Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) thought of himself as a journalist, but he is more often described as a man of letters because his work is so wide-ranging: Axel’s Castle (1931) introduced a generation of readers to Joyce, Proust, Yeats, and other modernists; To the Finland Station (1940) is a masterpiece of history; The Shock of Recognition (1943) perhaps the best and most personal anthology of American literature; Patriotic Gore (1962) surely the best literary history of American Civil War writing.
What Wilson was not, for most of his life, was a politically engaged writer, and certainly not an antiwar one. He served in World War I in an army medical unit and in the intelligence service, but he came back without a strong antiwar impulse, feeling chiefly that the war had freed him from the constraints of genteel society, as indeed it had. The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963) is the one book of his that shows him in opposition to war, but we feel as we read it that he’s being led to that opposition against his own inclination. He neglected, he tells us, to pay his income tax for several years, was found and penalized by the IRS, and got angry: at the IRS, at the nature of the tax system, and eventually at what the tax system was being used to fund, i.e., wars. He studied and got acquainted with those who refused to pay their taxes on principle, like Maurice McCrackin, whom the book portrays with great sympathy; and though Wilson was never going to take the risks that intentional war tax resisters were taking, he concludes the book, in the excerpt below, with a denunciation of the war system fiercer and more contemptuous than anything the gentle McCrackin ever wrote.
TO one who was born in the nineteenth century, and so still retains some remnants of the belief in human progress of a moral as well as a mechanical kind, it is especially repugnant to be forced to accept preparations for the demise of our society or of a damage to it so appalling that it is impossible to see beyond it. The confident reformer of the past always saw himself confronted by an enemy, the defeat of whom would represent for him a release of the forces of life, the “dawn of a new day,” the beginning of “a better world.” But who today is the reformer’s adversary? Not the trusts, the “malefactors of great wealth.” Not “capitalism,” not “communism.” Simply human limitations so general as sometimes to seem insurmountable, an impulse to internecine destruction which one comes more and more to feel irrepressible. These elements, plus our runaway technology, have produced our Defense Department, with its host of secret agents and diligent bureaucrats of the Pentagon and the CIA, who have got themselves into a position where they have not merely been able to formulate policy without the approval of Congress but even to carry it out; with its pressure on Congress itself which enables it to get its vast appropriations granted; with its blackmail through bugaboo by which it makes the country live in constant terror of an invasion by Soviet Commissars; with its stimulus to the gigantic war industries, which give employment to so much labor, and its equipping of so many laboratories that give employment to technicians and scientists; with its discouragement of young men’s ambitions by imposing on them two stultifying disruptive years of obligatory military service.
How to get rid of this huge growth, which is no longer a private organization, like one of Theodore Roosevelt’s old trusts that could be busted, that is not even a thriving corporation protected by a business administration but an excrescence of the government itself which officially drains our resources and which stupidly and insolently threatens our lives? In our day, the possibilities for human self-knowledge and for knowledge of the universe of which we are part, for the extension, both physical and mental, of human capabilities, have been opened up in all directions. We can not only fly and dive but are learning to live in space and beneath the sea; we are beginning to understand our relation to the other animals and our development as a genus among them; we have burrowed into the ruins of cities seven thousand years old and have had glimpses of the lives of men that existed many millennia earlier; we are coming to comprehend something about the processes by which we reproduce and by which our memories work; we have mastered techniques of the fine arts and other exploits of imaginative thought that lift us as far above our squalors as our space rockets do above the earth—and yet, skilled in and inspired by all this, we are now dominated by the great lethal mushroom that expands from the splitting of atoms and poisons the atmosphere of the earth and by the great human fungus behind it, which multiplies the cells of offices, of laboratories and training camps and which poisons the atmosphere of society. I should not make the mistake I have mentioned above of isolating a human institution and regarding it as the enemy of humanity. It is admitted that, in the phenomenon of hypnotism, the victim must have the will to be hypnotized; and we have now been hypnotizing ourselves. We have created the war branches of our government in one of our own images. But now that things have gone so far, is there any chance, short of catastrophe, of dismembering and disassembling this image and constructing a nobler one that answers better to what we pretend to?
All such images, to be sure, are myths, national idealizations. But there has been enough good will behind ours to make the rest of the world put some faith in it. The present image of the United States—homicidal and menacing—is having the contrary effect. And for all our boasts of wealth and freedom we are submitting to deprivation and coercion in order to feed and increase it.