Labor Troubles
The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.
The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of labor too often unfit. Like other organizedgroups, labor unions did not always consult the public good and criminals were found among them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the labor unions.
The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass, the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country backward in thehabitsof organized dealing between management and labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled principles—to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.
Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as that was known, the possibility of creating a laborpolicy became bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the settlement of all disputes.
Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly because we shall remain for some time behind the other great industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did; and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes, no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities, and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.
The Danger of Godlessness
I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their sources, as a guide to conduct—particularly the conduct of the war (which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our habits. I have, so far, namedthose aspects of our total outlook which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I come now to items which are no less potent because they are impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of America into play must count also on these.
We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.
The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic" itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is now associated with flummery and hoax.
We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.
This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselveslinked through God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling" which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as vain as our hope for better.
The Alger Factor
The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in America by an intense and confident appeal toaction, in the faith that action will bring far better things than have been known. The vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a childish confusion between what is better andwhat is merely bigger or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints—but we have also rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to which they tend.
The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire year. And both of these instances have another special point of interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.
I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a "lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably, without servantshauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.
The Morals of Plenty
We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation; Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be made by mass production). Mass production put an end to the old complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub—mass production of tubs and central heating in apartments. Themorality of scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of mass production; it was a working morality.
Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime
We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse; cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate time. We may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that substituted thegoodsof the many for the good of the few.
The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it remains a distinguishing mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.
In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon; characteristic of the twentieth century as thecrossroads general store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.
Prosperity and Politics
Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to emancipate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers; sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political party, or a generation—but America did not forget. Each time we forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing; and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that America could create the materials for a high standard of life, although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society wealthy"; and we didit so handsomely as to leave questionable his further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than the capitalist system can."
We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quantity system into action; and all of them required the same thing—equality of political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people, aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future, capable of earning and not afraid to spend—these are the customers required by mass production. And the same freedom, the same intention to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest spenders.
The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen, our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our fulfilmentof Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.
There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and examined briefly by themselves.
In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses, juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families take their cars and go driving.
These are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady, attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication.
Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are actually making their own fun. The same ignoble but useful desire for money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves. Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.
Means of Communication
The other elements I have mentioned, movies, radio and a new journalism, are the products of our immediate time. Although the moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular just before the first World War, and was promptly recognized as a prime instrument of propaganda by Lenin as he began to build the Socialist State in 1917; the moving picture may have been colossal then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered.
By that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established itself in its present commercial base. Radio was first conceived as an instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless telegraphy, when the Soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the heads of their governments—although this appeal still had to be printed, the radio receiver did not exist. When the necessary inventions were working (and the tinkering American forced the issue by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to serve the public. Among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the election results in the Harding-Cox campaign, crop reports, and music. The entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of 1929 the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals of the community.
By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture, devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old straight fiction magazine had offered.
These three new means of mass communication arerevolutionary inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the first move of acoup d'etatis to take over the radio and the next is to divert the movies into propaganda.
Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated.
Words and Pictures
Of the fact and picture publicationsLifeandLookare the best examples;TimeandNews-Weekare fact and illustration magazines which is basically different, although their success is also important. The appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions;Timeand theReaders' Digestbecome the great magazine phenomena of our time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public services.
The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old methods and the artinessof book "shoppes" which always got in the way of good book-sellers.
The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in process of being formed.
Until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for this new language is great. For neither the movies nor radio can be used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation. Radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with the right materials; but when President Roosevelt asked his audience to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could not do. The movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group presence. By this the movies also gain when they use the right materials.
The use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a mobile reserve of propaganda. When the radio and the movies have established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is carried to the wardmeeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory—where the action is determined by men and women in private discussion.
Universal Languages
Radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies, which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great mass inventions of America. The patents may have been taken out elsewhere, but it was in America that these two forms of mass communication were instantly placed at the service of all people. The errors of judgment have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of the hands of the bureaucrat. For a generation we deplored the vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and discovered that the only other effective movies were made by dictators, to falsify history, as the Russians did when the miserable Trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every film made by Hitler. For a generation we wept over the commercialism of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under compulsion.
The intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. Some great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by British radio (which is government owned, but not government operated); some exceptional and important films were made for the few. But the dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea—movies and the radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking ofallthe people. This universality lies in the nature of the instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited reception of the broadcasts; and only Hitler and Stalin and the sponsors have been happy to understand this.
Like all those who are habituated to the movies, I have suffered much from Hollywood, my pain being all the greater because I am so devoted; like all those who work in radio, I am acutely conscious of its faults; but the faults and the banalities are not in question now. Now we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our purposes. We have to discover what the ignoramus in Hollywood and the businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for.
The one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. We have to learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation; and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to accomplish an end. Moreover, we have to study the field so that we know whennotto use these instruments, what we must not take from them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal.
