disciplined and ordered&mdash;because the modern world is too complex to
+allow for the will of the individual. The democracies insist that the
+rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>and
+that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet
+outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private
+life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. The essential democratic
+belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in
+the desirability of <i>change</i>; and we, democratic people, believe that
+the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that
+progress will be made. The terror of change in which dictators live is
+shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only
+thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. It
+does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death.</p>
+
+<p>So long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution,
+and prosperity without regimentation, the Nazi states are in danger.
+In a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love
+poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next
+twenty years are critical. Unless we, the democratic people, are
+destroyed now, the fascist adults of 1940 to 1960 will still know that
+freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery.</p>
+
+<p>So much&mdash;which is enough&mdash;was true even before the declaration of war;
+since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend
+themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce
+engines of war, cannot win victories. And we are equally compelled,
+for our own safety, to destroy the <i>principle</i> which tries to destroy
+us. The alternative to victory over America is therefore not
+defeat&mdash;or an inconclusive truce. The alternative is annihilation for
+the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party
+men. They will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will
+no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the
+organization of victory.</p>
+
+<p>The fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their
+subordinates, they can control the world. And the purpose of their
+military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of
+the world. Even for the "self <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>sufficient" United States, this means
+that the standard of living must go down&mdash;drastically and for ever.</p>
+
+<p>The policy is not entirely new. It develops from tariff barriers and
+subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best
+friends&mdash;under the Stevenson Act regulating rubber prices, for
+instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to
+Germany or when our tariff laws kept Britain and France out of our
+markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. This
+means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have
+defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Revolution in Reverse</i></p>
+
+<p>The new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private
+business, buying and selling. As trade is the basic activity of our
+time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there
+is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution.
+The Communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the
+world&mdash;a house, a car, a job&mdash;shied away from the uncertainty of the
+future. But the reactionary revolution of Mussolini and Hitler
+instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not
+a mere protection against the Reds, it was a positive return to the
+days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and
+fifty years of Democracy, it blotted out the French and American
+Revolutions, it erased the names of Napoleon and Garibaldi from
+Continental European history, leaving the name of Metternich all the
+more splendid in its isolation. The manufacturers of motor cars and
+munitions were terrified of Reds in the factories; the great bankers
+and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced
+fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the
+World War&mdash;which was first political and then economic democracy.</p>
+
+<p>This was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but
+it had to destroy capitalism with it. The idiots <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>who ran the
+financial and industrial world in the 1920's proved their incompetence
+by the end of 1929; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were
+exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by
+its own confessed character had to destroy them. It is a pleasant
+irony that ten minutes with Karl Marx or Lenin or with a parlor pink
+could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide.</p>
+
+<p>Only an enemy can really appreciate Karl Marx. The faithful have to
+concentrate on the future coming of the Communists' Millenium; but the
+sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which Marx arrived
+at his criticism of the Capitalist System. In that analysis Marx
+simplifies history so:</p>
+
+<p>No economic system lives for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Each system has in it the germ of its own successor.</p>
+
+<p>The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its
+geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others
+broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and
+Luther through the social and religious barriers.)</p>
+
+<p>With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the
+successor to Feudalism.</p>
+
+<p>From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his
+followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in
+the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see
+all its results&mdash;the enormous increase in the number of prosperous
+families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised
+to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into
+Communism. But to the sceptic only one thing in the Marxian prophecy
+is important. He says that in the later stages of Capitalism, it will
+become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of
+production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change
+into a <i>new</i> system. (According to Marx, this new system will be
+Communism.)</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>There were moments under the grim eyes of Mr. Hoover when all the
+parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. There are
+apparently some Americans who wish that the New Deal had not
+interposed itself between the Gold Standard and the Red Flag.</p>
+
+<p>These are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have
+studied Marx before flirting with the fascists. For even the
+rudimentary analysis above shows that Capitalism cannot <i>grow into</i>
+fascism; fascism moves <i>backward</i> from democratic capitalism, it moves
+into the system which democracy destroyed&mdash;the feudal system. The
+capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on
+as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world
+it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has
+no future if it goes back to the past. And fascism is the discarded
+past of capitalism.</p>
+
+<p>We think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have
+declared war on us. Now we see how natural is the alliance between the
+European states who wish to restore feudalism and the Asiatic state
+which never abandoned it. Now we recognize the Nazi or Fascist party
+as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see
+the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. But we do not yet
+see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free
+state&mdash;and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as Hitler is to
+destroy democracy.</p>
+
+<p>We strike back at Japan because Japan attacked us, and fight Germany
+and Italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war
+until we understand that the Axis had to attack us and that we must
+destroy the system which made the attack inevitable.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Walled Town and Open Door</i></p>
+
+<p>At first glance, the feudal nature of fascism seems unimportant. In
+pure logic, maybe, feudal and democratic systems cannot co-exist, but
+in fact, feudal Japan did exist in 1830 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>and the United States was
+enjoying Jacksonian democracy. There must be something more than
+abstract hostility between the two systems.</p>
+
+<p>There is. Feudalism is a walled town; democracy is a ship at sea and a
+covered wagon. The capitalist pioneer gaps every wall in his path and
+his path is everywhere. The defender of the wall must destroy the
+invader before he comes near. In commercial terms, the fascists must
+conquer us in order to eliminate us as competitors for world trade. We
+can understand the method if we compare fascism at peace with
+democracy at war.</p>
+
+<p>In the first days of the war we abandoned several essential freedoms:
+speech and press and radio and assembly as far as they might affect
+the conduct of the war; and then, with more of a struggle, we gave up
+the right to manufacture motor cars, the right to buy or sell tires;
+we accepted an allotment of sugar; we abandoned the right to go into
+the business of manufacturing radio sets; we allowed the government to
+limit our installment buying; we neither got nor gave credit as freely
+as before; we gave up, in short, the system of civil liberty and free
+business enterprise&mdash;in order to win the war.</p>
+
+<p>Six hundred years ago, all over Europe the economy of peace was
+exactly our economy of war. In the Middle Ages, the <i>right</i> to become
+a watchmaker did not exist; the guild of watchmakers accepted or
+rejected an applicant. By this limitation, the total number of watches
+produced was roughly governed; the price was also established (and
+overcharging was a grave offense in the Middle Ages). Foreign
+competition was excluded; credit was for financiers, and the
+installment system had not been invented.</p>
+
+<p>The feudalism of six hundred years ago is the peace-time fascism of
+six years ago. The fascist version of feudalism is State control of
+production. In Nazi Germany the liberty to work at a trade, to
+manufacture a given article, to stop working, to change professions,
+were all seriously limited. The supply of materials was regulated by
+the State, the number <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>of radios to be exported was set by the State
+in connection with the purchase of strategic imports; the State could
+encourage or prevent the importation of coffee or helium or silk
+stockings; it could and did force men and women to raise crops, to
+make fuses, to learn flying, to stop reading. It created a feudal
+state far more benighted than any in the actual Middle Ages; it was in
+peace <i>totally</i> coordinated for production&mdash;far more so than we are
+now, at war.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of our sacrifice of liberty is to make things a thousand
+times faster than before; to save raw materials we abolish the cuff on
+our trousers and we use agate pots instead of aluminum; we work longer
+hours and work harder; we keep machines going twenty-four hours a day,
+seven days a week&mdash;all for the single purpose of maximum output.</p>
+
+<p>For the same purpose, the fascist state is organized <i>at peace</i>&mdash;to
+out-produce and <i>under-sell</i> its competitors.</p>
+
+<p>The harried German people gave up their freedom in order to recover
+prosperity. They became a nation of war-workers in an economic war. A
+vast amount of their production went into tanks and Stukas; another
+segment went into export goods to be traded for strategic materials;
+and only a small amount went for food and the comforts of life. Almost
+nothing went into luxuries.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Burning Books&mdash;and Underselling</i></p>
+
+<p>That is why the <i>internal</i> affairs of Germany became of surpassing
+importance to us. Whether we knew it or not, we were in competition
+with the labor battalions. When we denounced the Nazi suppression of
+free speech, the jailing of religious leaders, the silencing of
+Catholics, the persecution of Jews, we were as correct economically as
+we were ethically; the destruction of liberty had to be accomplished
+in Germany as the comfort level fell, to prevent criticism and
+conflict. Because liberals were tortured and books burned and Jews and
+Catholics given over to satisfy a frightful appetite for hatred, the
+people of Germany were kept longer at their work, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>and got less and
+less butter, and made more and more steel to undersell us in Soviet
+Russia or the Argentine; they made also more and more submarines to
+sink our ships if we ever came to war. Every liberty erased by Hitler
+was an economic attack on us, it made slave labor a more effective
+competitor to our free labor. The concentration camp and the
+blackguards on the streets were all part of an <i>economic</i> policy, to
+create a feudal serfdom in the place of free labor. If the policy
+succeeds, we will have to break down our standard of living and give
+up entirely our habits of freedom, in order to meet the competition of
+slave labor.</p>
+
+<p>It means today that we will not have cheap motor cars and presently it
+may mean that we will not have high test steel or meat every day.
+Victory for the Axis system means that we work for the Germans and the
+Japanese, literally, actually, on their terms, in factories bossed by
+their local representatives; and anything less than complete victory
+for us means that we work harder and longer for less and less, paying
+for defeat by accepting a mean standard of living, not daring to fight
+our way into the markets of the world which fascism has closed to us.</p>
+
+<p>Readers of <i>You Can't Do Business With Hitler</i> will not need to be
+convinced again that the two systems&mdash;his and ours&mdash;are mutually
+incompatible. Fortunately for us, they are also mutually destructive.
+The basis of fascism is, as I have noted, the feudal hope of a fixed
+unchangeable form of society which will last forever; the basis of
+democracy is change (which we call progress). Hitler announces that
+nazism will last a thousand years; the Japanese assert that their
+society has lasted longer; and the voice of Mussolini, when it used to
+be heard, spoke of Ancient Rome. We who are too impatient of the past,
+and need to understand our tradition, are at any rate aware of one
+thing&mdash;it is a tradition of change. (Jefferson to Lincoln to Theodore
+Roosevelt&mdash;the acceptance of change, even of radical change, is basic
+in American history.)</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>We might tolerate the tactics of fascism; the racial hatred, the false
+system of education, the attack on religion, all might pass if they
+weren't part of the great strategic process of the fascists, which is
+our mortal enemy, as our process is theirs. They exclude and we
+penetrate; they have to <i>destroy</i> liberty in order to control making
+and buying and selling and using steel and bread and radios, and we
+have to <i>create</i> liberty in order to create more customers for more
+things. They have to suppress dissent because dissent means difference
+which no feudal system can afford; we have to encourage criticism
+because only free inquiry destroys error and discovers new and useful
+truths.</p>
+
+<p>These hostile actions make us enemies because our penetration will not
+accept the Axis wall thrown up around nations normally free and
+friendly to us; and the Axis must make us into fascists because there
+can be no exceptions in a system dedicated to conformity. The whole
+world must accept a world-system.</p>
+
+<p>In particular, we must be eliminated because we do expose the fraud of
+fascism&mdash;which is that liberty must be sacrificed to attain power.
+This is an open principle of fascism, as it is of all dictatorships
+and "total" states. It is very appealing to tyrants and to weaklings,
+and the ruthlessness of the attack on liberty seems "realistic" even
+to believers in democracy&mdash;especially during the critical moments when
+action is needed and democracies seem to do nothing but talk. The
+truth is that our Executive is tremendously prompt and unhampered in
+war time; the appeaser of fascism does not tell the truth; he wants an
+end to talk, which is dangerous, because he is always at war and the
+secret fascist would have to admit that his perpetual war is against
+the people of the United States. So he says only that in modern times,
+liberty is too great a luxury, too easily abused; he says that a great
+State is too delicately balanced to tolerate the whims and
+idiosyncrasies of individuals; if the State has discovered the best
+diet for all the citizens, then no citizen can "prefer" another diet,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>and no expert may cast doubt on the official rations. To cause
+uncertainty is to diminish efficiency; to back "wrong" ideas is
+treason.</p>
+
+<p>One of the best descriptions of this state of mind occurs in a page of
+Arthur Koester's <i>Darkness at Noon</i>. It is fiction, but not untrue:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with
+thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion
+that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is
+all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be
+liquidated as <i>saboteurs</i>. In a nationally centralized
+agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of
+enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.
+If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him, and the
+execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he
+was wrong....</p>
+
+<p>"It is that alone that matters: who is objectively in the
+right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another
+problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he
+recommended nitrogen. If he was not, according to their ethics
+he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that
+nitrogen would have been better after all. If he was in good
+faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue
+making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be
+ruined by it....</p>
+
+<p>"That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of
+subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong
+must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the
+law of historical credit; it was our law."</p></div>
+
+<p>Intellectual fascists are particularly liable to the error of thinking
+that this sort of thing is above morality, beyond good and evil. The
+"cricket-moralists" are people like ourselves and the English, who are
+agitated because "innocent" men are put to death; the hard-headed ones
+answer that innocence isn't important; effectiveness is what counts.
+Yet the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>democratic-cricket-morality is in the long run more realistic
+than the tough school which kills its enemies first and then finds out
+if they were guilty. The reason we allow a scientist to cry for
+nitrates after we have decided on potash is that we have to keep
+scientific investigation alive; we cannot trust ourselves for too long
+to the potash group. In five years, both nitrate and potash may be
+discarded because we have found something better. And no scientist
+will for long retain his critical pioneering spirit if an official
+superior can reject his research. (An Army board rejected the research
+of General William Mitchell and it took a generation for Army men to
+recover initiative; and this was in an organization accustomed to
+respect rank and tradition. In science, which is more sensitive, the
+only practical thing is to reward the heretic and the explorer even
+while one adopts the idea of the orthodox.)</p>
+
+<p>This question of heresy, apparently so trifling, is critical for us
+because it is a clue to the weakness of Hitlerism and it provides us
+with the only strategy by which Hitlerism can be destroyed.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER II<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>Strategy for the Citizen</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>There is a tendency at this moment to consider Hitler a master
+strategist, master psychologist, master statesman. His analysis of
+democracy, however, leaves something unsaid, and the nervous strong
+men who admire Hitler, as well as the weaklings who need "leadership",
+are doing their best to fill in the gaps. The Hitlerian concept of
+totality allows no room for difference; an official bread ration and
+an official biochemistry are equally to be accepted by everyone; in
+democracy Hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing
+and to encourage deviations from the established principles of
+biochemistry. This, he says, weakens the State; for one thing it leads
+to endless discussion. (Hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of
+letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a
+world-scale, immense in space, enduring for all time, has the same
+terrific concentration on himself.) Hitler's admirers in a democracy
+take this up with considerable pleasure; in each of his victories they
+see an argument against the Bill of Rights. Then war comes; sugar is
+wanting and we accept a ration card; supreme commands are established
+in various fields; and the sentiment spreads that "we can only beat
+Hitler by becoming a 'total' State". (No one dares say "Nazi".)</p>
+
+<p>Hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into
+every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. He has
+tried to turn dissent into disunion&mdash;and he has been helped by some of
+the most loyal and patriotic Americans almost as much as he has been
+helped by bundists.</p>
+
+<p>We have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the
+causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of
+human action in which difference is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>vital with the areas in which
+difference is a mortal danger.</p>
+
+<p>The moment we saw the direction of Hitler's drive, which was to
+magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively
+intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more
+we were at odds. The results were serious enough.</p>
+
+<p>No policy governing production had been accepted by industry;</p>
+
+<p>No policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that
+it was operating smoothly;</p>
+
+<p>No great stock of vital raw materials was laid up;</p>
+
+<p>No great stock of vital war machinery had been created;</p>
+
+<p>No keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an
+integrated part of American thought;</p>
+
+<p>No awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an
+integrated part of military and naval thought.</p>
+
+<p>To this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had
+brought us&mdash;but it had, none the less, failed. For the purpose of
+disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from
+entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter
+the war.</p>
+
+<p>What we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a
+source of strength. It is the counterpart of the great scientific
+methods of exploration, comparison, proof. Our dissents mean that we
+continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement
+after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this
+"dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost
+daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the
+error of <i>change before production</i> which stalled our aircraft program
+of 1917 was not repeated.)</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Why We Can't Use Hitler</i></p>
+
+<p>If we "need a Hitler" to defeat Hitler, we are lost, at this moment,
+irretrievably, because the <i>final</i> triumph of Hitlerism is to make us
+need Hitler. The truth is we cannot use a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>Hitler, we cannot use
+fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the
+one field where totality has always existed, which is war. So far as
+war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's
+ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field;
+but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a
+matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be
+manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (The
+United States Army has officially declared against complete
+regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the
+history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it,
+because "the War Department considers that every American soldier
+should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.")</p>
+
+<p>We cannot use a Hitler because we lack the time. We cannot catch up
+with Hitler on Hitlerism. We cannot wait ten years to re-condition the
+people of America, the ten vital years which Hitler spent enslaving
+the German mind were spent by us in digging the American people out
+from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in 1929. We
+are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New
+Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual,
+argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps
+in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an
+American-type dictator, a Huey Long; in wartime, when people undergo
+incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and
+the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. Otherwise
+people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. That is
+why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator.</p>
+
+<p>The alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which Hitler
+calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential
+substance of unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of
+one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different
+aeroplane engines. I mean the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>combination of elements, as they are
+combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are
+combined in the people we are.</p>
+
+<p>We have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always
+allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of
+this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of
+our State; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not
+by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two
+things&mdash;the standard and the variant.</p>
+
+<p>Now we face death&mdash;called totality. For us it is death; and we can not
+avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by
+destroying whatever is deadly to us.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard for a layman to translate the "strategy of variety" into
+terms of production or naval movement. The translation is being made
+every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they
+follow the technique of variety because it is natural to them. All the
+layman can do is to watch and make sure that out of panic we do not
+betray ourselves to the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>It is not a matter of military technique, but of common sense that we
+can only destroy our enemy out of our strength, striking at his
+weakness; we can never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm
+against his strongest. And our strong point is the variety, the
+freedom, the independence of our thought and action. Hitler calls all
+this a weakness, because he has destroyed it in his own country; and
+so gives us the clue to his own weak spot.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Has Hitler a Weakness?</i></p>
+
+<p>In the face of the stupendous victories of Germany, it is hard to say
+that Hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take London or
+Moscow in its first attempts, nor Suez. Somewhere in this formidable
+strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by
+us if we are intimidated <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>into imitation. We have to be flexible,
+feeling out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging
+forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being
+fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough
+today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting
+steadily on the production front, intermittently on the V (or
+foreign-propaganda) front, on the front of domestic stability, on the
+financial front (in connection with the United Nations); and the war
+front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and
+transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most
+effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight
+on the ones our enemies have chosen.</p>
+
+<p>Every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other;
+every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights
+rises out of the kind of nation it is. This is the form of strategy
+which the layman has to understand&mdash;in self-defense against the
+petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last
+war, or will scrap everything in order to imitate the enemy. The
+layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. He
+knows that the tank and the Stuka and the parachute troop were
+separate alien inventions combined by the German High Command; but
+combinations of various arms is not an exclusively German conception.
+The new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a
+nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration
+on offensive striking power. All of these are successful against
+broken and betrayed armies in France, against small armies unsupported
+by tanks and planes; they are not entirely successful against huge
+armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love,
+an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and
+an incalculable production power on the other. Possibly the Soviet
+Union has discovered one weakness in the German war-strategy; it may
+not be the weakness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>through which we can strike; we may have to find
+another. We have to find the weakness of Japan, too&mdash;and we are not so
+inclined to imitate them.</p>
+
+<p>There is a famous picture of Winston Churchill, hatless in the street,
+with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in Antwerp in
+1914 and Churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the
+sky&mdash;an omen of things to come. At Antwerp Churchill had tried to head
+off the German swing to the sea, but Antwerp was a defeat and
+Churchill returned to London, still looking for some way to refuse the
+German system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. He
+tried it with the tank; he tried it at Gallipoli; finally the Allies
+tried it, half-heartedly, at Salonika. The war, on Germany's terms,
+was a stalemate and Germany might have broken through; the war ended
+because the balance was dislocated when America came in and,
+simultaneously, both England and America began to fight the war also
+on the propaganda level. By that time Churchill was "discredited"; he
+had tried to shorten the war by two years and the British forces, with
+success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the
+one more battleship, the one more division which would have insured
+victory&mdash;because Kitchener and the War Office and the French High
+Command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the German way.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Escape from Despair</i></p>
+
+<p>The desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought
+of fighting the military machines of Germany and Japan is justified
+<i>only</i> if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they
+propose to us. Analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which
+war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). White opens with Queen's
+pawn to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or
+decline. If he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on
+that basis, but Black can also reject White's plan of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>campaign. The
+good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other
+tries to impose.</p>
+
+<p>We have felt ourselves incapable of fighting Hitler because we hate
+Hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act
+as he does&mdash;with more horror, more cruelty, more debasement of
+humanity, in order to defeat him. And the public statements of our
+leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we
+have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implying our
+acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect
+is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. If this were all,
+it would still leave us fighting the fascist war.</p>
+
+<p>The civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of
+considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's
+authoritative and decisive objection to the Hitlerian strategy of
+propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers our native
+natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be
+constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of
+inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under
+the spell of the enemy's tactics. That is why it is important for the
+citizen to know that he is right. <i>We do not have to fight Hitler in
+his way</i>; that is what Hitler wants us to do, because <i>if we do we can
+not win</i>. There is another way&mdash;although we may not have found it yet.</p>
+
+<p>In its celebrated "orientation course" the United States army explains
+the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them
+strategists, but to make them better soldiers. The civilian needs at
+least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of
+luck or too cast down by disaster. The jokes about amateur strategists
+and the High Command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism
+are both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on
+tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. They needed
+desperately to know in February, 1942, why General <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>MacArthur was
+performing a useful function in Bataan and why bombers were not sent
+to his aid; and this information came to them from the President. But
+the President is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it
+takes to transport a division and put it into action; how air and sea
+power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts
+which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some
+sense of the importance of his work. The civilian in war work or out
+of it should know something about war, and in particular he should
+know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and
+appropriate and effective for us.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Military Mummery</i></p>
+
+<p>It might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military
+strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose
+lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is
+happening to them. The military mind, aided by the military expert,
+loves to use special terms; until recently the commentator on strategy
+was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from
+the field as obscure as prescriptions in Latin. It is supposed that
+doctors wrote in Latin not only because it was an exact and universal
+language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it gave
+mystery and authority to their prescriptions. Latin is still not
+understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast
+amount of business for the doctors because ads in English persuaded
+the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary
+medicines, without consulting the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>A rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are
+now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to
+millions by radio. They cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank
+and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of
+head tones. But they can expound the fundamentals&mdash;and so expose the
+military <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>leadership to the <i>criticism it desperately needs</i> if it is
+to function properly. The essentials of warfare are dreadfully
+simple&mdash;the production manager of any great industrial concern deals
+with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment;
+train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at
+chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the
+right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force
+at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for
+chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right
+chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have
+to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. The
+terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of
+instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by
+the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is
+shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or
+the good platoon leader from the second rate. The civilian, without
+information, cannot decide what to do; but, as Britain's <i>civilian</i>
+courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions
+have been made. He can tell as well as the greatest commander, that
+indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the Dardanelles
+impossible in 1916; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made
+the wreck of France certain in 1940. The civilian American who has
+taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely
+military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial American need
+not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply.
+We can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we
+are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as
+the wrong prescription.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that we will have to strip the false front from
+international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited
+"mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have
+to bring these things up to date because our lives <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>depend on them, we
+can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the
+diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a
+nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different
+strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and
+thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and
+Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and
+found pretexts for good wars.</p>
+
+<p>We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics&mdash;not without
+help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a
+thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract
+thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we
+know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like
+ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep
+people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to
+keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The
+very fact that we are now <i>all</i> critics of spending is a great
+advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics
+of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with
+other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that
+we are all fighting.</p>
+
+<p>As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about
+tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if
+I knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold
+together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is
+a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who
+organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national
+character.</p>
+
+<p>I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of
+variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field.
+I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a
+name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling
+that an American (or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>United Nations) strategy need not be&mdash;and must
+not be&mdash;the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his
+bosom, for comfort.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>A Variety of Strategies</i></p>
+
+<p>The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in
+time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook;
+it is called <i>Grand Strategy</i>; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a
+specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian;
+and Geoffrey West, biographer and student of politics; both British.
+Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this
+book is a revelation&mdash;particularly it shows the connection between war
+and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own
+words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with
+progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its
+own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French
+revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a
+history of the nineteenth century&mdash;and into this war.</p>
+
+<p>The authors have their own names for each kind of war&mdash;each is a
+"solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to
+the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor
+rises from the country which uses it&mdash;from its methods of production,
+its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and
+its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the
+revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the
+intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering,
+throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic
+self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French,
+by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and
+small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>British
+opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength
+of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of
+Napoleon. They would not come out (until they were ready at Waterloo)
+and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force.
+Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came
+years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force,
+Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of
+attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the
+enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could
+withdraw to take up positions and fight again."</p>
+
+<p>Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the
+average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he
+would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But
+the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a
+triumph because Wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to
+the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn
+toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the
+British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover,
+this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous
+manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the
+merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern
+England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy,
+its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms&mdash;all rise from
+the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.</p>
+
+<p>For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke,
+increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under
+Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the
+impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness
+and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development
+under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under
+Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>morale
+and initiative". Sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of
+London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations&mdash;a bullet
+is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves
+again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go
+through&mdash;unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or
+blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The
+defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of
+sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others,
+regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain
+death. <i>Every</i> person&mdash;not merely the trained minority. This happened
+at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small
+yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were
+taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders;
+some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the
+transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth,
+without stop&mdash;the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.</p>
+
+<p>These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of
+warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the
+nation <i>at that time</i>; the "psychology" of the nation may remain
+constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the
+methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won)
+colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended
+(so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women
+are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political
+illiberality has swept over the country&mdash;if any vital change has
+occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social change
+affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for
+ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is
+trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be
+left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is
+to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by
+minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both&mdash;by
+pulling back <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a
+battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the
+correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas,
+he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and
+planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a
+totally different military style, the only completely Communist style
+on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist
+society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools,
+manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same
+time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated
+itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory,
+reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the
+beginning&mdash;and had operated as a center of living civilization for
+hundreds of thousands.</p>
+
+<p>The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the Japanese are another
+example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of
+China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the
+cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them,
+the armies remained. Japan's attack on Britain and ourselves began
+with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the
+islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the
+psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there
+was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making
+war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their
+requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of
+other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and
+outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber;
+ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target;
+they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another
+try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man
+should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an
+army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by
+victory. So in the true sense it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>would be suicidal for us to imitate
+the Japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final
+moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned
+bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty&mdash;or
+death.</p>
+
+<p>Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have
+to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games,
+read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the
+function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a
+practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the
+physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field.
+Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we
+know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to
+keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.</p>
+
+<p>The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into
+terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER III<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>United...?</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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"&mdash;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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>were</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Matching our casual uncertainty was the dead-shot clear-minded
+intention of our enemies&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, in the Hitlerian prophecy, America needs only to be put
+under the slightest tension and it will fall apart.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>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
+<i>different</i> parts are arranged and combined to produce a specific
+effect; but a canvas all painted the same shade of blue has no
+unity&mdash;it is a totality, a total blank; there is no unity in a
+thousand ball-bearings; they are <i>totally</i> alike.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>which national unity
+requires of us, we will still be children playing a war game&mdash;and
+still persuading ourselves that we can't lose.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Background of Disunion</i></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <i>could</i>
+unite the people was willing to work out the basis of unity&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot improvise a national unity; we can only capitalize on gusts
+of anger or jubilation, from day to day&mdash;these are the tactics of war
+propaganda, not its grand strategy. For our basic unity we have to go
+where it already exists, we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>have to uncover a great mother-lode of
+the true metal, where it has always been; we have to <i>remind</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>We have this deep, internal, mother-lode of unity&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Losing a Generation</i></p>
+
+<p>We have to look into those twenty years before we can create an
+effective national unity; what we find there is a disaster&mdash;but facing
+it is a tonic to the nerves.</p>
+
+<p>What happened was this: for the first time since the Civil War,
+progressivism&mdash;our basic habit of mind&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>This constant battle for progressive principles is one of the most
+significant elements in American life&mdash;and we have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>So constant&mdash;and so critical&mdash;is the continuity of reformist politics
+in America, that the break, in 1920, becomes an event of extreme
+significance&mdash;a symptom to be watched, analysed and compared. Why did
+America suddenly break with its progressive tradition&mdash;and what was
+the result?</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a condition
+totally abnormal in American history.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>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&mdash;or perhaps because reforms delayed
+<i>are</i> revolutionary when they come.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Robbers and Pharisees</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>who preached thrift and probably
+would have prevented the depression if we had followed his advice.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>No More Ideals</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;were reflections in domestic life of
+our withdrawal from foreign affairs.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Left Deviation</i></p>
+
+<p>Parallel to normalcy ran the stream of radicalism, its enemy. Broken
+from political moorings by the collapse of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.)</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>back</i> (to normalcy; against
+the American pioneering tradition of forward movement); the direction
+of Russia was forward&mdash;to the unknown.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and in that unhappy
+state they tried to solace their homelessness by jeering at their
+homeland.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>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 <i>save</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and not a living Europe, of course. The Europe
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>held before America as an ideal in the 1920's was the Europe which
+died in the first World War.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Working Both Sides of the Street</i></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;why bother to save it?</p>
+
+<p>In 1936 I summed up years of disagreement with the fashionable
+attitude under the (borrowed) caption, <i>The Treason of the
+Intellectuals</i>. Looking back at it now, I find a conspicuous error&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The people of the United States were&mdash;and are&mdash;"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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>our great industrialists and the benign, tacit
+assent of Calvin Coolidge&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>We L'arn the Furriner</i></p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>conservative, they regretted being
+saved&mdash;thinking that perhaps the revolution of 1933 might have turned
+fascist, and in their favor.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and ask only for superior efficiency from the Republican Party.</p>
+
+<p>The newspapers of the country were violent; Martin Dies was violent;
+John L. Lewis was violent; but labor and radicals and people were
+<i>not</i> violent. We were approaching some unity of belief in America's
+national future when the war broke out.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Quarterback vs. Pedagogue</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>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&mdash;except a passion for
+the cruelty and the success of the Nazis.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER IV<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>"The Strategy of Truth"</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The consequences of building on a unity which does not exist are
+serious. We have discovered that all war is total war; we have also
+found that while our enemies lie to us, they do not lie to their High
+Commands.</p>
+
+<p>Total war requires total effort from the civilian and we have assumed
+that, in America, this means enthusiasm for our cause, understanding
+of our danger, willingness to sacrifice, confidence in our leaders,
+faith in ultimate victory. We may be wrong; total effort in Germany is
+based more on compulsion and promise than on understanding. But we
+cannot immediately alter the atmosphere in which we are living. If we
+could, if our leaders believed that total effort could be achieved
+more quickly by lies than by truth, it would be their obligation to
+lie to us. In total war there is no alternative to the most effective
+weapon. Only the weapon must be effective over a sufficient length of
+time; the advantage of a lie must be measured against the loss when
+the lie is shown up; if the balance is greater, over a period of time,
+than the value of the truth, the lie still must be told. If we are a
+people able to recognize a lie too fast for it to be effective, the
+lie must not be used; if we react "correctly" to certain forms of
+persuasion (as, say, magazine ads and radio commercials), the
+psychological counterparts of these should be used, at least until a
+new technique develops.</p>
+
+<p>This is a basis for "the strategy of truth" which Archibald MacLeish
+set in opposition to the Nazi "strategy of terror". The opposition is
+not perfect because the Nazis have used the truth plentifully in
+spreading terror, especially by the use of moving pictures. Their
+strategy, ethically, is a mixture of truth and lies, in combination;
+practically speaking, this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>strategy is on the highest ethical plane
+because it saves Nazi lives, brings quick victory, protects the State
+and the people. It is, however, ill-suited to our purposes.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Ethics of Lying</i></p>
+
+<p>Mr. MacLeish is being an excellent propagandist in the very use of the
+phrase, "strategy of truth", which corresponds to the President's
+"solemn pact of truth between government and the people"; there are a
+hundred psychological advantages in telling us that we are getting the
+truth; but propaganda has no right to use the truth if the truth
+ceases to be effective. Lies are easier to tell, but harder to handle;
+in a democracy they are tricky and dangerous because the conditions
+for making lies effective have not been created; such conditions were
+created in Germany; they came easily in other countries where no
+direct relations between people and government existed.</p>
+
+<p>Before propaganda can lie to us, safely and for our own preservation,
+honorably and desirably, it must persuade us to give up our whole
+system of communication, our political habits, our tradition of free
+criticism. This could be done; but it would be difficult; no
+propagandist now working in America is cunning and brutal enough to
+destroy our civil liberties without a struggle which would cost more
+(in terms of united effort) than it would be worth. We cannot stop in
+the middle of a war to break down one system of persuasion and create
+another; the frame of mind which advertising men call "consumer
+acceptance" is, as they know, induced by a touch of newness in a
+familiar framework; the new element catches attention but it has to
+become familiar before it is effective.</p>
+
+<p>Our propagandists, therefore, must use the truth, as they incline to
+do, but they have to learn its uses. We gain prestige by advertising
+the truth, even though the use of truth is forced upon us; but we have
+not yet won approval of the suppression of truth. It is good to use
+truth as flattery ("You are brave enough to know the truth") but truth
+also creates <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>fear which (advertisers again know this) is a potent
+incentive to action. Finally, the use of truth requires the
+canalization of propaganda; it is too dangerous to be handled by
+everyone.</p>
+
+<p>The propagandists of our cause include everyone who speaks to the
+people, sells a bond, writes, broadcasts, publishes, by executive
+order or private will; they vary in skill and in detailed purpose;
+they blurt out prejudices and conceal information useful to the
+citizen. They have not, so far as any one has discovered, lied to the
+people of America, contenting themselves at first with concealing the
+extent, or belittling the significance, of our reverses; presently the
+same sources began to abuse the American people for not being aware of
+the danger threatening them; and no one officially recognized the
+connection between ignorance and concealment.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Maxims for Propagandists</i></p>
+
+<p>It is easy to mark down the detailed errors of propaganda. The more
+difficult work is to create a positive program; and it is possible
+that we have been going through an experimental period, while such a
+program is being worked out in Washington. A few of the requirements
+are obvious.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must be used.</i> Our government has no more right to deprive
+us of propaganda than it has to deprive us of pursuit planes or
+bombers or anti-aircraft guns or antitoxin. Propaganda is the great
+offensive-defensive weapon of the home front; if we do not get it, we
+should demand it. If what we get is defective, we should protest as we
+would protest against defective bombsights.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must be organized.</i> Otherwise it becomes a diffused babel
+of opinion.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must be unscrupulous.</i> It has one duty&mdash;to the State.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must not be confused with policy.</i> If at a given moment
+the Grand Strategy of the war absolutely requires us to offer a
+separate peace to Italy or to make war on Rumania, propaganda must
+show this need in its happiest light; if the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>reverse is required,
+propaganda's job does not alter. Policy should not be made by
+propagandists and propagandists should have no policy.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must interact with policy.</i> If at a given moment, the
+Grand Strategy has a free choice between recognizing or rejecting a
+Danish Government-in-exile, the action which propaganda can use to
+best advantage is the better.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must have continuity.</i> The general principles of
+propaganda have to be worked out, and followed. The principle, in
+regard to direct war news, may be to tell all, to tell nothing, or to
+alter the dosage according to the temper of the people. The choice of
+one of these principles is of the gravest importance; it must be done,
+or approved, by the President. After the choice is made, sticking to
+one principle is the only way to build confidence. Except for details
+of naval losses, the British official announcements are prompt and
+accurate; the British people generally do not go about in the fear of
+hidden catastrophe. The Italian system differs and may be suited to
+the temper of the people; the Russian communiques are exactly adapted
+to Stalin's concept of the war: the Red soldier is cited for heroism,
+in small actions, the Germans are always identified as fascists, the
+vast actions of the entire front are passed over in a formal opening
+sentence. The German method has its source in Hitler; the
+announcements of action are rhetorical, contemptuous, and sometimes
+threatening; the oratory which accompanies the official statements
+has, for the first time, had a setback, since the destruction of the
+Russian Army was announced in the autumn of 1941, but no one has
+discovered any serious reaction as a result. The German people have
+been conditioned by action; and action has worked with propaganda for
+this result. The concentration camp, the death of free inquiry, and
+the triumph of Munich have been as potent as Goebbels' lies to prepare
+the German people for total war; so that they have not reacted against
+Hitler when a prediction has failed or a promise gone sour.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>Each of these methods has been consistently followed. Our
+propagandists on the home front began with the knowledge that a great
+part of the country did not want a war; a rather grim choice was
+presented: to frighten the people, or to baby them. The early
+waverings about Pearl Harbor reflected the dilemma; the anger roused
+by Pearl Harbor gave time to the propagandist to plan ahead. The
+result has been some excellent and some fumbling propaganda; but no
+principle has yet come to light.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must supply positive symbols.</i> The symbol, the slogan, the
+picture, which unites the citizen, and inspires to action, can be
+created by an individual, but can only be made effective by correct
+propaganda. The swastika is a positive symbol, a mark of unity
+(because it was once a mark of the revolutionary outcast); we have no
+such symbol. Uncle Sam is a cartoonists' fiction, too often appearing
+in comic guises, too often used in advertising, no longer
+corresponding even to the actuality of the American physique. The
+Minute-man has an antique flavor but is not sufficiently generalized;
+he is a brilliant defensive symbol and corresponded precisely to the
+phase of the militia, an "armed citizenry" leaping to the defense of
+the country. With my prejudice it is natural that I should suggest the
+Liberty Bell as a positive symbol of the thing we fight for. It is
+possible to draw its form on a wall&mdash;not to ward off evil, but to
+inspire fortitude.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must be independent.</i> It is a fighting arm; it has (or
+should have) special techniques; it is based on researches,
+measurements, comparisons, all approaching a scientific method. It
+should therefore be recognized as a separate function; Mr. Gorham
+Munson, preceded by Mr. Edward L. Bernays in 1928, has proposed a
+Secretary for Propaganda in the Cabinet, which would make the direct
+line of authority from the Executive to the administrators of policy,
+without interference. The conflicts of publicity (aircraft versus Navy
+for priorities, for instance) will eventually force some <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>organization
+of propaganda. The confusion of departmental interests is a constant
+drawback to propaganda, even if there is no direct conflict.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must be popular.</i> Since the first World War several new
+ways of approaching the American people have been developed. These
+have been chiefly commercial, as the radio and the popular illustrated
+magazine; the documentary moving picture has never been popular,
+except for the March of Time, but it has been tolerated; in the past
+two years a new type, the patriotic short, has been skilfully
+developed. The full length picture has hardly ever been used for
+direct communication; it is a "morale builder", not a propaganda
+weapon.</p>
+
+<p><i>Propaganda must be measured.</i> At the same time the method of the
+selective poll has been developed in several forms and a quick,
+dependable survey of public sentiment can be used to check the
+effectiveness of any propaganda. Recent refinements in the techniques
+promise even greater usefulness; the polls "weight" themselves, and,
+in effect, tell how important their returns should be considered. The
+objections to the polling methods are familiar; but until something
+better comes along, the reports on opinion, and notably on the
+fluctuations of opinion, are not to be sneered away. To my mind this
+is one of the basic operations of propaganda; and although I have no
+evidence, I assume that it is constantly being done.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Who Can Do It?</i></p>
+
+<p>An effective use of the instruments is now possible. We may blunder in
+our intentions, but technical blunders need not occur; the people who
+have used radio or print or pictures are skilled in their trade and
+they can use it for the nation as they used it for toothpaste or
+gasoline. And the people of America are accustomed to forms of
+publicity and persuasion which need not be significantly altered.
+Moreover, we can measure the tightness of our methods in the field,
+not by rejoicing over "mail response", or newspaper comment, but by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>discovering exactly how far we have created the attitude of mind and
+the temper of spirit at which we aim.</p>
+
+<p>The advertising agency and the sampler of public opinion can supply
+the groundwork of a flexible propaganda method. They cannot do
+everything, because certain objectives have always escaped them. But
+they are the people who have persuaded most effectively and reported
+most accurately the results of persuasion. They cannot create policy,
+not even the policy of propaganda; but they can propagandize.</p>
+
+<p>All of this refers to propaganda at home. It need not be called
+propaganda, but it must <i>be</i> propaganda&mdash;the organized use of all
+means of communication to create specific attitudes, leading to&mdash;or
+from&mdash;specific action.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>What Is Morale's Pulse?</i></p>
+
+<p>This is, of course, another way of saying that morale is affected by
+propaganda. I avoid the word "morale" because it has unhappily fallen
+into a phrase, "boosting morale", or "keeping morale at a high level."
+We have it on military authority that morale is an essential of
+victory, but no authority has told us how to create it, nor exactly to
+what high level morale should be "boosted". The concept of morale
+constantly supercharged by propaganda is fatally wrong; it confuses
+morale with cheerfulness and leads to the dangerous fluctuations of
+public emotion on which our enemies have always capitalized.</p>
+
+<p>Morale should be defined as a desirable and effective attitude toward
+events. As despair and defeatism are undesirable, they break up
+morale; as cheerfulness leads at times to ineffectiveness, it is bad
+for morale. To induce cheerfulness in the week of Singapore, the
+burning of the Normandie, and the escape of the German battleships
+from Brest, would have been the worst kind of morale-boosting; to
+prevent elation over a substantial victory would have been not quite
+so bad, but bad enough.</p>
+
+<p>There is a "classic example" of the effect of belittling a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>victory.
+The British public first got details of the Battle of Jutland from the
+German announcement of a naval victory, including names and number of
+British vessels sunk. The first British communique was no more subdued
+than usual, but coming <i>after</i> the German claims and making no
+assertions of victory, taking scrupulous care to list <i>all</i> British
+losses and only positively observed German losses, the announcement
+pulled morale down&mdash;not because it gave bad news, but because it put a
+bad light on good news; it did not allow morale to be level with
+events. The best opinion of the time considered Jutland a victory
+lacking finality, but with tremendous consequences; and Churchill was
+called in as a special writer to do the Admiralty's propaganda on the
+battle after the mischief was done. The time element was against him
+for a belated explanation is never as effective as a quick capture of
+the field by bold assertion and proof. Mr. Churchill was himself
+belated, a generation later, when he first defended the Navy for
+letting the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst escape and then, a day later,
+asserted that the ships had been compelled to leave Brest and that
+their removal was a gain for the British. The point is the same in
+both cases: the truth or an effective substitute may be used; but it
+has to correspond to actuality. The Admiralty underplayed its
+statement at Jutland. Churchill over-explained the situation at Brest.
+Both were bad for morale.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Hypodermic Technique</i></p>
+
+<p>The "shot-in-the-arm" theory of morale is a confession of incompetence
+in propaganda. For the healthy human being does not need sudden
+injections of drugs, not even for exceptional labors; and the
+objective of propaganda is to create an atmosphere in which the
+average citizen will work harder and bear more discomfort and live
+through more anxiety and suffer greater unhappiness <i>without
+considering his situation exceptional or abnormal</i>.</p>
+
+<p>To "boost morale", to give the public a shot of good news <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>(or even a
+shot of bad news), is an attempt to make us live above our normal
+temperature, to speed up our heart-beat and our metabolism. War itself
+raises the level; and all we have to do for morale is to stay on the
+new level.</p>
+
+<p>The principle that the citizen must not consider his situation
+exceptional is one of the few accepted by democratic and autocratic
+States alike. Hitler announces that until the war is over he will wear
+a simple soldier's uniform; Churchill refuses to accept a hoard of
+cigars; the President buys a bond. In every case the conspicuous head
+of a nation does what the average citizen has to do; and because each
+citizen is like his leader, all citizens are like one another. A unity
+is created.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Re-Uniting America</i></p>
+
+<p>This completes the circle which began with our need for unity, and
+proceeded through propaganda to morale. For the foundation of our war
+effort has to be unity and the base of good morale is the feeling of
+one-ness in the privations and in the triumphs of war. We can now
+proceed to some of the reasons for the breaks in unity, which
+propaganda has not seen, nor mended.</p>
+
+<p>First, the propagandists have rejected certain large groups of
+Americans because of pre-war pacifism; second, they have failed to
+recognize the use to which isolationism can be put; third, they have
+not thought out the principles of free criticism in a democracy at
+war. To rehearse all the other forms of separatist action would be to
+recall angers and frustrations dormant now, just below the level of
+conscious action. Moreover, a list of the causes of separation, with a
+remedy for each, would repeat the error of civilian propaganda in the
+early phases of the war&mdash;it would still be negative, and the need now
+is to set in motion the positive forces of unity, which have always
+been available to us.</p>
+
+<p><i>The accord we need is for free and complete and effective action, for
+sweating in the heat and crying in the night when disaster strikes,
+for changing the face of our private world, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>for losing what we have
+labored to build, for learning to be afraid and to suffer and to
+fight; it is an accord on the things that are vital because they are
+our life: what have we been, what shall we do, what do we want&mdash;past,
+present, future; history, character, destiny.</i></p>
+
+<p>The propaganda of the first six months of the war was not directed to
+the creation of unity in this sense; it was not concerned with
+anything but the immediate daily feeling of Americans toward the day's
+news; the civilian propagandists insisted that "disunity is ended"
+because all Americans knew what they were fighting for, so that it
+became faintly disloyal to point out that reiteration was not proof
+and that disunity could end, leaving mere chaos, a dispersed
+indifferent emotion, in its place. The end of dissension was not
+enough; unity had to be created, a fellow-feeling called up from the
+memory of the people, binding them to one another because it bound
+them to our soil and our heroes and our myths and our realities; and
+the act of creation of unity automatically destroyed disunion; when
+the gods arrive, not only the half-gods, but the devils also, depart.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Myth and Money</i></p>
+
+<p>Faintly one felt a lack of conviction in the propagandists themselves.
