Chapter XVIII
While the Department of Justice has been rounding up adolescent nonentities for conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States and while the Dies Committee has been investigating crackpots charged with similarly dangerous designs, the only really serious preparations under way in this country for the substitution of a totalitarian dictatorship for the American system, by force and violence (legalized, of course), have been those connected with the Industrial Mobilization Plan for the event of war. This plan is being worked on jointly by the War and Navy Departments in cooperation with the nation’s leading industrialists. Incidentally, these officials preparing for war and what they are to do in this event have more confidence (and more reason for it) in the imminent occurrence of that expected event than any leaders or members of subversive groups have in the immediacy of their hoped-for revolution. As the plan of the War and Navy Departments to replace the traditional American system with a totalitarian dictatorship by the Chief Executive in the exercise of his war powers is both legal and highly patriotic, I cannot possibly be prosecuted, investigated or even criticized for applauding it with all the enthusiasm of one who sincerely hopes for the revolutionary achievement of the new order which this plan and its governmental agents are eminently well suited to initiate under the smoke screen of a war to preserve the American system and check the march of dictatorship abroad.
As for the hunting down of subversive movements, juveniles, rowdies and crackpots by Messrs. Dies and Hoover, together with their own and other governmental agencies, I can only observe with interest that we are already getting warmed up for our totalitarian Gestapo or Ogpu and with some sadness that this feature of totalitarian socialism is the one which already seems clearly indicated to enjoy the greatest popularity with the American masses. This I naturally find not at all surprising. It fully confirms my pessimistic views of democracy which are as depressing as these substantiating indications. To understand democracy, it is essential not to believe in it. To believe in it, is usually not to understand it. The people everywhere understand and both enthusiastically and blindly approve of minority repression and persecution. They could not be made to understand the implications of the Industrial Mobilization Plan. And they would not approve of the plan if they did understand its implications. Hence official Washington plays it down, and the press give Messrs. Dies and Hoover the headlines. The stuff to give the masses in preparation for war is denunciation of dictators abroad and subversive minorities at home—any minority that is small and picturesque will do. This hate stuff creates the right emotional climate for war and the essential dynamism for revolutionary social change. It also diverts the thinking of the masses away from the real revolutionary changes implicit in our going to war.
The function of this war for us will be to facilitate the socialization of American industry under the war powers of the President, just as the function of the Civil War was to permit the liquidation of slavery by an executive proclamation of emancipation. We have a good American precedent for resort to war to effectuate a revolutionary change which we have not the social intelligence or folk unity to bring about without war. In the next war industrial and financial control by private capital will be liquidated by the war powers of the President as a necessity in a war emergency just as slavery was so ended during the Civil War. What could be sweeter for the national socialist leaders of tomorrow than to have the army and navy do most of the dirty work of the revolution while all possible opponents are at war salute to the martial strains of the “Star Spangled Banner?”
At some stage of the game it will be the task of a new elite to take over the new revolution made by the President as a war dictator with the aid of his war powers and War and Navy Department officials. This new elite must be prepared to rationalize the new revolution and to give it the dynamic ideology and leadership it will need to keep going as every revolution must do if it is to be a success. It is for the guidance of that new elite that this book has been written.
The new leaders must understand in advance at least two things about the war and the revolution: The first is that there is not going to be any return to a prewar normal as the Industrial Mobilization Plan (Page 27 Draft of 1936) promises “The controls and functions under discussion are not and should not be exercised in peace. The emergency would automatically terminate after the war.” (The emergency created by the last war has not terminated yet. It is now just becoming really acute.) The second thing to understand is that this is a new revolution and neither a peacetime wave of reform nor a wartime emergency phase. This is a permanent new revolution as a successor to the capitalist revolution now over. Its chief functions are to preserve order and end stagnation. It cannot perform the one without performing the other. The only imperative the leaders of the new revolution really need to understand and respect is that they must keep the revolution going. If they do not slip up on this, they can learn all they need to know by experience or trial and error and correct all their errors as they go along.
