I have a deep sense of privilege and honor in being invited to give the 1942 Lecture for Iota Chapter, Phi Delta Kappa. In line with an equally deep sense of the responsibility which in the present crisis we educators share for the social education of ourselves and our fellows in sane, sound, and progressively harmonious human group relations, I have quite deliberately, even if brashly, chosen as a subject, “Democracy Faces A World Order.” Acutely aware, as you may well imagine me to be, of the internal inconsistencies and national shortcomings of our American democracy, it has seemed, however, particularly constructive and hopeful to turn in another direction and propose some consideration of democracy in terms of the present international situation. For the external challenges of that situation and the irrevocable commitments of the world policies we have undertaken in that connection may well turn out to be the categorical imperative destined to purge our democracy of many of its inconsistencies and remedy much of its shortcomings.
The world crisis poses the issues clearly and inescapably. Democracy has encountered a type of challenge and opposition which is as obviously its moral antithesis as it is its political enemy. That fact is calculated not only to arouse democratically organized societies from considerable lethargy and decadence to a sharpened realization of their own basic values and objectives, but to force them to disavow and eventually purge from their own internal economies elements latently or actually of a piece with the repudiated creeds and practices on the other side of the issue. We know realistically, as a matter of fact, that much in the creed and practice of the totalitarian states has less obviously and less ruthlessly been part and parcel of the group belief and practice of ourselves and our allies. Unfortunately they have no monopoly on power politics, imperialist militarism and economic exploitation, racist rationalizations of world rule and dominance, the harsh persecution of selected minorities, or the doctrinaire bigotries of cultural superiority. But once let such traditions and practices become overtly and widely stigmatized and a moral situation has been precipitated, with inevitable alternatives of a definite stand. Precisely this has happened; and I, for one, am very hopeful of its reformative consequences. Confronted with the Frankensteins of our own vices, we have no choice but to repudiate them. Democracy at war must more clearly outline its position and more unequivocally avow its principles.
It may be said that essentially the same issues were involved in the first World War that styled itself a war to make the world safe for democracy. Vaguely and latently they were; and some few persons with insight and moral sensitivity were definitely aware of what was at stake in these issues and of the principles of collective morality which were threatened. However, the international implications of such issues came to the surface relatively late in the struggle, and particularly in America public opinion was neither on the whole aware of them nor willing to espouse them as vital to us. As a nation we are even yet too vague about world democracy and none too well equipped intellectually for its prosecution. But this time we are at least aware of the moral alternatives of the issue, of its crucial relevance to our national interests, and of the ruthless and unavoidable character of our opponents. The lack of these realizations in any steady or appreciable degree stultified our initiative in the peace of 1918 and frustrated our important participation in the germinal efforts for a democratic world order under the League of Nations plan. Such participation, presuming even the eventual failure of the League, would have been vitally educative for the general American public. Under the circumstances, however, with a nation morally awakened to the issues but still vague and immature about ways of implementing democracy on a world scale, it is the manifest duty of our intellectuals to discipline our national thinking into some realistic and practical sort of world-mindedness.
The last political experiment in world organization, although it nominally included many other nations, was really a Western European pact contrived as an extension or substitute for the old balance of power. While it instituted a world order in theory it strove in practice to maintain an unstable and to some degree unjust status quo and underwrote a crumbling but stubborn economic imperialism. Even in the concession of the mandate’s principle of trusteeship, there was the fatal reservation of national rather than basic international control and administration by which the mandates became clandestine colonies and relatively closed spheres of economic influence. So by incorporating the spoils and guaranteeing the vested interests of predatory Western expansionism, the Covenant of 1919 became a Pax Romana of irresponsible power politics rather than a Pax Democratica of reciprocal international rights and responsibilities. A world made safe for that spurious brand of democracy turned out to be a Jason’s garden of international intrigue and revenge.