+They were afraid of the debunkers, under whose shadow they had grown
+up. They did not venture to create an effective myth. Myth to them was
+Washington's Cherry Tree, and Lincoln's boyish oath against slavery
+and Theodore Roosevelt's Wild West; so they could not, with rhetoric
+to lift the hearts of harried men and women, recall the truth-myth of
+America, the loyalty which triumphed over desertion at Valley Forge,
+the psychological miracle of Lincoln's recovery from self-abasement to
+create his destiny and shape the destiny of the New World; the health
+and humor and humanity of the west as Roosevelt remembered it. At
+every point in our history the reality had something in it to touch
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>the imagination, the heart, to make one feel how complex and fortunate
+is the past we carry in us if we are Americans.</p>
+
+<p>The propagandists were also afraid of the plutocrats&mdash;as they were
+afraid of the myth, they were afraid of reality. They did not dare to
+say that America was an imperfect democracy whose greatness lay in the
+chance it gave to all men to work for perfection; they did not dare to
+say that the war itself must create democracy over again, they did not
+dare to proclaim liberty to this land or to all lands; in the name of
+unity they could not offend the enemies of human freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the propagandists for unity had to defend the
+Administration. The rancor of politics had never actually disappeared
+in America, during wars; it was barely sweetened by a trace of
+patriotism three months after the war began. As a good fight needs two
+sides, defenders of the President were as happy as his opponents to
+call names, play politics, and distress the country. The groundwork
+for defeating the nation's aims in war was laid before those aims had
+been expressed; and one reason why we could make no proclamation of
+our purpose was that our purpose was clouded over; we had not yet gone
+back to the source of our national strength; and we had not yet begun
+to use our strength to accomplish a national purpose.</p>
+
+<p>We were effecting a combination of individual capacities&mdash;not a unity
+of will. We were adding one individual to another, a slow process: we
+needed to multiply one by the other&mdash;which can only be done in
+complete union of purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the weakness of propaganda rose from its mixed intentions: to
+make us hate the enemy, to make us understand our Allies, to harden us
+for disaster, to defend the conduct of the war, to make us pay, to
+assure us that production was terrific, and then to make us pay more
+because production was inadequate; to silence the critics of the
+Administration, to appease the men of violence crying for Vichy's
+scalp or the men of violence crying for formulation of war aims. All
+these <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>things <i>had</i> to be done, promptly and effectively. They would
+have to be done no matter how unified in feeling we were; and they
+could not be done at all unless unity came first.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Call Back the Pacifists</i></p>
+
+<p>Small purposes were put first because the propagandists suffered from
+their own success. They had gone ahead of all and had brilliantly been
+teaching the American people the meaning of the European war; they
+were among the President's most potent allies and they deserve well of
+the country; the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and
+the other active interventionist groups were a rallying point for the
+enemies of Hitler, and a strong point for attack by all the pacifists.
+But the moment the aim of these committees was accomplished and war
+was declared, the first objective must have been the re-incorporation
+of the pacifist 40% of our population into the functioning national
+group. The actual enemies of the country soon declared themselves; the
+hidden ones could be discovered. The millions who did not want to go
+to war had to be persuaded first of all that <i>we</i> understood why
+<i>they</i> had been pacifists; we could not treat them as cowards, or
+pro-Germans, or Reds, or idiots. We needed the best of them to unite
+the country, and all of them to fight for it.</p>
+
+<p>Our propagandists did not know how to turn to their advantage the
+constant, native, completely sensible pacifism of the American people,
+especially of the Midwestern Americans. If the history of the United
+States has meaning, the pacifism of the Midwest is bound to become
+dominant; our part in the first World War achieved grandeur because
+the people of the Middle West, at least, meant it to be a war to end
+war, a war to end pacifism also, because there would be no need for
+it. The people of the Middle West want our position in the world to
+keep us out of the wars of other nations; they saw no wars into which
+we could be drawn. They were wrong&mdash;but their instincts were not
+wrong. They do not believe that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>the wars of the United States have
+been like the wars of other nations; nor that the United States must
+now look forward to such a series of wars as every nation of Europe
+has fought for domination or survival. This may be naive, as to the
+past and the future; but it is a naivete we cannot brush aside. It
+rises from too many natural causes. And the people of the Middle West
+may, if need be, fight to make their dream of peace come true; they
+will have to fight the American imperialists, whom they have fought
+before; and this time they will have new allies; for the pacifist of
+the Midwest will be joined by the pacifists of the industrial cities;
+and the great hope of the future is that the pacifists of America will
+help to organize the world after the war.</p>
+
+<p><i>They will not help if they remain isolationists; and they will remain
+isolationist, in the middle of a global war, until they are certain
+that a world-order they can join is to be the outcome of the war.</i>
+Again, our propagandists have to understand isolationism, an historic
+American tradition in one sense, a falsehood in another. Our dual
+relation to Europe is expressed in two phrases:</p>
+
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 5%;">We <i>came from</i> Europe.<br />
+We <i>went away from</i> Europe.</p>
+
+<p>For a time we were anti-European; now we are non-Europe; if Europe
+changes, we may become pro-European; but we can never be part of
+Europe. Isolation is half our story; communication the other. On the
+foundation of half the truth, the isolationist built the fairy tale of
+physical separation; the interventionist, on the basis of our
+communication with Europe, built more strongly&mdash;the positive overbore
+the negative. Yet the whole structure of our relation to Europe has to
+be built on both truths, we have to balance one strength with the
+other. We cannot make war or make peace without the help of the
+isolationists; and to jeer at them because they failed to understand
+the mathematics of air power and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>sea-bases is not to reconcile them
+to us; nor, for that matter, is it peculiarly honest. For few of those
+who wanted us to go to war against England's enemy warned us that we
+should have to fight Japan also; and none, so far as I know, told us
+that the task of a two-ocean war might be for several years a burden
+of losses and defeat.</p>
+
+<p>The defeat of pacifist isolationism was not accomplished by the
+interventionists, but by Japan. The interventionists, because they
+were better prophets, gained the appearance of being truer patriots;
+they were actually more intelligent observers of the war in Europe and
+more passionately aware of its meaning. But they can be trusted with
+propaganda only if they recognize the positive value of their former
+enemies, and do not try to create a caste of ex-pacifist
+"untouchables." That is the method of totality; it is Hitler declaring
+that liberals cannot take part in ruling Germany, and Communists
+cannot be Germans. Unity does not require us to destroy those who have
+differed with us, it requires total agreement as to aims, and
+temporary assent as to methods; we cannot tolerate the action of those
+who want Hitler to defeat us, just as the body cannot tolerate cells
+which proliferate in disharmony with other cells, and cause cancer. We
+cannot afford the time to answer every argument before we take any
+action, so temporary assent is needed (the Executive in war time
+automatically has it because he orders action without argument). In
+democratic countries we add critical examination after the event, and
+free discussion of future policy as correctives to error. None of
+these break into unity; none requires the isolation of any group
+except the enemies of the State.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of unity is effective action&mdash;more tanks and planes,
+delivered more promptly; more pilots, better trained; more people
+helping one another in the readjustments of war. It is part of the
+groundwork of morale; in a democracy it is based on reconciliation,
+not on revenge.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Limits of Criticism</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The pacifists and the isolationists are being punished for their
+errors if their legitimate emotions are not recognized as part of the
+natural composition of the American mind. Criticism presents a problem
+more irritating because it is constantly changing its form and because
+no principle of action has been evolved.</p>
+
+<p>At one of the grimmest moments of the war, a correspondent of the <i>New
+York Times</i> wrote that "for a while not politics but the war effort
+appeared to have undergone an 'adjournment'". At another, the
+President remarked that he did not care whether Democrats or
+Republicans were elected, provided Congress prosecuted the war
+energetically, and comment on this was that the President wanted to
+smash the two-party system, in order to have a non-critical Congress
+under him as he had had in 1933.</p>
+
+<p>Both of these items suggest, that propaganda has not yet taught us how
+to criticize our government in war time. The desirable limits of
+criticism have not been made clear. Every attack on the Administration
+has been handled as if it were treason; and there has been a faint
+suggestion of party pride in the achievements of our factories and of
+our bombers. Neither the war nor criticism of the war can be a
+party-matter; and no party-matter can be tolerated in the path of the
+war effort. All Americans know this, but the special application of
+this loyalty to our present situation has to be clarified. It has been
+left obscure.</p>
+
+<p>For the question of criticism is connected with the problem of unity
+in the simplest and most satisfying way. The moment we have unity, we
+can allow all criticism which rises from any large group of people.
+Off-center criticism, from small groups, is dangerous. It does not ask
+questions in the public mind, and its tendency is to divert energies,
+not to combine them; small groups, if they are not disloyal, are the
+price we pay for freedom of expression in war time; it is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>doubtful
+whether, at present, any American group can do much harm; it is even a
+matter of doubt whether Eugene V. Debs or several opposition senators
+were a graver danger to the armies of the United States in 1917. Small
+groups may be tolerated or, under law, suppressed; large groups never
+expose themselves to prosecution, but their criticism is serious and
+unless it is turned to advantage, it may be dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency of any executive, in war time, is to consider any
+criticism as a check on war effort. It is. If a commanding officer has
+to take five minutes to explain an order, five minutes are lost; if
+the President, or the head of OPM, has to defend an action or reply to
+a critic, energy is used up, time is lost. But time and energy may be
+lost a hundred times more wastefully if the explanation is not given,
+if the criticism is not uttered and grows internally and becomes
+suspicion and fear. Freedom of criticism is, in our country, a
+positive lever for bringing morale into logical relation to events.
+The victims of criticism can use it positively, their answers can
+create confidence; and best of all, it can be anticipated, so that it
+can do no harm.</p>
+
+<p>But this is true only if the right to criticize is subtly transformed
+into a duty; if, in doing his duty, the citizen refuses to criticize
+until he is fully informed; if the State makes available to the
+citizen enough information on which criticism can be based. Then the
+substance and the intention of criticism become positive factors in
+our fight for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Since it is freedom we are fighting for.</p>
+
+<p>Freedom, nothing else, is the source of unity&mdash;our purpose in the war,
+our reason for fighting. On a low level of survival we have forgotten
+some of our differences and combined our forces to fight because we
+were attacked; on the high level which makes us a nation we are united
+to fight for freedom, and this unites us to one another because it
+unites us with every American who ever fought for freedom. Most
+particularly our battle today unites us with those who first
+proclaimed liberty throughout the land.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER V<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>The Forgotten Document</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>To distract attention, to put people's minds on useless or bewildering
+projects is a bit of sabotage, in a total war. It is well enough to
+divert people, for a moment, so that they are refreshed; but no one
+has the right to confuse a clear issue or to start inessential
+projects or to ask people to look at anything except the job in hand.</p>
+
+<p>For five minutes, I propose a look at the Declaration of Independence,
+because it is the one document essential to our military and moral
+success; it is the standard by which we can judge the necessity of all
+projects; and although our destiny, and the means to fulfill it, are
+written into it, the Declaration is the forgotten document of American
+history. We remember the phrases too often repeated by politicians and
+dreamers; we do not study the hard realistic plan of national action
+embodied in every paragraph of the instrument.</p>
+
+<p>The famous phrases at the beginning give the moral, and revolutionary,
+reason for action; the magnificent ground plan of the character and
+history of the American people is explained in the forgotten details
+of the Declaration; and nothing in the conservative Constitution could
+do more than delay the unfolding of the plan or divide its fruits a
+little unevenly.</p>
+
+<p>I suggest that the Declaration supplies the <i>motive</i> of action for
+today; the moment we understand it, we have a definition of America, a
+specific blueprint of what we have been, what we are, and what we can
+become&mdash;and the action necessary for our future evolves from this;
+moreover the unnecessary action is likewise defined. Our course before
+we were attacked and our plans for the world after the war may seem
+the mere play of prejudice and chance; but the destiny of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>America
+will be determined not by the affections of one group or the fears of
+another, nor by hysteria and passion; our fate will be determined by
+the whole course of our history&mdash;and by our decision to continue its
+direction or to reverse it.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of this book flows out of this belief in the decisive role of
+the Declaration, but it does not attempt to indicate a course of
+action in detail. For the sake of illustration I cite these instances.</p>
+
+<p><i>Q.</i> Should the U.S. try to democratize the Germans or accept the view
+that the Germans are a race incapable of self-government?</p>
+
+<p><i>A.</i> The history of immigration, based on the Declaration, proves that
+Germans are capable of being good and great democratic citizens.</p>
+
+<p><i>Q.</i> Can the U.S. unite permanently with any single nation or any
+exclusive group of nations?</p>
+
+<p><i>A.</i> Our history, under the Declaration, makes it impossible.</p>
+
+<p><i>Q.</i> Can the U.S. join a world federation regulating specific economic
+problems, such as access to raw materials, tariffs, etc.?</p>
+
+<p><i>A.</i> Nothing in the Declaration is against, everything in our history
+is for, such a move.</p>
+
+<p><i>Q.</i> Can the U.S. fight the war successfully without accepting the
+active principles of the Totalitarian States?</p>
+
+<p><i>A.</i> If our history is any guide, the only way we can <i>lose</i> the war
+is by failing to fight it in our own way.</p>
+
+<p>I have already indicated the possibility that our whole military grand
+plan must be based on variety, which is the characteristic of America
+created by specific passages in the Declaration; I am sure that the
+whole grand plan of civilian unity (the plan of morale and propaganda)
+has to return to the leading lines of our history, if we want to act
+quickly, harmoniously and effectively; and the peace we make will be
+another Versailles, with another Article X in the Covenant, if we make
+it without returning to the sources of our strength.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>So, if we want to win in the field and at home, win the war and the
+peace, we must be aware of our history and of the principles laid down
+in 1776 and never, in the long run, betrayed.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>To Whom It May Concern</i></p>
+
+<p>The Declaration is in four parts and all of them have some bearing on
+the present.</p>
+
+<p>The first explains why the Declaration is issued. The words are so
+familiar that their significance is gone; but if we remember that days
+were spent in revision and the effect of every word was calculated, we
+can assume that there are no accidents, that the Declaration is
+precise and says what it means. Here is the passage:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"<i>When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
+one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
+them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,
+the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and
+of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
+of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
+impel them to the separation.</i>"</p></div>
+
+<p>The first official utterance of America is based on <i>human
+necessity</i>&mdash;not the necessity of princes or powers.</p>
+
+<p>It is the utterance of a people, not a nation. It invokes first Nature
+and then Nature's God as lawgivers.</p>
+
+<p>It asks independence and equality&mdash;in the same phrase; the habit of
+nations, to enslave or be enslaved, is not to be observed in the New
+World.</p>
+
+<p>And finally "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; the first
+utterance of America is addressed not to the nations of the world, but
+to the men and women who inhabit them.</p>
+
+<p><i>Human&mdash;people&mdash;Nature&mdash;Nature's God&mdash;mankind.</i></p>
+
+<p>These are the words boldly written across the map of America. A
+century and a half of change have not robbed one of them of their
+power&mdash;because they were not fad-words, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>not the catchwords of a
+revolution; they were words with cold clear meanings&mdash;and they
+destroyed feudalism in Europe for a hundred and sixty years.</p>
+
+<p>The practical application of the preamble is this: whenever we have
+spoken to the people of other nations, as we did in the Declaration,
+we have been successful; we have failed only when we have addressed
+ourselves to governments. The time is rapidly coming when our only
+communication with Europe must be over the heads of its rulers, to the
+people. It does not seem practical; but we shall see later that, for
+us, it has always been good politics.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Logic of Freedom</i></p>
+
+<p>The next passage in the Declaration is the one with all the
+quotations. There can be little harm in reprinting it:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"<i>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
+created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
+certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
+and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
+Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
+powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form
+of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
+Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
+new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
+organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
+likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,
+will dictate that Governments long established should not be
+changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
+experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to
+suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
+abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
+long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the
+same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute
+Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>throw off
+such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
+security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these
+Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them
+to alter their former System of Government The history of the
+present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries
+and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment
+of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let
+Facts be submitted to a candid world.</i>"</p></div>
+
+<p>Starting off with a rhetorical device&mdash;the pretense that its heresies
+are acceptable commonplaces, this long paragraph builds a philosophy
+of government on the unproved and inflammatory assumptions which it
+calls "self-evident". The self-evident truths are, in effect, <i>the
+terms agreed upon by the signers</i>. These signers now appear for the
+first time, they say "<i>we</i> hold", they say that, to themselves,
+certain truths are self-evident. The first three of "these truths" are
+some general statements about "all men"; the fourth and fifth tell why
+governments are established and why they should be overthrown. These
+two are the objective of the first three; but they have been neglected
+in favor of adolescent disputation over the equality of men at birth,
+and they have been forgotten in our adult pursuit of happiness which
+has often made us forget that life and liberty, no less than large
+incomes, are among our inalienable rights.</p>
+
+<p>The historians of the Declaration always remind us of John Locke's
+principle that governments exist only to protect property; when States
+fail they cease to be legitimate, they can be overthrown; and Locke is
+taken to be, more than Rousseau, the inspiration of the Declaration.
+The Declaration, it happens, never mentions the right to own property;
+but the argument for revolution is essentially the same: when a
+government ceases to function, it should be overthrown. The critical
+point is the definition of the chief duty of a government. The
+Colonists, in the Declaration, said it is to secure <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>certain rights to
+all men; not to guarantee privileges granted by the State, but to
+protect rights which are born when men are born, in them, with
+them&mdash;inalienably theirs.</p>
+
+<p>So the Declaration sets us for ever in opposition to the totalitarian
+State&mdash;for that State has all the inalienable rights, and the people
+exist only to protect the State.</p>
+
+<p>The catalogue of rights is comparatively unimportant; once we agree
+that the State exists to secure inherent rights, the great
+revolutionary stride has been taken; and immediately we see that our
+historic opposition to Old Europe is of a piece with our present
+opposition to Hitler. The purpose of our State is not the purpose of
+the European States; we might work with them, side by side, but a
+chemical union would result only in an explosion.</p>
+
+<p>There is one word artfully placed in the description of the State; the
+Declaration does not say that governments derive their powers from the
+consent of the governed. It says that governments instituted among men
+to protect their rights "derive their <i>just</i> powers from the consent of
+the governed". Always realistic, the Declaration recognizes the
+tendency of governors to reach out for power and to absorb whatever the
+people fail to hold. The idea of consent is also revolutionary&mdash;but the
+moment "inalienability" is granted, consent to be governed <i>must</i>
+follow. The fascist state recognizes <i>no</i> inalienable right, and needs
+no consent from its people.</p>
+
+<p>It is "self-evident", I think, that we have given wrong values to the
+three elements involved. We have talked about the "pursuit of
+happiness"; we have been impressed by the idea of any right being ours
+"for keeps", inalienable; and we have never thought much about the
+fundamental radicalism of the Declaration: that it makes government
+our servant, instructed <i>by us</i> to protect our rights. The chain of
+reasoning, as the Declaration sets it forth, leads to a practical
+issue:</p>
+
+<div class="block3"><p class="hang">All men are created equal&mdash;their equality lies in their having
+rights;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">these rights cannot be alienated;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">governments are set up to prevent alienation;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people
+to the government;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">and if one government fails, the people give the power to
+another.</p></div>
+
+<p>So in the first three hundred words of the Declaration the purpose of
+our government is logically developed.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Blueprint of America</i></p>
+
+<p>There follows first a general and then a particular condemnation of
+the King of England. This is the longest section of the Declaration.
+It is the section no one bothers to read; the statute of limitations
+has by this time outlawed our bill of complaint against George the
+Third. But the grievances of the Colonials were not high-pitched
+trifles; every complaint rises out of a definite desire to live under
+a decent government; and the whole list is like a picture, seen in
+negative, of the actual government the Colonists intended to set up;
+and the basic habits of American life, its great traditions, its good
+fortune and its deficiencies are all foreshadowed in this middle
+section. Here&mdash;for the sake of completeness&mdash;is the section:</p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary
+for the public good.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and
+pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his
+Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly
+neglected to attend them.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large
+districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of
+Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and
+formidable to tyrants only.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public
+Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with
+his measures.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with
+manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause
+others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of
+Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise;
+the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of
+invasion from without, and convulsions within.</i></p>
+
+<p>Here I omit one "count", reserved for separate consideration.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his
+Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of
+their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of
+Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without
+the Consent of our legislatures.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has affected to render the Military Independent of and superior
+to the Civil power.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign
+to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent
+to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For quartering large bodies of
+armed troops among us: For protecting them by a mock Trial from
+punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants
+of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the
+world: For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by
+jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended
+offenses: For abolishing the free System of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>English Laws in a
+neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government,
+and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and
+fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these
+Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable
+Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For
+suspending our own Legislatures and declaring themselves invested with
+power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his
+Protection and waging War against us.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has plundered our seas, ravished our Coasts, burnt our towns, and
+destroyed the lives of our people.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries
+to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun
+with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
+most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized
+nation.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high
+Seas to bear Arms against friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves
+by their Hands.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored
+to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
+Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction
+of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions
+We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated
+Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose
+character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is
+unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in
+attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to
+time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable
+jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of
+our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native
+justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our
+common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably
+interrupt our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf
+to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore,
+acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold
+them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace
+Friends.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The eighteen paragraphs of denunciation fall into seven general
+sections:</p>
+
+<div class="block3"><p class="hang">The King has thwarted representative government;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">he has obstructed justice;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">he has placed military above civil power;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">he has abolished the rule of Law;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity
+of the Colonies;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war
+on them.</p></div>
+
+<p>So the bill of complaint signifies these things about the Founders of
+our Country:</p>
+
+<div class="block3"><p class="hang">They demanded government with the consent, by the
+representatives, of the governed.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not
+tolerate any power superior to law&mdash;whether royal or military.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats,
+wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the
+establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no
+restraints on commerce and industry.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">They intended to be prosperous.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.</p></div>
+
+<p>These were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in
+England or France; they were the practical <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>application of Locke and
+Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and the Roundheads. Little in the
+whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies;
+troops had been quartered in Ireland, trial by jury suspended in
+England, tyrants then as now created their Praetorian guard or Storm
+Troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early
+time had been considered as tributaries of the Mother Country.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Practical "Dream"</i></p>
+
+<p>The American Colonists were about to break the traditions of European
+settlement, and with it the traditions of European government. And,
+with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence,
+they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one
+specification which had never been made before, and <i>could</i> never have
+been made before:</p>
+
+<p>"<i>He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for
+that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
+refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
+raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on
+representative government; it is so important that it comes before the
+items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor
+in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to
+understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our
+systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our
+mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the
+act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this
+unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its
+basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two
+processes by which America was made:</p>
+
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 5%;">Immigration<br />
+Pioneering</p>
+
+<p>With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which
+means political equality, in between the two other factors.
+Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth,
+the new thing in the new world, that one could <i>become</i> what one
+willed and worked to become&mdash;one could, regardless of birth or race or
+creed, <i>become an American</i>.</p>
+
+<p>So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of
+populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had
+no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the
+habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their
+prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to
+Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to
+America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in
+Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not
+a dream, but something grander and greater&mdash;citizenship, equality
+under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his
+ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the
+colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many
+lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands
+from the Appalachians to the Mississippi&mdash;or as much of it as they
+could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763,
+the Crown took over <i>all</i> title to the 250,000 square miles of land
+which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the
+best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man
+could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no
+common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America,
+uninterrupted since <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move
+westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become
+Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the
+forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was
+one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not
+across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had
+taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was
+broken; they were cut off from Europe, forbidden to bring over its
+men, forbidden to send over their goods. For the first time America
+was isolated from Europe.</p>
+
+<p>So the British Crown touched every focal spot&mdash;and bruised it. The
+outward movement, to and from Europe, always fruitful for America, was
+stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. The
+energies of America had always expressed themselves in movement; when
+an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then
+the explosion of forces we call the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>And nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the
+Revolution created. The thing that people afterward chose to call "the
+American dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the
+substantial fabric of American life&mdash;a systematic linking of free
+land, free trade, free citizenship, in a free society.</p>
+
+<p>A grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the
+Declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the
+Constitution. As Charles Beard is often made the authority for this
+economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of
+the Declaration may be cited in evidence:</p>
+
+<div class="block3"><p class="hang">the great estates were broken up;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally
+broken;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted
+and it disappeared steadily from the old.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>And the Ordnance of 1787, last great act of the Continental Congress,
+inspired by the Declaration, created the Northwest Territory, the
+heart of America for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and
+intelligence which the Constitution in all its wisdom did not surpass.</p>
+
+<p>That is what the Declaration accomplished. It set in action <i>all</i> the
+forces that ultimately made America. The action rose out of the final
+section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as
+"Representatives of the United States of America", the signers declare
+that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and
+Independent States...." In this clear insight, the Declaration says
+that the things separating one people from another have already
+happened&mdash;differences in experiences, desires, habits&mdash;and that the
+life of the Colonies is already so independent of Britain that the
+purely political bond must be dissolved.</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"<i>WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America,
+in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the
+world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by
+authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and
+declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be,
+Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all
+Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection
+between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally
+dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full
+Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
+Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States
+may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm
+reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to
+each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.</i>"</p></div>
+
+<p>So finally, as a unity of free and independent States, the new nation
+arrogates to itself four specific powers:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 2em;">To levy war<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">conclude peace</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">contract alliances</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">establish commerce.</span></p>
+
+<p>Only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a
+vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant
+that they had to be separately written down; three of
+them&mdash;war&mdash;peace&mdash;alliances&mdash;are wholly international; the fourth,
+commerce, at least partly so. The signers of the Declaration made no
+mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain
+independent, they were fighting <i>against</i> isolation.</p>
+
+<p>The error we must not make about the Declaration is to think of it as
+a purely domestic document, dealing with taxes and election of
+representatives and Redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our
+national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our
+life out of English hands; and the moment this is done, the
+Declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations,
+and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment our intercourse with the nations of Europe is a matter
+of life and death&mdash;death to the destroyer of free Europe or death to
+ourselves; but if we live, life for all Europe, also. Like parachute
+troops, our address to Europe must precede our armies; we have to know
+what to say to Europe, to whom to say, how to say it. And the answer
+was provided by the Declaration which let all Europe come to us&mdash;but
+held us independent of all Europe.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER VI<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>"The Population of These States"</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and
+it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to
+generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation
+it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to
+prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to
+the picture it distorts.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>English-Speaking Aliens</i></p>
+
+<p>The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic,
+Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her
+husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying
+beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly
+false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the
+most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the
+bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly
+<i>one third of all</i> the immigrants to the United States, were
+English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was
+from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal
+sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one
+finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years;
+Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement
+to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one
+of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably
+was the principal source for thirty years more&mdash;from 1790 until
+1820&mdash;during which time no official figures were kept.</p>
+
+<p>Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>twelve
+spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the
+tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from
+British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all
+knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions
+fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or
+political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends
+already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the
+country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their
+upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and
+willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without
+causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the
+national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants;
+they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they
+helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by
+abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even
+when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain
+British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of
+change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the
+minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an
+American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the
+man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a
+Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America
+in the mold of his old country.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Who Asked Them to Come?</i></p>
+
+<p>The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it
+makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the
+foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later
+the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to
+America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals
+as well as saints. The picture <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>is false not only in perspective, but
+in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the
+middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United
+States actively desired and solicited immigration.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell
+off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who
+had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder
+brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first
+years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens
+into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the
+railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the
+Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age
+and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and
+again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for
+shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any
+restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might
+demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner
+(the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a
+fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The
+only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not
+lower the totals.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>America Was Fulfilment!</i></p>
+
+<p>The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact
+without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was
+the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did
+not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to
+the only poverty which is degrading&mdash;the poverty which is accepted as
+permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden
+mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas,
+brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>made by steamship
+agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its
+immigrants&mdash;the promise and hope of better things for their children.
+America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.</p>
+
+<p>No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that
+the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater
+comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a
+projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction
+against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with
+luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income,
+in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and
+disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others.
+The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much.
+At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the
+Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen
+other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they
+had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand
+transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the
+new world.</p>
+
+<p>And this confidence&mdash;which was always justified&mdash;became as much a part
+of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system,
+our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our
+passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other
+essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from
+all other nations.</p>
+
+<p>The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself
+there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he
+could <i>become</i> an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute
+specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of
+the country.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the
+native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political
+rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the
+government placed anything in the way of social equality; the
+immigrant's life was his own to make.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or
+Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or
+brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the
+life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six
+generations, get along without him.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>America Is Various</i></p>
+
+<p>During the years in which big business solicited immigration and
+organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an
+unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was
+"working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people
+who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were
+wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived,
+forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with
+an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at
+the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly
+foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of
+unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization;
+sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately
+isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be
+kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of
+comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and
+Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories,
+living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to
+the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming
+in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with
+America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in
+Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it
+is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ...
+a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ...
+dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized
+Europeans" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>within our borders, colonies with their own religious
+leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could
+accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood"
+difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)</p>
+
+<p>The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from
+South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs
+and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over
+"assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's
+existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find
+a place&mdash;not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding
+uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as
+typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him,
+seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety
+the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of
+religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a
+universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country
+out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw
+infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and
+admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action
+was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit
+that the important action of creating America had come to an end.
+James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future
+"could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in
+an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far
+better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better
+world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one
+ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof
+of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and
+cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it
+politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us
+against the totalitarians who were yet to come.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more
+practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something
+celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done <i>to</i> the
+foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to
+be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but
+consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not
+become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as
+Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience
+of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the
+America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native
+born and the older immigrants wept because <i>their</i> America and their
+way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them
+by; America had to be reborn.</p>
+
+<p>So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and
+the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and
+prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not
+observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and
+relatively unimportant.</p>
+
+<p>The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social
+discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to
+slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good
+land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions;
+second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took
+scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty
+work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.</p>
+
+<p>But the practical people forgot the great practical side&mdash;which is
+also the mystical side&mdash;of our immigration. For the first time since
+the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made
+possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As
+Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through
+faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the
+eyes of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>God, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom
+spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a
+Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or
+alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their
+faith could make of them true Americans.</p>
+
+<p>The instant practical consequences of this new element in human
+history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of
+early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and
+explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans
+into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to
+Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and
+energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and
+Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of
+trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical
+as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation
+stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a
+practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration
+invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality,
+snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy
+life&mdash;and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was
+as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had
+other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep
+under the roots of the European system&mdash;and loosened them so that a
+tremor could shake the system entirely.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Change and Status</i></p>
+
+<p>For the European system stood against <i>becoming</i>; its objective was to
+remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of
+time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady
+long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it
+possessed was built to endure for ever; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>its cathedrals, its prisons,
+its symbols, its systems&mdash;including the symbols and the systems by
+which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious
+complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men
+from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over
+Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations
+waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors
+thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably
+Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and
+Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or
+hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts
+came&mdash;the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In
+each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each
+country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted.
+And in each country one class&mdash;the same class&mdash;ruled, and all other
+classes served.</p>
+
+<p>By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established
+church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but
+the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his <i>station</i>
+in life, his civil <i>status</i>, the <i>standing</i> of his family in the
+financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo
+remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a
+middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while
+an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment
+imagined that he could become an Englishman&mdash;any more than a Scot. The
+English knew that names change; men do not.</p>
+
+<p><i>Only when they came to America, they did.</i></p>
+
+<p>They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming
+American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive
+nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established
+religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>To the familiar European systems of damnation&mdash;by original sin, by economic
+determinism, by pre-natal influence&mdash;has been added a new one&mdash;damnation by
+racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth
+of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born
+German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the
+inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to
+its loftiest point.</p>
+
+<p>We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal.
+The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and
+into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably
+suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled
+with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there
+is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor,
+huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both
+capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human
+beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we
+look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations.
+What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human
+liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human
+liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change
+and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our
+system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation
+excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant
+citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but
+we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it
+in <i>our</i> schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate,
+but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the
+ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we
+abandon it, we nazify ourselves&mdash;and destroy the foundation of the
+Republic.</p>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span><i>Americans All</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good
+Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our
+settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of
+fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the
+language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought
+from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second
+generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have
+encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss
+in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are
+being made to create a general American interest in the separate
+cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not
+lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for
+the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of
+Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their
+country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be
+interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that
+Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding
+to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant
+danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the
+supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense
+100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done
+to help all the others.</p>
+
+<p>Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of
+Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the
+President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that
+we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added
+"and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.)
+Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in
+American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All
+series and, especially, from the difficulties <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>encountered, as well as
+from one special element of success.</p>
+
+<p>I set down some basic principles: that the programs would not
+<i>glorify</i> one national group after another; that the interrelation of
+each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast
+obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would
+be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered
+if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be
+paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making
+of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the
+special contribution of any single group.</p>
+
+<p>These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was
+knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group
+would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious
+was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to
+the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own.
+We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national
+sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently
+ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's
+own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of
+the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American
+backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole
+problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested
+in America.</p>
+
+<p>On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More
+than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and
+women who were <i>not</i> descendants of the national group presented that
+week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were
+from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the
+other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and
+Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and
+Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects
+of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were
+so much better Americans <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>than anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred
+thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit;
+the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a
+fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to
+us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.</p>
+
+<p>Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the
+immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and
+that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for
+ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United
+States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American"
+will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater
+significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid
+down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government
+has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the
+colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant
+"colonies" as spies.</p>
+
+<p>If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the
+legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost
+in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be
+safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars,
+degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish
+itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with
+variations).</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Are We Anglo-Saxon?</i></p>
+
+<p>At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American"
+become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions
+about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as
+Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the
+Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth
+and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with
+Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>not
+on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor
+of those who did most for our history.</p>
+
+<p>There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which
+is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots&mdash;and the
+Scots-Irish&mdash;founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards
+to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain
+basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were
+good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were
+great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty
+and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War
+of Independence.</p>
+
+<p>Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and
+everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and
+purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in
+George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick
+but not in Eleuth&egrave;re Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing
+and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his
+associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in
+Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as
+un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's
+test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was
+destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have
+to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz
+and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul
+Robeson and Jonas Lie.</p>
+
+<p>When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to
+belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For
+the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic
+manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the
+earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and
+presently they and their children were troubling about education, or
+civil <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free
+association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special
+fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will
+be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the
+settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples&mdash;and when
+they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged
+America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be
+destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make
+us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe
+(especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to
+destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.</p>
+
+<p>That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the
+help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never
+was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and
+Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and
+Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers,
+Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots,
+Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians.
+In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six
+nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots,
+Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many
+Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Creative Anglo-Saxon</i></p>
+
+<p>The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America&mdash;the gift
+greater than all their other great gifts&mdash;was the conception of a
+state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By
+the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the
+Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they
+destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of
+Independence, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was
+not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in
+England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality;
+on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were
+becoming American, even before a new nation was born.</p>
+
+<p>All that followed&mdash;the vast complexity of creating America, would have
+been impossible without that first supreme act of creative
+self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period
+established the principles of statehood and naturalization and
+citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they
+ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English
+and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still
+some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from
+New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the
+Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere;
+but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw.
+Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could
+<i>become</i> equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of
+that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this
+country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else.
+With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives
+and sacred honor that it would happen again.</p>
+
+<p>So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations
+contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have
+to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the
+others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was
+theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.</p>
+
+<p>In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an
+immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will
+change all around us; the dreadful alternations <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>of plenty and
+starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order
+in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some
+of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have
+learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are
+powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be
+left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.</p>
+
+<p>But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the
+great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization&mdash;the idea
+of men making themselves over&mdash;as for a century and a half they have
+made themselves into Americans.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>An Experiment in Evolution</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Note</span>: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined
+it as it defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it
+seems to mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has
+happened to us, we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an
+essential affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.</p>
+
+<p>Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a
+particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain
+foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for
+all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are
+basically haters of all foreigners will say that the <i>law</i> accepts
+citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.</p>
+
+<p>It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and
+people are often the truest words about America; and one of the
+profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet
+or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly
+true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.</p>
+
+<p>In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we
+are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments.
+We can observe and compare. Under <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>the inspiration of the eminent
+anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as
+it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans.
+Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they
+walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend
+to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm
+or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or
+standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.</p>
+
+<p>The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture.
+The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of
+Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American
+mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant).
+The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew
+is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the
+other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and
+one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the
+other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign";
+and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are
+foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself.
+The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American
+gesture takes its place.</p>
+
+<p>And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing
+in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as
+certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature
+changes in the atmosphere of liberty&mdash;as the mind and the spirit
+change.</p>
+
+<p>The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind
+(under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in
+America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom
+declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any
+race because they knew that the men of all races would become
+Americans. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved
+today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in
+action.</p>
+
+<p>It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now
+have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in
+Europe.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER VII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>Address to Europe</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The communications of America and Europe have always run in two
+channels: our fumbling, foolish diplomacy, our direct, candid,
+successful dealings with the people.</p>
+
+<p>Our first word was to the people of Europe; the Declaration of
+Independence tried to incite the British people against their own
+Parliament; and the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" refers
+to citizens, not to chancelleries. The Declaration was addressed to
+the world; it was heard in Paris and later in a dozen provinces of
+Germany, and in Savoy and in Manchester, and presently along the
+Nevski and the Yellow River. Since 1776, the people of the world have
+always listened to us, and answered. We have never failed when we have
+spoken to the people.</p>
+
+<p>After the Declaration, the American people spoke to all the people of
+Europe in the most direct way: they invited Europeans to come here,
+offering them land, wages, freedom; presently our railroads and
+steamship lines solicited larger numbers; and the policy of the
+government added inducements. Free immigration, and free movement,
+demanded in the Declaration, made possible by laws under the
+Constitution, were creating America. In domestic life we saw it at
+once; but the effects of immigration on our dealings with Europe were
+not immediate.</p>
+
+<p>We need only remember that for a hundred and twenty years the peoples
+of Europe and the people of the United States were constantly writing
+to one another; not merely doing business together, but exchanging
+ideas, mingling in marriage, coming together as dispersed families
+come together. Whatever went on in the Mississippi Valley was known
+along the fjords and in the Volga basin and by the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>Danube; if sulphur
+was discovered in Louisiana it first impoverished Sicily&mdash;then brought
+Sicilians to Louisiana; Greeks knew that sponges were to be found off
+Tampa. And more and more people in America knew what was happening in
+Europe&mdash;a famine, a revolution, a brief era of peace, a repressive
+ministry, a reform bill. The constant interaction of Europe and
+America was one beat of our existence&mdash;it was in counterpoint to the
+tramp of the pioneer moving Westward; immigration and migration meshed
+together.</p>
+
+<p>Our government from time to time spoke to the governments of Europe. A
+tone of sharp reproof was heard at times, a warm word for
+revolutionaries was coupled with indignation against tyrants: Turkey,
+the Dual Monarchy, the Tsar, all felt the lash&mdash;or Congress hoped they
+felt it; in the Boer War, England was the victim of semi-official
+criticism; and whenever possible, we were the first to recognize
+republics, even if they failed to maintain themselves on the ruins of
+monarchy. We fluttered official papers and were embarrassed by
+protocol, not believing in it anyhow, and were outwitted or
+out-charmed by second-rate diplomatists of Europe.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>People and Protocol</i></p>
+
+<p>The campaign platforms always demanded a "firm, vigorous, dignified"
+diplomacy; the diplomacy of Europe was outwardly correct, inwardly
+devious, shifting, flexible, and in our opinion corrupt. But our
+address to the <i>people</i> of Europe was, in all this time, so candid, so
+persuasive, that we destroyed the chancelleries and recaptured our
+losses. The first great communication, after 1776, was made by
+Lincoln&mdash;it was not a single speech or letter, it was a constant
+appeal to the conscience of the British people, begging them, as the
+Declaration had done, to override the will of their rulers. And this
+appeal also was successful; few events in our relations with England
+are more moving than the action of the starving Midlanders. Their
+government, like their men of wealth and birth, like their press and
+parliament, were eager <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>to see America split, and willing to see
+slavery upheld in order to destroy democracy. But the men and women of
+Manchester, starved by the Northern blockade of cotton, still begged
+their government not to interfere with the blockade&mdash;and sent word to
+Lincoln to assure him that the <i>people</i> of Britain were on the side of
+liberty, imploring him "not to faint in your providential mission.
+While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let
+the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to
+spring up and work fresh misery to your children." Nor did Lincoln
+fail to respond; Americans who could interest Britain in the northern
+cause were unofficial ambassadors to the people; and our minister,
+Charles Francis Adams labored with all sorts and conditions of men to
+make the government of Britain accept the will of the British people.
+The Emancipation Proclamation was a final step in the domestic
+statesmanship of the war; it was also a step in the diplomacy of the
+war, for it insured us the good will of the British people; and that
+good will was vital to the success of the Union. The North was coming
+close to war with the <i>government</i> of Britain, and the people's open
+prejudice in favor of Lincoln and freedom kept England from sufficient
+aid to the Confederacy.</p>
+
+<p>The next address of the United States to the people of Europe is a
+long tragedy, its consequences so dreadful today that we can barely
+analyze the steps by which the great work for human freedom was
+destroyed.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Wilson to the World</i></p>
+
+<p>Following the precedent of the Declaration, Woodrow Wilson began in
+1916 to address himself to the people of the nations at war in Europe.
+To ministries, German and British both, Wilson was sending
+expostulations on U-boats and embargos; to the peoples of Europe he
+addressed those speeches which were made at home; presently he wrote
+inquiries to the ministers which they were compelled to make public
+(since publication in neutral countries was certain). <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>Then, after the
+Soviets of Russia had gone over the heads of the Foreign Offices, to
+appeal to the workers of the world, Wilson carried his own method to
+its necessary point and, after we entered the war, began the masterly
+series of addresses to the German people which were so effective in
+creating the atmosphere of defeat.</p>
+
+<p>They created at the same time the purposes of allied victory. The war
+ended and one of the magnificent spectacles of modern times occurred:
+the people of Europe were for a moment united, and they were united by
+an American declaring the objectives of American life. The moment was
+so brief that few knew all it meant until it had passed; in the
+excitement of spectacles and events, of plots and processions, this
+moment when Europe trembled with a new hope passed unnoticed.</p>
+
+<p>What happened later to Woodrow Wilson is tragic enough; but nothing
+can take away from America this great moment in European history&mdash;to
+which every observer bears testimony, even the most cynical. The
+defeated people of Germany saw in America their only defence against
+the rapacity of Clemenceau, the irresponsible, volatile opportunism of
+Lloyd George, the crafty merchandising of Orlando; the first "liberal"
+leader, Prince Max, had deliberately pretended acceptance of the
+fourteen points in order to embarrass Wilson; but he spoke the truth
+when he said that Wilson's ideals were cherished by the overwhelming
+majority of the German <i>people</i>; and quite correctly the Germans saw
+that nothing but American idealism stood between them and a peace of
+vengeance. The enthusiasm of the victorious peoples was less selfish,
+but it was equally great; a profound distrust of their leaders had
+grown in the minds of realistic Frenchmen and Britons, they sensed the
+incapacity of their leaders to raise the objectives of the war above
+the level of the "knockout blow" or the <i>revanche</i>. As the Germans
+cried to be protected in their defeat, the victorious people asked to
+be protected from such fruits of victory as Europe had known for a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>thousand years. The demagogues still shouted hoarsely for a noose for
+the Kaiser and the old order in Germany began to plan for the next
+time&mdash;but the people of Europe were united; they had gone through the
+same war and, for the first time in their history, they wanted the
+same peace. It was the first time that an American peace was proposed
+to them.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>How Wilson Was Trapped</i></p>
+
+<p>Woodrow Wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the
+time he returned to Paris for the actual business of the peace, he had
+become the spiritual leader of the world. He was not, however, the
+political leader of his own country&mdash;he had lost the Congressional
+elections and he allowed the diplomats of Europe to make use of this
+defeat. They began to cut him off from the people of Europe; he fell
+into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secret sessions, the
+quarrels and departures; once he recovered control, ordered steam up
+in the George Washington to take him home; but in the end he was
+outguessed&mdash;in the smart word, he was outsmarted. He had imagined that
+he could defeat the old Europe by refusing to recognize its intrigues.
