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.

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

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[ToC]

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[ToC]

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[ToC]

"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[ToC]

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.