The Atlantic Charter, on the other hand, lays down, at least in sketchy outline, the ground plan of a really democratic world order. It is more than the product of the disillusionments of Versailles and Geneva; it arose from the practical necessity of countering both the creeds and the practices of our ruthless,—but mark you, consistently ruthless adversaries. Against a background of totalitarian challenge, it has been necessary to envisage a world order consistently and realistically democratic. But until such a world order is made more specific, indeed until means are devised for its practical implementation, there will, of course, remain the fearful possibility of its internal defeat by the forces and interests which it promises to curb and expel. This, it seems to me, is the intellectual and moral battlefront of the War: and as its momentous issue, the obligation to help to effective realization this inspiring but yet unimplemented forecast of world reconstruction. It would be a tragedy as catastrophic as military defeat itself should the Atlantic Charter turn out to be a deceptive mirage of war rationalization.
Already an authoritative cloud has appeared on the blue horizon of the Atlantic Charter. It is Mr. Churchill’s explicit reservations when interpolated on the status of Colonial peoples in the organized family of nations. “We were thinking principally of those nations which have lost their sovereignty and which will need to be restored to their places, rather than of those areas which under gradually evolving development still owe their allegiance to the British Crown.” Presumably this intact incorporation of the British Empire, as before, into a then essentially undemocratic family of nations would sabotage at the outset any vitally democratic world order.
What assurances have we, though, of a constructively favorable outcome? Let us put forward only the most realistic of reasons, before reviewing, with equal realism it is to be hoped, the obstacles. In the first place, global warfare has already brought about global disequilibrium; it is hard to imagine any force capable of maintaining more than precarious and temporary peace without a basic adjustment of the aspirations and claims of the great majority of these many peoples. A western hegemony with an aroused and divided Orient seems hardly possible; the coming peace will have to have a real rather than a nominal world denominator. Again, with the present alignment of nations—an actively participating Russia and China, a Free French cause based on African colonial support and initiative, and a potentially crucial Moslem Near East and Hindu India—no European, not to speak of a mere Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American bloc, has a more than passing chance to dominate and control such a world organization. Indeed, in the face of resentment of their past tradition of ethnic dominance, the best world course for these nations would be a role of real moral leadership grounded in an abdication of their previous presumptions and an acceptance of a truly democratic basis of world cooperation. On another front, the task of economic reconstruction will dictate the really vital moves of the post-War world, and political policies and ambitions will in all likelihood have to yield wherever they run seriously counter. With economic attrition affecting victors nearly as severely as the vanquished, the divorce of vested interests from the vital issues of further organization and collaboration will allow free play for radical departures from past policies. The war will leave us with a world both psychologically and economically harder to exploit. Combined with this is the all-important recognition on the part of the Atlantic Charter itself of the two basic economic roots of war,—unequal access to markets and sources of raw materials and widespread differentials of living standards and economic security, with the promise of their correction by mutual agreement. Any very practical approach to these problems must of necessity shift the emphasis from the competitive to the collaborative basis.
Rationally viewed, therefore, the imperatives of the peace loom up as specifications for a cooperative, democratic world organization. But as soon as they are scrutinized specifically, it is only too obvious how revolutionary and unprecedented they are. It must be a peace, like no other peace before it, that will integrate victors and vanquished alike, as peoples, and justly. It must incorporate and respectfully protect the institutional forms and traditions and the cultural values of a vast congeries of peoples and races,—European, Asiatic, African, American, Australasian. Direct participational representation of all considerable groups must be provided for, which, perhaps, hardest task of all, requires the eventual liquidation of imperialism. In addition, for the sake of guaranteed peace and world security, that most sacrosanct of all our secular concepts, the autonomous sovereignty of the self-arbiter nation, must surely be modified and voluntarily abridged. Cultural and economic reciprocities must be worked out and faithfully carried through on an unprecedented scale: indeed such thoroughgoing reconstruction as the world would in all likelihood never assent to unless convinced that the alternative was, just what the alternative now seems to be, collapse and chaos.