+He had, in effect, declared that secret treaties and all commitments
+preceding the fourteen points couldn't exist; he had hoped that they
+would be cancelled to conform to his pious pretence of ignorance. And
+Clemenceau and Lloyd George kept him quarreling over a mile of
+boundary or a religious enclave within a racial minority; they stirred
+passions; they starved German children by an embargo; they rumored
+reparations; they promised to hang the Kaiser; they drew Wilson deeper
+into smaller conferences; they promised him a League about which their
+cynicism was boundless, and he let them have war guilt and reparations
+and the betrayal of the Russian revolution and the old European system
+triumphant. They had fretted him and tried him and they had made their
+own people forget the passionate faith Wilson had inspired; they made
+Wilson the agent of disillusion for all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>that was generous and hopeful
+in Europe. They could do it because the moment Wilson began to talk to
+the premiers, he stopped talking to the people. From the moment he
+allowed the theme of exclusive war guilt to be announced, he cut
+himself off from all Germany; he did not know the temper of the
+working class in Europe, and he refused to listen to the men he
+himself had sent to report on Russia, which did not help him with the
+radical trade unions in France or the liberals in England. One by one
+the nations fell back into their ancient groove, the Italians sullenly
+nursing a grievance, the French whipping up a drama of revenge and
+memory in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the British "isolating"
+themselves in virtual control of the Continent, everybody frightened
+of Russia&mdash;and everyone still listening for another word of honest
+truth from Wilson, who was silent; for America was starting on a long
+era of isolation from Europe (the first in a century), an aberration
+in American life, against all its actual traditions, in keeping only
+with its vulgar oratory.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Excommunication of Europe</i></p>
+
+<p>The United States had no obligations to the nations which emerged out
+of the Treaty of Versailles, only a human obligation to their people
+to keep faith with them. The people of Germany believed in all fervor
+that they had gained an armistice and sought peace on the basis of the
+fourteen points; the people of France and England believed that their
+own governments had accepted the same points. And the same people
+might have been stirred to insist on a peace of reconciliation&mdash;not
+with princes and ministers, but with peoples&mdash;if Wilson and the
+Americans had continued to communicate with them.</p>
+
+<p>We withdrew into a stuffy silence. Just as we played a queer game of
+protocol and refused to "recognize" the USSR, so we sulked because the
+old bitch Europe wasn't being a gentleman&mdash;the only communication we
+made to Europe was when we dunned her for money. We have seen how the
+years of Harding and Coolidge affected our domestic life; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>they were
+not only a reaction against the fervor of the war months; they were a
+carefully calculated reaction against basic American policy at home
+and abroad; they betrayed American enterprise, delivered industry into
+the hands of finance, degraded government, laughed at corruption, and
+under the guise of "a return to normalcy" attempted to revive the dead
+conservatism of McKinley and Penrose in American politics.</p>
+
+<p>In this period, it is no wonder that we failed to utter one kind word
+to help the first democratic government in Germany, that we trembled
+with fear of the Reds, sneered at British labor until it became
+respectable enough to send us a Prime Minister, and excluded more and
+more rigorously the people of Europe whose blood had created our own.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly, as the depression of 1929-32 squeezed us, we began to see that
+our miseries connected us with Europe; it was a Republican president
+who first attempted to address Europe; but Mr. Hoover's temperament
+makes it difficult for him to speak freely to anyone; the talks with
+Ramsay MacDonald were pleasurable; the offer of a moratorium was the
+first kindness to Europe in a generation of studied American
+indifference. It failed (because France still preferred to avenge
+herself on Germany); and thereafter we had too many unpleasant things
+to do at home.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>One Good Deed</i></p>
+
+<p>We had, in the interval, spoken once to all the world. On the day the
+Japanese moved into Manchuria we had, in effect, notified the British
+that we chose not to accept the destruction or dismemberment of a
+friendly nation. The cynical indifference of Sir John Simon was the
+first intimation of the way Europe felt about American "idealism". It
+was also the first step toward "non-intervention" in Spain and the
+destruction of Europe at the hands of Adolf Hitler. When we were
+rebuffed by Downing Street, we sulked; we did not attempt to speak to
+the people of Asia, or try to win the British <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>public to our side. We
+had lost the habit. We were not even candid in our talks with the
+Chinese whose cause we favored because we had Japan (and American
+dealers in oil and scrap iron) to appease.</p>
+
+<p>In 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected leader of a Germany which had been
+out of communication with us for a generation. The United States which
+had been in the minds of generations of Germans, was forgotten by the
+people. In a few years Hitler had overthrown the power of France on
+the Continent, challenged Communism as an international force, and
+frightened the British Empire into an ignoble flutter of appeasement.</p>
+
+<p>To that dreary end our failure of communication had tended. We were
+the one power which might have held Europe together&mdash;in a League, in a
+mere hope of friendship and peace between nations, in the matrix of
+the fourteen points if nothing more. The moment we withdrew from
+Europe, its nations fell apart, not merely into victors and
+vanquished, but into querulous, distrustful, and angry people, each
+whipped into hysteria by demagogues or soothed to complaisance by
+frightened ministers.</p>
+
+<p>The obligation to address Europe is no longer a moral one. For our own
+security, for the cohesion of our own people, for victory over every
+element that works to break America into hostile parts&mdash;now we have
+the golden opportunity again, to speak to Europe, and to ask Europe to
+answer. As we look back on our ancient triumphs with the peoples of
+Europe and the sour end to which we let them come, this new chance is
+heaven-sent, undeserved, as if we could live our lives over again. And
+it is nearly so&mdash;for if we want to have a life to live in the future,
+if it is still to be the confident, secure life of a United America,
+we must speak now to Europe.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER VIII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>The Science of Short Wave</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>38 Million Freemen</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>years later he or his
+sons exploited other immigrants in turn, as greedily and brutally as
+the law allowed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The New World was New</i></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>was</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>And when that is said, we have to say one thing, harder to say
+honorably and modestly and persuasively:</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Soil of Liberty</i></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond this&mdash;which deals with great men and is flattering to national
+pride&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>They have also annihilated the myth of race by which Hitler's Germany
+creates a propaganda of hatred. <i>All</i> the peoples of Europe have lived
+together in amity in America, all have intermarried. Nothing in
+America&mdash;not even its crimes&mdash;can be ascribed to one group, nation, or
+race. Even the KKK, one suspects, was not 100% Aryan.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Germans As Freemen</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Brotherhood of the Oppressed</i></p>
+
+<p>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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>except that there is a superior race&mdash;and it is not his own?</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;because they are men, because under liberty there is no
+end to what they and their children may accomplish.</p>
+
+<p>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: <i>America means opportunity</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>This is our address to the people of Europe&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as the French did not
+believe it when we failed to break the British blockade in their
+favor. But we must persuade <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>them&mdash;we have their brothers and mothers
+and sons here to speak for us.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Our First Effective Front</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>the people</i> that their
+brothers are here with us&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>the
+Anglo-Saxon upper classes&mdash;and that "good Europeans" can never become
+good Americans. The moment we give any pretext for this propaganda,
+our communication with <i>all</i> of Europe is lost.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Short Wave to Ourselves</i></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>advise the
+Swedes to declare war or assure them that we understood why they did
+not; one could do almost as much for France.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;for Europe and for ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and can
+offer.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER IX<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>Definition of America</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>We have two prodigious victories to gain&mdash;the war and the world after
+the war. The chatter about not "defining war aims" because specific
+aims are bound to disturb us, is dangerously beside the point, because
+the kind of world we will create depends largely on the kind of war we
+wage. If we nazify ourselves to win, we will win a nazified world; if
+we communize ourselves, we will probably share a modified Marxian
+world with the Soviets; and if we win by intensification of our
+democracy, we will create the only kind of world in which we can live.
+And, as noted in discussing the strategy of the war, the chances are
+that we can only win if we divine the essential nature of our people
+and create a corresponding strategy.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to the direct military need for knowing what kind of
+people we are, there is the propaganda need, so that we can create a
+national unity and put aside the constant irritation of partisanship,
+the fear of "incidents", the wastage of emotional energy in quarrels
+among ourselves. And there is a third reason for an exact and candid
+review of what we are: it is our future.</p>
+
+<p>When this war ends we will make, in one form or another, solemn
+agreements with the nations of the world, our allies and what is left
+of our enemies. We know almost nothing about any of them&mdash;we, the
+American people. Our State Department knows little enough; what it
+knows, it has not communicated to us; and we have never been
+interested enough to make discoveries of our own. We are about to
+commit a huge international polygamy, with forty picture brides, each
+one in a different national costume.</p>
+
+<p>Some conditions of this mass marriage are the subject of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>the next
+section of this book. Here I am concerned with the one thing we can do
+to make the preliminary steps intelligent. We cannot learn all we need
+to know about all the other nations of the world; but we can reflect
+on some things within ourselves, we can know ourselves better; and on
+this knowledge we can erect the framework into which the other nations
+will fit; or out of which they will remain if they choose not to fit.
+We can, by knowing a few vital things about ourselves, learn a lot
+about South America and Europe and Asia and Australia; what <i>we</i> are
+will determine whom we will marry, whom reject, and whom we will set
+up, if agreeable, in an unsanctified situation. The laws of man, in
+many states, require certificates of eligibility to marry, the
+services of the church inquire if an obstacle exists. Before we enter
+into compacts full of tragic and noble possibilities, we might also
+make inquiries. Something in us shies away from the pomp of the old
+diplomacy&mdash;what is that something? We used to like revolutionaries and
+never understood colonial exploitation&mdash;how do these things affect us
+now? Are we prepared to deal with a government in one country and a
+people in another? Is it possible for us to ally ourselves to
+Communists, reformed fascists, variously incomplete democracies,
+cooperative democratic monarchies, and centralized empires, all at the
+same time? Is there anything in us which requires us to make terms
+with Britain about India, with Russia about propaganda, with Sweden
+about exports, before we make a new world with all of them? Can we,
+honorably, enter any agreement, with any state or with all states,
+while they are ignorant of our character&mdash;as ignorant, possibly, as we
+are of theirs?</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty we are in is nicely doubled, because introspection is
+no happy habit and we say that we <i>know</i> all about America, or we say
+that America cannot be known&mdash;it is too big, too varied, too
+complicated. And these two opposite statements are in themselves a
+beginning of a definition. America, by this testimony, is a country,
+large, varied, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>complex, inhabited by people who either understand
+their country perfectly or will not make an effort to understand it. I
+would not care to rest on this definition&mdash;but it shows the need of
+definition.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Mathematics of Character</i></p>
+
+<p>By "definition of America" I mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we
+are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from
+others. We are, for instance, the only country lying between the
+Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 25&deg; 35' and 49&deg; north latitude. This
+definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a
+criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact,
+the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied
+climate, our resources, our bigness with <i>its</i> consequences in the
+temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical <i>fact</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>Not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in
+mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of
+jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a
+superiority. Moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put
+on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other
+what is exclusively ours&mdash;and make a comparison, a guide to
+international conduct "on scientific principles". We would know how
+far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm
+basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or
+made compromise impossible.</p>
+
+<p>We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social
+boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we
+can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a
+diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics
+can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the
+hope of a better life&mdash;the number who came can be written down, the
+intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination
+can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>or lost by
+those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of
+men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far
+as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the
+great complex of our national character.</p>
+
+<p>We are defined by events&mdash;immigration was an event. But immigrants
+came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England.
+When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us.
+It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both
+absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries
+or has all our habits, because none has had our history&mdash;that is the
+base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with
+us, but we differ from each relatively&mdash;in some degree. This would not
+be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and
+were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted
+that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The
+corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Revolution in Property</i></p>
+
+<p>When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most
+important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The
+ruling class in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become
+poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as
+in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the
+thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of
+land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable
+area was only the fringe, the shore line, of Continental America; the
+Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the
+French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which
+unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.</p>
+
+<p>Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution
+in the deepest instincts of man had taken <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>place&mdash;land became a
+commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe,
+land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal
+Houses were founded on land); land was <i>real</i> estate, everything else
+was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws,
+laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and
+foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law
+governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to
+property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and
+marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the
+Prince (or <i>Princeps</i>) was often the first man in the land because he
+was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent
+thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur;
+in it they were buried.</p>
+
+<p>The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the
+clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and
+complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond
+the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a
+House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia
+tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to
+buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed
+(often legally, often by squatters' right&mdash;which is the right of work,
+not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and
+went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.</p>
+
+<p>There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move
+which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal
+instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock,
+reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European
+cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in
+themselves&mdash;or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied
+so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has
+beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his
+"rape <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's
+positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's
+advice to seek Nature "in a wise passiveness"&mdash;advice based on the
+poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then
+as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped
+his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". Our more
+familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for
+wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who
+wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what
+he was doing.</p>
+
+<p>He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did.
+The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and
+position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine&mdash;which is
+wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the <i>industry</i> of
+one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not
+by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to
+alter&mdash;for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a
+criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became
+respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was
+divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few
+generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable&mdash;but
+not responsible.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Consequences of Free Land</i></p>
+
+<p>This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had
+astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the
+land&mdash;in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The
+European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn,
+nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the
+soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a
+younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate
+unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. This <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>may be
+morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result:
+the American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil
+exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but
+escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant
+class. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite
+forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant
+virtues, the peasant sturdiness and all the rest of the good qualities
+which go with slavery to the soil.</p>
+
+<p>So the physical definition of America leads to these opening social
+definitions:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p class="hang">we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and
+power;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we were supremely the great wasters of the world;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant class.</p></div>
+
+<p>From this beginning we can go on to other effects:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p class="hang">our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war
+against neighboring states;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger
+could find more and better land);</p>
+
+<p class="hang">the national center of gravity was constantly changing as
+population moved to take up new land;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were
+constantly opening new frontiers;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and
+education, for instance) at the same time;</p>
+
+<p class="hang">we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning
+and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of
+political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>The effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant
+psychological factor in America; the obvious effects are that the land
+invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer&mdash;who between them
+created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of
+character. In addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at
+home and peaceful abroad. Once we felt secure within our territorial
+limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of
+the Spaniards in Cuba to bring us into our first war against a
+European nation since 1814. This pacifism was more intense in the more
+agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific
+Scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than
+ours. Pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from Germany
+and Russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service
+(for their children, if not for themselves). In revenge for this
+un-European pacifism we created a purely American lawlessness&mdash;and a
+toleration of it which is the amazement of Nazi Germany, where the
+leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized
+Europe, having lived through duels and massacres, is still shocked by
+our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in
+pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new
+citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>America on the Move</i></p>
+
+<p>One more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and
+all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers
+struck inland from Plymouth and upland from Jamestown) have not
+altered us. The voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a
+generation; but the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon was moving into the
+Northwest Territory as soon as the Revolution was over; then New
+England began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails
+broken by outriders to the western ocean; the Gold Rush pulled men
+through the wintry passes or around <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>the Horn, and by then our passion
+for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the Clipper ship;
+after the Civil War the Homestead Act started a new move to the West,
+and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular
+and abundant. If the 1870's were not marked by great migrations of
+men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of
+cattle, north from Texas in the summer, south from Wyoming as winter
+threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines
+and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to
+the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City. We were moving a bit more
+slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest
+was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no
+more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in Europe,
+developed as a common tool for the average family, and America was
+mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a
+satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of
+activity which has not been sufficiently studied&mdash;the tin can tourist,
+the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. This search for the
+sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established
+habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new
+ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required
+initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was
+only a new beginning.</p>
+
+<p>The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World
+War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost
+tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost
+entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that
+one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quantity-production
+of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor
+mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities,
+small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks,
+busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away
+from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>annually, altered the
+conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country
+known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a
+small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million
+Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road.
+Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy
+came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside
+cabin.</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car";
+that was left for dictators to promise&mdash;without fulfilment. The cars
+made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new
+models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a
+more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors,
+widely remarked. That the motor car could be used&mdash;was being used&mdash;as
+a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war
+threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which
+had rested there for thirty years&mdash;but might still be good for
+transport.</p>
+
+<p>In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near
+frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European
+<i>governments</i> subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were
+not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two
+things&mdash;making planes in mass production, and getting millions of
+people to use them. The present war has anticipated normal progress in
+methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a
+downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train;
+but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic
+American pattern of machines for mobility.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2">"<i>The Richest Nation on Earth</i>"</p>
+
+<p>From free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast
+amount of wealth in America. Because land could not be the exclusive
+base of riches, wealth in America began to take on many meanings and,
+for the first time in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>history, a wealthy people began to emerge,
+instead of a wealthy nation.</p>
+
+<p>We were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. The
+overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities
+are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the gods;
+of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we
+have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and
+clothing, we can always have enough; from South America, we can get
+foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few
+strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing;
+except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be
+poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw
+materials serviceable to all of us. So that our power to work, our way
+of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on
+the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth.</p>
+
+<p>We have a tradition about wealth, too. The Government, to some degree,
+has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the
+people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any
+artificial bar to enterprise.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2">"<i>Rugged Individuals</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million
+Americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the
+Hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first New
+Deal. Perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real Americans"
+would reject Federal aid&mdash;a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks
+about Valley Forge. It was forgotten that the men who froze and swore
+at Valley Forge demanded direct Government aid the moment the Republic
+was established; and that the Cumberland Road, the artery from
+Fredericksburg, Maryland to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was built by the
+Government of the United States for its citizens. Government gave
+bounties and free land; Government gave enormous sums of money <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>to
+industry by way of tariff, and gave 200 million acres of land to
+railroads. There was never a time when the Federal Government was not
+giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. The
+outcry when Government attempted to save <i>all</i> the citizens indicated
+an incomplete knowledge of our history. In particular, the steady
+reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for
+them to start again. The country, for all its obedience to financial
+power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. After the era
+of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was
+ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished&mdash;and not
+pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty&mdash;the almost
+universal condition of man throughout the world&mdash;was not enough for
+America.</p>
+
+<p>It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the
+stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark
+in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large
+nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing
+wealth. The Axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is
+possible that Hitler has already succeeded, for like the
+Administration in 1931, Hitler can say that no one dies of starvation.
+Our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure
+that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived,
+and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. This
+may betray a low liking for riches&mdash;but it has its good points also.
+It has helped to keep us free, which is something.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2">"<i>Ye Shall Live in Plenty</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Wealth&mdash;and the prospect of wealth&mdash;are positive elements in the
+American makeup. We differ from large sections of Europe because we
+take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we
+spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that
+for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and
+spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness.</p>
+
+<p>The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to
+do with forming the American character, because no one took it too
+seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they
+could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium&mdash;they were
+disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed
+the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to
+some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the
+facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the
+frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the
+facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve
+equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon
+domestic reform to concentrate on the war.</p>
+
+<p>Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of
+sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we
+accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living
+and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of
+America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert
+Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to
+renounce, but to enjoy".</p>
+
+<p>Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been
+people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material
+goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have
+their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations,
+most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to
+get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the
+world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America
+it is assumed that all will get a great deal.</p>
+
+<p>The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought
+of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are
+intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>America Invented Prosperity</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device
+of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can
+now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment;
+without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to
+become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still
+is&mdash;and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For
+it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money
+is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as
+if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our
+invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity
+is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the
+Constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a
+prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have
+often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to
+run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create
+either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with
+one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten
+times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it.
+As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it
+would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the
+country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The
+people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government;
+they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing
+economic controls&mdash;a highly concentrated government over a single, not
+a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did
+not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act
+while Congress was not in session; they erected no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>system of national
+courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy,
+could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When
+this system of Confederation broke down, the Constitution was
+carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of
+the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make
+their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did
+not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Constitution to their own
+advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances
+of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of
+property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of
+the Constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time
+... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly
+fulfilled."</p>
+
+<p>The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time;
+poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually
+also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States
+was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the
+reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and
+Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle
+down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of
+intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the
+expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a
+<i>constant</i> in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in
+1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things
+in the mind of the lower classes. The idea of class and the idea of a
+"station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted
+after <i>all</i> the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in
+America the Revolution set out to&mdash;and did&mdash;destroy the principle of
+natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty,
+and this gap between our intent and our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>achievement has been
+publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and
+what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we
+failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which
+did not accept poverty as inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world.
+We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became
+optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We
+enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us
+preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that,
+for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold,
+and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or
+Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Our Fifty Years of Class War</i></p>
+
+<p>From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of
+government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the
+children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy&mdash;the
+system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to
+displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on
+prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent
+movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for
+generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich
+and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our
+political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the
+combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of
+extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under
+Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried
+to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself.
+Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had
+begun to <i>limit</i> enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a
+peasantry and a proletariat. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>With some feeling that Europe must not
+repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal
+Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the
+safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.</p>
+
+<p>We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not
+become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are
+a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more
+important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money
+counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way
+back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal
+principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and
+concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we
+are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is
+required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our
+purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our
+capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Labor Troubles</i></p>
+
+<p>The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that
+we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are
+hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we
+were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of
+life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had
+exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests
+were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed
+revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through
+the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of
+organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.</p>
+
+<p>The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all
+concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of
+labor too often unfit. Like other organized <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>groups, labor unions did
+not always consult the public good and criminals were found among
+them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production
+or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long
+traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their
+ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic
+self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing
+from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing
+legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the
+labor unions.</p>
+
+<p>The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass,
+the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country
+backward in the <i>habits</i> of organized dealing between management and
+labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic
+hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of
+becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new
+wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled
+principles&mdash;to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.</p>
+
+<p>Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain
+his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the
+basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not
+represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient
+wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in
+Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we
+create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans
+have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of
+labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border
+clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces
+capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send
+the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal
+mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide
+them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as
+that was known, the possibility of creating a labor <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>policy became
+bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost
+when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as
+the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty
+years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the
+Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the
+settlement of all disputes.</p>
+
+<p>Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor
+disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly
+because we shall remain for some time behind the other great
+industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a
+British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did;
+and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the
+future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false
+unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes,
+no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations
+Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and
+worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we
+have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without
+self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for
+statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor
+situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities,
+and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we
+could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy
+could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the
+Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Danger of Godlessness</i></p>
+
+<p>I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their
+sources, as a guide to conduct&mdash;particularly the conduct of the war
+(which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian
+propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our
+habits. I have, so far, named <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>those aspects of our total outlook
+which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and
+from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor
+and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I
+come now to items which are no less potent because they are
+impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of
+America into play must count also on these.</p>
+
+<p>We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we
+are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from
+our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not
+constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to
+Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a
+connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or
+see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and
+disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our
+fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.</p>
+
+<p>The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of
+material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a
+functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man
+from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any
+sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private
+purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the
+mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic"
+itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is
+now associated with flummery and hoax.</p>
+
+<p>We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical
+world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good
+intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in
+our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of
+cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek
+his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.</p>
+
+<p>This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a
+practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>linked through
+God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any
+job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic
+countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to
+the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to
+universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a
+deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to
+abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in
+war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep
+universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute
+for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious
+actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already
+have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are
+enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear
+and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of
+religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether
+the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling"
+which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past
+was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as
+vain as our hope for better.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Alger Factor</i></p>
+
+<p>The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the
+departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against
+wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our
+Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic
+appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of
+the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference
+of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in
+America by an intense and confident appeal to <i>action</i>, in the faith
+that action will bring far better things than have been known. The
+vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a
+childish confusion between what is better and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>what is merely bigger
+or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this
+because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of
+poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern
+history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the
+minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have
+rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other
+peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the
+wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints&mdash;but we have also
+rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to
+which they tend.</p>
+
+<p>The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it
+must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What
+aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands
+reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the
+scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine
+covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona
+Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but
+the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music
+popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty
+years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the
+greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible
+that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic
+standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire
+year. And both of these instances have another special point of
+interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that
+pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and
+music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.</p>
+
+<p>I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a
+"lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American
+expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by
+twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably,
+without servants <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three
+flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes
+to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't
+think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy
+themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and
+it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget
+about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>The Morals of Plenty</i></p>
+
+<p>We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that
+nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is
+based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than
+his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those
+who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for
+a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry
+and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry
+clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation;
+Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were
+preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we
+never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and
+living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are
+usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what
+is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money
+beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient
+and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most
+moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it
+adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality
+denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be
+made by mass production). Mass production put an end to the old
+complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub&mdash;mass
+production of tubs and central heating in apartments. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>morality of
+scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be
+considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the
+chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men
+born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create
+equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this
+was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the
+practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of mass
+production; it was a working morality.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime</i></p>
+
+<p>We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of
+spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse;
+cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the
+five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate
+time. We may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time
+when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully
+as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the
+process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that
+substituted the <i>goods</i> of the many for the good of the few.</p>
+
+<p>The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it
+remains a distinguishing mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist
+us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to
+a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened
+to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have
+never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the
+five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive
+presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds
+cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the
+five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.</p>
+
+<p>In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon;
+characteristic of the twentieth century as the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>crossroads general
+store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone
+and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is
+impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods
+and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally
+held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French
+bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the
+five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Prosperity and Politics</i></p>
+
+<p>Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of
+Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in
+conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free
+land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to
+emancipate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in
+the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because
+in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of
+watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers;
+sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that
+we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political
+party, or a generation&mdash;but America did not forget. Each time we
+forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic
+means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time
+we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come
+back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years
+when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the
+redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing;
+and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that
+America could create the materials for a high standard of life,
+although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified
+supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society
+wealthy"; and we did <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>it so handsomely as to leave questionable his
+further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it
+can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than
+the capitalist system can."</p>
+
+<p>We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives
+comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and
+immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quantity system
+into action; and all of them required the same thing&mdash;equality of
+political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of
+education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free
+speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people,
+aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future,
+capable of earning and not afraid to spend&mdash;these are the customers
+required by mass production. And the same freedom, the same intention
+to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the
+future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its
+iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men
+from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that
+individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for
+Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in
+politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to
+our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their
+prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely
+a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest
+spenders.</p>
+
+<p>The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be
+understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it
+failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them
+move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our
+own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national
+well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen,
+our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our
+fulfilment <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements
+in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical
+life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts
+with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at
+least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out
+of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we
+breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER X<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>Popularity and Politics</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so
+significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and
+examined briefly by themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an
+average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie
+admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least
+once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses,
+juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses
+are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines
+are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families
+take their cars and go driving.</p>
+
+<p>These are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there
+are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady,
+attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most
+part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for
+information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication.</p>
+
+<p>Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had
+because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks
+did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are
+actually making their own fun. The same ignoble but useful desire for
+money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance
+halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves.
+Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore
+Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even
+withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Means of Communication</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The other elements I have mentioned, movies, radio and a new
+journalism, are the products of our immediate time. Although the
+moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular
+just before the first World War, and was promptly recognized as a
+prime instrument of propaganda by Lenin as he began to build the
+Socialist State in 1917; the moving picture may have been colossal
+then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of
+incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered.</p>
+
+<p>By that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established
+itself in its present commercial base. Radio was first conceived as an
+instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless
+telegraphy, when the Soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the
+heads of their governments&mdash;although this appeal still had to be
+printed, the radio receiver did not exist. When the necessary
+inventions were working (and the tinkering American forced the issue
+by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to
+serve the public. Among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the
+election results in the Harding-Cox campaign, crop reports, and music.
+The entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of
+1929 the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the
+business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to
+fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals
+of the community.</p>
+
+<p>By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in
+the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication
+had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture,
+devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old
+straight fiction magazine had offered.</p>
+
+<p>These three new means of mass communication are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>revolutionary
+inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of
+statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the
+first move of a <i>coup d'etat</i> is to take over the radio and the next
+is to divert the movies into propaganda.</p>
+
+<p>Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be
+understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Words and Pictures</i></p>
+
+<p>Of the fact and picture publications <i>Life</i> and <i>Look</i> are the best
+examples; <i>Time</i> and <i>News-Week</i> are fact and illustration magazines
+which is basically different, although their success is also
+important. The appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be
+adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; <i>Time</i>
+and the <i>Readers' Digest</i> become the great magazine phenomena of our
+time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of
+their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing
+themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their
+faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public
+services.</p>
+
+<p>The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its
+chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and
+image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development
+in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue
+the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and
+conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and
+newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of
+quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively
+small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting
+developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the
+book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the
+Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old
+methods and the artiness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>of book "shoppes" which always got in the
+way of good book-sellers.</p>
+
+<p>The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is
+especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The
+art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and
+isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the
+visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have
+been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by
+the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in
+process of being formed.</p>
+
+<p>Until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for
+this new language is great. For neither the movies nor radio can be
+used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the
+listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation.
+Radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with
+the right materials; but when President Roosevelt asked his audience
+to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of
+the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could
+not do. The movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered
+none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the
+immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to
+the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving
+picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be
+over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group
+presence. By this the movies also gain when they use the right
+materials.</p>
+
+<p>The use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the
+tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a
+mobile reserve of propaganda. When the radio and the movies have
+established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final
+battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is
+carried to the ward <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>meeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore
+soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory&mdash;where the action is
+determined by men and women in private discussion.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Universal Languages</i></p>
+
+<p>Radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies,
+which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great mass
+inventions of America. The patents may have been taken out elsewhere,
+but it was in America that these two forms of mass communication were
+instantly placed at the service of all people. The errors of judgment
+have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies
+were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of
+the hands of the bureaucrat. For a generation we deplored the
+vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and
+discovered that the only other effective movies were made by
+dictators, to falsify history, as the Russians did when the miserable
+Trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every
+film made by Hitler. For a generation we wept over the commercialism
+of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an
+audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was
+the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under
+compulsion.</p>
+
+<p>The intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. Some
+great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by British radio
+(which is government owned, but not government operated); some
+exceptional and important films were made for the few. But the
+dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea&mdash;movies and the
+radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to
+soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking
+of <i>all</i> the people. This universality lies in the nature of the
+instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited
+reception of the broadcasts; and only Hitler and Stalin and the
+sponsors have been happy to understand this.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>Like all those who are habituated to the movies, I have suffered much
+from Hollywood, my pain being all the greater because I am so devoted;
+like all those who work in radio, I am acutely conscious of its
+faults; but the faults and the banalities are not in question now. Now
+we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our
+purposes. We have to discover what the ignoramus in Hollywood and the
+businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for.</p>
+
+<p>The one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. We have to
+learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never
+could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and
+why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation;
+and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to
+accomplish an end. Moreover, we have to study the field so that we
+know when <i>not</i> to use these instruments, what we must not take from
+them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal.</p>
+
+<p>A coordinated use of <i>all</i> the means of persuasion is required; to let
+the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the
+movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste
+time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or
+most effectively on the air. There are many things to be done; we need
+excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come
+haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and
+history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other.
+If we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one
+ill-timed, but brilliantly made, documentary on production rendered
+futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one
+ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. When the
+means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we
+have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have
+to use all of them together.</p>
+
+<p>The movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem
+to rise on the international horizon of the 1920's, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>to have no link
+with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world.
+With these, it is true, we return to the universals of human
+expression and communication. But what we have done with them is
+unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based
+on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. That is
+why I have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have
+enormous inertia, the slightest error may accumulate tremendous
+consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most
+complete protection against disaster at home.</p>
+
+<p>We have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been
+completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have
+to remind the American people of other tools and instruments they have
+neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a passion with us to invent
+the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use
+against us.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XI<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>The Tools of Democracy</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The tools of democracy are certain civil actions, certain inventions,
+certain habits. They can be used against us&mdash;but only if we fail to
+use them ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest tools are civil liberties which we have been considering
+as "rights" or "privileges". The right to free speech is a great one;
+free speech probably was originally intended to protect property; it
+preserves liberty; the rights of assembly, of protest for redress, of
+a free press all have this double value, that they guarantee the
+integrity of the private man and protect the State.</p>
+
+<p>The great debate on the war brought back some long forgotten
+phenomena: broadsides, street meetings, marches, and brawls. Before
+they began, virtually <i>all</i> the civil rights were being used either by
+newcomers to America or by enemies of the American system. The poor
+had no access to the radio; they used a soap box instead and genteel
+people shrank away; the Bundist and the American Communist assembled
+and protested and published and spoke; the believers in America waited
+for an election to roll around again, and then did nothing about it.
+The enemies of the people sent a hundred thousand telegrams to
+Congressmen, signing the names of dead men to kill the regulation of
+utilities, but the believer in the democratic process didn't remember
+the name of his Congressman. Bewildered aliens got their second papers
+and were inducted into political clubs; the old line Americans never
+found out how the primaries worked.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Public Addresses</i></p>
+
+<p>A dangerous condition rose. No families from Beacon Street spoke in
+Boston Common; therefore, whoever spoke on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>the Common was an enemy of
+Beacon Street; all over America the well-born (and the well-heeled)
+retired from direct communication with the people, and all over
+America the privilege of talking to the citizens fell into the hands
+of radicals, lunatics, and dangerous enemies of the Republic&mdash;so that
+in time the very fact that one tried to exercise the right of free
+speech became suspect; and Beacon Street and Park Avenue could think
+of no way to protect themselves from Boston Common and Union
+Square&mdash;except to abolish free speech entirely. They did not dare to
+say it, but the remarkable Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City, said it
+for them: "Whenever I hear anyone talk about civil liberties, I know
+he's not a good American".</p>
+
+<p>The dreadful humiliation was that it came so close to the truth. The
+Red and the Bundist, clamoring or conspiring against America, were
+almost the only ones doing what all Americans had the right to do. We
+hated cranks, we did not want to be so conspicuous, we hadn't the
+time, the police would attend to it, if they didn't like it here let
+them go back ... we allowed our most precious rights to atrophy. When
+suddenly they were remembered, as they were by the bonus marchers of
+1932, we yelled revolution and the President of the United States
+called out the troops to shoot down the defenders of our country. It
+was the first time that a petition for redress had been offered by
+good citizens, by veterans, by men of notable American stock&mdash;and it
+frightened us because they were doing what "only foreigners" or
+"dangerous agitators" used to do; they were in fact being Americans in
+action.</p>
+
+<p>What is not used, dies. The habit of protecting our freedom was dying
+in the United States. There was no conspiracy of power against us;
+there was no need. We were carrying experimental democracy forward so
+far on several planes&mdash;the material and social planes particularly&mdash;that
+we let it go by default on the vital plane of practical politics. We
+did not go into politics, we did not electioneer, we did not threaten
+ward <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>bosses or county chairmen, we did not form third parties, we did
+nothing except vote, if it was a fair day (but not too fair if we meant
+to play golf). As for private action to defend our liberties, it was
+unnecessary and vulgar and bothersome.</p>
+
+<p>The depression scared us, but not into free speech; by that time free
+speech was Red; and the deeper we floundered in the mire of defeatism,
+the more intimidated we were by shouting Congressmen and
+super-patriots; it was only after the New Deal pulled us out of our
+tailspin that we saw the light: we too could have been obscure men
+speaking at street corners, we did not have to give all the soap boxes
+to men like Sacco and Vanzetti; we too could have published pamphlets
+like the dreadful Communists, and held meetings and badgered our
+Congressmen. Suddenly the people were reincorporated into their
+government; suddenly the people began to be concerned with government;
+and the tremendous revitalization of political anger was one of the
+best symptoms of democratic recovery in our generation.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Return to Politics</i></p>
+
+<p>The merciless pressure of taxation and then the grip of war have
+pushed us forward and in a generation we will be again as politically
+aware as our great-grandfathers were when they had one newspaper a
+week, and only their determination to rule themselves as a principle
+of action. Perhaps we shall take the trouble they took; they travelled
+a day's journey to hear a debate and discussed it for a fortnight;
+they thought about politics and studied the meaning of events. And
+they quite naturally did their duties as citizens; they dug their
+neighbors out of snow-blocked roads, they nominated their candidates,
+they watched and rebuked their representatives. It was not a political
+Utopia, but it was a more intelligent use of political power than ours
+has been. The usual excuse for the breakdown of political action in
+America is that so many "foreigners" came, to whom the politics of
+freedom were alien. This may have been true of some of the later
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>arrivals; but the Irish were captivated by, and presently captured,
+city politics wherever they settled; the Germans were the steadiest of
+citizens and so were the Scandinavians, their studious earnest belief
+in our institutions shaming our flippant disregard. The Southern
+Slavs, the Russian Jews and the Italians were farthest removed from
+our political habits; but their passion for America was great. It
+could have been worked into political action, and often was worked
+into political skulduggery by bosses of a more political bent. Many of
+these immigrants came after the exhaustion of free lands; many were
+plunged into slums and sweatshops and steel mills on a twelve hour
+day; and they emerged on the angry side, as disillusioned with America
+as some of its most ancient families.</p>
+
+<p>That political action dwindled after the great immigrations is true;
+but it was not the immigrant who refused to act; it was the old family
+and the typical American; the grafting politicians and the sidewalk
+radical both kept politics alive; the real Americans were slowly
+smothering politics. We shall never quite repay our debt to Tammany
+Hall and the Communists; between them political machines and saintly
+radicals managed to keep the instruments of democratic action from
+rusting. Now we have to take them back and learn how to use them
+again. Fortunately we have no choice. We neglected our rights because
+we wanted to sidestep our duties; today the war makes our duties
+inescapable and we are already beginning to use our rights. For in
+spite of censorship and regimentation, we will use more of our
+instruments of democracy than ever; we will because we are fighting
+for them and they have become valuable to us.</p>
+
+<p>The radio, the movies, and popular print are the three tools by which
+we can create democratic action. The action itself will be appropriate
+to our time and our conditions; we will not travel ten miles to hear a
+debate, so long as the radio lasts; but we will have to form units of
+self-protection in bombed cities; we may need other associations, to
+apportion <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>food, to house the homeless, to support the bereaved. We
+will have to learn how to live together, to share what was once as
+private as a motor car, to elect a village constable who may have our
+lives in his hands a dozen times a day. In the process we will be
+reverting to old and good democratic habits&mdash;in a city block in
+Atlanta or in a prairie village outside Emporia, or in a chic suburb
+along Lake Michigan. Something like the town-meeting is taking place
+in a thousand apartment houses where air-raid precautions and the
+disposal of waste paper are discussed and mothers who have to work
+trade time with wives who want to go to the movies; the farmers have,
+since 1932, been meeting; the suburbanites are discussing trains and
+creation of bus-routes. We are making the discovery that it is our
+country and we can decide its destiny. We are not to let others rule
+us; for in this emergency every man must rule himself; the man who
+neglects his political duty is as dangerous today as the man who
+leaves his lights on in a blackout.</p>
+
+<p>In the early months of the war our democratic processes were
+muscle-bound. We hadn't been doing things together; whenever we had
+organized, it was against some one else; we didn't fall naturally into
+a simple cooperative effort. And within two months we were breaking
+into hostile particles, until, in desperation, we discovered that men
+can work together. The obstructionist manufacturer and the stubborn
+labor leader could hold up an entire industry; but two men, one from
+each side, could set each factory going again. The creation of the
+labor-management committees of two was the first light in the darkness
+of our domestic policy.</p>
+
+<p>Still to come was the spontaneous outbreak of fervor and the cold
+organization for victory. We had forgotten the tools of democracy
+which we had to work together, as simply as men had to work on a
+snowbound country road together. In a small town of Ohio a pleasant
+event occurred which had a stir of promise; Dorothy Thompson's report
+was:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>"They got together in the old-fashioned American way: in the old opera
+house. They warmed and instilled enthusiasm and resolution into one
+another, by the mass of their presence, and by music, and prayer.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Sweet had put the F.F.A. (The Future Farmers of America and the
+older brothers of the Four-H clubs) to work, and they had made a
+survey of the existing resources of the community, in trucks, autos,
+combines, tractors. And he proposed to them that they use these
+resources, <i>as a community</i>, getting the greatest work out of them
+with the greatest conservation of them; organizing transportation to
+the factory where war production was going on, so that no auto
+travelled for its owner alone, but for as many workers as it could
+carry."</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Democratic Action</i></p>
+
+<p>There is a field of endeavor in war time where this sort of
+spontaneous, amateur organization is best; and our Government will be
+wise if it prevents the inexpert from building bombers but lets them,
+as far as possible, get children to and from school by local effort.
+We want to feel that we are being used, that our powers are working
+for the common good. So far we have been irritated by sudden demands,
+and frightened by long indifference to our offers&mdash;until an angry man
+has done something, as Mr. Fred Sweet did in Mt. Gilead. A government
+determined to win this war will create the opportunities for
+democratic action without waiting for angry men. The combination of
+maximum control (the single head of production) and maximum dispersion
+(two men in each factory solving the local problem) is exactly what we
+understand; to translate civilian emotion into terms of maximum use is
+the next step.</p>
+
+<p>Already this is happening to us: on one side we are grouping ourselves
+into smaller units; on the other we are discovering that we are parts
+of the whole nation. It is a tremendous release of energies for us; we
+are discovering what <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>we had hoped&mdash;that America is of indescribable
+significance to us and that we for the first time signify in
+America&mdash;we, not bosses or financiers or critics or cliques or groups
+or movements&mdash;but we ourselves. Something almost dead stirs again and
+we know that we shall be able to work with our fellowmen, and work
+with our Government, and watch those we chose to speak for us, and
+challenge corruption, and see to it that we, who are the people, are
+not betrayed. We may not revive the <i>forms</i> of democracy as they
+existed in Lincoln's time, but we will never again let the <i>spirit</i> of
+his democracy come so near to being beyond all revival.</p>
+
+<p>We will use the weapons we have and invent new ones; and we had better
+be prompt. Because we have a victory to win with these weapons and a
+world to make. We have to work Democracy because we have to create a
+world in which democracy can live. There is no time to lose.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>Democratic Control</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The shape of this war was created in dark back rooms of cheap saloons,
+in a lodging house in Geneva, in several prison cells, in small half
+secret meetings, up back flights of stairs, behind drawn shades, in
+boarding houses over the dining table, in the lobbies of movie-houses,
+at lectures attended by the idle and the curious and the hopeless, in
+the kitchen of a New York restaurant where waiters talked more about
+the future than about tips; it was molded also in British pubs and by
+the sullen lives of dole-gatherers; it took a definable shape and
+could have been re-formed but was not, so that its shape today is the
+result of the pressure of those who willed to act and the missing
+pressure of groups which failed to meet and talk and plan.</p>
+
+<p>The earth-shaking events of our time may have been created by the
+great and mysterious forces of history, but their exact form was fixed
+by obscure people: the Russian Revolution by Lenin and Trotsky,
+students, impractical men, and the homeless Stalin; and the war by
+Hitler, the house painter, the despised little man, the corporal who
+couldn't get over his military dreams. These were the leaders, the
+conspicuous ones. They planned&mdash;and wrote&mdash;and gathered a few even
+more obscure followers, and talked and lived in utter darkness until
+the time came for them to fight.</p>
+
+<p>For a thousand years the destiny of mankind will be shaped by what
+these men did in countries barely emerging into freedom&mdash;and we to
+whom the gods have given all freedom, sit by and hesitate even to talk
+about the future, folding our hands and piously saying that in any
+case it will be decided for us. That is the result of forgetting our
+democratic rights <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>and duties; with them we have forgotten that the
+future is ours to make.</p>
+
+<p>It will not be made for us; it will not be made in our favor unless we
+make it for ourselves; the weapons with which we fight the war will be
+strong and terrible when we come to create the peace. And we will
+create it either by using the weapons or by dropping them and running
+away from our triumph, which is also our responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>We will not escape the responsibility by saying that we cannot control
+"the great forces", the "wave" of events. We can do what Hitler and
+Lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can
+work and wait and work again. We must not say that we are helpless in
+the face of international intrigue. We&mdash;not Churchill and
+Roosevelt&mdash;wrote the Atlantic Charter, and we can un-write it and
+write it over again; we the people, not Henry Cabot Lodge, crushed the
+League of Nations by our indifference; we, not Congressmen bribed by
+scrap-iron dealers, armed Japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let
+Hitler go ahead by our ignorance. We have done all these things
+without working; and the only thing we have not tried, is to put out
+our hands and take hold of our destiny. In the first dreadful crisis
+of our war, we saw China begin to plan the world after the war,
+preparing a democratic center of 800 million people in Asia, putting
+pressure on Britain to proclaim liberty for India, taking hold of the
+future with faith and confidence&mdash;while we said not one open word to
+Asia, and had barely spoken to our nearest friends, the oppressed of
+Europe, to tell them that our purpose was liberty.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot let the shape of the future be molded by other hands. The
+price of living as we want to live is more than sweat and blood and
+tears: we have to make the grim effort of thinking and take the risk
+of making decisions. A painful truth comes home to us: we are no
+longer the spoiled children of Destiny&mdash;our destiny is our action.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Record of Isolation</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For more than a hundred years the people of the United States did not
+have to act and avoided the consequences of Democracy in international
+affairs. Officially we had nothing to do with Europe, except on
+special occasions when we snapped at Britain, frightened the Barbary
+pirates, helped Napoleon I, drove Napoleon III out of Mexico. We had
+no continuing policy and the details of foreign affairs were not
+submitted to the voter. This was natural enough; the eyes of America
+turned away from the Atlantic seaboard toward the Mississippi Valley;
+turned back from the Pacific to Chicago and the east; turned again to
+Detroit and Birmingham and Kansas City.</p>
+
+<p>We have not yet got the habit of thinking steadily about other
+nations. Our post-war suspicion of the League, our terror of the USSR,
+our pious agreements with England and Japan, our weak dislike of
+Mussolini and Hitler, still left us unconcerned with <i>policy</i>. We
+remained in the diplomatic era of William Jennings Bryan while Europe
+marched back into the era of Metternich or Talleyrand.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the voters have, since 1893, determined some aspects of our
+foreign policy. They did not vote on a loan to China, but they did
+keep in power the party that made war in Spain, bought the
+Philippines, protected Cuba, and policed Central America. This
+tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the
+Republican Party had always a better one, which was prosperity. In the
+early twentieth century, the American voter only accepted, he did not
+directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook.</p>
+
+<p>Our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is
+another&mdash;the tradition of democratic control. It has not begun to
+operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to
+clear our minds of some romantic illusions.</p>
+
+<p>Our future lies balanced between Europe and Asia; the disagreeable
+certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>cannot escape
+the world. We still think of participation in world affairs negatively
+as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as
+a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined
+from our shores. The prospect is disagreeable because we, the people,
+have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over
+diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. We have begun to
+send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we
+trust our ambassadors&mdash;because the journalists have begun to
+democratize diplomacy. They have told us more, they have often
+represented us more completely, and represented international business
+less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by
+the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart European
+capitals. The correspondents have taken the characteristic American
+democratic way of altering an ancient European institution, by
+shrewdly publicised disrespect. Whenever we have had a strong
+Secretary of State, something further has been done; but the permanent
+officials of our State Department have completely accepted the
+European style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and
+ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic sheets, that
+all the brash independence of America has been hushed; our leading
+career diplomats have never been Americanized by the middle west; they
+came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they
+represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented
+the East, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent
+America.</p>
+
+<p>On occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into
+the State Department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained
+professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for the
+<i>gaffes</i> and <i>gaucheries</i> of American diplomacy. These awkward
+Americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the
+chancelleries of Europe; but they were not falling into the hands of
+the European diplomats.</p>
+
+<p>Neither the fumbles of our occasional ignorant envoys nor <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>the correct
+discretion of the career men gave us any habit of thinking about other
+countries. On the west coast there is a tradition of wariness about
+the Orient&mdash;but it rises from immigration, not international
+relations. We have no habit of hatred as the French had for Germany,
+no cultivated friendships except for the occasional visit of a prince.