Order and activity versus anarchy and stagnation are the issues, not democracy and liberty versus dictatorship and regimentation. Justice, as ever, will be the interest of the stronger, in this case the majority. And this interest will center around the major objectives of order and activity. Up until recently Moscow talked democracy here to spread communism while the American plutocracy talked democracy to get lower taxes and less government regulation. Mr. Roosevelt has talked democracy to keep war against Hitler as an ever available ace up his sleeve to win a third term. Americans out of work or living on the margin of despair do not think or talk democracy or liberty. They think in terms of jobs, ham and eggs and individual security. These require order and activity of a degree democracy cannot achieve.
As a term, a concept or a pattern of institutions and ways, democracy is of no real interest or importance today. The world is not trying to get back to the democracy of the slave-owning Greeks or the slave-owning founders of this republic. The world is trying to find dynamism for the machine age. If a workable formula is found, it can and probably will, in this country, be called a democracy. And the term will be quite as applicable to it as to the slave-owning democracies of Athens or tidewater Virginia. Whatever form of government and society the people get will, by virtue of their definition, be democratic, if they like the word at the time. The solution of the problem of stagnation through a new social dynamism and folk unity will have to be worked out in action rather than on paper. As already seen, the first major phase of the action or gestation of the new revolution is likely to be world war, unnecessary and unfortunate as it is for us so to bring about here the new revolution.
The new folk unity must be spiritual rather than contractual. That is to say, contrary to Rousseau, it must be felt in men’s hearts rather than defined on paper, as in a constitution or some written document.
Seven years of the New Deal phase of the new revolution in America have failed to develop either a new dynamism or a new folk unity. The explanation is simple: A national electoral majority of “gimme” groups does not add up to a national unity. Mr. Roosevelt’s only success in national unification for the purposes of dynamism has been in the realm of foreign policy, where he has united the plutocratic critics of his social policy with the masses, those on relief sharing the same sentiments as the plutocracy as to the necessity of putting an end to the wicked foreign isms. All this merely proves that the American people are united over European and not over American problems. The explanation is simple: The solution of our own problems calls for a quality of folk unity which we lack, whereas an attempted solution of Europe’s problems calls only for a hate of Hitler, Stalin and the Japanese, which we do not lack. A solution for America’s problems would require folk unity, which we lack. A solution for Europe’s problems, namely hating Hitler and killing Germans, calls only for moral unity which we have to burn.
We lack folk unity but have plenty of moral unity for the cause of the Allies, and sundry small nations as well as the Chinese who are far from being a small nation. A moral unity for war, or a unity which was not a true folk unity, has at least twice before been the bane of American democracy. In our Civil War and the late World War we were morally united for wars which were not over interests of the whole people. Had the American people in 1860 had a folk unity, they would have imposed on the industrial interests of the North and the planter slavery interests of the South a compromise settlement involving the liquidation of slavery with indemnification to avert a needless war. But, alas, not being united as a people, Americans in 1860 easily allowed themselves to be morally united for war and emotionally barnstormed into it, one section against another, by the machinations of dominant economic interests of the two respective sections. Scarcely one per cent of the people owned slaves in the South or factories in the North. A thousand different formulas for peace on the basis of compromise between the factory and slavery interests could have been worked out, any one of which would have been better m every way for the interests of the American people than was the Civil War. But there was no folk unity to impose such an approach to the problem and such a solution for it. That this was true, was typical of democracy. In a democracy powerful minority interests always determine events and no single folk interest ever imposes itself to bring about a solution for the general welfare. If the conflict of minority interests is sufficiently big, as it was are united over European and not over American problems. The explanation is simple: The solution of our own problems calls for a quality of folk unity which we lack, whereas an attempted solution of Europe’s problems calls only for a hate of Hitler, Stalin and the Japanese, which we do not lack. A solution for America’s problems would require folk unity, which we lack. A solution for Europe’s problems, namely hating Hitler and killing Germans, calls only for moral unity which we have to burn.