Only the hardest of necessity can be expected to produce such momentous change. Yet with that very probability before us, we should be preparing ourselves intellectually for it. Many an idol of the tribe and nation must fall in the dust of this reconstruction: let us mention particularly those whose dogma and worship are obvious obstacles in the way. There is, first of all, as has already been mentioned, that ancient political idol of the sovereign, essentially irresponsible nation. Politically sacred though it be, if we really mean to renounce force as an instrument of national policy, we must repudiate it. The totalitarian spectre has put another cast on this ancient tradition of the self-arbiter nation, or rather, torn the legal mask from its face, so that we can see the real barbarity of its character. Then, next, there is that twin idol of economic force-majeur, making its own profit-rights by might, by which peace-time plunder and exploitation were legitimated. To belligerent and irresponsible nationalism it added the practice and justifications of economic imperialism, which if not curbed or liquidated, will scotch any progressive world order from its very inception. And on this point, we must not forget that with our dollar diplomacy we Americans have shared the practice of this system as actively and almost as culpably as the other industrial nations with their more explicit imperialisms. Hand in hand partners with these political and economic policies have gone their important and characteristic rationalizations,—the sustaining ideologies of dominant and superior races, of dominant and superior cultures. These it is which have added insult to the injuries of the force regimes of the modern Western world; and we only now begin to realize what a harvest of hate and antagonism they have sown in the rest of the world, and how much they stand in the way of the rapprochement and mutual confidence of the various peoples. Manifestly these attitudes are incompatible in any practical sense with that collaboration which world order basically requires. They, too, must be repudiated in practice as they have already been in theory. America has shared these doctrines so deeply and conspicuously that almost the first step requisite for any world role and authority she may aspire to must begin with their repudiation. In the racism and nation-cults of Germany, Italy, and Japan, we see the sinister outlines of fully developed racialism, but our horror is only hypocritical unless we can recognize and disavow their domestic counterparts.
Difficult as all this may be to recant, it is, nevertheless, the purchase price of a stable world order, as well as of any effective participation of ourselves in it. The political and economic measures of world reconstruction must, of course, largely be the concern of our statesman and their technical advisors. But the intellectual and cultural enlightenment equally necessary to a new order is in many respects a prior consideration. It is the prime responsibility of educators and must be regarded as their particular duty and contribution. Public opinion set in the moulds and stereotypes of conservative and conventional tradition will be hard to influence, but unless this task is speedily undertaken, progress toward internationalism may again be obstructed. National parochialism and all the cultural prejudices which bolster it must be broken down, and an enlarged perspective and understanding substituted. And though, as I shall point out later, color prejudice is a particularly critical obstacle, cultural prejudice of all varieties must be comprehended in the educational campaign for a more rational basis of group cooperation and understanding. In fact, if a broadside attack is made on cultural bias as a whole, in all of its varieties—national, credal, racial, and social—more consistent gains will be made. No one should underestimate their deep hold on the public mind or the force of their reactionary effect on the enlargement of the scope of group cooperation. In view of the fact that the United States could so easily, as the great international, multi-racial nation, be the focus of the spirit of internationalism, it is all the more to be deplored that the national mind is still so parochial and chauvinistic.
Isolationism is only one symptom of this blindness; an even more handicapping one, now that we are committed to a world situation, will be a narrow conception of a world order as necessarily made over on an enlarged pattern of our own. While we fight one brand of uniformitarianism, we cannot overlook this danger of identifying the cause of world organization with the expansion or imposition of our own institutional forms and culture values. This, too, is a presumptuous, even though well-intentioned, uniformitarianism. As an attitude or a program, it would only prove a great impediment to any vital extension of the democratic life on an international scale. Somehow we must manage to disengage the main values and objectives of democracy from the particular institutional forms by which we practise it, and break through to common denominators capable of uniting cooperatively many nations and many diverse cultures.
The great prerequisite for this is a spiritual, or at least an intellectual virtue; a sense of respect for cultural difference, as well as a sense of basic commonality in spite of difference. This lesson could and should have been learned in our country. But two factors have taken this flexible temper out of our democracy,—a straight-jacket conception of Americanism, largely contrary to fact, and color prejudice, contrary certainly to democratic professions. Previously we have considered them mainly as domestic handicaps—of course they are—but for the future we must be particularly concerned about their international consequences. To the extent that democracy has world obligations or even world ambitions, its domestic policies of race stand out in my judgment as the greatest single obstacle and handicap. Not only are the majority of humanity what we arbitrarily have defined as “colored” or “non-white,” but many if not most of these groups have been made negatively color-conscious and suspicious. Repercussions begin to register from all quarters of the globe, and it is only a temporarily mitigating factor that the European totalitarian powers have adopted even more extreme policies of discriminatory racialism. This fact is dwarfed somewhat by the general world situation. No world order with the taint of racialism, extreme or moderate, is permanently possible. Over and above the instability and inconsistency of the domestic racial set-up, it behooves America to realize that the world-tide is against racialism and its arbitrary barriers. A progressive world course cannot be steered against this tide, and world leadership is not to the nation or culture that cannot abandon racial and cultural prejudice.