+We are not susceptible to European flattery if we live beyond the
+Atlantic seaboard&mdash;or below the $50,000 income level; for crowds, a
+Hollywood star is at least as magnetic as a Balkan Queen; and it is
+not conceivable that we should ever treat the coming of a Russian
+ballet as a part of a political campaign, as the French, quite
+correctly, did in 1913.</p>
+
+<p>We are now paying for our quiet unfortified borders, for the broad
+seas so suddenly narrowed. We have to learn about foreign affairs,
+about our own Empire (we hardly know that we have one). And this is
+the hardest thing of all: that while we move in ignorance, <i>we have to
+re-work all the basic concepts of international affairs</i>, or they will
+destroy us. We will have some support in the people of Great Britain,
+in the governments of Scandinavia, and in the diplomatic habits of the
+USSR; but for the most part we must make our way alone.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Debunking Protocol</i></p>
+
+<p>Again, as in the case of military strategy, the average man must study
+the subject to protect himself. He can no longer risk his life, and
+the fortunes of his family, in the hands of a few career men in the
+State Department, working secretly, studying protocol, forgetting the
+people of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>The amateur statesman is as laughable as the amateur strategist, but
+the laugh is not always going to be on us. We will popularize
+diplomacy or it will destroy us. We have first of all to destroy the
+myth of "high politics". We have to examine Macchiavelli and
+Talleyrand and Bismarck and Disraeli with as much realism as we
+examine Benedict Arnold and James J. Hill and Edison and Kruger. We
+need <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>journalist-debunkers to do the work, a parallel, by the way, to
+the process of simplifying military discussion, which is being done by
+newspaper and radio experts. We have to learn that the great tricks,
+the great arrangements of power, have been as shady as horse-trades,
+as ruthless as robbery, and often as magnificent as building a
+railroad&mdash;but in all cases they have represented the desires of
+certain groups, powerful enough at any given time to impose their
+wishes on the people. War, business, patriotism, medicine, sociology,
+religion, and sex have all been re-examined and debunked in the past
+two generations; but diplomacy which can destroy our satisfaction in
+all of them, still parades as the perfect stuffed shirt, with a red
+ribbon across it. At the moment no one can say whether Hitler has
+blasted the Foreign Office and our State Department; if he has, it is
+an achievement equal to taking Crete; and we ought to thank him for
+it.</p>
+
+<p>We should learn that diplomacy has swapped national honor, and
+betrayed it, and used it cynically for the advantage of a few&mdash;as well
+as protected it. We should examine the assertion of "national destiny"
+before the era of democracy, to see whether the private wealth of a
+prince and the starvation of a people actually are predestined,
+whether the mine-owners of France could have allowed German democracy
+to live, whether Locarno satisfied national honor less than Munich.</p>
+
+<p>And, above all, we should know that this great "game" of European
+statesmanship, going on from the Renaissance to our own time, is a
+colossal and tragic failure. At times it has brought incalculable
+wealth to a thousand English families, to a few hundred Frenchmen, and
+power to some others. But it has always ended in the desolation of
+war&mdash;and the suspicion holds that to make war advantageously has been
+the aim of statesmanship, not to avoid it with honor.</p>
+
+<p>We have to rid ourselves of the intolerable flummery of the diplomats
+because in the future foreign affairs are going to be connected by a
+thousand wires to our domestic problems, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>and we propose to see who
+pulls the wires. The old tradition of betraying a President at home
+while supporting any stupidity abroad will have to be scrapped; and we
+will be a more formidable nation, in external affairs, if we conduct
+those affairs in our way, not in the way of our enemies.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>A "Various" Diplomacy</i></p>
+
+<p>It will not be enough to destroy the myth of high diplomacy and reduce
+it to its basic combinations of chicanery and power-pressure, its
+motives of pride and honor and greed. We have to take the positive
+step of creating a new diplomacy, based on the needs of America, and
+those needs have to be consciously understood by the American people.
+Out of that, we may create a layman's foreign policy executed by
+professional diplomats; just as we are on the way to create a layman's
+labor policy, executed by professional statisticians, mediators and
+agents. We have to recognize diplomacy as a polite war; and, as
+suggested in connection with actual war, we must not fight in the
+style or strategy of our enemies. We have always imitated in routine
+statesmanship; and only in the past twenty years have we begun an
+American style of diplomacy. The "strategy of variety" may serve us
+here as on the battlefield; it may not. But the strategy of European
+diplomacy is their weapon, and their strength; we are always defeated
+when we attempt it, as Wilson was, as Stimson was over Manchuria. Our
+only successes have been when we sidestepped diplomacy entirely and
+talked to people.</p>
+
+<p>The first step toward creating our own, democratic, diplomacy will be
+to convince the American people that they will not escape the
+consequences of this war. Many of us believe that we actually escaped
+the consequences of the first World War by rejecting the League of
+Nations; a process of re-education is indicated, for background. This
+education can begin with the future and move backward&mdash;for our
+relation to post-war Europe can be diagrammed almost as accurately as
+a fever chart. We withdrew from the League for peace <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>and found
+ourselves in an alliance for war. It can hardly be called a successful
+retreat. Actually we were in Europe, up to our financial necks, from
+the moment the war ended to the day when the collapse of an Austrian
+bank sent us spiralling to destruction in 1929; we stayed in it,
+trying to recover the benefits of the Davis and Young plans by the
+Hoover moratorium. We did everything with Europe except recognize its
+first weak effort to federalize itself on our model.</p>
+
+<p>Decisive our part in this war will be, but if we withdraw as we did
+the last time, leaving the nations of Europe to work out their own
+destiny, we will, as a practical matter, destroy ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>The only other certainty we have is that the prosperity of the United
+States is better served by peace in the world than by war. This is
+true of all nations; the only difference for us is that the
+dislocation may be a trace more severe, and that we have no tradition
+of huge territorial repayments, or indemnities, by which a nation may
+recoup the losses of war, while its people starve.</p>
+
+<p>Given that basis, we can observe Europe and Asia after the present
+war.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Phases of the Future</i></p>
+
+<p>We ought at once to make a calendar. This war will probably not follow
+the tradition of the last one; it may not gratify us with an exact
+moment for an armistice; we may defeat our enemies piecemeal and miss
+the headlines and tickertape and international broadcasts and cities
+alight again and all the gaiety and solemn emotion of an end to war.
+This war breaks patterns and sets new ones, so the first date on our
+calendar is a doubtful one; but let us say that by a certain day we
+will have smashed Germany and Japan; Italy would have betrayed them
+long before.</p>
+
+<p>Our next step is the "peace conference" stage. Again this war may
+disappoint us; we may have a long armistice and a reorganization of
+the world's powers, without Versailles and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>premiers in secret
+conferences; perhaps by that time the peoples of Europe and America
+will have captured their diplomats. Still, let us say that an interim
+between armistice and world-order will occur.</p>
+
+<p>The phases of the future grow longer as we progress. We will celebrate
+the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year,
+because in that time we are going to create the organization which
+will bring us peace for a century&mdash;or for ever. This middle period is
+the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day
+after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin
+thinking of the future of the world&mdash;and at the same time think about
+demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get
+tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down
+capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next
+election&mdash;by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate
+crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into
+the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world&mdash;for which
+there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old
+one.</p>
+
+<p>We can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of
+world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal
+nations, we will bring on an event in Europe beside which the rise of
+Hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act
+of destruction which Hitler began. And whatever comes out of it,
+fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years
+later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing
+the start of another European war, which will spread more rapidly to
+Asia and ourselves. Those of us who went through the first World War,
+and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire,
+may be resigned to a third act in the 1960's; but the men who fight
+this war may be as revolutionary in England and America as they turned
+out to be last time in Russia or in Germany. They may want assurance,
+the day after the war ends, that we have been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>thinking about them and
+the future of the world. They will give us the choice between world
+organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions
+will help us. We will have to choose and to act; fascism may be
+destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized
+world will not lack leaders; we can have modified Communism or
+super-fascism, all beautifully Americanized, if we have nothing
+better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. And by the
+time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad
+will mean starvation and plague and repression and death.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Seven New Worlds</i></p>
+
+<p>Forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of
+different alternatives to revolution and chaos. Some of these are
+based on political necessity or the desire to punish the Axis; some
+correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more
+inclusive. They can be summarized so:</p>
+
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 5%">Re-isolating America;<br />
+Collaboration with Fascism;<br />
+Collaboration with Communism;<br />
+Anglo-American domination;<br />
+American imperialism;<br />
+Revival of the League of Nations;<br />
+A federal organization of the world.</p>
+
+<p>To some people in the United States, none of these seems possible, all
+of them disastrous. If the confusion of propaganda continues, these
+people will fall back on the principle of isolation; it is a fatal
+backward step, but it is better than any of the seemingly fatal
+forward steps; it is in keeping with part of our tradition; and if
+Europe as always, with Asia now added, goes forward to another war,
+the centre and core of America will say "we want out", and mean it.
+But isolating America cannot be an immediate post-war policy; if we
+plan <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>to withdraw, we virtually hand over the world to revolution and
+hand ourselves into moral and financial bankruptcy. Isolation can only
+be a constant threat to the world, that we will withdraw unless some
+of our basic terms are met. We have to know our terms, or our threat
+is meaningless.</p>
+
+<p>There is much to be said for isolation, or autarchy; I pass it over
+quickly because I am not attempting to criticise each sketch of the
+post-war world; only to note certain aspects of them all&mdash;notably
+their relation to the America which I have described in earlier pages.
+The next two programs are also easy to assay: they are at the opposite
+extreme; they rise from no part of our basic tradition, and
+collaboration with either fascism or communism would have to come
+either by revolution after defeat or by long skillful propaganda which
+would disguise the fact and make us think that we were converting the
+world to our democracy.</p>
+
+<p>It is, nevertheless, childish to assume that the thing can't happen.
+Given a good unscrupulous American dictator we could have made peace
+with the Nazis, and the Japanese, by squeezing Britain out of the
+Atlantic and Russia out of the Pacific; our gain would have been the
+whole Western Hemisphere; this would have gratified both the
+isolationists and the imperialists; it would have preserved peace and
+the Monroe Doctrine; the only disqualification is that it would
+destroy freedom throughout the world&mdash;which is the purpose of fascism.
+This was possible; it may become possible again. Unless Britain shows
+more intellectual strength in the final phases of the war than she did
+in the earlier ones, the chance to scuttle her will appeal to any
+anti-European American dictator; liquidate Hitler, make peace with the
+anti-Hitlerian Nazis, especially the generals, send our appeasers as
+ambassadors, and in five years we can re-invigorate a defeated Germany
+and start world-fascism going again.</p>
+
+<p>The alternative is not so remote. It is a distinct and immediate
+possibility.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Red America</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A Socialist England after the war is promised, in effect, by everyone
+except the rulers of the British Empire. Add a free China indebted to
+Communist armies; add Russia victoriously on the side of democracy;
+Red successor states will rise in Italy, Germany and the Balkans; and
+our destiny would be the fourth or fifth international.</p>
+
+<p>If we say these things are fanciful, we convict ourselves of inability
+to break out of our own mythology. Either collaboration is as likely as
+complete isolation; neither would shock us if a good American led us
+into it. Sir Stafford Cripps is certain that the USSR and the USA fight
+for the same ideals; and collaboration with Hitler's enemies is our
+standing policy today. So that a "revolution" in Germany would
+automatically lead us into friendly relations with the revolutionaries;
+they will be either fascist or communist, quite possibly they will be
+Hitler's best friends. Actually we may approach either a fascist or a
+Communist world order by easy steps, our little hand held by proud
+propagandists guiding us on our way.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Parva Carta</i></p>
+
+<p>The dominant American relation to Europe, now, is expressed in the
+Atlantic Charter which is not an alliance, not a step toward union,
+but a statement of principles. However, the Charter has been used as a
+springboard and been taken as an omen; so it must be examined and its
+true bearings discovered. It has, for us, two essential points:</p>
+
+<p>One of these is the Anglo-American policing of the world; it is a curt
+reminder that this war is not waged to end war; that future wars are
+being taken for granted and preparations to win them will be made. The
+Charter was, however, a pre-war instrument for us. Presently the
+necessities of war may force us to go further and declare our
+intention to prevent war entirely.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>The specific economic point in the Atlantic Charter promises "all
+States, great and small, victor and vanquished ... access, on equal
+terms, to the trade and the raw materials of the world which are
+needed for their economic prosperity."</p>
+
+<p>This is a mixture of oil and the mercantile philosophy of a hundred
+years ago. It has a moral value; it knocks on the head all theories of
+"rights" in colonies; a nation subscribing to the Atlantic Charter and
+attempting to isolate a source of bauxite or pitchblende, will have to
+be hypocritical as well as powerful. "Access to", even on equal terms,
+does not however imply "power to take and use". Lapland may have
+access to Montana copper, unhindered by our law; and copper may be
+deemed vital to Lapland's prosperity (by a commission of experts); but
+Lapland will not get our copper unless we choose to let her have it.</p>
+
+<p>In effect, the maritime nations, England and America, have said that
+if they can get to a port in the Dutch East Indies, they propose to
+trade there, for oil or ivory or sea shells; and they have also said,
+proudly, that Germany can trade there also, after Germany becomes
+de-nazified.</p>
+
+<p>No realistic attempt to face the necessity of organized production and
+distribution is even implied in this point. Instead, President
+Roosevelt was able virtually to write into an international document a
+statement of his ideals; as Woodrow Wilson wrote his League of Nations
+into the Fourteen Points.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Roosevelt's freedoms are specific; people (not "nations") are to be
+free from want, from fear, from oppression. Freedom from want is the
+actual new thing in the world; want&mdash;need&mdash;hard times&mdash;poverty&mdash;from
+the beginning of European history these have been the accepted order,
+the lot of man, the inescapable fate to which he was doomed by being
+born.</p>
+
+<p>The Charter rose out of our history and out of England's need. Let me
+outline again the connection with our history. In 1776, the
+Declaration of Independence showed a way out <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>of the poverty-labyrinth
+in the destiny of man; the Declaration declared for prosperity (then
+synonymous with free land) and offered it to all (citizenship and
+equal rights to the immigrant, the chance to share in this new belief
+in prosperity by becoming American). In a century and a half Europe
+has scoffed and sneered at this (relatively successful) attempt to
+break through economic damnation&mdash;and at the end, as Europe rocks over
+the edge of destruction, an American offers this still new and
+imperfect thing as a foundation stone of peace in the world: freedom
+from want. It has not yet been completely achieved in America; but we
+know it can be achieved; we have gone far enough on our way to say
+that it can be achieved in the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>The American standard is far above freedom from want. It is based, in
+fact, on wanting too many things and getting a fair percentage of
+them. But President Roosevelt's point does not involve "leveling"; it
+is not an equal standard of living all over the world (which is the
+implied necessity of international Communism). The negative freedom
+from want is not freedom from wanting; it is explicit, as the words
+are used: it means that men shall have food and shelter and clothes;
+and medicine against plague; and an opportunity to learn and some
+leisure to enjoy life; in accordance with the standards of their
+people.</p>
+
+<p>This is a great deal. It was not too much for the Soviet Republics to
+promise, and to begin to bring, to Kalmucks and Tartars and Georgians;
+it is more than we have brought to our own disinherited in the South,
+in mining towns, in the fruitful valleys of California. Our partial
+failure is a disgrace, but not a disaster; our success, though
+incomplete, is important. For we have carried forward in the light of
+the other great freedom which Communism has had to sacrifice, which is
+freedom from fear. All the specific freedoms&mdash;to think, to utter, to
+believe, to act, are encompassed in this freedom from fear. Our basic
+disagreement with Communism is the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>same as our attack on
+nazi-fascism&mdash;both are based on illegitimate power (not power
+delegated or given, not power with the consent of the governed): hence
+both live on domination; on their capacity to instil fear. The war
+will prove how far this fear penetrated in Russia and in Germany, and
+how much longer it will be the instrument of coercion in either
+country.</p>
+
+<p>The President's freedoms are a wide promise to the people of the
+world&mdash;a promise made, like Woodrow Wilson's promises, before entering
+any agreement with any foreign power. Into the Atlantic Charter, Mr.
+Roosevelt also injected his basic domestic policies and, by some
+astute horsetrading managed to make them <i>theoretically</i> the basis for
+international agreement. This point promises improved labor standards,
+economic adjustment, and social security throughout the world.</p>
+
+<p>Improvement, adjustment, security&mdash;they are not absolutes; freedom
+from want is, in effect, security; any reasonable adjustment between
+owners and workers will be an improvement in most countries. But the
+principle behind the labor point is as clear as the inspiration of the
+points on raw materials and freedom: it is that wars are caused by the
+miseries of peoples; when the people rule, they will prevent wars
+unless their miseries are acute; if they are not in dire want, if they
+have a chance to work, if they are free of coercion and threat, they
+will not make war&mdash;nor will they fall under the hand of the tyrant and
+the demagogue.</p>
+
+<p>In plain practical statesmanship, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill
+apologized for Versailles, which denied Germany access to raw
+materials and prevented improvement in labor standards and drove
+millions of Europeans into want and fear; and at the same time they
+acknowledged the connection between high diplomacy and the food and
+shelter and comforts of the citizen. The eight points reiterate some
+of the fourteen; they withdraw from others; but the new thing is all
+American, it is the injection of the rights of the common man into an
+international document.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>But there the Atlantic Charter ends. As an instrument of propaganda
+and as a basis of making war and peace, it was outlawed by events; it
+is forgotten.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>What Is Lacking</i></p>
+
+<p>The Charter could not carry its own logic beyond a first step: since
+we were not allied to Britain we could not discuss a World system&mdash;all
+we could say was that aggressors would be disarmed (by ourselves and
+Great Britain, neither gaining a military or naval predominance) and
+later we also might disarm&mdash;when the world seemed safe. This was on
+the power side; on the economic side, our role was gratifyingly vague.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the Atlantic mists a few certainties rose, like icebergs. We
+soon saw:</p>
+
+<div class="block3"><p class="hang">1. That Britain has no method of organizing Europe; its
+tradition is isolation plus alliances.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">2. That Britain has no system of production parallel to the
+slave system of Germany, by which Europe would restore the
+ravages of war.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">3. That Britain cannot impose its relatively democratic habits
+and relatively high level of comfort on the Continent.</p></div>
+
+<p>In effect, after an uprush of enthusiasm following the defeat of
+Hitler, the democratic countries will face with panic their tragic
+incapacity to do what the fascists have almost done&mdash;unify the nations
+of Europe.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Slow Union-Now</i></p>
+
+<p>It was not the function of the Charter to outline the new map of
+Europe. But the map is being worked over and the most effective of the
+workers are those led by Clarence K. Streit toward Union-now. Long
+before the Atlantic Charter was issued, Federal Union had proposed
+free access to raw materials, even for Germans if they destroyed their
+Nazi leaders; and the entire publicity, remarkably organized, has a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>tone of authority which makes it profoundly significant. I do not know
+that it is a trial balloon of Downing Street or of the White House;
+but in America a Justice of the Supreme Court and a member of the
+Cabinet recommend the proposal to the "serious consideration" of the
+citizens and it has equally notable sponsors in England.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that union with the British Commonwealth of Nations stands
+in the way of America's actual function after the war; I see it as a
+sudden reversal of our historic direction, a shock we should not
+contemplate in war time; it does not correspond to the living
+actualities of our past or present. But I think we owe the Unionists a
+great deal; they have incited thought and even action; they serve as
+the Committee to Aid the Allies did before last December, to supply a
+rallying point for enthusiasts and enemies; we are doing far too
+little thinking about our international affairs, and Federal Union
+makes us think.</p>
+
+<p>It has two aims: the instant purpose of combining all our powers to
+win the war, using the fact of our union as an engine of propaganda in
+occupied and enemy countries; and second, "that this program be only
+the first step in the gradual, peaceful extension of ... federal union
+to all peoples willing and able to adhere to them, so that from this
+nucleus may grow eventually a universal world government of, by and
+for the people". (It sounds impractical, but so did the Communist
+Manifesto and Hitler's "ravings".)</p>
+
+<p>As to the immediate program, it would instantly revive the latent
+isolationism of tens of millions who used to insist that the Roosevelt
+policy would end in the sacrifice of our independence; we should have
+a unified control of production, but some 40% of our producers would
+lose all faith in our government. In the midst of winning the war, we
+should have to re-convince millions that we had not intentionally
+betrayed them.</p>
+
+<p>Military and productive unity can be independent of political <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>unity.
+Unified command was achieved in France in 1918 and in the Pacific in
+1942, without unions.</p>
+
+<p>As for effect abroad, propaganda could present a better case to
+Frenchmen who believe Britain let them down if complete Anglo-American
+union were not an accomplished fact; and the whole Continental and
+Russian and Asiatic suspicion of our motives might be allayed if we
+did not unite completely and permanently with "the people of Canada,
+the United Kingdom, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of
+South Africa" while we were not so fondly embracing the peoples of
+India, China, and the Netherlands East Indies. The abiding union of
+literate, superior, capitalist white men is not going to be taken as a
+first step to world equality by Slavs and Orientals; and much as the
+British Empire may wish not to acknowledge the fact, Communism has
+completely undermined the idea of white supremacy, and has given a new
+hope to Asia and Africa. It may have been a very bad thing to do, but
+we cannot stop for recriminations now. There are new soldiers for
+democracy in the world, and if they are fighting beside us, we cannot
+ignore them and fall into the arms of their traditional oppressors. We
+have a great work to do with the Chinese and the Indians, and all the
+other peoples who can stand against our enemy; we cannot begin to do
+it if our first move is accepting British overlordship in the East,
+uncritically, without pledges or promises.</p>
+
+<p>As a post-war program Federal Union is more persuasive. It begins with
+a Wilsonian peace offer&mdash;the influence is strong and supplies the deep
+emotional appeal of the organization. It guarantees free access to
+rubber and oil and gold; it accepts any nation whose people had
+certain minimal freedoms; it implies, of course, free trade&mdash;with new
+markets for our manufactured products, and no duties on British
+woolens; plans for the Union Congress "assure the American people a
+majority" at the start. (As between the United States and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>the British
+Commonwealth; as soon as "all peoples willing and able" to, enter, the
+200 million American and British Commonwealthers would be swamped by
+800 million Chinese and Indians and other Asiatics.)</p>
+
+<p>The average American pays a great tribute to the largeness of the
+concept of "Union-now"&mdash;he doesn't believe that anyone really means
+it. He thinks it is a fancy name for a war alliance, or possibly a new
+simplified League of Nations. The gross actuality of Iowa and
+Yorkshire ruled by one governing body, he cannot take in. And as the
+argument develops, this general scepticism is justified; for the
+American learns that while he may be ruled, he will not be over-ruled,
+and he wonders what Mr. Churchill and the man in the London street
+will say to that, or in what disguise this plan is being presented to
+the English or the Scots or the New Zealanders. So far no responsible
+British statesman has offered union to the United States, but Mr.
+Leslie Hore-Belisha has said that we need a declaration of
+inter-dependence and our Ambassador to the Court of St. James's told
+an international Society of writers that we need a sort of
+international citizenship. Mr. Wendell Willkie however has said that
+"American democracy must rule the world."</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Entry Into Europe</i></p>
+
+<p>By union or by alliance, American or Anglo-American rule over the
+world will have some strange consequences for us, citizens not
+accustomed to worry over "foreign affairs". Perhaps the strangest
+thing is that the results will be almost the same whether we are
+partners with Britain or alone in our mighty domination, with England
+as a satellite. An American or Anglo-American imperium can only be
+organized by force; it is, in effect, the old order of Europe, with
+America playing Britain's old star part, Britain reduced to the
+supporting role of France or Holland or Portugal. In any controversy,
+we step in, with our vast industrial power, our democratic tradition,
+our aloofness from Europe, just as England used to step <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>in with <i>her</i>
+power and traditions; the Atlantic is to us what the Channel or North
+Sea was to Britain. England's policy was to prevent the rise of any
+single Continental power, so she made an alliance with Prussia to
+fight France in 1814 and made an alliance with France to fight Prussia
+in 1914. In an Anglo-American alliance, England would be our European
+outpost, just as Prussia or France was England's Continental outpost.</p>
+
+<p>Our policy would still be the balance of power. Like England, we
+should be involved in every war, whether we take up arms or not&mdash;as
+she was involved in the Crimea and the Balkans, and South Africa and
+North Africa; we should have our Fashodas and our Algeciras and our
+Mafeking; our peace will be uneasy, our wars not our own.</p>
+
+<p>The Atlantic Charter suggests a "policing" of the world after the war;
+it holds off from anything further; it does not actually hint that a
+reorganization of power in the world is needed. Yet, at the same time,
+the creation of an oceanic bloc to combat the European land bloc is
+hinted. It is all rather like a German professor's dream of
+geo-politics; Russia becomes a Pacific power and Japan, by a miserable
+failure of geography, is virtually a Continental one, while the United
+States is reduced to two strips of ocean frontage, like a real estate
+development with no back lot, with no back country, with no background
+in the history of a Continent.</p>
+
+<p>The Sea-Powers unit is as treacherous as "the Atlantic group" or "the
+Democratic countries"; the intent is still to create a dominant power
+and give ourselves (and Britain) control of the raw materials and the
+trade of the world. No matter how naturally the group comes together,
+by tradition or self-interest, it becomes instantly the nucleus for an
+alliance; and as the alliance begins to form, nations we omit or
+reject begin to crystallize around some other centre, and we have the
+balance of power again, the race for markets and the race for
+armaments.</p>
+
+<p>This will be particularly true if we begin to play the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>diplomatic
+game with the stakes greater than those ever thrown&mdash;since we are the
+first two-ocean nation to enter world affairs. At the moment nothing
+seems more detestable than the policy of Japan; but diplomacy
+overcomes all detestation, and if we are going in for the game of
+dealing with nations instead of peoples, we can foresee ourselves
+years from now as the great balance between the Atlantic and the
+Pacific, between Japan and England, or Japan and Germany, perhaps the
+honest broker between the two sets of powers. In 1942 we are
+independent, fighting for freedom, helping all those who fight against
+tyranny; and we can do this because we have kept out of the groupings
+and combinations of the powers. But we are being pushed into a
+combination and we know now that there is only one way to avoid
+entanglement: we must prevent the combination from coming into
+existence.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Our Historic Decision</i></p>
+
+<p>In 1919 an attempt was made, by America, to put an end to all European
+combinations of power. That attempt was unanimously approved by the
+people of the United States, some of whom voted for the League while
+the others endorsed a Society of Nations, to which W.G. Harding
+promised our adhesion. The Society of Nations was never seriously
+proposed, and Harding betrayed the American people; at the same time
+it was monumentally clear that France, with England's help, had
+sabotaged the actual League by making it a facade for a punitive
+alliance. Between these two betrayals, the idea of world organization
+was mortally compromised.</p>
+
+<p>We may quarrel over the blame for the impotence of the League; did
+France invade the Ruhr because, without us in the League, she needed
+"protection"? or did we stay out of the League because we knew France
+would go into the Ruhr? That can be argued for ever. We know
+reasonably well why we kept out of the League; but no one troubles to
+remember how earnestly we wanted the League and prayed for it and
+wanted to enter, so that it remained always to trouble us as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>we tried
+to sleep through the destruction of Ethiopia or Spain or
+Czecho-Slovakia.</p>
+
+<p>The League was not a promise of security to the <i>people</i> of the United
+States. Our Government may have felt the need of a world order; we did
+not; the war had barely touched us, yet even those whom it had touched
+least were enthusiasts for a new federation of nations. It was neither
+fear nor any abstract love of peace. The League, or any other
+confederation of Europe, corresponded to our American need, which was
+to escape alliance with any single power or small group; to escape the
+danger of Europe united against us; and to escape the devil's
+temptation of imperialism&mdash;<i>because the people of the United States do
+not want to rule the world</i>. There is an instinct which tells us that
+those who rule are not independent; they are slaves to their slaves;
+it tells us that we are so constituted that we cannot rule over part
+of Europe or join with any part to rule the rest; it is our instinct
+of independence which forbids us in the end to destroy the liberty of
+any other nation.</p>
+
+<p>This goes back to the thought of union with the British nations. If we
+unite, and we are dominant, do we not accept the responsibility of
+domination? The appetite for empire is great and as the old world
+turned to us in 1941, as the War of the Worlds placed us in the centre
+of action, as more and more we came to make the decisions, as
+Australia, Russia, China, Britain called to us for help&mdash;the image of
+America ruling the world grew dazzling bright. It was our duty&mdash;our
+destiny; Mr. Henry Luce recognized the American century, seeing us
+accepted by the world which already accepts our motor cars, chewing
+gum and moving pictures. To shrink from ruling the world is abject
+cowardice. Did England shrink in 1914? Or France under Napoleon? Or
+Rome under Augustus? Or Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus?</p>
+
+<p>No. No despotism ever shrank from its "destiny" to destroy the freedom
+of other nations.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>But the history of America will still create our destiny&mdash;and our
+destiny is <i>not</i> to rule the world.</p>
+
+<p><i>Our destiny is to remain independent and the only way we can remain
+independent is by cooperation with all the other nations of the earth.
+That is the only way for us to escape exclusive alliances, the pull of
+grandiose imperial schemes, the danger of alliances against us, and a
+tragic drift into the European war system which can destroy us.</i> There
+is an area of action in which nationality plays no part: like labor
+statistics&mdash;and this area is steadily growing; there is another area
+jealously guarded, the area of honor and tariffs and taxes. We have to
+mark out the parts of our lives which we can offer up to international
+supervision and the parts we cannot. It will surprise us to see that
+we can become more independent if we collaborate more.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2">"<i>Far as Human Eye Can See</i>"</p>
+
+<p>I have no capacity to describe the world order after the war. If, as I
+have said, the war is fought by us in accordance with our national
+character, we will create a democratic relationship between the
+nations of the world; and our experience added to that of Britain and
+the USSR will tend toward a Federation of Commonwealths; the three
+great powers have arrived, by three separate experiences, at the idea
+of Federation; two of them are working out the problems of sovereign
+independent states within a union; the third, ourselves, worked the
+problem out long ago by expunging States Rights in theory and allowing
+a great deal in practise. As a result of our experience, we
+dogmatically assert that no Federation can be created without the
+ultimate extinction of independence; we may be right. But the thought
+persists that independence was wanted for the sake of liberty; that
+independence without security was the downfall of Czecho-Slovakia and
+France; and that we have cherished independence because the rest of
+the world did not cherish liberty as we did. Profoundly as I believe
+independence to be the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>key to American action, I can imagine the
+translation of the word into other terms; we are allied to Britain and
+the Netherlands and the Soviets today, we have accepted alien command
+of our troops and ships; we are supplying arms to the Soviets and
+building a naval base in Ecuador and have accepted an agreement by
+which Great Britain will have a word in the creation of the most
+cherished of our independent creations, the tariff. Independence, so
+absolute in origin, is like all absolutes, non-existent in fact; we
+know this in private life, for the man of "independent means" may
+depend on ten thousand people to pay him dividends; and only the mad
+are totally independent of human needs and duties.</p>
+
+<p>We will not willingly give up our right to elect a President; we may
+allow the President to appoint an American member to an international
+commission to allocate East Indies rubber; in return for which we will
+allocate our wheat or cotton or motors&mdash;on the advice of other
+nations, but without bowing our neck to their rule. We have always
+accepted specific international interference in our affairs&mdash;the
+Alabama claims and the Oregon boundary and the successive troubles in
+Venezuela prove that our "sovereign right" to do what we please was
+never exercised without some respect for the opinion of mankind&mdash;and
+the strength of the British navy. Indeed recent events indicate that
+for generations our independence of action, the reality of
+independence, rested on our faith in the British fleet.</p>
+
+<p>The moment we become realistic about our independence we will be able
+to collaborate effectively with other nations. We got a few lessons in
+realistic dealings in 1941&mdash;lend-lease and the trade for the naval
+bases were blunt, statesmanlike but most undiplomatic&mdash;moves to
+strengthen the British fleet, to extend our own area of safety, and to
+give us time against the threat of Japan. They protected our
+independence, but they also compromised it; the British by any
+concession to Japan might have weakened us; we took the risk, and our
+action was in effect an act of defensive war against Germany. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>Like
+Jefferson, buying Louisiana to protect us against any foreign power
+across the Mississippi, President Roosevelt acted under dire necessity
+and as Jefferson (not Roosevelt) put it, was not too deeply concerned
+with Constitutionality. The situation in 1941 required not only the
+bases but the continued functioning of the British fleet in the
+Atlantic; and we got what we needed.</p>
+
+<p>The economic agreement of 1942 is probably a greater invasion of our
+simon-pure independence of action; although it empowers a post-war
+President to decide how much of lend-lease was returned by valor in
+the field, it specifically binds us to alter our tariff if Britain can
+induce its Commonwealth of Nations to give up the system of "imperial
+preference". All our tariffs are horsetrades and the most-favored
+nation is a sweet device; but heretofore we have not bartered our
+tariffs in advance. Certainly a post-war economic union is in the
+wind; certainly we will accept it if it comes to us piecemeal, by
+agreements and joint-commissions and international resolutions which
+are not binding, but are accepted and become as routine as the law of
+copyright which once invaded our sacred national right to steal or the
+international postal union which gave us the right to send a letter to
+any country for five cents.</p>
+
+<p>When we think of the future our minds are clouded by memory of the
+League; we are psychologically getting ready to accept or reject the
+League all over again. We are worried over the form&mdash;will it be Geneva
+again or will headquarters be in Washington; will Germany have a vote;
+will we have to go to war if the Supreme Council tells us to. These
+are important if we are actually going to reconstitute the League; but
+if we are not, the only question is what we want the new world
+organization to do. In keeping with our political tradition we will
+pretend that we want it to do as little as possible and put upon it
+all the work we are too lazy to do ourselves; but even the minimum
+will be enough.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Our Standing Offer</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Everything points to an economic council representing the free nations
+of the world; the lease-lend principles in time of peace may be
+invoked, as Harold Laski has suggested, to provide food and raw
+materials for less favored nations; and the need for "economic
+sanctions" will not be lost on the nation which supplied Japan with
+scrap-iron and oil for five years of aggression against China and then
+was repaid at Pearl Harbor.</p>
+
+<p>If there is any wisdom&mdash;in the people or in their leaders&mdash;we will not
+have a formulated League to accept or reject; we will have a series of
+agreements (such as we have had for generations) covering more and
+more subjects, with more and more nations. We have drawn up treaties
+and agreements with twenty South American States, with forty-six
+nations united for liberty; we can draw up an agreement with Russia
+and Rumania and the Netherlands so that England and the Continent and
+China get oil; and another agreement may give us tungsten; we may have
+to take universal action to stop typhus&mdash;and no one will be an
+isolationist then. If the war ends by a series of uprisings we may be
+establishing temporary governments as part of our military strategy.
+Slowly the form of international cooperation will be seen; by that
+time it will be familiar to us&mdash;and we will see that we have not lost
+our independence, but have gained our liberty.</p>
+
+<p>We began the war with one weapon: liberty. If we fight the war well,
+we will begin the long peace with two: liberty and production. With
+them we will not need to rule the world; with them the world will be
+able to rule itself. All we have to do is to demonstrate the best use
+of the instruments&mdash;and to let others learn.</p>
+
+<p>Before our part in the war began, it was often suggested that America
+would feed and clothe Europe, send medicine and machinery to China,
+and make itself generally the post-war stockpile of Democracy as it
+had been the arsenal and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>treasury during the war; and the monotonous
+uncrushing answer was about "the money". Realities of war have blown
+"the money" question into atoms; no sensible person pretends that
+there is a real equation between our production and money value; we
+can't in any sense "afford" bombers and battleships; if we stopped to
+ask where "the money" would come from, and if the question were
+actually relevant, we would have to stop the war.</p>
+
+<p>Another actuality of war relieves us of the danger of being too
+generous&mdash;the actuality of rubber and tin and tungsten and all the
+other materials critical to production in peace time. Since we will
+have to rebuild our stocks of vital goods, our practical men will see
+to it that we get as well as give; we may send food to Greece and get
+rubber from Java, but on the books we will not be doing too badly.</p>
+
+<p>Neither money nor the bogey of a balance of trade is going to decide
+our provisioning of Europe and Asia; the cold necessity of preventing
+revolution and typhus will force us to rebuild and re-energize; in the
+end, like all enlargements of the market, this will repay us. The rest
+of the world will know a great deal about mass production by the end
+of the war: Indians and Australians will be expert at interchangeable
+parts; but we will have the immeasurable advantage of our long
+experience on which the war has forced us to build a true productive
+system. We will jump years ahead of our schedule of increase and
+improvement because of the war; and we will be able to face any
+problem of production&mdash;if we want to, or have to. The choice between
+people's lives and the gold standard will have to be made again, as it
+was by many nations in the 1930's; only this time the choice is not
+without a threat. After wars, people are accustomed to bloodshed; they
+prefer it to starvation.</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<p class="right2"><i>Alternative to Prosperity</i></p>
+
+<p>The greatest invention of democracy is the wealth of the people. We
+discovered that wealth rested more firmly on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>prosperity than on
+poverty and the genius of our nation has gone into creating a
+well-to-do mass of citizens. Unfinished as the job is, we can start to
+demonstrate its principles to others. In return they may refrain from
+teaching us the principles of revolution.</p>
+
+<p>Recovery and freedom are our concrete actual offer to the nations of
+Europe, counter to the offer of Hitler. Without this literal, concrete
+offer, we shall have to fight longer to defeat Hitler&mdash;and every added
+day costs us lives and money and strength inside ourselves which we
+need to create the new world; if we can defeat Hitler without the aim
+of liberty, our victory will be incomplete; we will not automatically
+emancipate France or Jugo-Slavia, or draw Rumania back into the orbit
+of free nations. Within each nation a powerful group profits by the
+Nazi-system; within each a vast population, battered, disheartened,
+diseased, wants only the meanest security, one meal a day, shelter
+only from the bitter days, something more than a rag for clothing&mdash;and
+an end to the struggle; these are not heroes, they are old people, men
+and women struck down and beaten and starved so that they cannot rise,
+but can drag down those who attempt to rise. These we may save only by
+giving them food and forgetfulness. On the other side there are the
+young&mdash;carefully indoctrinated, worked over to believe that the offer
+of fascism is hard, but practical; it is an offer of slavery and
+security; whereas they are told the offer of the democratic countries
+is an hypocrisy and&mdash;worse still&mdash;cannot be made good. We have to face
+the disagreeable fact that the Balkan peasant in 1900 heard of
+universal suffrage and high wages in America, and his grandchildren
+know more about our sharecroppers and race riots and strike breakers
+than we do&mdash;because the Goebbels machine has played the dark side of
+our record a million times. The first year of the war was bound to
+show the "superiority" of the German production technique over ours,
+since Europe will not know that we are still at the beginning of
+actual production. The mind of Europe knows <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>little good of us; we
+have not yet begun to undermine the fascist influence by words, and
+our acts are not yet planned. Even after Hitler is destroyed, we will
+have to act to overcome impotence in political action which years of
+Nazi "conditioning" induces, and to compensate for the destruction of
+technical skill in the occupied areas. To us the end of the war is a
+wild moving picture of gay processions, swastikas demolished, prisons
+opened, and the governments-in-exile hailed at the frontiers; all of
+these things may happen, but the reality, after the parade, will be a
+grim business of re-making the flesh and the spirit of peoples. The
+children of Israel rejoiced and sang as they crossed the Red Sea; but
+they had been slaves. So Moses led them forty years in the wilderness,
+when he could have gone directly to the Promised Land in forty months,
+because he wanted a generation of slaves to die, and a generation of
+hardy freemen to be in full mature power.<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> The generation we will
+raise to power in the occupied countries will have great experience of
+tyranny, none of freedom; it will know all about our shortcomings and
+nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it
+will have seen the Nazis at work and know nothing of new techniques of
+production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work.</p>
+
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> I have not traveled the route; but General Sir Francis
+Younghusband who had, gave me the figures&mdash;and the motive.</p></div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XIII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h2>The Liberty Bell</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it
+as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the
+world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. We
+have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not
+forget&mdash;and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and
+people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is
+only a word. We do not need to convert the world to a special form of
+political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the
+peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us
+to help. We will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will
+make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will
+underwrite. For in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must
+also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that
+there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone
+among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man,
+freedom can destroy poverty.</p>
+
+<p>We have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric
+power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known
+before, not even to ourselves. For we have to create enough liberty to
+take up the shameful slack in our own country. We all know,
+indifferently, that people (somewhere&mdash;where was it?&mdash;wasn't there a
+movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. But we assume that Americans
+always have enough liberty. The Senate's committee report on the
+fascism of organized big-farming in California is a shock which
+Americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not
+understand that we have been weakened internally, as England was
+weakened by its distressed areas <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>and its Malayan snobbery. We do not
+yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic
+system and calculated denials of liberty. We have denied liberty in
+hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain
+portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have
+started the counter-infection of communism. Most of the shameful
+occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war
+against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. Here are
+the facts in the California case, chosen because the documentation
+comes from official sources:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"Unemployment, underemployment, disorganized and haphazard
+migrancy, lack of adequate wages or annual income, bad housing,
+insufficient education, little medical care, the great public
+burden of relief, the denial of civil liberties, riots, strife,
+corruption are all part and parcel of this autocratic system of
+labor relations that has for decades dominated California's
+agricultural industry."</p></div>
+
+<p>The American people do not know that such things exist; no American
+orator has dared to say "except in three or four states, all men are
+equal in the eyes of the law"&mdash;or, "trial by jury is the right of
+every man except farm hands in California, who may be beaten at will."
+When the Senate's report is repeated to us from Japanese short-wave we
+will call it propaganda&mdash;and it will be the terrible potent propaganda
+of truth. We will still call for "stern measures", if a laborer who
+has lost the rights of man on American soil does not go into battle
+with a passion in his heart to die for liberty, and we will not
+understand that we have been at fault, because we have not created
+liberty. We have been living on borrowed liberty, not of our own
+making.</p>
+
+<p>We have not seen that some of our "cherished liberties" are heirlooms,
+beautiful antiques, not usable in the shape they come to us. We have
+the right to publish&mdash;but we cannot afford to print a newspaper&mdash;so
+that we have to create a new <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>freedom of the press. We have the right
+to keep a musket on the wall, but our enemies have ceased to prowl,
+the musket is an antique, and we need a new freedom to protect
+ourselves from officious bureaucrats. We have the right to assemble,
+but men of one mind, men of one trade, live a thousand miles apart, so
+we need a new freedom to combine&mdash;and a new restriction on
+combination, too.</p>
+
+<p>Freedom is always more dangerous than discipline, and the more complex
+our lives, the more dangerous is any freedom. This we know; we know
+that discipline and order are dangerous, too, because they cannot
+tolerate imperfection. A nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free,
+but it can exist 90% free, especially if the direction of life is
+toward freedom; that is what we have proved in 160 years. But a nation
+cannot exist 90% slave&mdash;or 90% regimented&mdash;because every degree of
+order multiplies the power of disorder. If a machine needs fifty
+meshed-in parts, for smooth operation, the failure of one part
+destroys forty-nine; if it needs five million, the failure of one part
+destroys five million.</p>
+
+<p>That is the hope of success for our strategy against the strategy of
+"totality"; the Nazis have surpassed the junkers by their disciplined
+initiative in the field, a genuine triumph; but we still do not know
+whether a whole people can be both disciplined and flexible; we have
+not yet seen the long-run effect of Hitler's long vituperation of
+Bolshevism, his treaty with Stalin, and his invasion of Russia&mdash;unless
+the weakening of Nazi power, its failure to press success into victory
+at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad reflect a hesitation in the
+stupefied German mind, an incapacity to change direction.</p>
+
+<p>Whether our dangers are greater than those of fascism may be proved in
+war; it remains for us to make the most of them, to transform danger
+into useful action. We have to increase freedom, because as freedom
+grows, it brings its own regulation and discipline; the dangers of
+liberty came to us only after we began to neglect it or suppress it;
+freedom itself is orderly, because it is a natural state of men, it is
+not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>chaos, it begins when the slave is set free and ends when the
+murderer destroys the freedom of others; between the tyrant and the
+anarchist lies the area of human freedom.</p>
+
+<p>It is also the area of human cooperation, the condition of life in
+which man uses all of his capacities because he is not deprived of the
+right to work, by choice, with other men. In that area, freedom
+expands and is never destructive. The flowering of freedom in the past
+hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted
+extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create
+liberty, they destroy only what is already dead.</p>
+
+<p>I have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"&mdash;as if the freedom of
+man were a commodity; <i>and it is</i>. So long as we think of it as a
+great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we <i>make</i> liberty it
+becomes a reality; the Declaration of Independence <i>made</i> liberty,
+concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets.
+Liberty, like love, has to be made; the passion out of which love
+rises exists always, but people have to <i>make love</i>, or the passion is
+betrayed; and the acts by which human beings make liberty are as
+fundamental as the act of sexual intercourse by which love is made.