We lack folk unity but have plenty of moral unity for the cause of the Allies, and sundry small nations as well as the Chinese who are far from being a small nation. A moral unity for war, or a unity which was not a true folk unity, has at least twice before been the bane of American democracy. In our Civil War and the late World War we were morally united for wars which were not over interests of the whole people. Had the American people in 1860 had a folk unity, they would have imposed on the industrial interests of the North and the planter slavery interests of the South a compromise settlement involving the liquidation of slavery with indemnification to avert a needless war. But, alas, not being united as a people, Americans in 1860 easily allowed themselves to be morally united for war and emotionally barnstormed into it, one section against another, by the machinations of dominant economic interests of the two respective sections. Scarcely one per cent of the people owned slaves in the South or factories in the North. A thousand different formulas for peace on the basis of compromise between the factory and slavery interests could have been worked out, any one of which would have been better in every way for the interests of the American people than was the Civil War. But there was no folk unity to impose such an approach to the problem and such a solution for it. That this was true, was typical of democracy. In a democracy powerful minority interests always determine events and no single folk interest ever imposes itself to bring about a solution for the general welfare. If the conflict of minority interests is sufficiently big, as it was in 1860, the people simply line up on the sides of the two contending minority interests to fight a wholly unnecessary war. Of course, minority interests caused the Mexican and the Spanish-American Wars, but these wars might intelligently have been fought by a united folk interest since they both added to the patrimony of the whole people something which probably could not have been got otherwise. But the Civil War added nothing to our patrimony which a united people could not have achieved without the war. The Civil War gave us the liquidation of slavery and a more perfect political union, but a folk unity would have given us both without such a war. As for the World War it gave us literally nothing of value to the whole people. It did not even teach us anything, which is one compensation which national suffering should afford.
A healthy folk unity has to be grounded in the self-interest, self-defense and self-aggrandizement of one folk. A unity of a people grounded in abstract, absolute or universal morality is an unmitigated disaster since it can be a dynamic factor only in the promotion of a war over interests other than their own or interests which are not those of the whole people. This is a truth which Americans find great difficulty in grasping. To them it seems cynicism, wickedness or a paradox to say that a war for pure morality is worse than a war for pure national selfishness. Yet it is true. When the American people or any other people fight for moral absolutes or universal abstractions and not for their own selfish interests they are almost certain to be fighting either for the wholly unattainable, such as world peace and collective security, or for the selfish interests of some other nation. Wars for national selfishness there will always be. The humane thing is to keep them as small and make them as infrequent as possible. If Americans always fight for the selfish interests of Britain and France, they thereby merely make such wars larger and more frequent than they would otherwise be. If Americans fight for unattainable ideals, they thereby merely add to that amount of fighting for attainable material objectives which is inevitable a wholly unnecessary amount of additional fighting. The American people, having been conditioned or habituated to wars for moral purposes wholly apart from folk interest, are easy marks for Anglo-French propaganda exactly as they were in 1860 for northern industrial and southern planter propaganda.
Our trouble is that we think and feel, not as Americans but as moralists, religionists, legalists, capitalists and, last but not least, as loyal British colonials. We love moral abstractions, not American blood which we are ready to spill in torrents for moral abstractions. We are loyal to freedom for the Finns or the Poles or to justice for the Chinese, but not to employment for Americans. Employment is not a moral abstraction. A White House Conference on Children in Democracy reported on January 18, 1940, the finding that two children out of every three in America live in homes where income is inadequate for a decent standard of living. This, of course, is largely due to the fact that the poor have most of the children in a democracy. Does that state of affairs excite any wave of moral indignation in America as does the plight of the Chinese, the Poles, the Finns or the Abyssinians? Obviously not. Our elder statesmen, our Mr. Hoovers, go into action and morally mobilize America for relief of the Belgians or the Finns, but not for the ending of the unemployment of ten million Americans.
