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 ofWilsonian 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 tosavethe 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 Europeheld 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 ofour 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 alsorevolutionist. 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 turnconservative, 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 werenotviolent. 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 ininternational 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 whowished 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.
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, thisstrategy 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 createsfear 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 thereverse 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 someorganization 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 bydiscovering 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 mustbepropaganda—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 avictory. 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 comingafterthe German claims and making no assertions of victory, taking scrupulous care to listallBritish 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 unhappinesswithout 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 touchthe 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 thesethingshadto 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 thatweunderstood whytheyhad 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 thatthe 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:
Wecame fromEurope.Wewent away fromEurope.
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 andsea-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.