+And as love recreates itself and has to be made, in order to live
+again, liberty has also to be re-created, or it dies out. Whatever
+lovers do affects the profound relation between them, for the passion
+is complex; whatever we do affects our liberties, for freedom rises
+out of a thousand circumstances; and we have to be not only eternally
+vigilant, but eternally creative; we can no longer live on the liberty
+inherited from the great men who created liberty in the Declaration of
+Independence. All that quantity has been exhausted, stolen from us,
+misused; if we want to survive, we must begin to make liberty again
+and proclaim it throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof;
+and it shall be a jubilee unto them.</p>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen"><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>Typographical errors corrected in text:</p>
+<br />
+Page &nbsp;&nbsp;54: &nbsp;"what the trust were" replaced with "what the trusts were"<br />
+Page &nbsp;&nbsp;83: &nbsp;"given by the the people" replaced with "given by the people"<br />
+Page 156: &nbsp;enterprizes replaced with enterprises<br />
+
+<p class="noin"><span class="sc">Note</span> that on Page 85 there are words missing from the
+quoted section of the Declaration of Independence.</p>
+<p class="noin">The missing words "to our British brethren. We have warned
+them" have been inserted in the paragraph that begins:</p>
+<p class="noin" style="margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%">"Nor have We been wanting in attention (to our British
+brethren. We have warned them) from time to time of
+attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable
+jurisdiction over us."</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Proclaim Liberty!
+
+Author: Gilbert Seldes
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34890]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROCLAIM LIBERTY! ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Curtis Weyant, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                                       |
+    |                                                           |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has     |
+    | been preserved.                                           |
+    |                                                           |
+    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For     |
+    | a complete list, please see the end of this document.     |
+    |                                                           |
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
+
+
+
+
+ALSO by GILBERT SELDES
+
+On Related Subjects
+
+      Your Money and Your Life
+      Mainland
+      The Years of the Locust
+      Against Revolution
+      The Stammering Century
+      The Seven Living Arts
+      The United States and the War
+          (London, 1917)
+      This is America
+          (Moving Picture)
+
+AND
+
+      The Movies Come From America
+      The Movies and the Talkies
+      The Future of Drinking
+      The Wings of the Eagle
+      Lysistrata (A Modern Version)
+
+
+
+
+_Proclaim_
+
+LIBERTY!
+
+_By_
+
+GILBERT SELDES
+
+Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
+inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them....
+                                      Leviticus xxv, 10.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE GREYSTONE PRESS
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.
+RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
+
+
+
+
+      TO THE CHILDREN
+      who will have
+      to live in the world
+      we are making
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
+
+
+Thanks are given to the Macmillan Company for their permission to
+quote several paragraphs from Arthur Koestler's _Darkness at Noon_ in
+my first chapter. _The Grand Strategy_ by H.A. Sargeaunt and Geoffrey
+West, referred to in chapter two, is published by Thomas Y. Crowell
+Co.
+
+                                                             G.S.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+   CHAPTER I  TOTAL VICTORY                                    13
+
+  CHAPTER II  STRATEGY FOR THE CITIZEN                         29
+
+ CHAPTER III  UNITED...?                                       44
+
+  CHAPTER IV  "THE STRATEGY OF TRUTH"                          61
+
+   CHAPTER V  THE FORGOTTEN DOCUMENT                           77
+
+  CHAPTER VI  "THE POPULATION OF THESE STATES"                 92
+
+ CHAPTER VII  ADDRESS TO EUROPE                               111
+
+CHAPTER VIII  THE SCIENCE OF SHORT WAVE                       119
+
+  CHAPTER IX  DEFINITION OF AMERICA                           129
+
+   CHAPTER X  POPULARITY AND POLITICS                         156
+
+  CHAPTER XI  THE TOOLS OF DEMOCRACY                          163
+
+ CHAPTER XII  DEMOCRATIC CONTROL                              170
+
+CHAPTER XIII  THE LIBERTY BELL                                199
+
+
+
+
+PROCLAIM LIBERTY!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Total Victory
+
+
+The peril we are in today is this:
+
+For the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong
+enough to destroy us.
+
+This book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies--where
+it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. It is not about
+munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to
+create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of
+America, what it has been and is and will be. And since character is
+destiny, this book is about the destiny of America.
+
+The next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. With the
+best of motives, and the worst results, Americans for months after
+December 7, 1941, said that Pearl Harbor was a costly blessing because
+it united all Americans and made us understand why the war was
+inevitable. A fifty-mile bus trip outside of New York--perhaps even a
+subway ride within its borders--would have proved both of these
+statements blandly and dangerously false. American unity could not be
+made in Japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a
+cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and
+recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of
+anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those
+of our enemies.
+
+What follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist.
+For some twenty years I have observed the sources of American unity
+and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future
+of American liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as
+it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children
+will live in the world we are now creating. I am therefore not
+writing frivolously, or merely to testify to my devotion; I am
+writing to persuade--to uncover sources of strength which others may
+have overlooked, to create new weapons, to stir new thoughts. If I
+thought the war for freedom could be won by writing lies, I would
+write lies. I am afraid the war will be lost if we do not face the
+truth, so I write what I believe to be true about America--about its
+past and present and future, meaning its history and character and
+destiny--but mostly about the present, with only a glance at our
+forgotten past, and a declaration of faith in the future which is, I
+hope, the inevitable result of our victory.
+
+We know the name and character of our enemy--the Axis; but after
+months of war we are not entirely convinced that it intends to destroy
+us because we do not see why it has to destroy us. Destroy; not
+defeat. The desperate war we are fighting is still taken as a gigantic
+maneuvre; obviously the Axis wants to "win" battles and dictate "peace
+terms". We still use these phrases of 1918, unaware that the purpose
+of Axis war is not defeat of an enemy, but destruction of his national
+life. We have seen it happen in France and Poland and Norway and
+Holland; but we cannot imagine that the Nazis intend actually to
+appoint a German Governor General over the Mississippi Valley, a
+Gauleiter in the New England provinces, and forbid us to read
+newspapers, go to the movies or drink coffee; we cannot believe that
+the Axis intends to destroy the character of America, annihilating the
+liberties our ancestors fought for, and the level of comfort which we
+cherished so scrupulously in later generations. In moments of pure
+speculation, when we wonder what would happen "at worst", we think of
+a humiliating defeat on land and sea, bombardment of our cities,
+surrender--and a peace conference at which we and Britain agree to pay
+indemnities; perhaps, until we pay off, German and Japanese soldiers
+would be quartered in our houses, police our streets; but we assume
+that after the "shooting war" was over, they would not ravish our
+women.
+
+
+  _Victory_ (_Axis Model_)
+
+All this is the war of 1918. In 1942 the purpose of Axis victory is
+the destruction of the American system, the annihilation of the
+financial and industrial power of the United States, the reduction of
+this country to an inferior position in the world and the enslavement
+of the American people by depriving them of their liberty and of their
+wealth. The actual physical slavery of the American people and the
+deliberate taking over of our factories and farms and houses and motor
+cars and radios are both implied in an Axis victory; the enslavement
+is automatic, the robbery of our wealth will depend on Axis economic
+strategy: if we can produce more _for them_ by remaining in technical
+possession of our factories, they will let us keep them.
+
+We cannot believe this is so because we see no reason for it. Our
+intentions toward the German and Italian people are not to enslave and
+impoverish; on the contrary, we think of the defeat of their leaders
+as the beginning of liberty. We do not intend to make Venice a
+tributary city, nor Essen a factory town run by American government
+officials. We may police the streets of Berlin until a democratic
+government proves its strength by punishing the SS and the Gestapo,
+until the broken prisoners of Dachau return in whatever triumph they
+can still enjoy. But our basic purpose is still to defeat the armed
+forces of the Axis and to insure ourselves against another war by the
+creation of free governments everywhere.
+
+(Neither the American people nor their leaders have believed that a
+responsible peaceable government can be erected _now_ in Japan. Toward
+the Japanese our unclarified intentions are simple: annihilation of
+the power, to such an extent that it cannot rise again--as a military
+or a commercial rival. The average citizen would probably be glad to
+hand over to the Chinese the job of governing Japan.)
+
+Fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes on; as we
+fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our
+effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to
+think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting.
+The vengeful articles of the treaty of Versailles were written after
+the Armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created
+during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been
+accepted by Americans if the United States had fought longer and
+therefore thought longer about them.
+
+We shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. But
+we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an Axis peace
+means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field
+and revolution at home, the Axis powers had to go to war on the United
+States.
+
+If we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on Pearl
+Harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by Axis
+standards, Pearl Harbor was the final incident of one series of
+events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose,
+the destruction of American democracy--which, so long as it endured,
+undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers.
+
+Why? Why are Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo insecure if we survive? Why
+were we in danger so long as they were victorious? The answer lies in
+the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the
+_reason_ has to be found in the character of those involved; the war
+is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of
+our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it
+was inevitable--and how we will win.
+
+Our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our
+present crisis, and so creates our future. That is the sense in which
+character is Destiny.
+
+We know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war
+began we knew the treachery of the Japanese military caste, the jackal
+aggression of Mussolini, the brutality and falseness of Hitler; and
+the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these
+leaders.
+
+But these things do not explain why we are a danger to the Axis, and
+the Axis to us.
+
+
+  "_Historic Necessity_"
+
+The profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of
+fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new,
+but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as
+the Feudal Order. Democracy destroyed Feudalism; and Feudalism,
+returning in a new form as Fascism, must destroy democracy or go down
+in the attempt; the New Order and the New World cannot exist side by
+side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one
+another and only one will survive. We might blindly let the new
+despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force
+since 1776; but it cannot let us live. We could co-exist with Czarism
+because it was a shrinking force; or with British Imperialism because
+its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. We could
+not have lived side by side with Trotskyite Communism because it was
+as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the German Nazis.
+
+As it happened, Stalin, not Trotsky, took over from Lenin; Socialism
+in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". Stalin made a
+sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of
+propaganda; he allowed German Communism to be beaten to death in
+concentration camps; and, as Trotsky might have said, the "historical
+obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the
+bearded old Marxian enemies of Capital, but by Capital's own young
+sadists, the Storm Troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and
+manufacturers of Italy and Germany. That is why, since 1932, realist
+democrats have known that the enemy had to be Hitler, not Stalin. It
+was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees
+of expansion. Moreover, Stalin himself recognized the explosive force
+of fascism in Germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew
+factories to the Urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from
+the German border as he could. By doing so, he became the ideal ally
+of all those powers whom Hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding.
+The relatively static democratic nations of Europe, the shrinking
+semi-socialist states like France and Austria, were bruised by contact
+with Hitler; presently they were absorbed because the Nazi geography
+demanded a continent for a military base.
+
+The destruction of America was a geographical necessity, for Hitler;
+and something more. Geographically, the United States lies between
+Hitler's enemies, England and Russia; we are not accustomed to the
+thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for
+England's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a
+threat to Germany. Look at the other side: we are a potential
+transpacific base for Russia; our fleet can supply the Soviets and
+China; Russia can retreat toward Siberian ports and join us. So we
+dominate the two northern oceans, and with Russia, the Arctic as well.
+That is the geographic reason for Hitler's attack on us.
+
+The moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of
+the United States must be destroyed, its future must turn black and
+bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on
+its foundations until Democracy perishes from the earth.
+
+So long as a Democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living)
+survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that
+propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and
+security. In order to have security, says Hitler, you must give up
+will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be
+disciplined and ordered--because the modern world is too complex to
+allow for the will of the individual. The democracies insist that the
+rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom and
+that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet
+outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private
+life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. The essential democratic
+belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in
+the desirability of _change_; and we, democratic people, believe that
+the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that
+progress will be made. The terror of change in which dictators live is
+shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only
+thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. It
+does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death.
+
+So long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution,
+and prosperity without regimentation, the Nazi states are in danger.
+In a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love
+poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next
+twenty years are critical. Unless we, the democratic people, are
+destroyed now, the fascist adults of 1940 to 1960 will still know that
+freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery.
+
+So much--which is enough--was true even before the declaration of war;
+since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend
+themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce
+engines of war, cannot win victories. And we are equally compelled,
+for our own safety, to destroy the _principle_ which tries to destroy
+us. The alternative to victory over America is therefore not
+defeat--or an inconclusive truce. The alternative is annihilation for
+the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party
+men. They will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will
+no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the
+organization of victory.
+
+The fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their
+subordinates, they can control the world. And the purpose of their
+military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of
+the world. Even for the "self sufficient" United States, this means
+that the standard of living must go down--drastically and for ever.
+
+The policy is not entirely new. It develops from tariff barriers and
+subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best
+friends--under the Stevenson Act regulating rubber prices, for
+instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to
+Germany or when our tariff laws kept Britain and France out of our
+markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. This
+means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have
+defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could.
+
+
+  _Revolution in Reverse_
+
+The new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private
+business, buying and selling. As trade is the basic activity of our
+time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there
+is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution.
+The Communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the
+world--a house, a car, a job--shied away from the uncertainty of the
+future. But the reactionary revolution of Mussolini and Hitler
+instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not
+a mere protection against the Reds, it was a positive return to the
+days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and
+fifty years of Democracy, it blotted out the French and American
+Revolutions, it erased the names of Napoleon and Garibaldi from
+Continental European history, leaving the name of Metternich all the
+more splendid in its isolation. The manufacturers of motor cars and
+munitions were terrified of Reds in the factories; the great bankers
+and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced
+fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the
+World War--which was first political and then economic democracy.
+
+This was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but
+it had to destroy capitalism with it. The idiots who ran the
+financial and industrial world in the 1920's proved their incompetence
+by the end of 1929; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were
+exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by
+its own confessed character had to destroy them. It is a pleasant
+irony that ten minutes with Karl Marx or Lenin or with a parlor pink
+could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide.
+
+Only an enemy can really appreciate Karl Marx. The faithful have to
+concentrate on the future coming of the Communists' Millenium; but the
+sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which Marx arrived
+at his criticism of the Capitalist System. In that analysis Marx
+simplifies history so:
+
+No economic system lives for ever.
+
+Each system has in it the germ of its own successor.
+
+The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its
+geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others
+broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and
+Luther through the social and religious barriers.)
+
+With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the
+successor to Feudalism.
+
+From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his
+followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in
+the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see
+all its results--the enormous increase in the number of prosperous
+families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised
+to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into
+Communism. But to the sceptic only one thing in the Marxian prophecy
+is important. He says that in the later stages of Capitalism, it will
+become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of
+production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change
+into a _new_ system. (According to Marx, this new system will be
+Communism.)
+
+There were moments under the grim eyes of Mr. Hoover when all the
+parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. There are
+apparently some Americans who wish that the New Deal had not
+interposed itself between the Gold Standard and the Red Flag.
+
+These are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have
+studied Marx before flirting with the fascists. For even the
+rudimentary analysis above shows that Capitalism cannot _grow into_
+fascism; fascism moves _backward_ from democratic capitalism, it moves
+into the system which democracy destroyed--the feudal system. The
+capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on
+as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world
+it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has
+no future if it goes back to the past. And fascism is the discarded
+past of capitalism.
+
+We think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have
+declared war on us. Now we see how natural is the alliance between the
+European states who wish to restore feudalism and the Asiatic state
+which never abandoned it. Now we recognize the Nazi or Fascist party
+as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see
+the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. But we do not yet
+see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free
+state--and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as Hitler is to
+destroy democracy.
+
+We strike back at Japan because Japan attacked us, and fight Germany
+and Italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war
+until we understand that the Axis had to attack us and that we must
+destroy the system which made the attack inevitable.
+
+
+  _Walled Town and Open Door_
+
+At first glance, the feudal nature of fascism seems unimportant. In
+pure logic, maybe, feudal and democratic systems cannot co-exist, but
+in fact, feudal Japan did exist in 1830 and the United States was
+enjoying Jacksonian democracy. There must be something more than
+abstract hostility between the two systems.
+
+There is. Feudalism is a walled town; democracy is a ship at sea and a
+covered wagon. The capitalist pioneer gaps every wall in his path and
+his path is everywhere. The defender of the wall must destroy the
+invader before he comes near. In commercial terms, the fascists must
+conquer us in order to eliminate us as competitors for world trade. We
+can understand the method if we compare fascism at peace with
+democracy at war.
+
+In the first days of the war we abandoned several essential freedoms:
+speech and press and radio and assembly as far as they might affect
+the conduct of the war; and then, with more of a struggle, we gave up
+the right to manufacture motor cars, the right to buy or sell tires;
+we accepted an allotment of sugar; we abandoned the right to go into
+the business of manufacturing radio sets; we allowed the government to
+limit our installment buying; we neither got nor gave credit as freely
+as before; we gave up, in short, the system of civil liberty and free
+business enterprise--in order to win the war.
+
+Six hundred years ago, all over Europe the economy of peace was
+exactly our economy of war. In the Middle Ages, the _right_ to become
+a watchmaker did not exist; the guild of watchmakers accepted or
+rejected an applicant. By this limitation, the total number of watches
+produced was roughly governed; the price was also established (and
+overcharging was a grave offense in the Middle Ages). Foreign
+competition was excluded; credit was for financiers, and the
+installment system had not been invented.
+
+The feudalism of six hundred years ago is the peace-time fascism of
+six years ago. The fascist version of feudalism is State control of
+production. In Nazi Germany the liberty to work at a trade, to
+manufacture a given article, to stop working, to change professions,
+were all seriously limited. The supply of materials was regulated by
+the State, the number of radios to be exported was set by the State
+in connection with the purchase of strategic imports; the State could
+encourage or prevent the importation of coffee or helium or silk
+stockings; it could and did force men and women to raise crops, to
+make fuses, to learn flying, to stop reading. It created a feudal
+state far more benighted than any in the actual Middle Ages; it was in
+peace _totally_ coordinated for production--far more so than we are
+now, at war.
+
+The purpose of our sacrifice of liberty is to make things a thousand
+times faster than before; to save raw materials we abolish the cuff on
+our trousers and we use agate pots instead of aluminum; we work longer
+hours and work harder; we keep machines going twenty-four hours a day,
+seven days a week--all for the single purpose of maximum output.
+
+For the same purpose, the fascist state is organized _at peace_--to
+out-produce and _under-sell_ its competitors.
+
+The harried German people gave up their freedom in order to recover
+prosperity. They became a nation of war-workers in an economic war. A
+vast amount of their production went into tanks and Stukas; another
+segment went into export goods to be traded for strategic materials;
+and only a small amount went for food and the comforts of life. Almost
+nothing went into luxuries.
+
+
+  _Burning Books--and Underselling_
+
+That is why the _internal_ affairs of Germany became of surpassing
+importance to us. Whether we knew it or not, we were in competition
+with the labor battalions. When we denounced the Nazi suppression of
+free speech, the jailing of religious leaders, the silencing of
+Catholics, the persecution of Jews, we were as correct economically as
+we were ethically; the destruction of liberty had to be accomplished
+in Germany as the comfort level fell, to prevent criticism and
+conflict. Because liberals were tortured and books burned and Jews and
+Catholics given over to satisfy a frightful appetite for hatred, the
+people of Germany were kept longer at their work, and got less and
+less butter, and made more and more steel to undersell us in Soviet
+Russia or the Argentine; they made also more and more submarines to
+sink our ships if we ever came to war. Every liberty erased by Hitler
+was an economic attack on us, it made slave labor a more effective
+competitor to our free labor. The concentration camp and the
+blackguards on the streets were all part of an _economic_ policy, to
+create a feudal serfdom in the place of free labor. If the policy
+succeeds, we will have to break down our standard of living and give
+up entirely our habits of freedom, in order to meet the competition of
+slave labor.
+
+It means today that we will not have cheap motor cars and presently it
+may mean that we will not have high test steel or meat every day.
+Victory for the Axis system means that we work for the Germans and the
+Japanese, literally, actually, on their terms, in factories bossed by
+their local representatives; and anything less than complete victory
+for us means that we work harder and longer for less and less, paying
+for defeat by accepting a mean standard of living, not daring to fight
+our way into the markets of the world which fascism has closed to us.
+
+Readers of _You Can't Do Business With Hitler_ will not need to be
+convinced again that the two systems--his and ours--are mutually
+incompatible. Fortunately for us, they are also mutually destructive.
+The basis of fascism is, as I have noted, the feudal hope of a fixed
+unchangeable form of society which will last forever; the basis of
+democracy is change (which we call progress). Hitler announces that
+nazism will last a thousand years; the Japanese assert that their
+society has lasted longer; and the voice of Mussolini, when it used to
+be heard, spoke of Ancient Rome. We who are too impatient of the past,
+and need to understand our tradition, are at any rate aware of one
+thing--it is a tradition of change. (Jefferson to Lincoln to Theodore
+Roosevelt--the acceptance of change, even of radical change, is basic
+in American history.)
+
+We might tolerate the tactics of fascism; the racial hatred, the false
+system of education, the attack on religion, all might pass if they
+weren't part of the great strategic process of the fascists, which is
+our mortal enemy, as our process is theirs. They exclude and we
+penetrate; they have to _destroy_ liberty in order to control making
+and buying and selling and using steel and bread and radios, and we
+have to _create_ liberty in order to create more customers for more
+things. They have to suppress dissent because dissent means difference
+which no feudal system can afford; we have to encourage criticism
+because only free inquiry destroys error and discovers new and useful
+truths.
+
+These hostile actions make us enemies because our penetration will not
+accept the Axis wall thrown up around nations normally free and
+friendly to us; and the Axis must make us into fascists because there
+can be no exceptions in a system dedicated to conformity. The whole
+world must accept a world-system.
+
+In particular, we must be eliminated because we do expose the fraud of
+fascism--which is that liberty must be sacrificed to attain power.
+This is an open principle of fascism, as it is of all dictatorships
+and "total" states. It is very appealing to tyrants and to weaklings,
+and the ruthlessness of the attack on liberty seems "realistic" even
+to believers in democracy--especially during the critical moments when
+action is needed and democracies seem to do nothing but talk. The
+truth is that our Executive is tremendously prompt and unhampered in
+war time; the appeaser of fascism does not tell the truth; he wants an
+end to talk, which is dangerous, because he is always at war and the
+secret fascist would have to admit that his perpetual war is against
+the people of the United States. So he says only that in modern times,
+liberty is too great a luxury, too easily abused; he says that a great
+State is too delicately balanced to tolerate the whims and
+idiosyncrasies of individuals; if the State has discovered the best
+diet for all the citizens, then no citizen can "prefer" another diet,
+and no expert may cast doubt on the official rations. To cause
+uncertainty is to diminish efficiency; to back "wrong" ideas is
+treason.
+
+One of the best descriptions of this state of mind occurs in a page of
+Arthur Koester's _Darkness at Noon_. It is fiction, but not untrue:
+
+     "A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with
+     thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion
+     that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is
+     all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be
+     liquidated as _saboteurs_. In a nationally centralized
+     agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of
+     enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.
+     If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him, and the
+     execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he
+     was wrong....
+
+     "It is that alone that matters: who is objectively in the
+     right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another
+     problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he
+     recommended nitrogen. If he was not, according to their ethics
+     he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that
+     nitrogen would have been better after all. If he was in good
+     faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue
+     making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be
+     ruined by it....
+
+     "That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of
+     subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong
+     must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the
+     law of historical credit; it was our law."
+
+Intellectual fascists are particularly liable to the error of thinking
+that this sort of thing is above morality, beyond good and evil. The
+"cricket-moralists" are people like ourselves and the English, who are
+agitated because "innocent" men are put to death; the hard-headed ones
+answer that innocence isn't important; effectiveness is what counts.
+Yet the democratic-cricket-morality is in the long run more realistic
+than the tough school which kills its enemies first and then finds out
+if they were guilty. The reason we allow a scientist to cry for
+nitrates after we have decided on potash is that we have to keep
+scientific investigation alive; we cannot trust ourselves for too long
+to the potash group. In five years, both nitrate and potash may be
+discarded because we have found something better. And no scientist
+will for long retain his critical pioneering spirit if an official
+superior can reject his research. (An Army board rejected the research
+of General William Mitchell and it took a generation for Army men to
+recover initiative; and this was in an organization accustomed to
+respect rank and tradition. In science, which is more sensitive, the
+only practical thing is to reward the heretic and the explorer even
+while one adopts the idea of the orthodox.)
+
+This question of heresy, apparently so trifling, is critical for us
+because it is a clue to the weakness of Hitlerism and it provides us
+with the only strategy by which Hitlerism can be destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Strategy for the Citizen
+
+
+There is a tendency at this moment to consider Hitler a master
+strategist, master psychologist, master statesman. His analysis of
+democracy, however, leaves something unsaid, and the nervous strong
+men who admire Hitler, as well as the weaklings who need "leadership",
+are doing their best to fill in the gaps. The Hitlerian concept of
+totality allows no room for difference; an official bread ration and
+an official biochemistry are equally to be accepted by everyone; in
+democracy Hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing
+and to encourage deviations from the established principles of
+biochemistry. This, he says, weakens the State; for one thing it leads
+to endless discussion. (Hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of
+letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a
+world-scale, immense in space, enduring for all time, has the same
+terrific concentration on himself.) Hitler's admirers in a democracy
+take this up with considerable pleasure; in each of his victories they
+see an argument against the Bill of Rights. Then war comes; sugar is
+wanting and we accept a ration card; supreme commands are established
+in various fields; and the sentiment spreads that "we can only beat
+Hitler by becoming a 'total' State". (No one dares say "Nazi".)
+
+Hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into
+every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. He has
+tried to turn dissent into disunion--and he has been helped by some of
+the most loyal and patriotic Americans almost as much as he has been
+helped by bundists.
+
+We have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the
+causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of
+human action in which difference is vital with the areas in which
+difference is a mortal danger.
+
+The moment we saw the direction of Hitler's drive, which was to
+magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively
+intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more
+we were at odds. The results were serious enough.
+
+No policy governing production had been accepted by industry;
+
+No policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that
+it was operating smoothly;
+
+No great stock of vital raw materials was laid up;
+
+No great stock of vital war machinery had been created;
+
+No keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an
+integrated part of American thought;
+
+No awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an
+integrated part of military and naval thought.
+
+To this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had
+brought us--but it had, none the less, failed. For the purpose of
+disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from
+entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter
+the war.
+
+What we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a
+source of strength. It is the counterpart of the great scientific
+methods of exploration, comparison, proof. Our dissents mean that we
+continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement
+after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this
+"dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost
+daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the
+error of _change before production_ which stalled our aircraft program
+of 1917 was not repeated.)
+
+
+  _Why We Can't Use Hitler_
+
+If we "need a Hitler" to defeat Hitler, we are lost, at this moment,
+irretrievably, because the _final_ triumph of Hitlerism is to make us
+need Hitler. The truth is we cannot use a Hitler, we cannot use
+fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the
+one field where totality has always existed, which is war. So far as
+war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's
+ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field;
+but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a
+matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be
+manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (The
+United States Army has officially declared against complete
+regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the
+history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it,
+because "the War Department considers that every American soldier
+should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.")
+
+We cannot use a Hitler because we lack the time. We cannot catch up
+with Hitler on Hitlerism. We cannot wait ten years to re-condition the
+people of America, the ten vital years which Hitler spent enslaving
+the German mind were spent by us in digging the American people out
+from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in 1929. We
+are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New
+Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual,
+argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps
+in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an
+American-type dictator, a Huey Long; in wartime, when people undergo
+incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and
+the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. Otherwise
+people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. That is
+why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator.
+
+The alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which Hitler
+calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential
+substance of unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of
+one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different
+aeroplane engines. I mean the combination of elements, as they are
+combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are
+combined in the people we are.
+
+We have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always
+allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of
+this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of
+our State; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not
+by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two
+things--the standard and the variant.
+
+Now we face death--called totality. For us it is death; and we can not
+avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by
+destroying whatever is deadly to us.
+
+It is hard for a layman to translate the "strategy of variety" into
+terms of production or naval movement. The translation is being made
+every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they
+follow the technique of variety because it is natural to them. All the
+layman can do is to watch and make sure that out of panic we do not
+betray ourselves to the enemy.
+
+It is not a matter of military technique, but of common sense that we
+can only destroy our enemy out of our strength, striking at his
+weakness; we can never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm
+against his strongest. And our strong point is the variety, the
+freedom, the independence of our thought and action. Hitler calls all
+this a weakness, because he has destroyed it in his own country; and
+so gives us the clue to his own weak spot.
+
+
+  _Has Hitler a Weakness?_
+
+In the face of the stupendous victories of Germany, it is hard to say
+that Hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take London or
+Moscow in its first attempts, nor Suez. Somewhere in this formidable
+strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by
+us if we are intimidated into imitation. We have to be flexible,
+feeling out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging
+forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being
+fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough
+today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting
+steadily on the production front, intermittently on the V (or
+foreign-propaganda) front, on the front of domestic stability, on the
+financial front (in connection with the United Nations); and the war
+front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and
+transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most
+effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight
+on the ones our enemies have chosen.
+
+Every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other;
+every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights
+rises out of the kind of nation it is. This is the form of strategy
+which the layman has to understand--in self-defense against the
+petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last
+war, or will scrap everything in order to imitate the enemy. The
+layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. He
+knows that the tank and the Stuka and the parachute troop were
+separate alien inventions combined by the German High Command; but
+combinations of various arms is not an exclusively German conception.
+The new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a
+nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration
+on offensive striking power. All of these are successful against
+broken and betrayed armies in France, against small armies unsupported
+by tanks and planes; they are not entirely successful against huge
+armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love,
+an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and
+an incalculable production power on the other. Possibly the Soviet
+Union has discovered one weakness in the German war-strategy; it may
+not be the weakness through which we can strike; we may have to find
+another. We have to find the weakness of Japan, too--and we are not so
+inclined to imitate them.
+
+There is a famous picture of Winston Churchill, hatless in the street,
+with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in Antwerp in
+1914 and Churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the
+sky--an omen of things to come. At Antwerp Churchill had tried to head
+off the German swing to the sea, but Antwerp was a defeat and
+Churchill returned to London, still looking for some way to refuse the
+German system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. He
+tried it with the tank; he tried it at Gallipoli; finally the Allies
+tried it, half-heartedly, at Salonika. The war, on Germany's terms,
+was a stalemate and Germany might have broken through; the war ended
+because the balance was dislocated when America came in and,
+simultaneously, both England and America began to fight the war also
+on the propaganda level. By that time Churchill was "discredited"; he
+had tried to shorten the war by two years and the British forces, with
+success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the
+one more battleship, the one more division which would have insured
+victory--because Kitchener and the War Office and the French High
+Command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the German way.
+
+
+  _Escape from Despair_
+
+The desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought
+of fighting the military machines of Germany and Japan is justified
+_only_ if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they
+propose to us. Analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which
+war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). White opens with Queen's
+pawn to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or
+decline. If he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on
+that basis, but Black can also reject White's plan of campaign. The
+good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other
+tries to impose.
+
+We have felt ourselves incapable of fighting Hitler because we hate
+Hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act
+as he does--with more horror, more cruelty, more debasement of
+humanity, in order to defeat him. And the public statements of our
+leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we
+have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implying our
+acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect
+is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. If this were all,
+it would still leave us fighting the fascist war.
+
+The civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of
+considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's
+authoritative and decisive objection to the Hitlerian strategy of
+propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers our native
+natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be
+constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of
+inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under
+the spell of the enemy's tactics. That is why it is important for the
+citizen to know that he is right. _We do not have to fight Hitler in
+his way_; that is what Hitler wants us to do, because _if we do we can
+not win_. There is another way--although we may not have found it yet.
+
+In its celebrated "orientation course" the United States army explains
+the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them
+strategists, but to make them better soldiers. The civilian needs at
+least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of
+luck or too cast down by disaster. The jokes about amateur strategists
+and the High Command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism
+are both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on
+tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. They needed
+desperately to know in February, 1942, why General MacArthur was
+performing a useful function in Bataan and why bombers were not sent
+to his aid; and this information came to them from the President. But
+the President is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it
+takes to transport a division and put it into action; how air and sea
+power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts
+which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some
+sense of the importance of his work. The civilian in war work or out
+of it should know something about war, and in particular he should
+know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and
+appropriate and effective for us.
+
+
+  _Military Mummery_
+
+It might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military
+strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose
+lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is
+happening to them. The military mind, aided by the military expert,
+loves to use special terms; until recently the commentator on strategy
+was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from
+the field as obscure as prescriptions in Latin. It is supposed that
+doctors wrote in Latin not only because it was an exact and universal
+language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it gave
+mystery and authority to their prescriptions. Latin is still not
+understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast
+amount of business for the doctors because ads in English persuaded
+the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary
+medicines, without consulting the doctor.
+
+A rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are
+now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to
+millions by radio. They cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank
+and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of
+head tones. But they can expound the fundamentals--and so expose the
+military leadership to the _criticism it desperately needs_ if it is
+to function properly. The essentials of warfare are dreadfully
+simple--the production manager of any great industrial concern deals
+with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment;
+train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at
+chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the
+right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force
+at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for
+chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right
+chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have
+to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. The
+terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of
+instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by
+the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is
+shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or
+the good platoon leader from the second rate. The civilian, without
+information, cannot decide what to do; but, as Britain's _civilian_
+courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions
+have been made. He can tell as well as the greatest commander, that
+indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the Dardanelles
+impossible in 1916; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made
+the wreck of France certain in 1940. The civilian American who has
+taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely
+military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial American need
+not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply.
+We can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we
+are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as
+the wrong prescription.
+
+I believe that we will have to strip the false front from
+international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited
+"mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have
+to bring these things up to date because our lives depend on them, we
+can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the
+diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a
+nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different
+strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and
+thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and
+Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and
+found pretexts for good wars.
+
+We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics--not without
+help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a
+thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract
+thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we
+know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like
+ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep
+people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to
+keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The
+very fact that we are now _all_ critics of spending is a great
+advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics
+of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with
+other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that
+we are all fighting.
+
+As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about
+tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if
+I knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold
+together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is
+a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who
+organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national
+character.
+
+I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of
+variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field.
+I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a
+name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling
+that an American (or United Nations) strategy need not be--and must
+not be--the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his
+bosom, for comfort.
+
+
+  _A Variety of Strategies_
+
+The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in
+time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook;
+it is called _Grand Strategy_; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a
+specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian;
+and Geoffrey West, biographer and student of politics; both British.
+Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this
+book is a revelation--particularly it shows the connection between war
+and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own
+words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with
+progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its
+own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French
+revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a
+history of the nineteenth century--and into this war.
+
+The authors have their own names for each kind of war--each is a
+"solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to
+the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor
+rises from the country which uses it--from its methods of production,
+its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and
+its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the
+revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the
+intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering,
+throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic
+self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French,
+by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and
+small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.
+
+Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the British
+opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength
+of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of
+Napoleon. They would not come out (until they were ready at Waterloo)
+and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force.
+Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came
+years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force,
+Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of
+attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the
+enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could
+withdraw to take up positions and fight again."
+
+Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the
+average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he
+would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But
+the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a
+triumph because Wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to
+the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn
+toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the
+British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover,
+this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous
+manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the
+merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern
+England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy,
+its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms--all rise from
+the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.
+
+For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke,
+increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under
+Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the
+impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness
+and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development
+under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under
+Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale
+and initiative". Sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of
+London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations--a bullet
+is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves
+again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go
+through--unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or
+blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The
+defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of
+sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others,
+regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain
+death. _Every_ person--not merely the trained minority. This happened
+at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small
+yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were
+taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders;
+some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the
+transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth,
+without stop--the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.
+
+These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of
+warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the
+nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain
+constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the
+methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won)
+colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended
+(so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women
+are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political
+illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has
+occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social change
+affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for
+ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is
+trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be
+left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is
+to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by
+minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both--by
+pulling back into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a
+battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the
+correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas,
+he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and
+planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a
+totally different military style, the only completely Communist style
+on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist
+society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools,
+manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same
+time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated
+itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory,
+reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the
+beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for
+hundreds of thousands.
+
+The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the Japanese are another
+example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of
+China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the
+cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them,
+the armies remained. Japan's attack on Britain and ourselves began
+with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the
+islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the
+psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there
+was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making
+war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their
+requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of
+other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and
+outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber;
+ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target;
+they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another
+try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man
+should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an
+army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by
+victory. So in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate
+the Japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final
+moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned
+bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or
+death.
+
+Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have
+to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games,
+read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the
+function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a
+practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the
+physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field.
+Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we
+know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to
+keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.
+
+The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into
+terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+"The Strategy of Truth"
+
+
+The consequences of building on a unity which does not exist are
+serious. We have discovered that all war is total war; we have also
+found that while our enemies lie to us, they do not lie to their High
+Commands.
+
+Total war requires total effort from the civilian and we have assumed
+that, in America, this means enthusiasm for our cause, understanding
+of our danger, willingness to sacrifice, confidence in our leaders,
+faith in ultimate victory. We may be wrong; total effort in Germany is
+based more on compulsion and promise than on understanding. But we
+cannot immediately alter the atmosphere in which we are living. If we
+could, if our leaders believed that total effort could be achieved
+more quickly by lies than by truth, it would be their obligation to
+lie to us. In total war there is no alternative to the most effective
+weapon. Only the weapon must be effective over a sufficient length of
+time; the advantage of a lie must be measured against the loss when
+the lie is shown up; if the balance is greater, over a period of time,
+than the value of the truth, the lie still must be told. If we are a
+people able to recognize a lie too fast for it to be effective, the
+lie must not be used; if we react "correctly" to certain forms of
+persuasion (as, say, magazine ads and radio commercials), the
+psychological counterparts of these should be used, at least until a
+new technique develops.
+
+This is a basis for "the strategy of truth" which Archibald MacLeish
+set in opposition to the Nazi "strategy of terror". The opposition is
+not perfect because the Nazis have used the truth plentifully in
+spreading terror, especially by the use of moving pictures. Their
+strategy, ethically, is a mixture of truth and lies, in combination;
+practically speaking, this strategy is on the highest ethical plane
+because it saves Nazi lives, brings quick victory, protects the State
+and the people. It is, however, ill-suited to our purposes.
+
+
+  _Ethics of Lying_
+
+Mr. MacLeish is being an excellent propagandist in the very use of the
+phrase, "strategy of truth", which corresponds to the President's
+"solemn pact of truth between government and the people"; there are a
+hundred psychological advantages in telling us that we are getting the
+truth; but propaganda has no right to use the truth if the truth
+ceases to be effective. Lies are easier to tell, but harder to handle;
+in a democracy they are tricky and dangerous because the conditions
+for making lies effective have not been created; such conditions were
+created in Germany; they came easily in other countries where no
+direct relations between people and government existed.
+
+Before propaganda can lie to us, safely and for our own preservation,
+honorably and desirably, it must persuade us to give up our whole
+system of communication, our political habits, our tradition of free
+criticism. This could be done; but it would be difficult; no
+propagandist now working in America is cunning and brutal enough to
+destroy our civil liberties without a struggle which would cost more
+(in terms of united effort) than it would be worth. We cannot stop in
+the middle of a war to break down one system of persuasion and create
+another; the frame of mind which advertising men call "consumer
+acceptance" is, as they know, induced by a touch of newness in a
+familiar framework; the new element catches attention but it has to
+become familiar before it is effective.
+
+Our propagandists, therefore, must use the truth, as they incline to
+do, but they have to learn its uses. We gain prestige by advertising
+the truth, even though the use of truth is forced upon us; but we have
+not yet won approval of the suppression of truth. It is good to use
+truth as flattery ("You are brave enough to know the truth") but truth
+also creates fear which (advertisers again know this) is a potent
+incentive to action. Finally, the use of truth requires the
+canalization of propaganda; it is too dangerous to be handled by
+everyone.
+
+The propagandists of our cause include everyone who speaks to the
+people, sells a bond, writes, broadcasts, publishes, by executive
+order or private will; they vary in skill and in detailed purpose;
+they blurt out prejudices and conceal information useful to the
+citizen. They have not, so far as any one has discovered, lied to the
+people of America, contenting themselves at first with concealing the
+extent, or belittling the significance, of our reverses; presently the
+same sources began to abuse the American people for not being aware of
+the danger threatening them; and no one officially recognized the
+connection between ignorance and concealment.
+
+
+  _Maxims for Propagandists_
+
+It is easy to mark down the detailed errors of propaganda. The more
+difficult work is to create a positive program; and it is possible
+that we have been going through an experimental period, while such a
+program is being worked out in Washington. A few of the requirements
+are obvious.
+
+_Propaganda must be used._ Our government has no more right to deprive
+us of propaganda than it has to deprive us of pursuit planes or
+bombers or anti-aircraft guns or antitoxin. Propaganda is the great
+offensive-defensive weapon of the home front; if we do not get it, we
+should demand it. If what we get is defective, we should protest as we
+would protest against defective bombsights.
+
+_Propaganda must be organized._ Otherwise it becomes a diffused babel
+of opinion.
+
+_Propaganda must be unscrupulous._ It has one duty--to the State.
+
+_Propaganda must not be confused with policy._ If at a given moment
+the Grand Strategy of the war absolutely requires us to offer a
+separate peace to Italy or to make war on Rumania, propaganda must
+show this need in its happiest light; if the reverse is required,
+propaganda's job does not alter. Policy should not be made by
+propagandists and propagandists should have no policy.
+
+_Propaganda must interact with policy._ If at a given moment, the
+Grand Strategy has a free choice between recognizing or rejecting a
+Danish Government-in-exile, the action which propaganda can use to
+best advantage is the better.
+
+_Propaganda must have continuity._ The general principles of
+propaganda have to be worked out, and followed. The principle, in
+regard to direct war news, may be to tell all, to tell nothing, or to
+alter the dosage according to the temper of the people. The choice of
+one of these principles is of the gravest importance; it must be done,
+or approved, by the President. After the choice is made, sticking to
+one principle is the only way to build confidence. Except for details
+of naval losses, the British official announcements are prompt and
+accurate; the British people generally do not go about in the fear of
+hidden catastrophe. The Italian system differs and may be suited to
+the temper of the people; the Russian communiques are exactly adapted
+to Stalin's concept of the war: the Red soldier is cited for heroism,
+in small actions, the Germans are always identified as fascists, the
+vast actions of the entire front are passed over in a formal opening
+sentence. The German method has its source in Hitler; the
+announcements of action are rhetorical, contemptuous, and sometimes
+threatening; the oratory which accompanies the official statements
+has, for the first time, had a setback, since the destruction of the
+Russian Army was announced in the autumn of 1941, but no one has
+discovered any serious reaction as a result. The German people have
+been conditioned by action; and action has worked with propaganda for
+this result. The concentration camp, the death of free inquiry, and
+the triumph of Munich have been as potent as Goebbels' lies to prepare
+the German people for total war; so that they have not reacted against
+Hitler when a prediction has failed or a promise gone sour.
+
+Each of these methods has been consistently followed. Our
+propagandists on the home front began with the knowledge that a great
+part of the country did not want a war; a rather grim choice was
+presented: to frighten the people, or to baby them. The early
+waverings about Pearl Harbor reflected the dilemma; the anger roused
+by Pearl Harbor gave time to the propagandist to plan ahead. The
+result has been some excellent and some fumbling propaganda; but no
+principle has yet come to light.
+
+_Propaganda must supply positive symbols._ The symbol, the slogan, the
+picture, which unites the citizen, and inspires to action, can be
+created by an individual, but can only be made effective by correct
+propaganda. The swastika is a positive symbol, a mark of unity
+(because it was once a mark of the revolutionary outcast); we have no
+such symbol. Uncle Sam is a cartoonists' fiction, too often appearing
+in comic guises, too often used in advertising, no longer
+corresponding even to the actuality of the American physique. The
+Minute-man has an antique flavor but is not sufficiently generalized;
+he is a brilliant defensive symbol and corresponded precisely to the
+phase of the militia, an "armed citizenry" leaping to the defense of
+the country. With my prejudice it is natural that I should suggest the
+Liberty Bell as a positive symbol of the thing we fight for. It is
+possible to draw its form on a wall--not to ward off evil, but to
+inspire fortitude.
+
+_Propaganda must be independent._ It is a fighting arm; it has (or
+should have) special techniques; it is based on researches,
+measurements, comparisons, all approaching a scientific method. It
+should therefore be recognized as a separate function; Mr. Gorham
+Munson, preceded by Mr. Edward L. Bernays in 1928, has proposed a
+Secretary for Propaganda in the Cabinet, which would make the direct
+line of authority from the Executive to the administrators of policy,
+without interference. The conflicts of publicity (aircraft versus Navy
+for priorities, for instance) will eventually force some organization
+of propaganda. The confusion of departmental interests is a constant
+drawback to propaganda, even if there is no direct conflict.
+
+_Propaganda must be popular._ Since the first World War several new
+ways of approaching the American people have been developed. These
+have been chiefly commercial, as the radio and the popular illustrated
+magazine; the documentary moving picture has never been popular,
+except for the March of Time, but it has been tolerated; in the past
+two years a new type, the patriotic short, has been skilfully
+developed. The full length picture has hardly ever been used for
+direct communication; it is a "morale builder", not a propaganda
+weapon.
+
+_Propaganda must be measured._ At the same time the method of the
+selective poll has been developed in several forms and a quick,
+dependable survey of public sentiment can be used to check the
+effectiveness of any propaganda. Recent refinements in the techniques
+promise even greater usefulness; the polls "weight" themselves, and,
+in effect, tell how important their returns should be considered. The
+objections to the polling methods are familiar; but until something
+better comes along, the reports on opinion, and notably on the
+fluctuations of opinion, are not to be sneered away. To my mind this
+is one of the basic operations of propaganda; and although I have no
+evidence, I assume that it is constantly being done.