The British have had through several centuries, and still have today, the advantage over us of being fairly united as a people over British interests, not moral abstractions. At the same time they are past-masters in the manipulation of the moral symbols by which the American people can be moved like puppets into war. This superiority to us in folk unity is mainly a result of a different historical development. What has contributed most to British unity has been the elementary fact, comprehensible to the dullest English wit, that they are all in the same boat, the empire, and that all else is the sea; that they must live by their loot or perish without it.
For folk unity, a people must feel a consciousness of a common danger and a common destiny. This, the British have in a fighting. The American people, having been conditioned or habituated to wars for moral purposes wholly apart from folk interest, are easy marks for Anglo-French propaganda exactly as they were in 1860 for northern industrial and southern planter propaganda.
Our trouble is that we think and feel, not as Americans but as moralists, religionists, legalists, capitalists and, last but not least, as loyal British colonials. We love moral abstractions, not American blood which we are ready to spill in torrents for moral abstractions. We are loyal to freedom for the Finns or the Poles or to justice for the Chinese, but not to employment for Americans. Employment is not a moral abstraction. A White House Conference on Children in Democracy reported on January 18, 1940, the finding that two children out of every three in America live in homes where income is inadequate for a decent standard of living. This, of course, is largely due to the fact that the poor have most of the children in a democracy. Does that state of affairs excite any wave of moral indignation in America as does the plight of the Chinese, the Poles, the Finns or the Abyssinians? Obviously not. Our elder statesmen, our Mr. Hoovers, go into action and morally mobilize America for relief of the Belgians or the Finns, but not for the ending of the unemployment of ten million Americans.
The British have had through several centuries, and still have today, the advantage over us of being fairly united as a people over British interests, not moral abstractions. At the same time they are past-masters in the manipulation of the moral symbols by which the American people can be moved like puppets into war. This superiority to us in folk unity is mainly a result of a different historical development. What has contributed most to British unity has been the elementary fact, comprehensible to the dullest English wit, that they are all in the same boat, the empire, and that all else is the sea; that they must live by their loot or perish without it.
For folk unity, a people must feel a consciousness of a common danger and a common destiny. This, the British have in a higher degree than we Americans because of their abject dependence on sea power for food and on the empire for income. We have been taught to revere the Constitution and the British to revere the fleet as a national bulwark. There is a lot more realism to a sixteen-inch gun than a Supreme Court decision. And there is a lot more folk unity in national defense than in constitutional law. Now that we have long since virtually exterminated the Indians and ended that frontier menace, we have had for generations no consciousness of a foreign danger. The Civil War ended a secession and secured the formal framework of our national unity, but it added nothing to our feeling of folk unity. Rather, for a long time it worked against the development of such a sentiment. Then, shortly after the Civil War our feeling of folk unity suffered by reason of a radical change in the composition of our immigration from the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Protestant stocks of northern Europe which were racially and culturally cognate with our own to the southern European and Russian stocks which were racially, religiously and culturally far removed from the dominant white native American stock. America thus came to mean an opportunity rather than a nation. Americanism to most people here and abroad meant the personal success story of an Andrew Carnegie rather than the tradition of a Nelson. “England expects every man to do his duty” is not the same tradition as “America expects everybody to make money.” A nation is a nation by reason of what its citizens have done for it rather than because of what it has done for them.
The first requisite of the new revolution in America will be a shift in emphasis from success to sacrifice—for America. America as a big opportunity to write a personal success story is over. America as a unified great nation is about to be born—in war, travail, disillusionment and grim determination. Let the elite catch now, in advance of events, the vision of a new America the keystone of which will be the people and not the person. One will hear less about the rights of man and more about the duties of men and the rights of the American people.