SINCE this war began I have felt sometimes that all our good words had been rather frayed out with constant repetition, as if they were talismans that needed only to be spoken against the evil and the evil would vanish; or they have been debased by the enemy, part of whose business is to disguise fascism in the language of democracy. And I have noticed that the people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not at all the same people.*
By natural sympathy I belong with those who are not talking much at present, except in the simplest and straightest of terms, like the young Norwegian boy who escaped from Norway and joined the Canadian forces. When asked how he felt about Norway’s fate, he could say only, “It is hard to explain how a man feels who has lost his country.” I think he meant it was impossible; but he had a choice, to accept defeat or fight, and he made the choice, and that was his way of talking. There was the American boy going into the navy, who answered the same foolish question: “It’s too serious a thing to be emotional about.” And the young American wife who was one of the last civilians to escape, by very dangerous and exhausting ways, from a bombarded island where her husband was on active duty. She was expecting her first baby. “Oh yes, I had the baby,” she said, matter-of-factly, “a fine healthy boy.” And another girl, twenty-one years old, has a six-month-old girl baby and a husband who will be off to the army any day now. She wrote: “I’m glad I have that job. Her Daddy won’t have to worry about us.”
While the talkers have been lecturing us, saying the American people have been spoiled by too much prosperity and made slack of fiber by too much peace and freedom, and gloating rather over the painful times we are about to endure for our own good, I keep my mind firmly on these four young ones, not because they are exceptional but precisely because they are not. They come literally in regiments these days, though not all of them are in uniform, nor should be. They are the typical millions of young people in this country, and they have not been particularly softened by prosperity; they were brought up on the depression. They have not been carefully sheltered: most of them have worked for a living when they could find work, and an astonishing number of them have helped support their families. They do their jobs and pay their taxes and buy War Savings Stamps and contribute to the Red Cross and China Relief and Bundles for Britain and all the rest. They do the work in factories and offices and on farms. The girls knit and nurse and cook and are learning to replace the boys in skilled work in war production. The boys by the thousand are getting off to camp, carrying their little two-by-four suitcases or bundles. I think of this war in terms of these people, who are my kind of people; the war they are fighting is my war, and yes, it is hard to find exactly the right word to say to them. I wait to hear what they will have to say to the world when this war is won and over and they must begin their lives again in the country they have helped to save for democracy.
I wait for that with the most immense and deep longing and hope and belief in them.
In the meantime let us glance at that theory, always revived in the heat and excitement of war, that peace makes spirits slothful and bodies flabby. In this season, when Americans are celebrating the birthday of our Republic, its most important birthday since that first day of our hard-won beginnings, we might remember that the men who wrote the Constitution and compiled the Body of Liberties were agreed on the revolutionary theory that peace was a blessing to a country—one of the greatest blessings—and they were careful to leave recorded their opinions on this subject. And they were right. Peace is good, and the arts of peace, and its fruits. The freedom we may have only in peace is good. It was never true there was too much of either; the truth is, there was never enough, never rightly exercised, never deeply enough understood. But we have been making a fairly steady headway this century and a half in face of strong and determined opposition from enemies within as well as from without. We have had poverty in a country able to support in plenty more than twice its present population, yet by long effort we were arriving at an increasing standard of good living for greater and greater numbers of people. One of the prime aims of the democratic form of government was to create an economy in which all the people were to be allowed access to the means and materials of life, and to share fairly in the abundance of the earth. This has been the hardest fight of all, the bitterest, but the battle is by no means lost, and it is not ended, and it will be won in time.
Truth is, the value of peace to us was that it gave us time, and the right to fight for our liberties as a people, against our internal enemies, using those weapons provided for us within our own system of government; and the first result of war with an external enemy is that this right is suspended, and there is the danger that, even if the foreign war is won, the gains at home may be lost, and must be fought for all over again.
It has been the habit and the principle of this people to think in terms of peace, and perhaps to live in rather a too-optimistic faith that peace could be maintained when all the plainest signs pointed in the opposite direction; but they have fought their wars very well, and they will fight this one well, too. And it is no time to be losing our heads and saying, or thinking, that in the disciplines and the restrictions and the heavy taxes and the restraint on action necessary to concerted effort, we have already lost the freedoms we are supposed to be fighting for. If we lose the war, there will be nothing left to talk about; the blessed and sometimes abused American freedom of speech will have vanished with the rest. But we are not going to lose this war, and the people of this country are going to have the enormous privilege of another chance to make of their Republic what those men who won and founded it for us meant for it to be. We aren’t going anywhere, that is one great thing. Every single soul of us is involved personally in this war; this is the last stand, and this is our territory. Here is the place and now is the time to put a stop, once and for all, to the stampede of the human race like terrorized cattle over one world frontier after another. We stay here.
And during this period of suspension of the humanities, in the midst of the outrage and the world horror staggering to the imagination, we might find it profitable to examine the true nature of our threatened liberties, and their political, legal, and social origins and meanings, and decide exactly what their value is, and where we should be without them. They were not accidental by any means; they are implicit in our theory of government, which was in turn based on humanistic concepts of the importance of the individual man and his rights in society. They are not mere ornaments on the façade, but are laid in the foundation stone of the structure, and they will last so long as the structure itself but no longer. They are not inalienable: the house was built with great labor and it is made with human hands; human hands can tear it down again, and will, if it is not well loved and defended. The first rule for any effective defense is: Know your enemies. Blind, fanatical patriotism which shouts and weeps is no good for this war. This is another kind of war altogether. I trust the quiet coldness of the experienced fighters, I like their knowing that words are wasted in this business.
1942