+
+
+  _Who Can Do It?_
+
+An effective use of the instruments is now possible. We may blunder in
+our intentions, but technical blunders need not occur; the people who
+have used radio or print or pictures are skilled in their trade and
+they can use it for the nation as they used it for toothpaste or
+gasoline. And the people of America are accustomed to forms of
+publicity and persuasion which need not be significantly altered.
+Moreover, we can measure the tightness of our methods in the field,
+not by rejoicing over "mail response", or newspaper comment, but by
+discovering exactly how far we have created the attitude of mind and
+the temper of spirit at which we aim.
+
+The advertising agency and the sampler of public opinion can supply
+the groundwork of a flexible propaganda method. They cannot do
+everything, because certain objectives have always escaped them. But
+they are the people who have persuaded most effectively and reported
+most accurately the results of persuasion. They cannot create policy,
+not even the policy of propaganda; but they can propagandize.
+
+All of this refers to propaganda at home. It need not be called
+propaganda, but it must _be_ propaganda--the organized use of all
+means of communication to create specific attitudes, leading to--or
+from--specific action.
+
+
+  _What Is Morale's Pulse?_
+
+This is, of course, another way of saying that morale is affected by
+propaganda. I avoid the word "morale" because it has unhappily fallen
+into a phrase, "boosting morale", or "keeping morale at a high level."
+We have it on military authority that morale is an essential of
+victory, but no authority has told us how to create it, nor exactly to
+what high level morale should be "boosted". The concept of morale
+constantly supercharged by propaganda is fatally wrong; it confuses
+morale with cheerfulness and leads to the dangerous fluctuations of
+public emotion on which our enemies have always capitalized.
+
+Morale should be defined as a desirable and effective attitude toward
+events. As despair and defeatism are undesirable, they break up
+morale; as cheerfulness leads at times to ineffectiveness, it is bad
+for morale. To induce cheerfulness in the week of Singapore, the
+burning of the Normandie, and the escape of the German battleships
+from Brest, would have been the worst kind of morale-boosting; to
+prevent elation over a substantial victory would have been not quite
+so bad, but bad enough.
+
+There is a "classic example" of the effect of belittling a victory.
+The British public first got details of the Battle of Jutland from the
+German announcement of a naval victory, including names and number of
+British vessels sunk. The first British communique was no more subdued
+than usual, but coming _after_ the German claims and making no
+assertions of victory, taking scrupulous care to list _all_ British
+losses and only positively observed German losses, the announcement
+pulled morale down--not because it gave bad news, but because it put a
+bad light on good news; it did not allow morale to be level with
+events. The best opinion of the time considered Jutland a victory
+lacking finality, but with tremendous consequences; and Churchill was
+called in as a special writer to do the Admiralty's propaganda on the
+battle after the mischief was done. The time element was against him
+for a belated explanation is never as effective as a quick capture of
+the field by bold assertion and proof. Mr. Churchill was himself
+belated, a generation later, when he first defended the Navy for
+letting the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst escape and then, a day later,
+asserted that the ships had been compelled to leave Brest and that
+their removal was a gain for the British. The point is the same in
+both cases: the truth or an effective substitute may be used; but it
+has to correspond to actuality. The Admiralty underplayed its
+statement at Jutland. Churchill over-explained the situation at Brest.
+Both were bad for morale.
+
+
+  _The Hypodermic Technique_
+
+The "shot-in-the-arm" theory of morale is a confession of incompetence
+in propaganda. For the healthy human being does not need sudden
+injections of drugs, not even for exceptional labors; and the
+objective of propaganda is to create an atmosphere in which the
+average citizen will work harder and bear more discomfort and live
+through more anxiety and suffer greater unhappiness _without
+considering his situation exceptional or abnormal_.
+
+To "boost morale", to give the public a shot of good news (or even a
+shot of bad news), is an attempt to make us live above our normal
+temperature, to speed up our heart-beat and our metabolism. War itself
+raises the level; and all we have to do for morale is to stay on the
+new level.
+
+The principle that the citizen must not consider his situation
+exceptional is one of the few accepted by democratic and autocratic
+States alike. Hitler announces that until the war is over he will wear
+a simple soldier's uniform; Churchill refuses to accept a hoard of
+cigars; the President buys a bond. In every case the conspicuous head
+of a nation does what the average citizen has to do; and because each
+citizen is like his leader, all citizens are like one another. A unity
+is created.
+
+
+  _Re-Uniting America_
+
+This completes the circle which began with our need for unity, and
+proceeded through propaganda to morale. For the foundation of our war
+effort has to be unity and the base of good morale is the feeling of
+one-ness in the privations and in the triumphs of war. We can now
+proceed to some of the reasons for the breaks in unity, which
+propaganda has not seen, nor mended.
+
+First, the propagandists have rejected certain large groups of
+Americans because of pre-war pacifism; second, they have failed to
+recognize the use to which isolationism can be put; third, they have
+not thought out the principles of free criticism in a democracy at
+war. To rehearse all the other forms of separatist action would be to
+recall angers and frustrations dormant now, just below the level of
+conscious action. Moreover, a list of the causes of separation, with a
+remedy for each, would repeat the error of civilian propaganda in the
+early phases of the war--it would still be negative, and the need now
+is to set in motion the positive forces of unity, which have always
+been available to us.
+
+_The accord we need is for free and complete and effective action, for
+sweating in the heat and crying in the night when disaster strikes,
+for changing the face of our private world, for losing what we have
+labored to build, for learning to be afraid and to suffer and to
+fight; it is an accord on the things that are vital because they are
+our life: what have we been, what shall we do, what do we want--past,
+present, future; history, character, destiny._
+
+The propaganda of the first six months of the war was not directed to
+the creation of unity in this sense; it was not concerned with
+anything but the immediate daily feeling of Americans toward the day's
+news; the civilian propagandists insisted that "disunity is ended"
+because all Americans knew what they were fighting for, so that it
+became faintly disloyal to point out that reiteration was not proof
+and that disunity could end, leaving mere chaos, a dispersed
+indifferent emotion, in its place. The end of dissension was not
+enough; unity had to be created, a fellow-feeling called up from the
+memory of the people, binding them to one another because it bound
+them to our soil and our heroes and our myths and our realities; and
+the act of creation of unity automatically destroyed disunion; when
+the gods arrive, not only the half-gods, but the devils also, depart.
+
+
+  _Myth and Money_
+
+Faintly one felt a lack of conviction in the propagandists themselves.
+They were afraid of the debunkers, under whose shadow they had grown
+up. They did not venture to create an effective myth. Myth to them was
+Washington's Cherry Tree, and Lincoln's boyish oath against slavery
+and Theodore Roosevelt's Wild West; so they could not, with rhetoric
+to lift the hearts of harried men and women, recall the truth-myth of
+America, the loyalty which triumphed over desertion at Valley Forge,
+the psychological miracle of Lincoln's recovery from self-abasement to
+create his destiny and shape the destiny of the New World; the health
+and humor and humanity of the west as Roosevelt remembered it. At
+every point in our history the reality had something in it to touch
+the imagination, the heart, to make one feel how complex and fortunate
+is the past we carry in us if we are Americans.
+
+The propagandists were also afraid of the plutocrats--as they were
+afraid of the myth, they were afraid of reality. They did not dare to
+say that America was an imperfect democracy whose greatness lay in the
+chance it gave to all men to work for perfection; they did not dare to
+say that the war itself must create democracy over again, they did not
+dare to proclaim liberty to this land or to all lands; in the name of
+unity they could not offend the enemies of human freedom.
+
+Moreover, the propagandists for unity had to defend the
+Administration. The rancor of politics had never actually disappeared
+in America, during wars; it was barely sweetened by a trace of
+patriotism three months after the war began. As a good fight needs two
+sides, defenders of the President were as happy as his opponents to
+call names, play politics, and distress the country. The groundwork
+for defeating the nation's aims in war was laid before those aims had
+been expressed; and one reason why we could make no proclamation of
+our purpose was that our purpose was clouded over; we had not yet gone
+back to the source of our national strength; and we had not yet begun
+to use our strength to accomplish a national purpose.
+
+We were effecting a combination of individual capacities--not a unity
+of will. We were adding one individual to another, a slow process: we
+needed to multiply one by the other--which can only be done in
+complete union of purpose.
+
+Some of the weakness of propaganda rose from its mixed intentions: to
+make us hate the enemy, to make us understand our Allies, to harden us
+for disaster, to defend the conduct of the war, to make us pay, to
+assure us that production was terrific, and then to make us pay more
+because production was inadequate; to silence the critics of the
+Administration, to appease the men of violence crying for Vichy's
+scalp or the men of violence crying for formulation of war aims. All
+these things _had_ to be done, promptly and effectively. They would
+have to be done no matter how unified in feeling we were; and they
+could not be done at all unless unity came first.
+
+
+  _Call Back the Pacifists_
+
+Small purposes were put first because the propagandists suffered from
+their own success. They had gone ahead of all and had brilliantly been
+teaching the American people the meaning of the European war; they
+were among the President's most potent allies and they deserve well of
+the country; the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and
+the other active interventionist groups were a rallying point for the
+enemies of Hitler, and a strong point for attack by all the pacifists.
+But the moment the aim of these committees was accomplished and war
+was declared, the first objective must have been the re-incorporation
+of the pacifist 40% of our population into the functioning national
+group. The actual enemies of the country soon declared themselves; the
+hidden ones could be discovered. The millions who did not want to go
+to war had to be persuaded first of all that _we_ understood why
+_they_ had been pacifists; we could not treat them as cowards, or
+pro-Germans, or Reds, or idiots. We needed the best of them to unite
+the country, and all of them to fight for it.
+
+Our propagandists did not know how to turn to their advantage the
+constant, native, completely sensible pacifism of the American people,
+especially of the Midwestern Americans. If the history of the United
+States has meaning, the pacifism of the Midwest is bound to become
+dominant; our part in the first World War achieved grandeur because
+the people of the Middle West, at least, meant it to be a war to end
+war, a war to end pacifism also, because there would be no need for
+it. The people of the Middle West want our position in the world to
+keep us out of the wars of other nations; they saw no wars into which
+we could be drawn. They were wrong--but their instincts were not
+wrong. They do not believe that the wars of the United States have
+been like the wars of other nations; nor that the United States must
+now look forward to such a series of wars as every nation of Europe
+has fought for domination or survival. This may be naive, as to the
+past and the future; but it is a naivete we cannot brush aside. It
+rises from too many natural causes. And the people of the Middle West
+may, if need be, fight to make their dream of peace come true; they
+will have to fight the American imperialists, whom they have fought
+before; and this time they will have new allies; for the pacifist of
+the Midwest will be joined by the pacifists of the industrial cities;
+and the great hope of the future is that the pacifists of America will
+help to organize the world after the war.
+
+_They will not help if they remain isolationists; and they will remain
+isolationist, in the middle of a global war, until they are certain
+that a world-order they can join is to be the outcome of the war._
+Again, our propagandists have to understand isolationism, an historic
+American tradition in one sense, a falsehood in another. Our dual
+relation to Europe is expressed in two phrases:
+
+    We _came from_ Europe.
+    We _went away from_ Europe.
+
+For a time we were anti-European; now we are non-Europe; if Europe
+changes, we may become pro-European; but we can never be part of
+Europe. Isolation is half our story; communication the other. On the
+foundation of half the truth, the isolationist built the fairy tale of
+physical separation; the interventionist, on the basis of our
+communication with Europe, built more strongly--the positive overbore
+the negative. Yet the whole structure of our relation to Europe has to
+be built on both truths, we have to balance one strength with the
+other. We cannot make war or make peace without the help of the
+isolationists; and to jeer at them because they failed to understand
+the mathematics of air power and sea-bases is not to reconcile them
+to us; nor, for that matter, is it peculiarly honest. For few of those
+who wanted us to go to war against England's enemy warned us that we
+should have to fight Japan also; and none, so far as I know, told us
+that the task of a two-ocean war might be for several years a burden
+of losses and defeat.
+
+The defeat of pacifist isolationism was not accomplished by the
+interventionists, but by Japan. The interventionists, because they
+were better prophets, gained the appearance of being truer patriots;
+they were actually more intelligent observers of the war in Europe and
+more passionately aware of its meaning. But they can be trusted with
+propaganda only if they recognize the positive value of their former
+enemies, and do not try to create a caste of ex-pacifist
+"untouchables." That is the method of totality; it is Hitler declaring
+that liberals cannot take part in ruling Germany, and Communists
+cannot be Germans. Unity does not require us to destroy those who have
+differed with us, it requires total agreement as to aims, and
+temporary assent as to methods; we cannot tolerate the action of those
+who want Hitler to defeat us, just as the body cannot tolerate cells
+which proliferate in disharmony with other cells, and cause cancer. We
+cannot afford the time to answer every argument before we take any
+action, so temporary assent is needed (the Executive in war time
+automatically has it because he orders action without argument). In
+democratic countries we add critical examination after the event, and
+free discussion of future policy as correctives to error. None of
+these break into unity; none requires the isolation of any group
+except the enemies of the State.
+
+The purpose of unity is effective action--more tanks and planes,
+delivered more promptly; more pilots, better trained; more people
+helping one another in the readjustments of war. It is part of the
+groundwork of morale; in a democracy it is based on reconciliation,
+not on revenge.
+
+
+  _The Limits of Criticism_
+
+The pacifists and the isolationists are being punished for their
+errors if their legitimate emotions are not recognized as part of the
+natural composition of the American mind. Criticism presents a problem
+more irritating because it is constantly changing its form and because
+no principle of action has been evolved.
+
+At one of the grimmest moments of the war, a correspondent of the _New
+York Times_ wrote that "for a while not politics but the war effort
+appeared to have undergone an 'adjournment'". At another, the
+President remarked that he did not care whether Democrats or
+Republicans were elected, provided Congress prosecuted the war
+energetically, and comment on this was that the President wanted to
+smash the two-party system, in order to have a non-critical Congress
+under him as he had had in 1933.
+
+Both of these items suggest, that propaganda has not yet taught us how
+to criticize our government in war time. The desirable limits of
+criticism have not been made clear. Every attack on the Administration
+has been handled as if it were treason; and there has been a faint
+suggestion of party pride in the achievements of our factories and of
+our bombers. Neither the war nor criticism of the war can be a
+party-matter; and no party-matter can be tolerated in the path of the
+war effort. All Americans know this, but the special application of
+this loyalty to our present situation has to be clarified. It has been
+left obscure.
+
+For the question of criticism is connected with the problem of unity
+in the simplest and most satisfying way. The moment we have unity, we
+can allow all criticism which rises from any large group of people.
+Off-center criticism, from small groups, is dangerous. It does not ask
+questions in the public mind, and its tendency is to divert energies,
+not to combine them; small groups, if they are not disloyal, are the
+price we pay for freedom of expression in war time; it is doubtful
+whether, at present, any American group can do much harm; it is even a
+matter of doubt whether Eugene V. Debs or several opposition senators
+were a graver danger to the armies of the United States in 1917. Small
+groups may be tolerated or, under law, suppressed; large groups never
+expose themselves to prosecution, but their criticism is serious and
+unless it is turned to advantage, it may be dangerous.
+
+The tendency of any executive, in war time, is to consider any
+criticism as a check on war effort. It is. If a commanding officer has
+to take five minutes to explain an order, five minutes are lost; if
+the President, or the head of OPM, has to defend an action or reply to
+a critic, energy is used up, time is lost. But time and energy may be
+lost a hundred times more wastefully if the explanation is not given,
+if the criticism is not uttered and grows internally and becomes
+suspicion and fear. Freedom of criticism is, in our country, a
+positive lever for bringing morale into logical relation to events.
+The victims of criticism can use it positively, their answers can
+create confidence; and best of all, it can be anticipated, so that it
+can do no harm.
+
+But this is true only if the right to criticize is subtly transformed
+into a duty; if, in doing his duty, the citizen refuses to criticize
+until he is fully informed; if the State makes available to the
+citizen enough information on which criticism can be based. Then the
+substance and the intention of criticism become positive factors in
+our fight for freedom.
+
+Since it is freedom we are fighting for.
+
+Freedom, nothing else, is the source of unity--our purpose in the war,
+our reason for fighting. On a low level of survival we have forgotten
+some of our differences and combined our forces to fight because we
+were attacked; on the high level which makes us a nation we are united
+to fight for freedom, and this unites us to one another because it
+unites us with every American who ever fought for freedom. Most
+particularly our battle today unites us with those who first
+proclaimed liberty throughout the land.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+The Forgotten Document
+
+
+To distract attention, to put people's minds on useless or bewildering
+projects is a bit of sabotage, in a total war. It is well enough to
+divert people, for a moment, so that they are refreshed; but no one
+has the right to confuse a clear issue or to start inessential
+projects or to ask people to look at anything except the job in hand.
+
+For five minutes, I propose a look at the Declaration of Independence,
+because it is the one document essential to our military and moral
+success; it is the standard by which we can judge the necessity of all
+projects; and although our destiny, and the means to fulfill it, are
+written into it, the Declaration is the forgotten document of American
+history. We remember the phrases too often repeated by politicians and
+dreamers; we do not study the hard realistic plan of national action
+embodied in every paragraph of the instrument.
+
+The famous phrases at the beginning give the moral, and revolutionary,
+reason for action; the magnificent ground plan of the character and
+history of the American people is explained in the forgotten details
+of the Declaration; and nothing in the conservative Constitution could
+do more than delay the unfolding of the plan or divide its fruits a
+little unevenly.
+
+I suggest that the Declaration supplies the _motive_ of action for
+today; the moment we understand it, we have a definition of America, a
+specific blueprint of what we have been, what we are, and what we can
+become--and the action necessary for our future evolves from this;
+moreover the unnecessary action is likewise defined. Our course before
+we were attacked and our plans for the world after the war may seem
+the mere play of prejudice and chance; but the destiny of America
+will be determined not by the affections of one group or the fears of
+another, nor by hysteria and passion; our fate will be determined by
+the whole course of our history--and by our decision to continue its
+direction or to reverse it.
+
+The rest of this book flows out of this belief in the decisive role of
+the Declaration, but it does not attempt to indicate a course of
+action in detail. For the sake of illustration I cite these instances.
+
+_Q._ Should the U.S. try to democratize the Germans or accept the view
+that the Germans are a race incapable of self-government?
+
+_A._ The history of immigration, based on the Declaration, proves that
+Germans are capable of being good and great democratic citizens.
+
+_Q._ Can the U.S. unite permanently with any single nation or any
+exclusive group of nations?
+
+_A._ Our history, under the Declaration, makes it impossible.
+
+_Q._ Can the U.S. join a world federation regulating specific economic
+problems, such as access to raw materials, tariffs, etc.?
+
+_A._ Nothing in the Declaration is against, everything in our history
+is for, such a move.
+
+_Q._ Can the U.S. fight the war successfully without accepting the
+active principles of the Totalitarian States?
+
+_A._ If our history is any guide, the only way we can _lose_ the war
+is by failing to fight it in our own way.
+
+I have already indicated the possibility that our whole military grand
+plan must be based on variety, which is the characteristic of America
+created by specific passages in the Declaration; I am sure that the
+whole grand plan of civilian unity (the plan of morale and propaganda)
+has to return to the leading lines of our history, if we want to act
+quickly, harmoniously and effectively; and the peace we make will be
+another Versailles, with another Article X in the Covenant, if we make
+it without returning to the sources of our strength.
+
+So, if we want to win in the field and at home, win the war and the
+peace, we must be aware of our history and of the principles laid down
+in 1776 and never, in the long run, betrayed.
+
+
+  _To Whom It May Concern_
+
+The Declaration is in four parts and all of them have some bearing on
+the present.
+
+The first explains why the Declaration is issued. The words are so
+familiar that their significance is gone; but if we remember that days
+were spent in revision and the effect of every word was calculated, we
+can assume that there are no accidents, that the Declaration is
+precise and says what it means. Here is the passage:
+
+     "_When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
+     one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
+     them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,
+     the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and
+     of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
+     of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
+     impel them to the separation._"
+
+The first official utterance of America is based on _human
+necessity_--not the necessity of princes or powers.
+
+It is the utterance of a people, not a nation. It invokes first Nature
+and then Nature's God as lawgivers.
+
+It asks independence and equality--in the same phrase; the habit of
+nations, to enslave or be enslaved, is not to be observed in the New
+World.
+
+And finally "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; the first
+utterance of America is addressed not to the nations of the world, but
+to the men and women who inhabit them.
+
+_Human--people--Nature--Nature's God--mankind._
+
+These are the words boldly written across the map of America. A
+century and a half of change have not robbed one of them of their
+power--because they were not fad-words, not the catchwords of a
+revolution; they were words with cold clear meanings--and they
+destroyed feudalism in Europe for a hundred and sixty years.
+
+The practical application of the preamble is this: whenever we have
+spoken to the people of other nations, as we did in the Declaration,
+we have been successful; we have failed only when we have addressed
+ourselves to governments. The time is rapidly coming when our only
+communication with Europe must be over the heads of its rulers, to the
+people. It does not seem practical; but we shall see later that, for
+us, it has always been good politics.
+
+
+  _The Logic of Freedom_
+
+The next passage in the Declaration is the one with all the
+quotations. There can be little harm in reprinting it:
+
+     "_We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
+     created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
+     certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
+     and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
+     Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
+     powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form
+     of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
+     Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
+     new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
+     organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
+     likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed,
+     will dictate that Governments long established should not be
+     changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
+     experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to
+     suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
+     abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
+     long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the
+     same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute
+     Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off
+     such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
+     security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these
+     Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them
+     to alter their former System of Government The history of the
+     present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries
+     and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment
+     of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let
+     Facts be submitted to a candid world._"
+
+Starting off with a rhetorical device--the pretense that its heresies
+are acceptable commonplaces, this long paragraph builds a philosophy
+of government on the unproved and inflammatory assumptions which it
+calls "self-evident". The self-evident truths are, in effect, _the
+terms agreed upon by the signers_. These signers now appear for the
+first time, they say "_we_ hold", they say that, to themselves,
+certain truths are self-evident. The first three of "these truths" are
+some general statements about "all men"; the fourth and fifth tell why
+governments are established and why they should be overthrown. These
+two are the objective of the first three; but they have been neglected
+in favor of adolescent disputation over the equality of men at birth,
+and they have been forgotten in our adult pursuit of happiness which
+has often made us forget that life and liberty, no less than large
+incomes, are among our inalienable rights.
+
+The historians of the Declaration always remind us of John Locke's
+principle that governments exist only to protect property; when States
+fail they cease to be legitimate, they can be overthrown; and Locke is
+taken to be, more than Rousseau, the inspiration of the Declaration.
+The Declaration, it happens, never mentions the right to own property;
+but the argument for revolution is essentially the same: when a
+government ceases to function, it should be overthrown. The critical
+point is the definition of the chief duty of a government. The
+Colonists, in the Declaration, said it is to secure certain rights to
+all men; not to guarantee privileges granted by the State, but to
+protect rights which are born when men are born, in them, with
+them--inalienably theirs.
+
+So the Declaration sets us for ever in opposition to the totalitarian
+State--for that State has all the inalienable rights, and the people
+exist only to protect the State.
+
+The catalogue of rights is comparatively unimportant; once we agree
+that the State exists to secure inherent rights, the great
+revolutionary stride has been taken; and immediately we see that our
+historic opposition to Old Europe is of a piece with our present
+opposition to Hitler. The purpose of our State is not the purpose of
+the European States; we might work with them, side by side, but a
+chemical union would result only in an explosion.
+
+There is one word artfully placed in the description of the State; the
+Declaration does not say that governments derive their powers from the
+consent of the governed. It says that governments instituted among men
+to protect their rights "derive their _just_ powers from the consent of
+the governed". Always realistic, the Declaration recognizes the
+tendency of governors to reach out for power and to absorb whatever the
+people fail to hold. The idea of consent is also revolutionary--but the
+moment "inalienability" is granted, consent to be governed _must_
+follow. The fascist state recognizes _no_ inalienable right, and needs
+no consent from its people.
+
+It is "self-evident", I think, that we have given wrong values to the
+three elements involved. We have talked about the "pursuit of
+happiness"; we have been impressed by the idea of any right being ours
+"for keeps", inalienable; and we have never thought much about the
+fundamental radicalism of the Declaration: that it makes government
+our servant, instructed _by us_ to protect our rights. The chain of
+reasoning, as the Declaration sets it forth, leads to a practical
+issue:
+
+  All men are created equal--their equality lies in their having
+    rights;
+
+  these rights cannot be alienated;
+
+  governments are set up to prevent alienation;
+
+  power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people
+    to the government;
+
+  and if one government fails, the people give the power to
+    another.
+
+So in the first three hundred words of the Declaration the purpose of
+our government is logically developed.
+
+
+  _Blueprint of America_
+
+There follows first a general and then a particular condemnation of
+the King of England. This is the longest section of the Declaration.
+It is the section no one bothers to read; the statute of limitations
+has by this time outlawed our bill of complaint against George the
+Third. But the grievances of the Colonials were not high-pitched
+trifles; every complaint rises out of a definite desire to live under
+a decent government; and the whole list is like a picture, seen in
+negative, of the actual government the Colonists intended to set up;
+and the basic habits of American life, its great traditions, its good
+fortune and its deficiencies are all foreshadowed in this middle
+section. Here--for the sake of completeness--is the section:
+
+"_He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary
+for the public good._
+
+"_He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and
+pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his
+Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly
+neglected to attend them._
+
+"_He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large
+districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of
+Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and
+formidable to tyrants only._
+
+"_He has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual,
+uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public
+Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with
+his measures._
+
+"_He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with
+manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people._
+
+"_He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause
+others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of
+Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise;
+the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of
+invasion from without, and convulsions within._
+
+Here I omit one "count", reserved for separate consideration.
+
+"_He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his
+Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers._
+
+"_He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of
+their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries._
+
+"_He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of
+Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance._
+
+"_He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without
+the Consent of our legislatures._
+
+"_He has affected to render the Military Independent of and superior
+to the Civil power._
+
+"_He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign
+to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent
+to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For quartering large bodies of
+armed troops among us: For protecting them by a mock Trial from
+punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants
+of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the
+world: For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by
+jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended
+offenses: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a
+neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government,
+and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and
+fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these
+Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable
+Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For
+suspending our own Legislatures and declaring themselves invested with
+power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever._
+
+"_He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his
+Protection and waging War against us._
+
+"_He has plundered our seas, ravished our Coasts, burnt our towns, and
+destroyed the lives of our people._
+
+"_He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries
+to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun
+with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
+most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized
+nation._
+
+"_He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high
+Seas to bear Arms against friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves
+by their Hands._
+
+"_He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored
+to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
+Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction
+of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions
+We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated
+Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose
+character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is
+unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in
+attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to
+time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable
+jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of
+our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native
+justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our
+common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably
+interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf
+to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore,
+acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold
+them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace
+Friends._"
+
+The eighteen paragraphs of denunciation fall into seven general
+sections:
+
+  The King has thwarted representative government;
+
+  he has obstructed justice;
+
+  he has placed military above civil power;
+
+  he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed;
+
+  he has abolished the rule of Law;
+
+  he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity
+    of the Colonies;
+
+  he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war
+    on them.
+
+So the bill of complaint signifies these things about the Founders of
+our Country:
+
+  They demanded government with the consent, by the
+    representatives, of the governed.
+
+  They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not
+    tolerate any power superior to law--whether royal or military.
+
+  They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats,
+    wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the
+    establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.
+
+  They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no
+    restraints on commerce and industry.
+
+  They intended to be prosperous.
+
+  They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.
+
+These were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in
+England or France; they were the practical application of Locke and
+Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and the Roundheads. Little in the
+whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies;
+troops had been quartered in Ireland, trial by jury suspended in
+England, tyrants then as now created their Praetorian guard or Storm
+Troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early
+time had been considered as tributaries of the Mother Country.
+
+
+  _The Practical "Dream"_
+
+The American Colonists were about to break the traditions of European
+settlement, and with it the traditions of European government. And,
+with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence,
+they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one
+specification which had never been made before, and _could_ never have
+been made before:
+
+"_He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for
+that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
+refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
+raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands._"
+
+This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on
+representative government; it is so important that it comes before the
+items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor
+in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to
+understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our
+systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our
+mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the
+act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this
+unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its
+basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be.
+
+This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two
+processes by which America was made:
+
+    Immigration
+    Pioneering
+
+With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which
+means political equality, in between the two other factors.
+Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth,
+the new thing in the new world, that one could _become_ what one
+willed and worked to become--one could, regardless of birth or race or
+creed, _become an American_.
+
+So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of
+populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had
+no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the
+habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their
+prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to
+Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to
+America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in
+Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not
+a dream, but something grander and greater--citizenship, equality
+under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his
+ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the
+colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many
+lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands
+from the Appalachians to the Mississippi--or as much of it as they
+could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763,
+the Crown took over _all_ title to the 250,000 square miles of land
+which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the
+best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man
+could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no
+common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America,
+uninterrupted since 1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move
+westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become
+Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the
+forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was
+one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not
+across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had
+taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was
+broken; they were cut off from Europe, forbidden to bring over its
+men, forbidden to send over their goods. For the first time America
+was isolated from Europe.
+
+So the British Crown touched every focal spot--and bruised it. The
+outward movement, to and from Europe, always fruitful for America, was
+stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. The
+energies of America had always expressed themselves in movement; when
+an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then
+the explosion of forces we call the Revolution.
+
+And nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the
+Revolution created. The thing that people afterward chose to call "the
+American dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the
+substantial fabric of American life--a systematic linking of free
+land, free trade, free citizenship, in a free society.
+
+A grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the
+Declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the
+Constitution. As Charles Beard is often made the authority for this
+economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of
+the Declaration may be cited in evidence:
+
+  the great estates were broken up;
+
+  the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally
+    broken;
+
+  in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted
+    and it disappeared steadily from the old.
+
+And the Ordnance of 1787, last great act of the Continental Congress,
+inspired by the Declaration, created the Northwest Territory, the
+heart of America for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and
+intelligence which the Constitution in all its wisdom did not surpass.
+
+That is what the Declaration accomplished. It set in action _all_ the
+forces that ultimately made America. The action rose out of the final
+section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as
+"Representatives of the United States of America", the signers declare
+that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and
+Independent States...." In this clear insight, the Declaration says
+that the things separating one people from another have already
+happened--differences in experiences, desires, habits--and that the
+life of the Colonies is already so independent of Britain that the
+purely political bond must be dissolved.
+
+"_WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America,
+in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the
+world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by
+authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and
+declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be,
+Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all
+Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection
+between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally
+dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full
+Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
+Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States
+may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm
+reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to
+each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor._"
+
+So finally, as a unity of free and independent States, the new nation
+arrogates to itself four specific powers:
+
+    To levy war
+      conclude peace
+      contract alliances
+      establish commerce.
+
+Only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a
+vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant
+that they had to be separately written down; three of
+them--war--peace--alliances--are wholly international; the fourth,
+commerce, at least partly so. The signers of the Declaration made no
+mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain
+independent, they were fighting _against_ isolation.
+
+The error we must not make about the Declaration is to think of it as
+a purely domestic document, dealing with taxes and election of
+representatives and Redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our
+national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our
+life out of English hands; and the moment this is done, the
+Declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations,
+and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of Europe.
+
+At this moment our intercourse with the nations of Europe is a matter
+of life and death--death to the destroyer of free Europe or death to
+ourselves; but if we live, life for all Europe, also. Like parachute
+troops, our address to Europe must precede our armies; we have to know
+what to say to Europe, to whom to say, how to say it. And the answer
+was provided by the Declaration which let all Europe come to us--but
+held us independent of all Europe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"The Population of These States"
+
+
+In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and
+it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to
+generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation
+it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to
+prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to
+the picture it distorts.
+
+
+  _English-Speaking Aliens_
+
+The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic,
+Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her
+husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying
+beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly
+false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the
+most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the
+bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly
+_one third of all_ the immigrants to the United States, were
+English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was
+from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal
+sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one
+finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years;
+Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement
+to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one
+of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably
+was the principal source for thirty years more--from 1790 until
+1820--during which time no official figures were kept.
+
+Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve
+spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the
+tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from
+British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all
+knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions
+fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or
+political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends
+already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the
+country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their
+upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and
+willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without
+causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the
+national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new
+nation.
+
+It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants;
+they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they
+helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by
+abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even
+when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain
+British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of
+change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the
+minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an
+American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the
+man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a
+Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America
+in the mold of his old country.
+
+
+  _Who Asked Them to Come?_
+
+The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it
+makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the
+foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later
+the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to
+America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals
+as well as saints. The picture is false not only in perspective, but
+in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the
+middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United
+States actively desired and solicited immigration.
+
+Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell
+off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who
+had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder
+brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first
+years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens
+into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the
+railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the
+Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age
+and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and
+again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for
+shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.
+
+Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any
+restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might
+demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner
+(the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a
+fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The
+only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not
+lower the totals.
+
+
+  _America Was Fulfilment!_
+
+The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact
+without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was
+the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did
+not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to
+the only poverty which is degrading--the poverty which is accepted as
+permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden
+mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas,
+brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steamship
+agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its
+immigrants--the promise and hope of better things for their children.
+America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.
+
+No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that
+the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater
+comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a
+projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction
+against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with
+luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income,
+in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and
+disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others.
+The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much.
+At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the
+Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen
+other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they
+had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand
+transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the
+new world.
+
+And this confidence--which was always justified--became as much a part
+of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system,
+our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our
+passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other
+essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from
+all other nations.
+
+The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself
+there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he
+could _become_ an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute
+specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of
+the country.
+
+As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the
+native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political
+rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the
+government placed anything in the way of social equality; the
+immigrant's life was his own to make.
+
+This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or
+Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or
+brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the
+life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six
+generations, get along without him.
+
+
+  _America Is Various_
+
+During the years in which big business solicited immigration and
+organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an
+unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was
+"working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people
+who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were
+wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived,
+forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with
+an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at
+the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly
+foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of
+unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization;
+sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately
+isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be
+kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of
+comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and
+Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories,
+living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to
+the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming
+in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with
+America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in
+Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it
+is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ...
+a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ...
+dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized
+Europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious
+leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could
+accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood"
+difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)
+
+The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from
+South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs
+and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over
+"assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's
+existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find
+a place--not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding
+uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as
+typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him,
+seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety
+the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of
+religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a
+universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country
+out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw
+infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and
+admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action
+was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit
+that the important action of creating America had come to an end.
+James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future
+"could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in
+an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far
+better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better
+world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one
+ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof
+of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and
+cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it
+politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us
+against the totalitarians who were yet to come.
+
+This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more
+practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something
+celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done _to_ the
+foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to
+be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but
+consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not
+become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as
+Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience
+of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the
+America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native
+born and the older immigrants wept because _their_ America and their
+way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them
+by; America had to be reborn.
+
+So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and
+the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and
+prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not
+observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and
+relatively unimportant.
+
+The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social
+discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to
+slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good
+land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions;
+second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took
+scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty
+work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.
+
+But the practical people forgot the great practical side--which is
+also the mystical side--of our immigration. For the first time since
+the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made
+possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As
+Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through
+faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the
+eyes of God, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom
+spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a
+Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or
+alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their
+faith could make of them true Americans.
+
+The instant practical consequences of this new element in human
+history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of
+early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and
+explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans
+into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to
+Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and
+energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and
+Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of
+trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.
+
+This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical
+as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation
+stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a
+practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration
+invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality,
+snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy
+life--and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was
+as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had
+other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep
+under the roots of the European system--and loosened them so that a
+tremor could shake the system entirely.
+
+
+  _Change and Status_
+
+For the European system stood against _becoming_; its objective was to
+remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of
+time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady
+long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it
+possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons,
+its symbols, its systems--including the symbols and the systems by
+which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious
+complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men
+from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over
+Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations
+waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors
+thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably
+Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and
+Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or
+hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts
+came--the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In
+each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each
+country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted.
+And in each country one class--the same class--ruled, and all other
+classes served.
+
+By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established
+church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but
+the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his _station_
+in life, his civil _status_, the _standing_ of his family in the
+financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo
+remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a
+middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while
+an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment
+imagined that he could become an Englishman--any more than a Scot. The
+English knew that names change; men do not.
+
+_Only when they came to America, they did._
+
+They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming
+American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive
+nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established
+religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.
+
+To the familiar European systems of damnation--by original sin, by economic
+determinism, by pre-natal influence--has been added a new one--damnation by
+racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth
+of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born
+German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the
+inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to
+its loftiest point.
+
+We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal.
+The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and
+into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably
+suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled
+with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there
+is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor,
+huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both
+capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human
+beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we
+look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations.
+What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human
+liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human
+liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change
+and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our
+system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation
+excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant
+citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but
+we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it
+in _our_ schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate,
+but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the
+ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we
+abandon it, we nazify ourselves--and destroy the foundation of the
+Republic.
+
+
+  _Americans All_
+
+Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good
+Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our
+settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of
+fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the
+language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought
+from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second
+generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have
+encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss
+in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are
+being made to create a general American interest in the separate
+cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not
+lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for
+the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of
+Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their
+country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be
+interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that
+Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding
+to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant
+danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the
+supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense
+100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done
+to help all the others.
+
+Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of
+Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the
+President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that
+we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added
+"and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.)
+Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in
+American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All
+series and, especially, from the difficulties encountered, as well as
+from one special element of success.
+
+I set down some basic principles: that the programs would not
+_glorify_ one national group after another; that the interrelation of
+each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast
+obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would
+be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered
+if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be
+paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making
+of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the
+special contribution of any single group.
+
+These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was
+knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group
+would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious
+was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to
+the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own.
+We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national
+sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently
+ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's
+own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of
+the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American
+backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole
+problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested
+in America.
+
+On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More
+than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and
+women who were _not_ descendants of the national group presented that
+week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were
+from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the
+other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and
+Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and
+Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects
+of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were
+so much better Americans than anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred
+thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit;
+the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a
+fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to
+us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.
+
+Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the
+immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and
+that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for
+ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United
+States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American"
+will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater
+significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid
+down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government
+has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the
+colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant
+"colonies" as spies.
+
+If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the
+legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost
+in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be
+safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars,
+degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish
+itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with
+variations).
+
+
+  _Are We Anglo-Saxon?_
+
+At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American"
+become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions
+about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as
+Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the
+Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth
+and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with
+Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status, not
+on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor
+of those who did most for our history.
+
+There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which
+is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots--and the
+Scots-Irish--founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards
+to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain
+basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were
+good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were
+great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty
+and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War
+of Independence.
+
+Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and
+everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and
+purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in
+George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick
+but not in Eleuthere Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing
+and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his
+associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in
+Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as
+un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's
+test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was
+destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have
+to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz
+and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul
+Robeson and Jonas Lie.
+
+When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to
+belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For
+the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic
+manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the
+earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and
+presently they and their children were troubling about education, or
+civil service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free
+association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special
+fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will
+be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the
+settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples--and when
+they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged
+America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be
+destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make
+us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe
+(especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to
+destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.
+
+That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the
+help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never
+was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and
+Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and
+Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers,
+Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots,
+Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians.
+In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six
+nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots,
+Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many
+Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.
+
+
+  _The Creative Anglo-Saxon_
+
+The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America--the gift
+greater than all their other great gifts--was the conception of a
+state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By
+the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the
+Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they
+destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of
+Independence, the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was
+not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in
+England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality;
+on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were
+becoming American, even before a new nation was born.
+
+All that followed--the vast complexity of creating America, would have
+been impossible without that first supreme act of creative
+self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period
+established the principles of statehood and naturalization and
+citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they
+ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English
+and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still
+some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from
+New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the
+Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere;
+but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw.
+Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could
+_become_ equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of
+that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this
+country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else.
+With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives
+and sacred honor that it would happen again.
+
+So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations
+contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have
+to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the
+others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was
+theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.
+
+In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an
+immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will
+change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and
+starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order
+in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some
+of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have
+learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are
+powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be
+left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.
+
+But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the
+great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization--the idea
+of men making themselves over--as for a century and a half they have
+made themselves into Americans.
+
+
+  _An Experiment in Evolution_
+
+NOTE: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined it as it
+defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to
+mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us,
+we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential
+affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.
+
+Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a
+particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain
+foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for
+all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are
+basically haters of all foreigners will say that the _law_ accepts
+citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.
+
+It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and
+people are often the truest words about America; and one of the
+profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet
+or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly
+true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.
+
+In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we
+are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments.
+We can observe and compare. Under the inspiration of the eminent
+anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as
+it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans.
+Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they
+walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend
+to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm
+or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or
+standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.
+
+The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture.
+The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of
+Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American
+mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant).
+The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew
+is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the
+other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and
+one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the
+other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign";
+and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are
+foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself.
+The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American
+gesture takes its place.
+
+And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing
+in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as
+certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature
+changes in the atmosphere of liberty--as the mind and the spirit
+change.
+
+The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind
+(under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in
+America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom
+declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any
+race because they knew that the men of all races would become
+Americans. Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved
+today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in
+action.
+
+It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now
+have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in
+Europe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Address to Europe
+
+
+The communications of America and Europe have always run in two
+channels: our fumbling, foolish diplomacy, our direct, candid,
+successful dealings with the people.
+
+Our first word was to the people of Europe; the Declaration of
+Independence tried to incite the British people against their own
+Parliament; and the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" refers
+to citizens, not to chancelleries. The Declaration was addressed to
+the world; it was heard in Paris and later in a dozen provinces of
+Germany, and in Savoy and in Manchester, and presently along the
+Nevski and the Yellow River. Since 1776, the people of the world have
+always listened to us, and answered. We have never failed when we have
+spoken to the people.
+
+After the Declaration, the American people spoke to all the people of
+Europe in the most direct way: they invited Europeans to come here,
+offering them land, wages, freedom; presently our railroads and
+steamship lines solicited larger numbers; and the policy of the
+government added inducements. Free immigration, and free movement,
+demanded in the Declaration, made possible by laws under the
+Constitution, were creating America. In domestic life we saw it at
+once; but the effects of immigration on our dealings with Europe were
+not immediate.
+
+We need only remember that for a hundred and twenty years the peoples
+of Europe and the people of the United States were constantly writing
+to one another; not merely doing business together, but exchanging
+ideas, mingling in marriage, coming together as dispersed families
+come together. Whatever went on in the Mississippi Valley was known
+along the fjords and in the Volga basin and by the Danube; if sulphur
+was discovered in Louisiana it first impoverished Sicily--then brought
+Sicilians to Louisiana; Greeks knew that sponges were to be found off
+Tampa. And more and more people in America knew what was happening in
+Europe--a famine, a revolution, a brief era of peace, a repressive
+ministry, a reform bill. The constant interaction of Europe and
+America was one beat of our existence--it was in counterpoint to the
+tramp of the pioneer moving Westward; immigration and migration meshed
+together.
+
+Our government from time to time spoke to the governments of Europe. A
+tone of sharp reproof was heard at times, a warm word for
+revolutionaries was coupled with indignation against tyrants: Turkey,
+the Dual Monarchy, the Tsar, all felt the lash--or Congress hoped they
+felt it; in the Boer War, England was the victim of semi-official
+criticism; and whenever possible, we were the first to recognize
+republics, even if they failed to maintain themselves on the ruins of
+monarchy. We fluttered official papers and were embarrassed by
+protocol, not believing in it anyhow, and were outwitted or
+out-charmed by second-rate diplomatists of Europe.
+
+
+  _People and Protocol_
+
+The campaign platforms always demanded a "firm, vigorous, dignified"
+diplomacy; the diplomacy of Europe was outwardly correct, inwardly
+devious, shifting, flexible, and in our opinion corrupt. But our
+address to the _people_ of Europe was, in all this time, so candid, so
+persuasive, that we destroyed the chancelleries and recaptured our
+losses. The first great communication, after 1776, was made by
+Lincoln--it was not a single speech or letter, it was a constant
+appeal to the conscience of the British people, begging them, as the
+Declaration had done, to override the will of their rulers. And this
+appeal also was successful; few events in our relations with England
+are more moving than the action of the starving Midlanders. Their
+government, like their men of wealth and birth, like their press and
+parliament, were eager to see America split, and willing to see
+slavery upheld in order to destroy democracy. But the men and women of
+Manchester, starved by the Northern blockade of cotton, still begged
+their government not to interfere with the blockade--and sent word to
+Lincoln to assure him that the _people_ of Britain were on the side of
+liberty, imploring him "not to faint in your providential mission.
+While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let
+the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to
+spring up and work fresh misery to your children." Nor did Lincoln
+fail to respond; Americans who could interest Britain in the northern
+cause were unofficial ambassadors to the people; and our minister,
+Charles Francis Adams labored with all sorts and conditions of men to
+make the government of Britain accept the will of the British people.
+The Emancipation Proclamation was a final step in the domestic
+statesmanship of the war; it was also a step in the diplomacy of the
+war, for it insured us the good will of the British people; and that
+good will was vital to the success of the Union. The North was coming
+close to war with the _government_ of Britain, and the people's open
+prejudice in favor of Lincoln and freedom kept England from sufficient
+aid to the Confederacy.
+
+The next address of the United States to the people of Europe is a
+long tragedy, its consequences so dreadful today that we can barely
+analyze the steps by which the great work for human freedom was
+destroyed.
+
+
+  _Wilson to the World_
+
+Following the precedent of the Declaration, Woodrow Wilson began in
+1916 to address himself to the people of the nations at war in Europe.