A coordinated use ofallthe means of persuasion is required; to let the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or most effectively on the air. There are many things to be done; we need excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other. If we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one ill-timed, but brilliantly made, documentary on production rendered futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. When the means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have to use all of them together.
The movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem to rise on the international horizon of the 1920's,to have no link with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world. With these, it is true, we return to the universals of human expression and communication. But what we have done with them is unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. That is why I have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have enormous inertia, the slightest error may accumulate tremendous consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most complete protection against disaster at home.
We have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have to remind the American people of other tools and instruments they have neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a passion with us to invent the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use against us.
The tools of democracy are certain civil actions, certain inventions, certain habits. They can be used against us—but only if we fail to use them ourselves.
The greatest tools are civil liberties which we have been considering as "rights" or "privileges". The right to free speech is a great one; free speech probably was originally intended to protect property; it preserves liberty; the rights of assembly, of protest for redress, of a free press all have this double value, that they guarantee the integrity of the private man and protect the State.
The great debate on the war brought back some long forgotten phenomena: broadsides, street meetings, marches, and brawls. Before they began, virtuallyallthe civil rights were being used either by newcomers to America or by enemies of the American system. The poor had no access to the radio; they used a soap box instead and genteel people shrank away; the Bundist and the American Communist assembled and protested and published and spoke; the believers in America waited for an election to roll around again, and then did nothing about it. The enemies of the people sent a hundred thousand telegrams to Congressmen, signing the names of dead men to kill the regulation of utilities, but the believer in the democratic process didn't remember the name of his Congressman. Bewildered aliens got their second papers and were inducted into political clubs; the old line Americans never found out how the primaries worked.
Public Addresses
A dangerous condition rose. No families from Beacon Street spoke in Boston Common; therefore, whoever spoke onthe Common was an enemy of Beacon Street; all over America the well-born (and the well-heeled) retired from direct communication with the people, and all over America the privilege of talking to the citizens fell into the hands of radicals, lunatics, and dangerous enemies of the Republic—so that in time the very fact that one tried to exercise the right of free speech became suspect; and Beacon Street and Park Avenue could think of no way to protect themselves from Boston Common and Union Square—except to abolish free speech entirely. They did not dare to say it, but the remarkable Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City, said it for them: "Whenever I hear anyone talk about civil liberties, I know he's not a good American".
The dreadful humiliation was that it came so close to the truth. The Red and the Bundist, clamoring or conspiring against America, were almost the only ones doing what all Americans had the right to do. We hated cranks, we did not want to be so conspicuous, we hadn't the time, the police would attend to it, if they didn't like it here let them go back ... we allowed our most precious rights to atrophy. When suddenly they were remembered, as they were by the bonus marchers of 1932, we yelled revolution and the President of the United States called out the troops to shoot down the defenders of our country. It was the first time that a petition for redress had been offered by good citizens, by veterans, by men of notable American stock—and it frightened us because they were doing what "only foreigners" or "dangerous agitators" used to do; they were in fact being Americans in action.
What is not used, dies. The habit of protecting our freedom was dying in the United States. There was no conspiracy of power against us; there was no need. We were carrying experimental democracy forward so far on several planes—the material and social planes particularly—that we let it go by default on the vital plane of practical politics. We did not go into politics, we did not electioneer, we did not threaten wardbosses or county chairmen, we did not form third parties, we did nothing except vote, if it was a fair day (but not too fair if we meant to play golf). As for private action to defend our liberties, it was unnecessary and vulgar and bothersome.
The depression scared us, but not into free speech; by that time free speech was Red; and the deeper we floundered in the mire of defeatism, the more intimidated we were by shouting Congressmen and super-patriots; it was only after the New Deal pulled us out of our tailspin that we saw the light: we too could have been obscure men speaking at street corners, we did not have to give all the soap boxes to men like Sacco and Vanzetti; we too could have published pamphlets like the dreadful Communists, and held meetings and badgered our Congressmen. Suddenly the people were reincorporated into their government; suddenly the people began to be concerned with government; and the tremendous revitalization of political anger was one of the best symptoms of democratic recovery in our generation.
Return to Politics
The merciless pressure of taxation and then the grip of war have pushed us forward and in a generation we will be again as politically aware as our great-grandfathers were when they had one newspaper a week, and only their determination to rule themselves as a principle of action. Perhaps we shall take the trouble they took; they travelled a day's journey to hear a debate and discussed it for a fortnight; they thought about politics and studied the meaning of events. And they quite naturally did their duties as citizens; they dug their neighbors out of snow-blocked roads, they nominated their candidates, they watched and rebuked their representatives. It was not a political Utopia, but it was a more intelligent use of political power than ours has been. The usual excuse for the breakdown of political action in America is that so many "foreigners" came, to whom the politics of freedom were alien. This may have been true of some of the laterarrivals; but the Irish were captivated by, and presently captured, city politics wherever they settled; the Germans were the steadiest of citizens and so were the Scandinavians, their studious earnest belief in our institutions shaming our flippant disregard. The Southern Slavs, the Russian Jews and the Italians were farthest removed from our political habits; but their passion for America was great. It could have been worked into political action, and often was worked into political skulduggery by bosses of a more political bent. Many of these immigrants came after the exhaustion of free lands; many were plunged into slums and sweatshops and steel mills on a twelve hour day; and they emerged on the angry side, as disillusioned with America as some of its most ancient families.