For a foretaste of the eventual situation we may merely look to the south of us, whether to the Caribbean where, more and more, we are acquiring economic and political and even military interests, or to Central and South America, where we have a Pan-American policy and program to further and vindicate. As a crisis emergency, Pan-American solidarity has made a good start. Particularly have the wholesome and reassuring reversals of the “good neighbor” policy given it impetus and convincing appeal. But with increasing intercommunication and collaboration the racial question is critically involved with a hard choice set between eventual suspicion and alienation and an abandonment of the policies and practices of North American color caste.
Mr. Frazier, a colleague of mine, recently returned from a survey in Brazil, has this clear warning to offer: “The racial heritage of Latin Americans,” he says, “together with their attitudes toward race constitutes one of the real barriers to American solidarity. This,” he continues, “is a question that has not been faced frankly in most discussions of Pan-Americanism. One might add that on the part of Latin-Americans as well as of North-Americans, there has been a tendency to evade the issue, though the conflicting attitudes toward racial mixture are the basis of distrust and the lack of mutual respect. In their dealings with North Americans, our Latin neighbors have often been careful not to offend our feelings with regard to color caste. This has been facilitated by the fact that the ruling classes, with some few exceptions, have been of predominantly light complexion. But as the masses of these countries begin to rise and as there is greater intercourse between the Latin-American countries and North America such evasions in the long run will be impossible.”
If to this we add the inevitability of the closer integration of the Caribbean, one can easily see why the foreign frontier of race is more critical even than the domestic. Within the very near future, the hitherto separated segments of the race problem will automatically be linked through the trends and exigencies of the world conflict. It is ironical to notice that in Pan-American solidarity the relatively more colored or mixed nations are the backbone of the American bloc, with the “whiter” nations to the Far South less committed and enthusiastic. Fortunately, very fortunately, the alignments of the present World War are not color alignments, but the racial question does intrude as a critical factor. Groups that are minority groups in one economy are related by racial or cultural ties to large majorities elsewhere, and national policies must eventually feel the pressure of international policy. Both hemispherically and for the world situation, our national policy of race is to say the least unstrategic, while of course, to say the most, it is democratically inconsistent and humanly unjust. Moral issues have often before turned on matters of expediency, and that is why in this short analysis I have placed the emphasis there. A world democracy cannot possibly tolerate what a national democracy has countenanced too long. In this, as on many other points, we must choose between being provincials or internationals.
Considering even the obstacles—and it is wise both to consider and heed them—there is some hope for an international world order to come. The socializing impacts of the world of today, and especially of this world conflict, are already unprecedented. The aggregate effect, I think, almost irrespective of the military outcome, will be an unforeseen and in some quarters, an undesired solidarity of the human race. The divisive cleavages both within nations and between nations may not vanish, but certainly will in the near future have less divisive effect and significance. These forces, not the reformers or even the conspirators, will be the real authors of a new society, and while the notion of a world order is far from new, contemporary conditions and their trends are, it seems, destined to bring about a rapid realization of it. The principal open question is what leadership will assume control of the consolidations that are bound to take place. Under intelligent anticipation of the trends, democratic leadership has the chance for that responsible control, particularly if it keys its program to the international interests, which incidentally are the majority interests, and in so doing helps a world order to establish itself. As I see it, democracy’s present task and highest duty is to midwife this new society into being—and may it be a truly democratic society in the sense that being born into it will automatically confer on everyone, everywhere, the basic rights asserted to be naturally and inalienably human.