+To ministries, German and British both, Wilson was sending
+expostulations on U-boats and embargos; to the peoples of Europe he
+addressed those speeches which were made at home; presently he wrote
+inquiries to the ministers which they were compelled to make public
+(since publication in neutral countries was certain). Then, after the
+Soviets of Russia had gone over the heads of the Foreign Offices, to
+appeal to the workers of the world, Wilson carried his own method to
+its necessary point and, after we entered the war, began the masterly
+series of addresses to the German people which were so effective in
+creating the atmosphere of defeat.
+
+They created at the same time the purposes of allied victory. The war
+ended and one of the magnificent spectacles of modern times occurred:
+the people of Europe were for a moment united, and they were united by
+an American declaring the objectives of American life. The moment was
+so brief that few knew all it meant until it had passed; in the
+excitement of spectacles and events, of plots and processions, this
+moment when Europe trembled with a new hope passed unnoticed.
+
+What happened later to Woodrow Wilson is tragic enough; but nothing
+can take away from America this great moment in European history--to
+which every observer bears testimony, even the most cynical. The
+defeated people of Germany saw in America their only defence against
+the rapacity of Clemenceau, the irresponsible, volatile opportunism of
+Lloyd George, the crafty merchandising of Orlando; the first "liberal"
+leader, Prince Max, had deliberately pretended acceptance of the
+fourteen points in order to embarrass Wilson; but he spoke the truth
+when he said that Wilson's ideals were cherished by the overwhelming
+majority of the German _people_; and quite correctly the Germans saw
+that nothing but American idealism stood between them and a peace of
+vengeance. The enthusiasm of the victorious peoples was less selfish,
+but it was equally great; a profound distrust of their leaders had
+grown in the minds of realistic Frenchmen and Britons, they sensed the
+incapacity of their leaders to raise the objectives of the war above
+the level of the "knockout blow" or the _revanche_. As the Germans
+cried to be protected in their defeat, the victorious people asked to
+be protected from such fruits of victory as Europe had known for a
+thousand years. The demagogues still shouted hoarsely for a noose for
+the Kaiser and the old order in Germany began to plan for the next
+time--but the people of Europe were united; they had gone through the
+same war and, for the first time in their history, they wanted the
+same peace. It was the first time that an American peace was proposed
+to them.
+
+
+_How Wilson Was Trapped_
+
+Woodrow Wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the
+time he returned to Paris for the actual business of the peace, he had
+become the spiritual leader of the world. He was not, however, the
+political leader of his own country--he had lost the Congressional
+elections and he allowed the diplomats of Europe to make use of this
+defeat. They began to cut him off from the people of Europe; he fell
+into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secret sessions, the
+quarrels and departures; once he recovered control, ordered steam up
+in the George Washington to take him home; but in the end he was
+outguessed--in the smart word, he was outsmarted. He had imagined that
+he could defeat the old Europe by refusing to recognize its intrigues.
+He had, in effect, declared that secret treaties and all commitments
+preceding the fourteen points couldn't exist; he had hoped that they
+would be cancelled to conform to his pious pretence of ignorance. And
+Clemenceau and Lloyd George kept him quarreling over a mile of
+boundary or a religious enclave within a racial minority; they stirred
+passions; they starved German children by an embargo; they rumored
+reparations; they promised to hang the Kaiser; they drew Wilson deeper
+into smaller conferences; they promised him a League about which their
+cynicism was boundless, and he let them have war guilt and reparations
+and the betrayal of the Russian revolution and the old European system
+triumphant. They had fretted him and tried him and they had made their
+own people forget the passionate faith Wilson had inspired; they made
+Wilson the agent of disillusion for all that was generous and hopeful
+in Europe. They could do it because the moment Wilson began to talk to
+the premiers, he stopped talking to the people. From the moment he
+allowed the theme of exclusive war guilt to be announced, he cut
+himself off from all Germany; he did not know the temper of the
+working class in Europe, and he refused to listen to the men he
+himself had sent to report on Russia, which did not help him with the
+radical trade unions in France or the liberals in England. One by one
+the nations fell back into their ancient groove, the Italians sullenly
+nursing a grievance, the French whipping up a drama of revenge and
+memory in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the British "isolating"
+themselves in virtual control of the Continent, everybody frightened
+of Russia--and everyone still listening for another word of honest
+truth from Wilson, who was silent; for America was starting on a long
+era of isolation from Europe (the first in a century), an aberration
+in American life, against all its actual traditions, in keeping only
+with its vulgar oratory.
+
+
+  _The Excommunication of Europe_
+
+The United States had no obligations to the nations which emerged out
+of the Treaty of Versailles, only a human obligation to their people
+to keep faith with them. The people of Germany believed in all fervor
+that they had gained an armistice and sought peace on the basis of the
+fourteen points; the people of France and England believed that their
+own governments had accepted the same points. And the same people
+might have been stirred to insist on a peace of reconciliation--not
+with princes and ministers, but with peoples--if Wilson and the
+Americans had continued to communicate with them.
+
+We withdrew into a stuffy silence. Just as we played a queer game of
+protocol and refused to "recognize" the USSR, so we sulked because the
+old bitch Europe wasn't being a gentleman--the only communication we
+made to Europe was when we dunned her for money. We have seen how the
+years of Harding and Coolidge affected our domestic life; they were
+not only a reaction against the fervor of the war months; they were a
+carefully calculated reaction against basic American policy at home
+and abroad; they betrayed American enterprise, delivered industry into
+the hands of finance, degraded government, laughed at corruption, and
+under the guise of "a return to normalcy" attempted to revive the dead
+conservatism of McKinley and Penrose in American politics.
+
+In this period, it is no wonder that we failed to utter one kind word
+to help the first democratic government in Germany, that we trembled
+with fear of the Reds, sneered at British labor until it became
+respectable enough to send us a Prime Minister, and excluded more and
+more rigorously the people of Europe whose blood had created our own.
+
+Slowly, as the depression of 1929-32 squeezed us, we began to see that
+our miseries connected us with Europe; it was a Republican president
+who first attempted to address Europe; but Mr. Hoover's temperament
+makes it difficult for him to speak freely to anyone; the talks with
+Ramsay MacDonald were pleasurable; the offer of a moratorium was the
+first kindness to Europe in a generation of studied American
+indifference. It failed (because France still preferred to avenge
+herself on Germany); and thereafter we had too many unpleasant things
+to do at home.
+
+
+  _One Good Deed_
+
+We had, in the interval, spoken once to all the world. On the day the
+Japanese moved into Manchuria we had, in effect, notified the British
+that we chose not to accept the destruction or dismemberment of a
+friendly nation. The cynical indifference of Sir John Simon was the
+first intimation of the way Europe felt about American "idealism". It
+was also the first step toward "non-intervention" in Spain and the
+destruction of Europe at the hands of Adolf Hitler. When we were
+rebuffed by Downing Street, we sulked; we did not attempt to speak to
+the people of Asia, or try to win the British public to our side. We
+had lost the habit. We were not even candid in our talks with the
+Chinese whose cause we favored because we had Japan (and American
+dealers in oil and scrap iron) to appease.
+
+In 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected leader of a Germany which had been
+out of communication with us for a generation. The United States which
+had been in the minds of generations of Germans, was forgotten by the
+people. In a few years Hitler had overthrown the power of France on
+the Continent, challenged Communism as an international force, and
+frightened the British Empire into an ignoble flutter of appeasement.
+
+To that dreary end our failure of communication had tended. We were
+the one power which might have held Europe together--in a League, in a
+mere hope of friendship and peace between nations, in the matrix of
+the fourteen points if nothing more. The moment we withdrew from
+Europe, its nations fell apart, not merely into victors and
+vanquished, but into querulous, distrustful, and angry people, each
+whipped into hysteria by demagogues or soothed to complaisance by
+frightened ministers.
+
+The obligation to address Europe is no longer a moral one. For our own
+security, for the cohesion of our own people, for victory over every
+element that works to break America into hostile parts--now we have
+the golden opportunity again, to speak to Europe, and to ask Europe to
+answer. As we look back on our ancient triumphs with the peoples of
+Europe and the sour end to which we let them come, this new chance is
+heaven-sent, undeserved, as if we could live our lives over again. And
+it is nearly so--for if we want to have a life to live in the future,
+if it is still to be the confident, secure life of a United America,
+we must speak now to Europe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Definition of America
+
+
+We have two prodigious victories to gain--the war and the world after
+the war. The chatter about not "defining war aims" because specific
+aims are bound to disturb us, is dangerously beside the point, because
+the kind of world we will create depends largely on the kind of war we
+wage. If we nazify ourselves to win, we will win a nazified world; if
+we communize ourselves, we will probably share a modified Marxian
+world with the Soviets; and if we win by intensification of our
+democracy, we will create the only kind of world in which we can live.
+And, as noted in discussing the strategy of the war, the chances are
+that we can only win if we divine the essential nature of our people
+and create a corresponding strategy.
+
+In addition to the direct military need for knowing what kind of
+people we are, there is the propaganda need, so that we can create a
+national unity and put aside the constant irritation of partisanship,
+the fear of "incidents", the wastage of emotional energy in quarrels
+among ourselves. And there is a third reason for an exact and candid
+review of what we are: it is our future.
+
+When this war ends we will make, in one form or another, solemn
+agreements with the nations of the world, our allies and what is left
+of our enemies. We know almost nothing about any of them--we, the
+American people. Our State Department knows little enough; what it
+knows, it has not communicated to us; and we have never been
+interested enough to make discoveries of our own. We are about to
+commit a huge international polygamy, with forty picture brides, each
+one in a different national costume.
+
+Some conditions of this mass marriage are the subject of the next
+section of this book. Here I am concerned with the one thing we can do
+to make the preliminary steps intelligent. We cannot learn all we need
+to know about all the other nations of the world; but we can reflect
+on some things within ourselves, we can know ourselves better; and on
+this knowledge we can erect the framework into which the other nations
+will fit; or out of which they will remain if they choose not to fit.
+We can, by knowing a few vital things about ourselves, learn a lot
+about South America and Europe and Asia and Australia; what _we_ are
+will determine whom we will marry, whom reject, and whom we will set
+up, if agreeable, in an unsanctified situation. The laws of man, in
+many states, require certificates of eligibility to marry, the
+services of the church inquire if an obstacle exists. Before we enter
+into compacts full of tragic and noble possibilities, we might also
+make inquiries. Something in us shies away from the pomp of the old
+diplomacy--what is that something? We used to like revolutionaries and
+never understood colonial exploitation--how do these things affect us
+now? Are we prepared to deal with a government in one country and a
+people in another? Is it possible for us to ally ourselves to
+Communists, reformed fascists, variously incomplete democracies,
+cooperative democratic monarchies, and centralized empires, all at the
+same time? Is there anything in us which requires us to make terms
+with Britain about India, with Russia about propaganda, with Sweden
+about exports, before we make a new world with all of them? Can we,
+honorably, enter any agreement, with any state or with all states,
+while they are ignorant of our character--as ignorant, possibly, as we
+are of theirs?
+
+The difficulty we are in is nicely doubled, because introspection is
+no happy habit and we say that we _know_ all about America, or we say
+that America cannot be known--it is too big, too varied, too
+complicated. And these two opposite statements are in themselves a
+beginning of a definition. America, by this testimony, is a country,
+large, varied, complex, inhabited by people who either understand
+their country perfectly or will not make an effort to understand it. I
+would not care to rest on this definition--but it shows the need of
+definition.
+
+
+  _Mathematics of Character_
+
+By "definition of America" I mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we
+are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from
+others. We are, for instance, the only country lying between the
+Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 25 deg. 35' and 49 deg. north latitude. This
+definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a
+criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact,
+the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied
+climate, our resources, our bigness with _its_ consequences in the
+temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical _fact_.)
+
+Not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in
+mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of
+jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a
+superiority. Moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put
+on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other
+what is exclusively ours--and make a comparison, a guide to
+international conduct "on scientific principles". We would know how
+far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm
+basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or
+made compromise impossible.
+
+We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social
+boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we
+can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a
+diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics
+can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the
+hope of a better life--the number who came can be written down, the
+intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination
+can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by
+those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of
+men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far
+as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the
+great complex of our national character.
+
+We are defined by events--immigration was an event. But immigrants
+came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England.
+When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us.
+It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both
+absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries
+or has all our habits, because none has had our history--that is the
+base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with
+us, but we differ from each relatively--in some degree. This would not
+be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and
+were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted
+that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The
+corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.
+
+
+  _The Revolution in Property_
+
+When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most
+important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The
+ruling class in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become
+poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as
+in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the
+thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of
+land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable
+area was only the fringe, the shore line, of Continental America; the
+Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the
+French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which
+unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.
+
+Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution
+in the deepest instincts of man had taken place--land became a
+commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe,
+land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal
+Houses were founded on land); land was _real_ estate, everything else
+was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws,
+laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and
+foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law
+governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to
+property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and
+marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the
+Prince (or _Princeps_) was often the first man in the land because he
+was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent
+thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur;
+in it they were buried.
+
+The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the
+clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and
+complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond
+the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a
+House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia
+tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to
+buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed
+(often legally, often by squatters' right--which is the right of work,
+not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and
+went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.
+
+There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move
+which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal
+instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock,
+reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European
+cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in
+themselves--or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied
+so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has
+beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his
+"rape of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's
+positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's
+advice to seek Nature "in a wise passiveness"--advice based on the
+poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then
+as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped
+his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". Our more
+familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for
+wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who
+wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what
+he was doing.
+
+He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did.
+The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and
+position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine--which is
+wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the _industry_ of
+one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not
+by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to
+alter--for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a
+criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became
+respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was
+divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few
+generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable--but
+not responsible.
+
+
+  _The Consequences of Free Land_
+
+This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had
+astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the
+land--in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The
+European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn,
+nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the
+soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a
+younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate
+unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. This may be
+morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result:
+the American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil
+exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but
+escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant
+class. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite
+forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant
+virtues, the peasant sturdiness and all the rest of the good qualities
+which go with slavery to the soil.
+
+So the physical definition of America leads to these opening social
+definitions:
+
+  we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and
+    power;
+
+  we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil;
+
+  we were supremely the great wasters of the world;
+
+  we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant class.
+
+From this beginning we can go on to other effects:
+
+  our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war
+    against neighboring states;
+
+  we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger
+    could find more and better land);
+
+  the national center of gravity was constantly changing as
+    population moved to take up new land;
+
+  we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were
+    constantly opening new frontiers;
+
+  our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;
+
+  we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and
+    education, for instance) at the same time;
+
+  we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning
+    and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of
+    political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.
+
+The effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant
+psychological factor in America; the obvious effects are that the land
+invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer--who between them
+created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of
+character. In addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at
+home and peaceful abroad. Once we felt secure within our territorial
+limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of
+the Spaniards in Cuba to bring us into our first war against a
+European nation since 1814. This pacifism was more intense in the more
+agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific
+Scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than
+ours. Pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from Germany
+and Russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service
+(for their children, if not for themselves). In revenge for this
+un-European pacifism we created a purely American lawlessness--and a
+toleration of it which is the amazement of Nazi Germany, where the
+leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized
+Europe, having lived through duels and massacres, is still shocked by
+our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in
+pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new
+citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs.
+
+
+  _America on the Move_
+
+One more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and
+all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers
+struck inland from Plymouth and upland from Jamestown) have not
+altered us. The voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a
+generation; but the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon was moving into the
+Northwest Territory as soon as the Revolution was over; then New
+England began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails
+broken by outriders to the western ocean; the Gold Rush pulled men
+through the wintry passes or around the Horn, and by then our passion
+for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the Clipper ship;
+after the Civil War the Homestead Act started a new move to the West,
+and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular
+and abundant. If the 1870's were not marked by great migrations of
+men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of
+cattle, north from Texas in the summer, south from Wyoming as winter
+threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines
+and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to
+the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City. We were moving a bit more
+slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest
+was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no
+more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in Europe,
+developed as a common tool for the average family, and America was
+mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a
+satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of
+activity which has not been sufficiently studied--the tin can tourist,
+the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. This search for the
+sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established
+habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new
+ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required
+initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was
+only a new beginning.
+
+The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World
+War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost
+tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost
+entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that
+one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quantity-production
+of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor
+mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities,
+small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks,
+busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away
+from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the
+conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country
+known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a
+small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million
+Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road.
+Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy
+came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside
+cabin.
+
+"Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car";
+that was left for dictators to promise--without fulfilment. The cars
+made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new
+models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a
+more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors,
+widely remarked. That the motor car could be used--was being used--as
+a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war
+threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which
+had rested there for thirty years--but might still be good for
+transport.
+
+In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near
+frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European
+_governments_ subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were
+not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two
+things--making planes in mass production, and getting millions of
+people to use them. The present war has anticipated normal progress in
+methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a
+downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train;
+but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic
+American pattern of machines for mobility.
+
+
+  "_The Richest Nation on Earth_"
+
+From free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast
+amount of wealth in America. Because land could not be the exclusive
+base of riches, wealth in America began to take on many meanings and,
+for the first time in history, a wealthy people began to emerge,
+instead of a wealthy nation.
+
+We were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. The
+overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities
+are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the gods;
+of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we
+have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and
+clothing, we can always have enough; from South America, we can get
+foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few
+strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing;
+except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be
+poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw
+materials serviceable to all of us. So that our power to work, our way
+of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on
+the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth.
+
+We have a tradition about wealth, too. The Government, to some degree,
+has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the
+people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any
+artificial bar to enterprise.
+
+
+  "_Rugged Individuals_"
+
+Government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million
+Americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the
+Hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first New
+Deal. Perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real Americans"
+would reject Federal aid--a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks
+about Valley Forge. It was forgotten that the men who froze and swore
+at Valley Forge demanded direct Government aid the moment the Republic
+was established; and that the Cumberland Road, the artery from
+Fredericksburg, Maryland to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was built by the
+Government of the United States for its citizens. Government gave
+bounties and free land; Government gave enormous sums of money to
+industry by way of tariff, and gave 200 million acres of land to
+railroads. There was never a time when the Federal Government was not
+giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. The
+outcry when Government attempted to save _all_ the citizens indicated
+an incomplete knowledge of our history. In particular, the steady
+reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for
+them to start again. The country, for all its obedience to financial
+power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. After the era
+of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was
+ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished--and not
+pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty--the almost
+universal condition of man throughout the world--was not enough for
+America.
+
+It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the
+stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark
+in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large
+nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing
+wealth. The Axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is
+possible that Hitler has already succeeded, for like the
+Administration in 1931, Hitler can say that no one dies of starvation.
+Our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure
+that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived,
+and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. This
+may betray a low liking for riches--but it has its good points also.
+It has helped to keep us free, which is something.
+
+
+  "_Ye Shall Live in Plenty_"
+
+Wealth--and the prospect of wealth--are positive elements in the
+American makeup. We differ from large sections of Europe because we
+take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we
+spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that
+for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed
+in business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and
+spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness.
+
+The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to
+do with forming the American character, because no one took it too
+seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they
+could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium--they were
+disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed
+the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to
+some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the
+facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the
+frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the
+facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve
+equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon
+domestic reform to concentrate on the war.
+
+Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of
+sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we
+accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living
+and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of
+America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert
+Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to
+renounce, but to enjoy".
+
+Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been
+people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material
+goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have
+their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations,
+most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to
+get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the
+world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America
+it is assumed that all will get a great deal.
+
+The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought
+of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are
+intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.
+
+
+  _America Invented Prosperity_
+
+In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device
+of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can
+now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment;
+without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to
+become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still
+is--and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For
+it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money
+is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as
+if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our
+invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.
+
+For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity
+is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.
+
+The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the
+Constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a
+prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have
+often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to
+run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create
+either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with
+one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten
+times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it.
+As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it
+would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the
+country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The
+people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government;
+they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing
+economic controls--a highly concentrated government over a single, not
+a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did
+not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act
+while Congress was not in session; they erected no system of national
+courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy,
+could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When
+this system of Confederation broke down, the Constitution was
+carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of
+the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make
+their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did
+not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.
+
+The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Constitution to their own
+advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances
+of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of
+property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of
+the Constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time
+... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly
+fulfilled."
+
+The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time;
+poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually
+also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States
+was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the
+reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and
+Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle
+down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of
+intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the
+expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a
+_constant_ in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in
+1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things
+in the mind of the lower classes. The idea of class and the idea of a
+"station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted
+after _all_ the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in
+America the Revolution set out to--and did--destroy the principle of
+natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty,
+and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been
+publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and
+what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we
+failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which
+did not accept poverty as inevitable.
+
+This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world.
+We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became
+optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We
+enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us
+preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that,
+for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold,
+and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or
+Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.
+
+
+  _Our Fifty Years of Class War_
+
+From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of
+government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the
+children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy--the
+system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to
+displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on
+prosperity.
+
+The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent
+movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for
+generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich
+and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our
+political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the
+combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of
+extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under
+Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried
+to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself.
+Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had
+begun to _limit_ enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a
+peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not
+repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal
+Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the
+safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.
+
+We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not
+become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are
+a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more
+important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money
+counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way
+back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal
+principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and
+concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we
+are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is
+required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our
+purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our
+capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.
+
+
+  _Labor Troubles_
+
+The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that
+we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are
+hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we
+were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of
+life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had
+exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests
+were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed
+revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through
+the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of
+organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.
+
+The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all
+concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of
+labor too often unfit. Like other organized groups, labor unions did
+not always consult the public good and criminals were found among
+them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production
+or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long
+traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their
+ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic
+self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing
+from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing
+legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the
+labor unions.
+
+The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass,
+the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country
+backward in the _habits_ of organized dealing between management and
+labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic
+hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of
+becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new
+wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled
+principles--to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.
+
+Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain
+his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the
+basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not
+represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient
+wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in
+Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we
+create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans
+have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of
+labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border
+clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces
+capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send
+the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal
+mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide
+them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as
+that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became
+bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost
+when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as
+the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty
+years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the
+Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the
+settlement of all disputes.
+
+Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor
+disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly
+because we shall remain for some time behind the other great
+industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a
+British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did;
+and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the
+future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false
+unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes,
+no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations
+Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and
+worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we
+have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without
+self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for
+statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor
+situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities,
+and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we
+could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy
+could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the
+Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.
+
+
+  _The Danger of Godlessness_
+
+I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their
+sources, as a guide to conduct--particularly the conduct of the war
+(which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian
+propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our
+habits. I have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook
+which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and
+from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor
+and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I
+come now to items which are no less potent because they are
+impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of
+America into play must count also on these.
+
+We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we
+are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from
+our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not
+constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to
+Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a
+connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or
+see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and
+disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our
+fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.
+
+The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of
+material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a
+functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man
+from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any
+sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private
+purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the
+mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic"
+itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is
+now associated with flummery and hoax.
+
+We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical
+world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good
+intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in
+our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of
+cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek
+his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.
+
+This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a
+practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves linked through
+God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any
+job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic
+countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to
+the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to
+universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a
+deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to
+abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in
+war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep
+universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute
+for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious
+actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already
+have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are
+enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear
+and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of
+religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether
+the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling"
+which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past
+was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as
+vain as our hope for better.
+
+
+  _The Alger Factor_
+
+The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the
+departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against
+wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our
+Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic
+appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of
+the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference
+of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in
+America by an intense and confident appeal to _action_, in the faith
+that action will bring far better things than have been known. The
+vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a
+childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger
+or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this
+because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of
+poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern
+history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the
+minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have
+rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other
+peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the
+wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints--but we have also
+rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to
+which they tend.
+
+The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it
+must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What
+aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands
+reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the
+scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine
+covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona
+Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but
+the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music
+popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty
+years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the
+greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible
+that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic
+standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire
+year. And both of these instances have another special point of
+interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that
+pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and
+music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.
+
+I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a
+"lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American
+expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by
+twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably,
+without servants hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three
+flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes
+to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't
+think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy
+themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and
+it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget
+about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.
+
+
+  _The Morals of Plenty_
+
+We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that
+nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is
+based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than
+his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those
+who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for
+a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry
+and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry
+clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation;
+Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were
+preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we
+never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and
+living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are
+usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what
+is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money
+beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient
+and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most
+moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it
+adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality
+denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be
+made by mass production). Mass production put an end to the old
+complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub--mass
+production of tubs and central heating in apartments. The morality of
+scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be
+considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the
+chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men
+born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create
+equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this
+was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the
+practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of mass
+production; it was a working morality.
+
+
+  _Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime_
+
+We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of
+spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse;
+cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the
+five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate
+time. We may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time
+when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully
+as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the
+process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that
+substituted the _goods_ of the many for the good of the few.
+
+The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it
+remains a distinguishing mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist
+us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to
+a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened
+to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have
+never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the
+five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive
+presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds
+cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the
+five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.
+
+In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon;
+characteristic of the twentieth century as the crossroads general
+store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone
+and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is
+impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods
+and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally
+held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French
+bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the
+five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.
+
+
+  _Prosperity and Politics_
+
+Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of
+Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in
+conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free
+land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to
+emancipate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in
+the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because
+in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of
+watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers;
+sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that
+we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political
+party, or a generation--but America did not forget. Each time we
+forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic
+means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time
+we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come
+back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years
+when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the
+redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing;
+and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that
+America could create the materials for a high standard of life,
+although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified
+supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society
+wealthy"; and we did it so handsomely as to leave questionable his
+further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it
+can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than
+the capitalist system can."
+
+We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives
+comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and
+immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quantity system
+into action; and all of them required the same thing--equality of
+political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of
+education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free
+speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people,
+aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future,
+capable of earning and not afraid to spend--these are the customers
+required by mass production. And the same freedom, the same intention
+to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the
+future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its
+iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men
+from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that
+individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for
+Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in
+politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to
+our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their
+prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely
+a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest
+spenders.
+
+The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be
+understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it
+failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them
+move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our
+own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national
+well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen,
+our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our
+fulfilment of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements
+in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical
+life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts
+with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at
+least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out
+of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we
+breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Popularity and Politics
+
+
+There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so
+significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and
+examined briefly by themselves.
+
+In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an
+average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie
+admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least
+once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses,
+juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses
+are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines
+are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families
+take their cars and go driving.
+
+These are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there
+are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady,
+attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most
+part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for
+information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication.
+
+Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had
+because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks
+did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are
+actually making their own fun. The same ignoble but useful desire for
+money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance
+halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves.
+Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore
+Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even
+withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.
+
+
+  _Means of Communication_
+
+The other elements I have mentioned, movies, radio and a new
+journalism, are the products of our immediate time. Although the
+moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular
+just before the first World War, and was promptly recognized as a
+prime instrument of propaganda by Lenin as he began to build the
+Socialist State in 1917; the moving picture may have been colossal
+then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of
+incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered.
+
+By that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established
+itself in its present commercial base. Radio was first conceived as an
+instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless
+telegraphy, when the Soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the
+heads of their governments--although this appeal still had to be
+printed, the radio receiver did not exist. When the necessary
+inventions were working (and the tinkering American forced the issue
+by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to
+serve the public. Among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the
+election results in the Harding-Cox campaign, crop reports, and music.
+The entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of
+1929 the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the
+business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to
+fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals
+of the community.
+
+By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in
+the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication
+had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture,
+devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old
+straight fiction magazine had offered.
+
+These three new means of mass communication are revolutionary
+inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of
+statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the
+first move of a _coup d'etat_ is to take over the radio and the next
+is to divert the movies into propaganda.
+
+Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be
+understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated.
+
+
+  _Words and Pictures_
+
+Of the fact and picture publications _Life_ and _Look_ are the best
+examples; _Time_ and _News-Week_ are fact and illustration magazines
+which is basically different, although their success is also
+important. The appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be
+adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; _Time_
+and the _Readers' Digest_ become the great magazine phenomena of our
+time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of
+their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing
+themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their
+faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public
+services.
+
+The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its
+chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and
+image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development
+in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue
+the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and
+conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and
+newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of
+quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively
+small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting
+developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the
+book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the
+Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old
+methods and the artiness of book "shoppes" which always got in the
+way of good book-sellers.
+
+The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is
+especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The
+art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and
+isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the
+visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have
+been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by
+the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in
+process of being formed.
+
+Until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for
+this new language is great. For neither the movies nor radio can be
+used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the
+listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation.
+Radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with
+the right materials; but when President Roosevelt asked his audience
+to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of
+the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could
+not do. The movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered
+none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the
+immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to
+the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving
+picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be
+over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group
+presence. By this the movies also gain when they use the right
+materials.
+
+The use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the
+tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a
+mobile reserve of propaganda. When the radio and the movies have
+established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final
+battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is
+carried to the ward meeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore
+soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory--where the action is
+determined by men and women in private discussion.
+
+
+  _Universal Languages_
+
+Radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies,
+which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great mass
+inventions of America. The patents may have been taken out elsewhere,
+but it was in America that these two forms of mass communication were
+instantly placed at the service of all people. The errors of judgment
+have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies
+were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of
+the hands of the bureaucrat. For a generation we deplored the
+vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and
+discovered that the only other effective movies were made by
+dictators, to falsify history, as the Russians did when the miserable
+Trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every
+film made by Hitler. For a generation we wept over the commercialism
+of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an
+audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was
+the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under
+compulsion.
+
+The intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. Some
+great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by British radio
+(which is government owned, but not government operated); some
+exceptional and important films were made for the few. But the
+dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea--movies and the
+radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to
+soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking
+of _all_ the people. This universality lies in the nature of the
+instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited
+reception of the broadcasts; and only Hitler and Stalin and the
+sponsors have been happy to understand this.
+
+Like all those who are habituated to the movies, I have suffered much
+from Hollywood, my pain being all the greater because I am so devoted;
+like all those who work in radio, I am acutely conscious of its
+faults; but the faults and the banalities are not in question now. Now
+we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our
+purposes. We have to discover what the ignoramus in Hollywood and the
+businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for.
+
+The one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. We have to
+learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never
+could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and
+why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation;
+and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to
+accomplish an end. Moreover, we have to study the field so that we
+know when _not_ to use these instruments, what we must not take from
+them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal.
+
+A coordinated use of _all_ the means of persuasion is required; to let
+the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the
+movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste
+time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or
+most effectively on the air. There are many things to be done; we need
+excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come
+haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and
+history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other.
+If we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one
+ill-timed, but brilliantly made, documentary on production rendered
+futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one
+ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. When the
+means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we
+have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have
+to use all of them together.
+
+The movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem
+to rise on the international horizon of the 1920's, to have no link
+with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world.
+With these, it is true, we return to the universals of human
+expression and communication. But what we have done with them is
+unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based
+on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. That is
+why I have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have
+enormous inertia, the slightest error may accumulate tremendous
+consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most
+complete protection against disaster at home.
+
+We have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been
+completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have
+to remind the American people of other tools and instruments they have
+neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a passion with us to invent
+the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use
+against us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The Tools of Democracy
+
+
+The tools of democracy are certain civil actions, certain inventions,
+certain habits. They can be used against us--but only if we fail to
+use them ourselves.
+
+The greatest tools are civil liberties which we have been considering
+as "rights" or "privileges". The right to free speech is a great one;
+free speech probably was originally intended to protect property; it
+preserves liberty; the rights of assembly, of protest for redress, of
+a free press all have this double value, that they guarantee the
+integrity of the private man and protect the State.
+
+The great debate on the war brought back some long forgotten
+phenomena: broadsides, street meetings, marches, and brawls. Before
+they began, virtually _all_ the civil rights were being used either by
+newcomers to America or by enemies of the American system. The poor
+had no access to the radio; they used a soap box instead and genteel
+people shrank away; the Bundist and the American Communist assembled
+and protested and published and spoke; the believers in America waited
+for an election to roll around again, and then did nothing about it.
+The enemies of the people sent a hundred thousand telegrams to
+Congressmen, signing the names of dead men to kill the regulation of
+utilities, but the believer in the democratic process didn't remember
+the name of his Congressman. Bewildered aliens got their second papers
+and were inducted into political clubs; the old line Americans never
+found out how the primaries worked.
+
+
+  _Public Addresses_
+
+A dangerous condition rose. No families from Beacon Street spoke in
+Boston Common; therefore, whoever spoke on the Common was an enemy of
+Beacon Street; all over America the well-born (and the well-heeled)
+retired from direct communication with the people, and all over
+America the privilege of talking to the citizens fell into the hands
+of radicals, lunatics, and dangerous enemies of the Republic--so that
+in time the very fact that one tried to exercise the right of free
+speech became suspect; and Beacon Street and Park Avenue could think
+of no way to protect themselves from Boston Common and Union
+Square--except to abolish free speech entirely. They did not dare to
+say it, but the remarkable Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City, said it
+for them: "Whenever I hear anyone talk about civil liberties, I know
+he's not a good American".
+
+The dreadful humiliation was that it came so close to the truth. The
+Red and the Bundist, clamoring or conspiring against America, were
+almost the only ones doing what all Americans had the right to do. We
+hated cranks, we did not want to be so conspicuous, we hadn't the
+time, the police would attend to it, if they didn't like it here let
+them go back ... we allowed our most precious rights to atrophy. When
+suddenly they were remembered, as they were by the bonus marchers of
+1932, we yelled revolution and the President of the United States
+called out the troops to shoot down the defenders of our country. It
+was the first time that a petition for redress had been offered by
+good citizens, by veterans, by men of notable American stock--and it
+frightened us because they were doing what "only foreigners" or
+"dangerous agitators" used to do; they were in fact being Americans in
+action.
+
+What is not used, dies. The habit of protecting our freedom was dying
+in the United States. There was no conspiracy of power against us;
+there was no need. We were carrying experimental democracy forward so
+far on several planes--the material and social planes particularly--that
+we let it go by default on the vital plane of practical politics. We
+did not go into politics, we did not electioneer, we did not threaten
+ward bosses or county chairmen, we did not form third parties, we did
+nothing except vote, if it was a fair day (but not too fair if we meant
+to play golf). As for private action to defend our liberties, it was
+unnecessary and vulgar and bothersome.
+
+The depression scared us, but not into free speech; by that time free
+speech was Red; and the deeper we floundered in the mire of defeatism,
+the more intimidated we were by shouting Congressmen and
+super-patriots; it was only after the New Deal pulled us out of our
+tailspin that we saw the light: we too could have been obscure men
+speaking at street corners, we did not have to give all the soap boxes
+to men like Sacco and Vanzetti; we too could have published pamphlets
+like the dreadful Communists, and held meetings and badgered our
+Congressmen. Suddenly the people were reincorporated into their
+government; suddenly the people began to be concerned with government;
+and the tremendous revitalization of political anger was one of the
+best symptoms of democratic recovery in our generation.
+
+
+  _Return to Politics_
+
+The merciless pressure of taxation and then the grip of war have
+pushed us forward and in a generation we will be again as politically
+aware as our great-grandfathers were when they had one newspaper a
+week, and only their determination to rule themselves as a principle
+of action. Perhaps we shall take the trouble they took; they travelled
+a day's journey to hear a debate and discussed it for a fortnight;
+they thought about politics and studied the meaning of events. And
+they quite naturally did their duties as citizens; they dug their
+neighbors out of snow-blocked roads, they nominated their candidates,
+they watched and rebuked their representatives. It was not a political
+Utopia, but it was a more intelligent use of political power than ours
+has been. The usual excuse for the breakdown of political action in
+America is that so many "foreigners" came, to whom the politics of
+freedom were alien. This may have been true of some of the later
+arrivals; but the Irish were captivated by, and presently captured,
+city politics wherever they settled; the Germans were the steadiest of
+citizens and so were the Scandinavians, their studious earnest belief
+in our institutions shaming our flippant disregard. The Southern
+Slavs, the Russian Jews and the Italians were farthest removed from
+our political habits; but their passion for America was great. It
+could have been worked into political action, and often was worked
+into political skulduggery by bosses of a more political bent. Many of
+these immigrants came after the exhaustion of free lands; many were
+plunged into slums and sweatshops and steel mills on a twelve hour
+day; and they emerged on the angry side, as disillusioned with America
+as some of its most ancient families.
+
+That political action dwindled after the great immigrations is true;
+but it was not the immigrant who refused to act; it was the old family
+and the typical American; the grafting politicians and the sidewalk
+radical both kept politics alive; the real Americans were slowly
+smothering politics. We shall never quite repay our debt to Tammany
+Hall and the Communists; between them political machines and saintly
+radicals managed to keep the instruments of democratic action from
+rusting. Now we have to take them back and learn how to use them
+again. Fortunately we have no choice. We neglected our rights because
+we wanted to sidestep our duties; today the war makes our duties
+inescapable and we are already beginning to use our rights. For in
+spite of censorship and regimentation, we will use more of our
+instruments of democracy than ever; we will because we are fighting
+for them and they have become valuable to us.
+
+The radio, the movies, and popular print are the three tools by which
+we can create democratic action. The action itself will be appropriate
+to our time and our conditions; we will not travel ten miles to hear a
+debate, so long as the radio lasts; but we will have to form units of
+self-protection in bombed cities; we may need other associations, to
+apportion food, to house the homeless, to support the bereaved. We
+will have to learn how to live together, to share what was once as
+private as a motor car, to elect a village constable who may have our
+lives in his hands a dozen times a day. In the process we will be
+reverting to old and good democratic habits--in a city block in
+Atlanta or in a prairie village outside Emporia, or in a chic suburb
+along Lake Michigan. Something like the town-meeting is taking place
+in a thousand apartment houses where air-raid precautions and the
+disposal of waste paper are discussed and mothers who have to work
+trade time with wives who want to go to the movies; the farmers have,
+since 1932, been meeting; the suburbanites are discussing trains and
+creation of bus-routes. We are making the discovery that it is our
+country and we can decide its destiny. We are not to let others rule
+us; for in this emergency every man must rule himself; the man who
+neglects his political duty is as dangerous today as the man who
+leaves his lights on in a blackout.
+
+In the early months of the war our democratic processes were
+muscle-bound. We hadn't been doing things together; whenever we had
+organized, it was against some one else; we didn't fall naturally into
+a simple cooperative effort. And within two months we were breaking
+into hostile particles, until, in desperation, we discovered that men
+can work together. The obstructionist manufacturer and the stubborn
+labor leader could hold up an entire industry; but two men, one from
+each side, could set each factory going again. The creation of the
+labor-management committees of two was the first light in the darkness
+of our domestic policy.
+
+Still to come was the spontaneous outbreak of fervor and the cold
+organization for victory. We had forgotten the tools of democracy
+which we had to work together, as simply as men had to work on a
+snowbound country road together. In a small town of Ohio a pleasant
+event occurred which had a stir of promise; Dorothy Thompson's report
+was:
+
+"They got together in the old-fashioned American way: in the old opera
+house. They warmed and instilled enthusiasm and resolution into one
+another, by the mass of their presence, and by music, and prayer.
+
+"Mr. Sweet had put the F.F.A. (The Future Farmers of America and the
+older brothers of the Four-H clubs) to work, and they had made a
+survey of the existing resources of the community, in trucks, autos,
+combines, tractors. And he proposed to them that they use these
+resources, _as a community_, getting the greatest work out of them
+with the greatest conservation of them; organizing transportation to
+the factory where war production was going on, so that no auto
+travelled for its owner alone, but for as many workers as it could
+carry."
+
+
+  _Democratic Action_
+
+There is a field of endeavor in war time where this sort of
+spontaneous, amateur organization is best; and our Government will be
+wise if it prevents the inexpert from building bombers but lets them,
+as far as possible, get children to and from school by local effort.
+We want to feel that we are being used, that our powers are working
+for the common good. So far we have been irritated by sudden demands,
+and frightened by long indifference to our offers--until an angry man
+has done something, as Mr. Fred Sweet did in Mt. Gilead. A government
+determined to win this war will create the opportunities for
+democratic action without waiting for angry men. The combination of
+maximum control (the single head of production) and maximum dispersion
+(two men in each factory solving the local problem) is exactly what we
+understand; to translate civilian emotion into terms of maximum use is
+the next step.
+
+Already this is happening to us: on one side we are grouping ourselves
+into smaller units; on the other we are discovering that we are parts
+of the whole nation. It is a tremendous release of energies for us; we
+are discovering what we had hoped--that America is of indescribable
+significance to us and that we for the first time signify in
+America--we, not bosses or financiers or critics or cliques or groups
+or movements--but we ourselves. Something almost dead stirs again and
+we know that we shall be able to work with our fellowmen, and work
+with our Government, and watch those we chose to speak for us, and
+challenge corruption, and see to it that we, who are the people, are
+not betrayed. We may not revive the _forms_ of democracy as they
+existed in Lincoln's time, but we will never again let the _spirit_ of
+his democracy come so near to being beyond all revival.
+
+We will use the weapons we have and invent new ones; and we had better
+be prompt. Because we have a victory to win with these weapons and a
+world to make. We have to work Democracy because we have to create a
+world in which democracy can live. There is no time to lose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Democratic Control
+
+
+The shape of this war was created in dark back rooms of cheap saloons,
+in a lodging house in Geneva, in several prison cells, in small half
+secret meetings, up back flights of stairs, behind drawn shades, in
+boarding houses over the dining table, in the lobbies of movie-houses,
+at lectures attended by the idle and the curious and the hopeless, in
+the kitchen of a New York restaurant where waiters talked more about
+the future than about tips; it was molded also in British pubs and by
+the sullen lives of dole-gatherers; it took a definable shape and
+could have been re-formed but was not, so that its shape today is the
+result of the pressure of those who willed to act and the missing
+pressure of groups which failed to meet and talk and plan.
+
+The earth-shaking events of our time may have been created by the
+great and mysterious forces of history, but their exact form was fixed
+by obscure people: the Russian Revolution by Lenin and Trotsky,
+students, impractical men, and the homeless Stalin; and the war by
+Hitler, the house painter, the despised little man, the corporal who
+couldn't get over his military dreams. These were the leaders, the
+conspicuous ones. They planned--and wrote--and gathered a few even
+more obscure followers, and talked and lived in utter darkness until
+the time came for them to fight.
+
+For a thousand years the destiny of mankind will be shaped by what
+these men did in countries barely emerging into freedom--and we to
+whom the gods have given all freedom, sit by and hesitate even to talk
+about the future, folding our hands and piously saying that in any
+case it will be decided for us. That is the result of forgetting our
+democratic rights and duties; with them we have forgotten that the
+future is ours to make.
+
+It will not be made for us; it will not be made in our favor unless we
+make it for ourselves; the weapons with which we fight the war will be
+strong and terrible when we come to create the peace. And we will
+create it either by using the weapons or by dropping them and running
+away from our triumph, which is also our responsibility.
+
+We will not escape the responsibility by saying that we cannot control
+"the great forces", the "wave" of events. We can do what Hitler and
+Lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can
+work and wait and work again. We must not say that we are helpless in
+the face of international intrigue. We--not Churchill and
+Roosevelt--wrote the Atlantic Charter, and we can un-write it and
+write it over again; we the people, not Henry Cabot Lodge, crushed the
+League of Nations by our indifference; we, not Congressmen bribed by
+scrap-iron dealers, armed Japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let
+Hitler go ahead by our ignorance. We have done all these things
+without working; and the only thing we have not tried, is to put out
+our hands and take hold of our destiny. In the first dreadful crisis
+of our war, we saw China begin to plan the world after the war,
+preparing a democratic center of 800 million people in Asia, putting
+pressure on Britain to proclaim liberty for India, taking hold of the
+future with faith and confidence--while we said not one open word to
+Asia, and had barely spoken to our nearest friends, the oppressed of
+Europe, to tell them that our purpose was liberty.
+
+We cannot let the shape of the future be molded by other hands. The
+price of living as we want to live is more than sweat and blood and
+tears: we have to make the grim effort of thinking and take the risk
+of making decisions. A painful truth comes home to us: we are no
+longer the spoiled children of Destiny--our destiny is our action.
+
+
+  _Record of Isolation_
+
+For more than a hundred years the people of the United States did not
+have to act and avoided the consequences of Democracy in international
+affairs. Officially we had nothing to do with Europe, except on
+special occasions when we snapped at Britain, frightened the Barbary
+pirates, helped Napoleon I, drove Napoleon III out of Mexico. We had
+no continuing policy and the details of foreign affairs were not
+submitted to the voter. This was natural enough; the eyes of America
+turned away from the Atlantic seaboard toward the Mississippi Valley;
+turned back from the Pacific to Chicago and the east; turned again to
+Detroit and Birmingham and Kansas City.
+
+We have not yet got the habit of thinking steadily about other
+nations. Our post-war suspicion of the League, our terror of the USSR,
+our pious agreements with England and Japan, our weak dislike of
+Mussolini and Hitler, still left us unconcerned with _policy_. We
+remained in the diplomatic era of William Jennings Bryan while Europe
+marched back into the era of Metternich or Talleyrand.
+
+Yet the voters have, since 1893, determined some aspects of our
+foreign policy. They did not vote on a loan to China, but they did
+keep in power the party that made war in Spain, bought the
+Philippines, protected Cuba, and policed Central America. This
+tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the
+Republican Party had always a better one, which was prosperity. In the
+early twentieth century, the American voter only accepted, he did not
+directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook.
+
+Our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is
+another--the tradition of democratic control. It has not begun to
+operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to
+clear our minds of some romantic illusions.