That political action dwindled after the great immigrations is true; but it was not the immigrant who refused to act; it was the old family and the typical American; the grafting politicians and the sidewalk radical both kept politics alive; the real Americans were slowly smothering politics. We shall never quite repay our debt to Tammany Hall and the Communists; between them political machines and saintly radicals managed to keep the instruments of democratic action from rusting. Now we have to take them back and learn how to use them again. Fortunately we have no choice. We neglected our rights because we wanted to sidestep our duties; today the war makes our duties inescapable and we are already beginning to use our rights. For in spite of censorship and regimentation, we will use more of our instruments of democracy than ever; we will because we are fighting for them and they have become valuable to us.
The radio, the movies, and popular print are the three tools by which we can create democratic action. The action itself will be appropriate to our time and our conditions; we will not travel ten miles to hear a debate, so long as the radio lasts; but we will have to form units of self-protection in bombed cities; we may need other associations, to apportionfood, to house the homeless, to support the bereaved. We will have to learn how to live together, to share what was once as private as a motor car, to elect a village constable who may have our lives in his hands a dozen times a day. In the process we will be reverting to old and good democratic habits—in a city block in Atlanta or in a prairie village outside Emporia, or in a chic suburb along Lake Michigan. Something like the town-meeting is taking place in a thousand apartment houses where air-raid precautions and the disposal of waste paper are discussed and mothers who have to work trade time with wives who want to go to the movies; the farmers have, since 1932, been meeting; the suburbanites are discussing trains and creation of bus-routes. We are making the discovery that it is our country and we can decide its destiny. We are not to let others rule us; for in this emergency every man must rule himself; the man who neglects his political duty is as dangerous today as the man who leaves his lights on in a blackout.
In the early months of the war our democratic processes were muscle-bound. We hadn't been doing things together; whenever we had organized, it was against some one else; we didn't fall naturally into a simple cooperative effort. And within two months we were breaking into hostile particles, until, in desperation, we discovered that men can work together. The obstructionist manufacturer and the stubborn labor leader could hold up an entire industry; but two men, one from each side, could set each factory going again. The creation of the labor-management committees of two was the first light in the darkness of our domestic policy.
Still to come was the spontaneous outbreak of fervor and the cold organization for victory. We had forgotten the tools of democracy which we had to work together, as simply as men had to work on a snowbound country road together. In a small town of Ohio a pleasant event occurred which had a stir of promise; Dorothy Thompson's report was:
"They got together in the old-fashioned American way: in the old opera house. They warmed and instilled enthusiasm and resolution into one another, by the mass of their presence, and by music, and prayer.
"Mr. Sweet had put the F.F.A. (The Future Farmers of America and the older brothers of the Four-H clubs) to work, and they had made a survey of the existing resources of the community, in trucks, autos, combines, tractors. And he proposed to them that they use these resources,as a community, getting the greatest work out of them with the greatest conservation of them; organizing transportation to the factory where war production was going on, so that no auto travelled for its owner alone, but for as many workers as it could carry."
Democratic Action
There is a field of endeavor in war time where this sort of spontaneous, amateur organization is best; and our Government will be wise if it prevents the inexpert from building bombers but lets them, as far as possible, get children to and from school by local effort. We want to feel that we are being used, that our powers are working for the common good. So far we have been irritated by sudden demands, and frightened by long indifference to our offers—until an angry man has done something, as Mr. Fred Sweet did in Mt. Gilead. A government determined to win this war will create the opportunities for democratic action without waiting for angry men. The combination of maximum control (the single head of production) and maximum dispersion (two men in each factory solving the local problem) is exactly what we understand; to translate civilian emotion into terms of maximum use is the next step.
Already this is happening to us: on one side we are grouping ourselves into smaller units; on the other we are discovering that we are parts of the whole nation. It is a tremendous release of energies for us; we are discovering whatwe had hoped—that America is of indescribable significance to us and that we for the first time signify in America—we, not bosses or financiers or critics or cliques or groups or movements—but we ourselves. Something almost dead stirs again and we know that we shall be able to work with our fellowmen, and work with our Government, and watch those we chose to speak for us, and challenge corruption, and see to it that we, who are the people, are not betrayed. We may not revive theformsof democracy as they existed in Lincoln's time, but we will never again let thespiritof his democracy come so near to being beyond all revival.
We will use the weapons we have and invent new ones; and we had better be prompt. Because we have a victory to win with these weapons and a world to make. We have to work Democracy because we have to create a world in which democracy can live. There is no time to lose.