+
+Our future lies balanced between Europe and Asia; the disagreeable
+certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that we cannot escape
+the world. We still think of participation in world affairs negatively
+as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as
+a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined
+from our shores. The prospect is disagreeable because we, the people,
+have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over
+diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. We have begun to
+send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we
+trust our ambassadors--because the journalists have begun to
+democratize diplomacy. They have told us more, they have often
+represented us more completely, and represented international business
+less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by
+the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart European
+capitals. The correspondents have taken the characteristic American
+democratic way of altering an ancient European institution, by
+shrewdly publicised disrespect. Whenever we have had a strong
+Secretary of State, something further has been done; but the permanent
+officials of our State Department have completely accepted the
+European style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and
+ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic sheets, that
+all the brash independence of America has been hushed; our leading
+career diplomats have never been Americanized by the middle west; they
+came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they
+represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented
+the East, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent
+America.
+
+On occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into
+the State Department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained
+professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for the
+_gaffes_ and _gaucheries_ of American diplomacy. These awkward
+Americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the
+chancelleries of Europe; but they were not falling into the hands of
+the European diplomats.
+
+Neither the fumbles of our occasional ignorant envoys nor the correct
+discretion of the career men gave us any habit of thinking about other
+countries. On the west coast there is a tradition of wariness about
+the Orient--but it rises from immigration, not international
+relations. We have no habit of hatred as the French had for Germany,
+no cultivated friendships except for the occasional visit of a prince.
+We are not susceptible to European flattery if we live beyond the
+Atlantic seaboard--or below the $50,000 income level; for crowds, a
+Hollywood star is at least as magnetic as a Balkan Queen; and it is
+not conceivable that we should ever treat the coming of a Russian
+ballet as a part of a political campaign, as the French, quite
+correctly, did in 1913.
+
+We are now paying for our quiet unfortified borders, for the broad
+seas so suddenly narrowed. We have to learn about foreign affairs,
+about our own Empire (we hardly know that we have one). And this is
+the hardest thing of all: that while we move in ignorance, _we have to
+re-work all the basic concepts of international affairs_, or they will
+destroy us. We will have some support in the people of Great Britain,
+in the governments of Scandinavia, and in the diplomatic habits of the
+USSR; but for the most part we must make our way alone.
+
+
+  _Debunking Protocol_
+
+Again, as in the case of military strategy, the average man must study
+the subject to protect himself. He can no longer risk his life, and
+the fortunes of his family, in the hands of a few career men in the
+State Department, working secretly, studying protocol, forgetting the
+people of the United States.
+
+The amateur statesman is as laughable as the amateur strategist, but
+the laugh is not always going to be on us. We will popularize
+diplomacy or it will destroy us. We have first of all to destroy the
+myth of "high politics". We have to examine Macchiavelli and
+Talleyrand and Bismarck and Disraeli with as much realism as we
+examine Benedict Arnold and James J. Hill and Edison and Kruger. We
+need journalist-debunkers to do the work, a parallel, by the way, to
+the process of simplifying military discussion, which is being done by
+newspaper and radio experts. We have to learn that the great tricks,
+the great arrangements of power, have been as shady as horse-trades,
+as ruthless as robbery, and often as magnificent as building a
+railroad--but in all cases they have represented the desires of
+certain groups, powerful enough at any given time to impose their
+wishes on the people. War, business, patriotism, medicine, sociology,
+religion, and sex have all been re-examined and debunked in the past
+two generations; but diplomacy which can destroy our satisfaction in
+all of them, still parades as the perfect stuffed shirt, with a red
+ribbon across it. At the moment no one can say whether Hitler has
+blasted the Foreign Office and our State Department; if he has, it is
+an achievement equal to taking Crete; and we ought to thank him for
+it.
+
+We should learn that diplomacy has swapped national honor, and
+betrayed it, and used it cynically for the advantage of a few--as well
+as protected it. We should examine the assertion of "national destiny"
+before the era of democracy, to see whether the private wealth of a
+prince and the starvation of a people actually are predestined,
+whether the mine-owners of France could have allowed German democracy
+to live, whether Locarno satisfied national honor less than Munich.
+
+And, above all, we should know that this great "game" of European
+statesmanship, going on from the Renaissance to our own time, is a
+colossal and tragic failure. At times it has brought incalculable
+wealth to a thousand English families, to a few hundred Frenchmen, and
+power to some others. But it has always ended in the desolation of
+war--and the suspicion holds that to make war advantageously has been
+the aim of statesmanship, not to avoid it with honor.
+
+We have to rid ourselves of the intolerable flummery of the diplomats
+because in the future foreign affairs are going to be connected by a
+thousand wires to our domestic problems, and we propose to see who
+pulls the wires. The old tradition of betraying a President at home
+while supporting any stupidity abroad will have to be scrapped; and we
+will be a more formidable nation, in external affairs, if we conduct
+those affairs in our way, not in the way of our enemies.
+
+
+  _A "Various" Diplomacy_
+
+It will not be enough to destroy the myth of high diplomacy and reduce
+it to its basic combinations of chicanery and power-pressure, its
+motives of pride and honor and greed. We have to take the positive
+step of creating a new diplomacy, based on the needs of America, and
+those needs have to be consciously understood by the American people.
+Out of that, we may create a layman's foreign policy executed by
+professional diplomats; just as we are on the way to create a layman's
+labor policy, executed by professional statisticians, mediators and
+agents. We have to recognize diplomacy as a polite war; and, as
+suggested in connection with actual war, we must not fight in the
+style or strategy of our enemies. We have always imitated in routine
+statesmanship; and only in the past twenty years have we begun an
+American style of diplomacy. The "strategy of variety" may serve us
+here as on the battlefield; it may not. But the strategy of European
+diplomacy is their weapon, and their strength; we are always defeated
+when we attempt it, as Wilson was, as Stimson was over Manchuria. Our
+only successes have been when we sidestepped diplomacy entirely and
+talked to people.
+
+The first step toward creating our own, democratic, diplomacy will be
+to convince the American people that they will not escape the
+consequences of this war. Many of us believe that we actually escaped
+the consequences of the first World War by rejecting the League of
+Nations; a process of re-education is indicated, for background. This
+education can begin with the future and move backward--for our
+relation to post-war Europe can be diagrammed almost as accurately as
+a fever chart. We withdrew from the League for peace and found
+ourselves in an alliance for war. It can hardly be called a successful
+retreat. Actually we were in Europe, up to our financial necks, from
+the moment the war ended to the day when the collapse of an Austrian
+bank sent us spiralling to destruction in 1929; we stayed in it,
+trying to recover the benefits of the Davis and Young plans by the
+Hoover moratorium. We did everything with Europe except recognize its
+first weak effort to federalize itself on our model.
+
+Decisive our part in this war will be, but if we withdraw as we did
+the last time, leaving the nations of Europe to work out their own
+destiny, we will, as a practical matter, destroy ourselves.
+
+The only other certainty we have is that the prosperity of the United
+States is better served by peace in the world than by war. This is
+true of all nations; the only difference for us is that the
+dislocation may be a trace more severe, and that we have no tradition
+of huge territorial repayments, or indemnities, by which a nation may
+recoup the losses of war, while its people starve.
+
+Given that basis, we can observe Europe and Asia after the present
+war.
+
+
+  _Phases of the Future_
+
+We ought at once to make a calendar. This war will probably not follow
+the tradition of the last one; it may not gratify us with an exact
+moment for an armistice; we may defeat our enemies piecemeal and miss
+the headlines and tickertape and international broadcasts and cities
+alight again and all the gaiety and solemn emotion of an end to war.
+This war breaks patterns and sets new ones, so the first date on our
+calendar is a doubtful one; but let us say that by a certain day we
+will have smashed Germany and Japan; Italy would have betrayed them
+long before.
+
+Our next step is the "peace conference" stage. Again this war may
+disappoint us; we may have a long armistice and a reorganization of
+the world's powers, without Versailles and premiers in secret
+conferences; perhaps by that time the peoples of Europe and America
+will have captured their diplomats. Still, let us say that an interim
+between armistice and world-order will occur.
+
+The phases of the future grow longer as we progress. We will celebrate
+the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year,
+because in that time we are going to create the organization which
+will bring us peace for a century--or for ever. This middle period is
+the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day
+after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin
+thinking of the future of the world--and at the same time think about
+demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get
+tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down
+capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next
+election--by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate
+crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into
+the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world--for which
+there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old
+one.
+
+We can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of
+world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal
+nations, we will bring on an event in Europe beside which the rise of
+Hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act
+of destruction which Hitler began. And whatever comes out of it,
+fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years
+later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing
+the start of another European war, which will spread more rapidly to
+Asia and ourselves. Those of us who went through the first World War,
+and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire,
+may be resigned to a third act in the 1960's; but the men who fight
+this war may be as revolutionary in England and America as they turned
+out to be last time in Russia or in Germany. They may want assurance,
+the day after the war ends, that we have been thinking about them and
+the future of the world. They will give us the choice between world
+organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions
+will help us. We will have to choose and to act; fascism may be
+destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized
+world will not lack leaders; we can have modified Communism or
+super-fascism, all beautifully Americanized, if we have nothing
+better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. And by the
+time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad
+will mean starvation and plague and repression and death.
+
+
+  _Seven New Worlds_
+
+Forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of
+different alternatives to revolution and chaos. Some of these are
+based on political necessity or the desire to punish the Axis; some
+correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more
+inclusive. They can be summarized so:
+
+    Re-isolating America;
+    Collaboration with Fascism;
+    Collaboration with Communism;
+    Anglo-American domination;
+    American imperialism;
+    Revival of the League of Nations;
+    A federal organization of the world.
+
+To some people in the United States, none of these seems possible, all
+of them disastrous. If the confusion of propaganda continues, these
+people will fall back on the principle of isolation; it is a fatal
+backward step, but it is better than any of the seemingly fatal
+forward steps; it is in keeping with part of our tradition; and if
+Europe as always, with Asia now added, goes forward to another war,
+the centre and core of America will say "we want out", and mean it.
+But isolating America cannot be an immediate post-war policy; if we
+plan to withdraw, we virtually hand over the world to revolution and
+hand ourselves into moral and financial bankruptcy. Isolation can only
+be a constant threat to the world, that we will withdraw unless some
+of our basic terms are met. We have to know our terms, or our threat
+is meaningless.
+
+There is much to be said for isolation, or autarchy; I pass it over
+quickly because I am not attempting to criticise each sketch of the
+post-war world; only to note certain aspects of them all--notably
+their relation to the America which I have described in earlier pages.
+The next two programs are also easy to assay: they are at the opposite
+extreme; they rise from no part of our basic tradition, and
+collaboration with either fascism or communism would have to come
+either by revolution after defeat or by long skillful propaganda which
+would disguise the fact and make us think that we were converting the
+world to our democracy.
+
+It is, nevertheless, childish to assume that the thing can't happen.
+Given a good unscrupulous American dictator we could have made peace
+with the Nazis, and the Japanese, by squeezing Britain out of the
+Atlantic and Russia out of the Pacific; our gain would have been the
+whole Western Hemisphere; this would have gratified both the
+isolationists and the imperialists; it would have preserved peace and
+the Monroe Doctrine; the only disqualification is that it would
+destroy freedom throughout the world--which is the purpose of fascism.
+This was possible; it may become possible again. Unless Britain shows
+more intellectual strength in the final phases of the war than she did
+in the earlier ones, the chance to scuttle her will appeal to any
+anti-European American dictator; liquidate Hitler, make peace with the
+anti-Hitlerian Nazis, especially the generals, send our appeasers as
+ambassadors, and in five years we can re-invigorate a defeated Germany
+and start world-fascism going again.
+
+The alternative is not so remote. It is a distinct and immediate
+possibility.
+
+
+  _Red America_
+
+A Socialist England after the war is promised, in effect, by everyone
+except the rulers of the British Empire. Add a free China indebted to
+Communist armies; add Russia victoriously on the side of democracy;
+Red successor states will rise in Italy, Germany and the Balkans; and
+our destiny would be the fourth or fifth international.
+
+If we say these things are fanciful, we convict ourselves of inability
+to break out of our own mythology. Either collaboration is as likely as
+complete isolation; neither would shock us if a good American led us
+into it. Sir Stafford Cripps is certain that the USSR and the USA fight
+for the same ideals; and collaboration with Hitler's enemies is our
+standing policy today. So that a "revolution" in Germany would
+automatically lead us into friendly relations with the revolutionaries;
+they will be either fascist or communist, quite possibly they will be
+Hitler's best friends. Actually we may approach either a fascist or a
+Communist world order by easy steps, our little hand held by proud
+propagandists guiding us on our way.
+
+
+  _Parva Carta_
+
+The dominant American relation to Europe, now, is expressed in the
+Atlantic Charter which is not an alliance, not a step toward union,
+but a statement of principles. However, the Charter has been used as a
+springboard and been taken as an omen; so it must be examined and its
+true bearings discovered. It has, for us, two essential points:
+
+One of these is the Anglo-American policing of the world; it is a curt
+reminder that this war is not waged to end war; that future wars are
+being taken for granted and preparations to win them will be made. The
+Charter was, however, a pre-war instrument for us. Presently the
+necessities of war may force us to go further and declare our
+intention to prevent war entirely.
+
+The specific economic point in the Atlantic Charter promises "all
+States, great and small, victor and vanquished ... access, on equal
+terms, to the trade and the raw materials of the world which are
+needed for their economic prosperity."
+
+This is a mixture of oil and the mercantile philosophy of a hundred
+years ago. It has a moral value; it knocks on the head all theories of
+"rights" in colonies; a nation subscribing to the Atlantic Charter and
+attempting to isolate a source of bauxite or pitchblende, will have to
+be hypocritical as well as powerful. "Access to", even on equal terms,
+does not however imply "power to take and use". Lapland may have
+access to Montana copper, unhindered by our law; and copper may be
+deemed vital to Lapland's prosperity (by a commission of experts); but
+Lapland will not get our copper unless we choose to let her have it.
+
+In effect, the maritime nations, England and America, have said that
+if they can get to a port in the Dutch East Indies, they propose to
+trade there, for oil or ivory or sea shells; and they have also said,
+proudly, that Germany can trade there also, after Germany becomes
+de-nazified.
+
+No realistic attempt to face the necessity of organized production and
+distribution is even implied in this point. Instead, President
+Roosevelt was able virtually to write into an international document a
+statement of his ideals; as Woodrow Wilson wrote his League of Nations
+into the Fourteen Points.
+
+Mr. Roosevelt's freedoms are specific; people (not "nations") are to be
+free from want, from fear, from oppression. Freedom from want is the
+actual new thing in the world; want--need--hard times--poverty--from
+the beginning of European history these have been the accepted order,
+the lot of man, the inescapable fate to which he was doomed by being
+born.
+
+The Charter rose out of our history and out of England's need. Let me
+outline again the connection with our history. In 1776, the
+Declaration of Independence showed a way out of the poverty-labyrinth
+in the destiny of man; the Declaration declared for prosperity (then
+synonymous with free land) and offered it to all (citizenship and
+equal rights to the immigrant, the chance to share in this new belief
+in prosperity by becoming American). In a century and a half Europe
+has scoffed and sneered at this (relatively successful) attempt to
+break through economic damnation--and at the end, as Europe rocks over
+the edge of destruction, an American offers this still new and
+imperfect thing as a foundation stone of peace in the world: freedom
+from want. It has not yet been completely achieved in America; but we
+know it can be achieved; we have gone far enough on our way to say
+that it can be achieved in the whole world.
+
+The American standard is far above freedom from want. It is based, in
+fact, on wanting too many things and getting a fair percentage of
+them. But President Roosevelt's point does not involve "leveling"; it
+is not an equal standard of living all over the world (which is the
+implied necessity of international Communism). The negative freedom
+from want is not freedom from wanting; it is explicit, as the words
+are used: it means that men shall have food and shelter and clothes;
+and medicine against plague; and an opportunity to learn and some
+leisure to enjoy life; in accordance with the standards of their
+people.
+
+This is a great deal. It was not too much for the Soviet Republics to
+promise, and to begin to bring, to Kalmucks and Tartars and Georgians;
+it is more than we have brought to our own disinherited in the South,
+in mining towns, in the fruitful valleys of California. Our partial
+failure is a disgrace, but not a disaster; our success, though
+incomplete, is important. For we have carried forward in the light of
+the other great freedom which Communism has had to sacrifice, which is
+freedom from fear. All the specific freedoms--to think, to utter, to
+believe, to act, are encompassed in this freedom from fear. Our basic
+disagreement with Communism is the same as our attack on
+nazi-fascism--both are based on illegitimate power (not power
+delegated or given, not power with the consent of the governed): hence
+both live on domination; on their capacity to instil fear. The war
+will prove how far this fear penetrated in Russia and in Germany, and
+how much longer it will be the instrument of coercion in either
+country.
+
+The President's freedoms are a wide promise to the people of the
+world--a promise made, like Woodrow Wilson's promises, before entering
+any agreement with any foreign power. Into the Atlantic Charter, Mr.
+Roosevelt also injected his basic domestic policies and, by some
+astute horsetrading managed to make them _theoretically_ the basis for
+international agreement. This point promises improved labor standards,
+economic adjustment, and social security throughout the world.
+
+Improvement, adjustment, security--they are not absolutes; freedom
+from want is, in effect, security; any reasonable adjustment between
+owners and workers will be an improvement in most countries. But the
+principle behind the labor point is as clear as the inspiration of the
+points on raw materials and freedom: it is that wars are caused by the
+miseries of peoples; when the people rule, they will prevent wars
+unless their miseries are acute; if they are not in dire want, if they
+have a chance to work, if they are free of coercion and threat, they
+will not make war--nor will they fall under the hand of the tyrant and
+the demagogue.
+
+In plain practical statesmanship, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill
+apologized for Versailles, which denied Germany access to raw
+materials and prevented improvement in labor standards and drove
+millions of Europeans into want and fear; and at the same time they
+acknowledged the connection between high diplomacy and the food and
+shelter and comforts of the citizen. The eight points reiterate some
+of the fourteen; they withdraw from others; but the new thing is all
+American, it is the injection of the rights of the common man into an
+international document.
+
+But there the Atlantic Charter ends. As an instrument of propaganda
+and as a basis of making war and peace, it was outlawed by events; it
+is forgotten.
+
+
+  _What Is Lacking_
+
+The Charter could not carry its own logic beyond a first step: since
+we were not allied to Britain we could not discuss a World system--all
+we could say was that aggressors would be disarmed (by ourselves and
+Great Britain, neither gaining a military or naval predominance) and
+later we also might disarm--when the world seemed safe. This was on
+the power side; on the economic side, our role was gratifyingly vague.
+
+Out of the Atlantic mists a few certainties rose, like icebergs. We
+soon saw:
+
+  1. That Britain has no method of organizing Europe; its
+     tradition is isolation plus alliances.
+
+  2. That Britain has no system of production parallel to the
+     slave system of Germany, by which Europe would restore the
+     ravages of war.
+
+  3. That Britain cannot impose its relatively democratic habits
+     and relatively high level of comfort on the Continent.
+
+In effect, after an uprush of enthusiasm following the defeat of
+Hitler, the democratic countries will face with panic their tragic
+incapacity to do what the fascists have almost done--unify the nations
+of Europe.
+
+
+  _Slow Union-Now_
+
+It was not the function of the Charter to outline the new map of
+Europe. But the map is being worked over and the most effective of the
+workers are those led by Clarence K. Streit toward Union-now. Long
+before the Atlantic Charter was issued, Federal Union had proposed
+free access to raw materials, even for Germans if they destroyed their
+Nazi leaders; and the entire publicity, remarkably organized, has a
+tone of authority which makes it profoundly significant. I do not know
+that it is a trial balloon of Downing Street or of the White House;
+but in America a Justice of the Supreme Court and a member of the
+Cabinet recommend the proposal to the "serious consideration" of the
+citizens and it has equally notable sponsors in England.
+
+I believe that union with the British Commonwealth of Nations stands
+in the way of America's actual function after the war; I see it as a
+sudden reversal of our historic direction, a shock we should not
+contemplate in war time; it does not correspond to the living
+actualities of our past or present. But I think we owe the Unionists a
+great deal; they have incited thought and even action; they serve as
+the Committee to Aid the Allies did before last December, to supply a
+rallying point for enthusiasts and enemies; we are doing far too
+little thinking about our international affairs, and Federal Union
+makes us think.
+
+It has two aims: the instant purpose of combining all our powers to
+win the war, using the fact of our union as an engine of propaganda in
+occupied and enemy countries; and second, "that this program be only
+the first step in the gradual, peaceful extension of ... federal union
+to all peoples willing and able to adhere to them, so that from this
+nucleus may grow eventually a universal world government of, by and
+for the people". (It sounds impractical, but so did the Communist
+Manifesto and Hitler's "ravings".)
+
+As to the immediate program, it would instantly revive the latent
+isolationism of tens of millions who used to insist that the Roosevelt
+policy would end in the sacrifice of our independence; we should have
+a unified control of production, but some 40% of our producers would
+lose all faith in our government. In the midst of winning the war, we
+should have to re-convince millions that we had not intentionally
+betrayed them.
+
+Military and productive unity can be independent of political unity.
+Unified command was achieved in France in 1918 and in the Pacific in
+1942, without unions.
+
+As for effect abroad, propaganda could present a better case to
+Frenchmen who believe Britain let them down if complete Anglo-American
+union were not an accomplished fact; and the whole Continental and
+Russian and Asiatic suspicion of our motives might be allayed if we
+did not unite completely and permanently with "the people of Canada,
+the United Kingdom, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of
+South Africa" while we were not so fondly embracing the peoples of
+India, China, and the Netherlands East Indies. The abiding union of
+literate, superior, capitalist white men is not going to be taken as a
+first step to world equality by Slavs and Orientals; and much as the
+British Empire may wish not to acknowledge the fact, Communism has
+completely undermined the idea of white supremacy, and has given a new
+hope to Asia and Africa. It may have been a very bad thing to do, but
+we cannot stop for recriminations now. There are new soldiers for
+democracy in the world, and if they are fighting beside us, we cannot
+ignore them and fall into the arms of their traditional oppressors. We
+have a great work to do with the Chinese and the Indians, and all the
+other peoples who can stand against our enemy; we cannot begin to do
+it if our first move is accepting British overlordship in the East,
+uncritically, without pledges or promises.
+
+As a post-war program Federal Union is more persuasive. It begins with
+a Wilsonian peace offer--the influence is strong and supplies the deep
+emotional appeal of the organization. It guarantees free access to
+rubber and oil and gold; it accepts any nation whose people had
+certain minimal freedoms; it implies, of course, free trade--with new
+markets for our manufactured products, and no duties on British
+woolens; plans for the Union Congress "assure the American people a
+majority" at the start. (As between the United States and the British
+Commonwealth; as soon as "all peoples willing and able" to, enter, the
+200 million American and British Commonwealthers would be swamped by
+800 million Chinese and Indians and other Asiatics.)
+
+The average American pays a great tribute to the largeness of the
+concept of "Union-now"--he doesn't believe that anyone really means
+it. He thinks it is a fancy name for a war alliance, or possibly a new
+simplified League of Nations. The gross actuality of Iowa and
+Yorkshire ruled by one governing body, he cannot take in. And as the
+argument develops, this general scepticism is justified; for the
+American learns that while he may be ruled, he will not be over-ruled,
+and he wonders what Mr. Churchill and the man in the London street
+will say to that, or in what disguise this plan is being presented to
+the English or the Scots or the New Zealanders. So far no responsible
+British statesman has offered union to the United States, but Mr.
+Leslie Hore-Belisha has said that we need a declaration of
+inter-dependence and our Ambassador to the Court of St. James's told
+an international Society of writers that we need a sort of
+international citizenship. Mr. Wendell Willkie however has said that
+"American democracy must rule the world."
+
+
+  _Entry Into Europe_
+
+By union or by alliance, American or Anglo-American rule over the
+world will have some strange consequences for us, citizens not
+accustomed to worry over "foreign affairs". Perhaps the strangest
+thing is that the results will be almost the same whether we are
+partners with Britain or alone in our mighty domination, with England
+as a satellite. An American or Anglo-American imperium can only be
+organized by force; it is, in effect, the old order of Europe, with
+America playing Britain's old star part, Britain reduced to the
+supporting role of France or Holland or Portugal. In any controversy,
+we step in, with our vast industrial power, our democratic tradition,
+our aloofness from Europe, just as England used to step in with _her_
+power and traditions; the Atlantic is to us what the Channel or North
+Sea was to Britain. England's policy was to prevent the rise of any
+single Continental power, so she made an alliance with Prussia to
+fight France in 1814 and made an alliance with France to fight Prussia
+in 1914. In an Anglo-American alliance, England would be our European
+outpost, just as Prussia or France was England's Continental outpost.
+
+Our policy would still be the balance of power. Like England, we
+should be involved in every war, whether we take up arms or not--as
+she was involved in the Crimea and the Balkans, and South Africa and
+North Africa; we should have our Fashodas and our Algeciras and our
+Mafeking; our peace will be uneasy, our wars not our own.
+
+The Atlantic Charter suggests a "policing" of the world after the war;
+it holds off from anything further; it does not actually hint that a
+reorganization of power in the world is needed. Yet, at the same time,
+the creation of an oceanic bloc to combat the European land bloc is
+hinted. It is all rather like a German professor's dream of
+geo-politics; Russia becomes a Pacific power and Japan, by a miserable
+failure of geography, is virtually a Continental one, while the United
+States is reduced to two strips of ocean frontage, like a real estate
+development with no back lot, with no back country, with no background
+in the history of a Continent.
+
+The Sea-Powers unit is as treacherous as "the Atlantic group" or "the
+Democratic countries"; the intent is still to create a dominant power
+and give ourselves (and Britain) control of the raw materials and the
+trade of the world. No matter how naturally the group comes together,
+by tradition or self-interest, it becomes instantly the nucleus for an
+alliance; and as the alliance begins to form, nations we omit or
+reject begin to crystallize around some other centre, and we have the
+balance of power again, the race for markets and the race for
+armaments.
+
+This will be particularly true if we begin to play the diplomatic
+game with the stakes greater than those ever thrown--since we are the
+first two-ocean nation to enter world affairs. At the moment nothing
+seems more detestable than the policy of Japan; but diplomacy
+overcomes all detestation, and if we are going in for the game of
+dealing with nations instead of peoples, we can foresee ourselves
+years from now as the great balance between the Atlantic and the
+Pacific, between Japan and England, or Japan and Germany, perhaps the
+honest broker between the two sets of powers. In 1942 we are
+independent, fighting for freedom, helping all those who fight against
+tyranny; and we can do this because we have kept out of the groupings
+and combinations of the powers. But we are being pushed into a
+combination and we know now that there is only one way to avoid
+entanglement: we must prevent the combination from coming into
+existence.
+
+
+  _Our Historic Decision_
+
+In 1919 an attempt was made, by America, to put an end to all European
+combinations of power. That attempt was unanimously approved by the
+people of the United States, some of whom voted for the League while
+the others endorsed a Society of Nations, to which W.G. Harding
+promised our adhesion. The Society of Nations was never seriously
+proposed, and Harding betrayed the American people; at the same time
+it was monumentally clear that France, with England's help, had
+sabotaged the actual League by making it a facade for a punitive
+alliance. Between these two betrayals, the idea of world organization
+was mortally compromised.
+
+We may quarrel over the blame for the impotence of the League; did
+France invade the Ruhr because, without us in the League, she needed
+"protection"? or did we stay out of the League because we knew France
+would go into the Ruhr? That can be argued for ever. We know
+reasonably well why we kept out of the League; but no one troubles to
+remember how earnestly we wanted the League and prayed for it and
+wanted to enter, so that it remained always to trouble us as we tried
+to sleep through the destruction of Ethiopia or Spain or
+Czecho-Slovakia.
+
+The League was not a promise of security to the _people_ of the United
+States. Our Government may have felt the need of a world order; we did
+not; the war had barely touched us, yet even those whom it had touched
+least were enthusiasts for a new federation of nations. It was neither
+fear nor any abstract love of peace. The League, or any other
+confederation of Europe, corresponded to our American need, which was
+to escape alliance with any single power or small group; to escape the
+danger of Europe united against us; and to escape the devil's
+temptation of imperialism--_because the people of the United States do
+not want to rule the world_. There is an instinct which tells us that
+those who rule are not independent; they are slaves to their slaves;
+it tells us that we are so constituted that we cannot rule over part
+of Europe or join with any part to rule the rest; it is our instinct
+of independence which forbids us in the end to destroy the liberty of
+any other nation.
+
+This goes back to the thought of union with the British nations. If we
+unite, and we are dominant, do we not accept the responsibility of
+domination? The appetite for empire is great and as the old world
+turned to us in 1941, as the War of the Worlds placed us in the centre
+of action, as more and more we came to make the decisions, as
+Australia, Russia, China, Britain called to us for help--the image of
+America ruling the world grew dazzling bright. It was our duty--our
+destiny; Mr. Henry Luce recognized the American century, seeing us
+accepted by the world which already accepts our motor cars, chewing
+gum and moving pictures. To shrink from ruling the world is abject
+cowardice. Did England shrink in 1914? Or France under Napoleon? Or
+Rome under Augustus? Or Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus?
+
+No. No despotism ever shrank from its "destiny" to destroy the freedom
+of other nations.
+
+But the history of America will still create our destiny--and our
+destiny is _not_ to rule the world.
+
+_Our destiny is to remain independent and the only way we can remain
+independent is by cooperation with all the other nations of the earth.
+That is the only way for us to escape exclusive alliances, the pull of
+grandiose imperial schemes, the danger of alliances against us, and a
+tragic drift into the European war system which can destroy us._ There
+is an area of action in which nationality plays no part: like labor
+statistics--and this area is steadily growing; there is another area
+jealously guarded, the area of honor and tariffs and taxes. We have to
+mark out the parts of our lives which we can offer up to international
+supervision and the parts we cannot. It will surprise us to see that
+we can become more independent if we collaborate more.
+
+
+  "_Far as Human Eye Can See_"
+
+I have no capacity to describe the world order after the war. If, as I
+have said, the war is fought by us in accordance with our national
+character, we will create a democratic relationship between the
+nations of the world; and our experience added to that of Britain and
+the USSR will tend toward a Federation of Commonwealths; the three
+great powers have arrived, by three separate experiences, at the idea
+of Federation; two of them are working out the problems of sovereign
+independent states within a union; the third, ourselves, worked the
+problem out long ago by expunging States Rights in theory and allowing
+a great deal in practise. As a result of our experience, we
+dogmatically assert that no Federation can be created without the
+ultimate extinction of independence; we may be right. But the thought
+persists that independence was wanted for the sake of liberty; that
+independence without security was the downfall of Czecho-Slovakia and
+France; and that we have cherished independence because the rest of
+the world did not cherish liberty as we did. Profoundly as I believe
+independence to be the key to American action, I can imagine the
+translation of the word into other terms; we are allied to Britain and
+the Netherlands and the Soviets today, we have accepted alien command
+of our troops and ships; we are supplying arms to the Soviets and
+building a naval base in Ecuador and have accepted an agreement by
+which Great Britain will have a word in the creation of the most
+cherished of our independent creations, the tariff. Independence, so
+absolute in origin, is like all absolutes, non-existent in fact; we
+know this in private life, for the man of "independent means" may
+depend on ten thousand people to pay him dividends; and only the mad
+are totally independent of human needs and duties.
+
+We will not willingly give up our right to elect a President; we may
+allow the President to appoint an American member to an international
+commission to allocate East Indies rubber; in return for which we will
+allocate our wheat or cotton or motors--on the advice of other
+nations, but without bowing our neck to their rule. We have always
+accepted specific international interference in our affairs--the
+Alabama claims and the Oregon boundary and the successive troubles in
+Venezuela prove that our "sovereign right" to do what we please was
+never exercised without some respect for the opinion of mankind--and
+the strength of the British navy. Indeed recent events indicate that
+for generations our independence of action, the reality of
+independence, rested on our faith in the British fleet.
+
+The moment we become realistic about our independence we will be able
+to collaborate effectively with other nations. We got a few lessons in
+realistic dealings in 1941--lend-lease and the trade for the naval
+bases were blunt, statesmanlike but most undiplomatic--moves to
+strengthen the British fleet, to extend our own area of safety, and to
+give us time against the threat of Japan. They protected our
+independence, but they also compromised it; the British by any
+concession to Japan might have weakened us; we took the risk, and our
+action was in effect an act of defensive war against Germany. Like
+Jefferson, buying Louisiana to protect us against any foreign power
+across the Mississippi, President Roosevelt acted under dire necessity
+and as Jefferson (not Roosevelt) put it, was not too deeply concerned
+with Constitutionality. The situation in 1941 required not only the
+bases but the continued functioning of the British fleet in the
+Atlantic; and we got what we needed.
+
+The economic agreement of 1942 is probably a greater invasion of our
+simon-pure independence of action; although it empowers a post-war
+President to decide how much of lend-lease was returned by valor in
+the field, it specifically binds us to alter our tariff if Britain can
+induce its Commonwealth of Nations to give up the system of "imperial
+preference". All our tariffs are horsetrades and the most-favored
+nation is a sweet device; but heretofore we have not bartered our
+tariffs in advance. Certainly a post-war economic union is in the
+wind; certainly we will accept it if it comes to us piecemeal, by
+agreements and joint-commissions and international resolutions which
+are not binding, but are accepted and become as routine as the law of
+copyright which once invaded our sacred national right to steal or the
+international postal union which gave us the right to send a letter to
+any country for five cents.
+
+When we think of the future our minds are clouded by memory of the
+League; we are psychologically getting ready to accept or reject the
+League all over again. We are worried over the form--will it be Geneva
+again or will headquarters be in Washington; will Germany have a vote;
+will we have to go to war if the Supreme Council tells us to. These
+are important if we are actually going to reconstitute the League; but
+if we are not, the only question is what we want the new world
+organization to do. In keeping with our political tradition we will
+pretend that we want it to do as little as possible and put upon it
+all the work we are too lazy to do ourselves; but even the minimum
+will be enough.
+
+
+  _Our Standing Offer_
+
+Everything points to an economic council representing the free nations
+of the world; the lease-lend principles in time of peace may be
+invoked, as Harold Laski has suggested, to provide food and raw
+materials for less favored nations; and the need for "economic
+sanctions" will not be lost on the nation which supplied Japan with
+scrap-iron and oil for five years of aggression against China and then
+was repaid at Pearl Harbor.
+
+If there is any wisdom--in the people or in their leaders--we will not
+have a formulated League to accept or reject; we will have a series of
+agreements (such as we have had for generations) covering more and
+more subjects, with more and more nations. We have drawn up treaties
+and agreements with twenty South American States, with forty-six
+nations united for liberty; we can draw up an agreement with Russia
+and Rumania and the Netherlands so that England and the Continent and
+China get oil; and another agreement may give us tungsten; we may have
+to take universal action to stop typhus--and no one will be an
+isolationist then. If the war ends by a series of uprisings we may be
+establishing temporary governments as part of our military strategy.
+Slowly the form of international cooperation will be seen; by that
+time it will be familiar to us--and we will see that we have not lost
+our independence, but have gained our liberty.
+
+We began the war with one weapon: liberty. If we fight the war well,
+we will begin the long peace with two: liberty and production. With
+them we will not need to rule the world; with them the world will be
+able to rule itself. All we have to do is to demonstrate the best use
+of the instruments--and to let others learn.
+
+Before our part in the war began, it was often suggested that America
+would feed and clothe Europe, send medicine and machinery to China,
+and make itself generally the post-war stockpile of Democracy as it
+had been the arsenal and treasury during the war; and the monotonous
+uncrushing answer was about "the money". Realities of war have blown
+"the money" question into atoms; no sensible person pretends that
+there is a real equation between our production and money value; we
+can't in any sense "afford" bombers and battleships; if we stopped to
+ask where "the money" would come from, and if the question were
+actually relevant, we would have to stop the war.
+
+Another actuality of war relieves us of the danger of being too
+generous--the actuality of rubber and tin and tungsten and all the
+other materials critical to production in peace time. Since we will
+have to rebuild our stocks of vital goods, our practical men will see
+to it that we get as well as give; we may send food to Greece and get
+rubber from Java, but on the books we will not be doing too badly.
+
+Neither money nor the bogey of a balance of trade is going to decide
+our provisioning of Europe and Asia; the cold necessity of preventing
+revolution and typhus will force us to rebuild and re-energize; in the
+end, like all enlargements of the market, this will repay us. The rest
+of the world will know a great deal about mass production by the end
+of the war: Indians and Australians will be expert at interchangeable
+parts; but we will have the immeasurable advantage of our long
+experience on which the war has forced us to build a true productive
+system. We will jump years ahead of our schedule of increase and
+improvement because of the war; and we will be able to face any
+problem of production--if we want to, or have to. The choice between
+people's lives and the gold standard will have to be made again, as it
+was by many nations in the 1930's; only this time the choice is not
+without a threat. After wars, people are accustomed to bloodshed; they
+prefer it to starvation.
+
+
+  _Alternative to Prosperity_
+
+The greatest invention of democracy is the wealth of the people. We
+discovered that wealth rested more firmly on prosperity than on
+poverty and the genius of our nation has gone into creating a
+well-to-do mass of citizens. Unfinished as the job is, we can start to
+demonstrate its principles to others. In return they may refrain from
+teaching us the principles of revolution.
+
+Recovery and freedom are our concrete actual offer to the nations of
+Europe, counter to the offer of Hitler. Without this literal, concrete
+offer, we shall have to fight longer to defeat Hitler--and every added
+day costs us lives and money and strength inside ourselves which we
+need to create the new world; if we can defeat Hitler without the aim
+of liberty, our victory will be incomplete; we will not automatically
+emancipate France or Jugo-Slavia, or draw Rumania back into the orbit
+of free nations. Within each nation a powerful group profits by the
+Nazi-system; within each a vast population, battered, disheartened,
+diseased, wants only the meanest security, one meal a day, shelter
+only from the bitter days, something more than a rag for clothing--and
+an end to the struggle; these are not heroes, they are old people, men
+and women struck down and beaten and starved so that they cannot rise,
+but can drag down those who attempt to rise. These we may save only by
+giving them food and forgetfulness. On the other side there are the
+young--carefully indoctrinated, worked over to believe that the offer
+of fascism is hard, but practical; it is an offer of slavery and
+security; whereas they are told the offer of the democratic countries
+is an hypocrisy and--worse still--cannot be made good. We have to face
+the disagreeable fact that the Balkan peasant in 1900 heard of
+universal suffrage and high wages in America, and his grandchildren
+know more about our sharecroppers and race riots and strike breakers
+than we do--because the Goebbels machine has played the dark side of
+our record a million times. The first year of the war was bound to
+show the "superiority" of the German production technique over ours,
+since Europe will not know that we are still at the beginning of
+actual production. The mind of Europe knows little good of us; we
+have not yet begun to undermine the fascist influence by words, and
+our acts are not yet planned. Even after Hitler is destroyed, we will
+have to act to overcome impotence in political action which years of
+Nazi "conditioning" induces, and to compensate for the destruction of
+technical skill in the occupied areas. To us the end of the war is a
+wild moving picture of gay processions, swastikas demolished, prisons
+opened, and the governments-in-exile hailed at the frontiers; all of
+these things may happen, but the reality, after the parade, will be a
+grim business of re-making the flesh and the spirit of peoples. The
+children of Israel rejoiced and sang as they crossed the Red Sea; but
+they had been slaves. So Moses led them forty years in the wilderness,
+when he could have gone directly to the Promised Land in forty months,
+because he wanted a generation of slaves to die, and a generation of
+hardy freemen to be in full mature power.[A] The generation we will
+raise to power in the occupied countries will have great experience of
+tyranny, none of freedom; it will know all about our shortcomings and
+nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it
+will have seen the Nazis at work and know nothing of new techniques of
+production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote A: I have not traveled the route; but General Sir Francis
+Younghusband who had, gave me the figures--and the motive.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+The Liberty Bell
+
+
+Above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it
+as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the
+world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. We
+have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not
+forget--and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and
+people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is
+only a word. We do not need to convert the world to a special form of
+political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the
+peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us
+to help. We will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will
+make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will
+underwrite. For in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must
+also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that
+there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone
+among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man,
+freedom can destroy poverty.
+
+We have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric
+power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known
+before, not even to ourselves. For we have to create enough liberty to
+take up the shameful slack in our own country. We all know,
+indifferently, that people (somewhere--where was it?--wasn't there a
+movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. But we assume that Americans
+always have enough liberty. The Senate's committee report on the
+fascism of organized big-farming in California is a shock which
+Americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not
+understand that we have been weakened internally, as England was
+weakened by its distressed areas and its Malayan snobbery. We do not
+yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic
+system and calculated denials of liberty. We have denied liberty in
+hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain
+portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have
+started the counter-infection of communism. Most of the shameful
+occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war
+against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. Here are
+the facts in the California case, chosen because the documentation
+comes from official sources:
+
+     "Unemployment, underemployment, disorganized and haphazard
+     migrancy, lack of adequate wages or annual income, bad housing,
+     insufficient education, little medical care, the great public
+     burden of relief, the denial of civil liberties, riots, strife,
+     corruption are all part and parcel of this autocratic system of
+     labor relations that has for decades dominated California's
+     agricultural industry."
+
+The American people do not know that such things exist; no American
+orator has dared to say "except in three or four states, all men are
+equal in the eyes of the law"--or, "trial by jury is the right of
+every man except farm hands in California, who may be beaten at will."
+When the Senate's report is repeated to us from Japanese short-wave we
+will call it propaganda--and it will be the terrible potent propaganda
+of truth. We will still call for "stern measures", if a laborer who
+has lost the rights of man on American soil does not go into battle
+with a passion in his heart to die for liberty, and we will not
+understand that we have been at fault, because we have not created
+liberty. We have been living on borrowed liberty, not of our own
+making.
+
+We have not seen that some of our "cherished liberties" are heirlooms,
+beautiful antiques, not usable in the shape they come to us. We have
+the right to publish--but we cannot afford to print a newspaper--so
+that we have to create a new freedom of the press. We have the right
+to keep a musket on the wall, but our enemies have ceased to prowl,
+the musket is an antique, and we need a new freedom to protect
+ourselves from officious bureaucrats. We have the right to assemble,
+but men of one mind, men of one trade, live a thousand miles apart, so
+we need a new freedom to combine--and a new restriction on
+combination, too.
+
+Freedom is always more dangerous than discipline, and the more complex
+our lives, the more dangerous is any freedom. This we know; we know
+that discipline and order are dangerous, too, because they cannot
+tolerate imperfection. A nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free,
+but it can exist 90% free, especially if the direction of life is
+toward freedom; that is what we have proved in 160 years. But a nation
+cannot exist 90% slave--or 90% regimented--because every degree of
+order multiplies the power of disorder. If a machine needs fifty
+meshed-in parts, for smooth operation, the failure of one part
+destroys forty-nine; if it needs five million, the failure of one part
+destroys five million.
+
+That is the hope of success for our strategy against the strategy of
+"totality"; the Nazis have surpassed the junkers by their disciplined
+initiative in the field, a genuine triumph; but we still do not know
+whether a whole people can be both disciplined and flexible; we have
+not yet seen the long-run effect of Hitler's long vituperation of
+Bolshevism, his treaty with Stalin, and his invasion of Russia--unless
+the weakening of Nazi power, its failure to press success into victory
+at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad reflect a hesitation in the
+stupefied German mind, an incapacity to change direction.
+
+Whether our dangers are greater than those of fascism may be proved in
+war; it remains for us to make the most of them, to transform danger
+into useful action. We have to increase freedom, because as freedom
+grows, it brings its own regulation and discipline; the dangers of
+liberty came to us only after we began to neglect it or suppress it;
+freedom itself is orderly, because it is a natural state of men, it is
+not chaos, it begins when the slave is set free and ends when the
+murderer destroys the freedom of others; between the tyrant and the
+anarchist lies the area of human freedom.
+
+It is also the area of human cooperation, the condition of life in
+which man uses all of his capacities because he is not deprived of the
+right to work, by choice, with other men. In that area, freedom
+expands and is never destructive. The flowering of freedom in the past
+hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted
+extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create
+liberty, they destroy only what is already dead.
+
+I have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"--as if the freedom of
+man were a commodity; _and it is_. So long as we think of it as a
+great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we _make_ liberty it
+becomes a reality; the Declaration of Independence _made_ liberty,
+concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets.
+Liberty, like love, has to be made; the passion out of which love
+rises exists always, but people have to _make love_, or the passion is
+betrayed; and the acts by which human beings make liberty are as
+fundamental as the act of sexual intercourse by which love is made.
+And as love recreates itself and has to be made, in order to live
+again, liberty has also to be re-created, or it dies out. Whatever
+lovers do affects the profound relation between them, for the passion
+is complex; whatever we do affects our liberties, for freedom rises
+out of a thousand circumstances; and we have to be not only eternally
+vigilant, but eternally creative; we can no longer live on the liberty
+inherited from the great men who created liberty in the Declaration of
+Independence. All that quantity has been exhausted, stolen from us,
+misused; if we want to survive, we must begin to make liberty again
+and proclaim it throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof;
+and it shall be a jubilee unto them.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                    |
+    |                                                            |
+    | Page  54: "what the trust were" replaced with              |
+    |           "what the trusts were"                           |
+    | Page  83: "given by the the people" replaced with          |
+    |           "given by the people"                            |
+    | Page 156: enterprizes replaced with enterprises            |
+    |                                                            |
+    |            -------------------------------------           |
+    |                                                            |
+    | NOTE that on Page 85 there are words missing from the      |
+    | quoted section of the Declaration of Independence.         |
+    | The missing words "to our British brethren. We have warned |
+    | them" have been inserted in the paragraph that begins:     |
+    | "Nor have We been wanting in attention (to our British     |
+    | brethren. We have warned them) from time to time of        |
+    | attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable   |
+    | jurisdiction over us."                                     |
+    |                                                            |
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Proclaim Liberty!, by Gilbert Seldes
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