13. Watching and Waiting for the Dawn
In 1953, during the course of the Korean War, I was seventy years old. My mood was that of a relaxed spectator at a great drama. I had been on the stage, had spoken my piece. The time had come when I could take my place in the audience and watch my fellow actors play their parts. Perhaps I could give a cue here and there or interject a new word, but my work-good, bad, and indifferent-was done.
One day when I was feeling detached and at ease, I was tapped on the shoulder, metaphorically, and told: "You're not tending to business. Your assignment calls for twenty more years of active duty. Collect your scattered ideas, gather up your tools, and get on with the job."
As usual, I followed suggestions from that source. It seemed a bit out of line to re-activate myself at seventy, but I did just that. My wife and I left Vermont where we had lived and worked for nineteen years, where we were becoming increasingly involved in a growing maple syrup and sugar business and were seriously disturbed by the influx of tourists, vacationers, and skiers, and went to live in a quiet isolated place beside the sea in Maine. Under these new conditions I felt that it would be possible for me to study, travel, write, and teach at any opportunity.
Instead of retiring and enjoying a well-earned rest, I got back into harness and have spent some of the most active and productive years of my life on the job, contributing my two-bits to prevent or at least postpone the general human drift to collective suicide.
During the two decades following 1953 I crossed and recrossed North America, crossed and recrossed the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, made several visits to Central and South America, lectured extensively, contributed a World Events department for Monthly Review, and wrote a whole series of books and pamphlets dealing with the general social crisis.
I had begun traveling around the United States in 1904-5 when my circuits were short and local. Now in the 1950s I went into every state seeking an answer to the question: what kind of a country is the United States today? My wife and I traveled about 50,000 miles by automobile in making these study-lecture trips.
Since we were living on a self-subsistent Maine farm, we spent the growing season of each year raising and preserving our food supply, filling our woodshed, doing some minor building and repairing. In October or early November we loaded our station wagon with a minimum of personal baggage and anywhere from 700 to 1000 pounds of books, pamphlets, magazines, and leaflets. In case our supply of literature should run short, we wrapped and labeled packages of the likeliest literature and had them sent after us by book post, as needed.
Our general procedure was simple. We planned a five month trip in broad outline, arranging speaking dates along a selected route: for example, from Maine south to Florida; from Florida west via Texas to California; from California north to Washington and British Columbia; from there back east through Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and Minnesota or through Colorado, Utah, and the Great Plains to St. Louis or Chicago; then back to Maine. Or we might go first from Maine to the northwest, then south and east by one of several routes. We covered every state in the union during half a dozen such trips.
As late as the 1950s there were active forums scattered across the country, some secular, some of them in churches, ethical societies, and free-thought centers. Between these fixed lecture dates personal friends and readers of Monthly Review arranged house meetings. If no meeting could be arranged in a large population center like Dallas or Denver we picked names at random from our personal lists or from among Monthly Review subscribers and wrote, in advance, asking whether we might call on them and hear about conditions in their locality. Many times we stayed with private families, which brought us at once into intimate touch with local people. Wherever we stopped, at public meetings or house meetings we were able to sell or give away quantities of books and printed matter.
Such trips, lasting from three to five months, were strenuous in the extreme. Driving several hundred miles day after day was a chore. Keeping on schedule, finding our way (especially at night over strange roads), threading through congested traffic, then holding meetings and getting to bed late at night, took a great deal of energy, organization, and patience. It also had its rewards. We met new people, renewed old friendships, talked privately and publicly with a wide variety of men and women. We learned much about the United States, at first hand, year after year.
We summed up our impressions and conclusions in a book USA Today, which was rather widely circulated in this country and was translated into Russian, Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese.
Beginning in 1911 I visited Europe occasionally; after 1920 these visits became frequent. By the 1950s I took it for granted that part of every other year should be spent abroad. Several considerations took me first to Europe. For a thousand years Europe had been the seat of western civilization. The ideas and ideals of the West had originated or developed there and had been tested out under varying national auspices. Any student should therefore devote a substantial part of his life to on-the-spot observation and checking on this motherland of present-day civilization.
European libraries and museums contained well-arranged and catalogued records-a gold mine-of which I took frequent advantage, working for months on end in the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Staats Bibliothek in Berlin, and the Institute of World Economy in Kiel.
American socialists, like their European comrades, assumed that as capitalism matured and declined it would be replaced by a socialist pattern of society. Europe was therefore the grandstand seat for anyone concerned with this revolutionary aspect of social development. Europe was not only the homeland of capitalism, it was likewise the birthplace of the modern labor movement, the modern cooperative movement and the present-day socialist-communist political movements. The real attraction therefore, for an American socialist in Europe, was not the deathbed scene of expiring monopoly capitalism but the emergence on the European stage of the infant socialist republics.
A visitor to Western Europe could see capitalism in its final stages of decline and by traveling a few miles to the east could see socialism in process of construction. Europe was therefore a vast sociological laboratory in which several hundred million people were carrying on social experiments that were bound to have a profound influence on the future of Europeans and a lesser but consequent influence on the future of the whole human race.
Five large-scale social experiments had been going on side by side in present-day Europe: first and most official, the restoration of Europe's free enterprise society-economically under the Marshall Plan financed by Washington; politically under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, organized and led by the United States. Second was a fascist variant of European capitalism under German and Italian leadership. Third, a welfare-state variant of reformed capitalism led by Scandinavia. Fourth, a European variant of socialism, shepherded by the Soviet Union. Fifth, various attempts, all abortive, to launch a Central European Confederation.
I took it for granted that nineteenth-century monopoly-capitalism could not be restored in Europe. Did any one or any combination of the other four experiments which I studied in the European social laboratory offer the half-billion Europeans and the three billion humans on other continents a way out of the general social crisis which held western civilization in its grip? This was the big question confronting mankind in the century that began in 1870. This was the question that ran through my studies of war, revolution, imperialism, and civilization.
Searching for an answer to that question I have visited, during the last thirty years, every important capitalist country on the European continent and every socialist country in Europe, from Russia to Albania. These contacts have enabled me to compare and contrast developments in the United States with their counterparts in the European mother countries.
Aroused and stimulated by Castro's spectacular success in challenging Washington's power monopoly in the western hemisphere I made several trips to various parts of Latin America and Cuba. I was only slightly acquainted with the area. While gathering material for my book Dollar Diplomacy I had gone twice to Mexico in search of data on the struggle over the recently discovered oil fields in and around Tampico. That was back in 1926, three decades before the Castro-led Cuban revolution. I visited Cuba in 1960-61 and was duly impressed by the extent of the transformation that was taking place on that island.
At the same time I became interested in the efforts of Cheddi Jagan to apply Fabian principles to Latin American colonialism and by constitutional, legal and political means to begin socialist construction in the crown colony of British Guyana. I visited Guyana twice and noted the widespread support gained by the People's Progressive Party. Dr. Jagan was a convinced socialist. He believed in democracy as a form of political organization and was devoting himself wholeheartedly to building socialism in Guyana, legally and gradually through the education of a largely illiterate electorate. The Jagan movement and the Castro movement, both in the Caribbean area, antithetical in method, were developing side by side.
On my second visit to Georgetown I went with Cheddi to a number of folk meetings that he and other Progressive Party leaders were organizing. Dr. Jagan was then Prime Minister in the Guyanese government. His constituents were largely rural, descendants of the Indian indentured servants, brought to Guyana to provide labor for the sugar plantations.
Dr. Jagan had developed a following, organized in the P.P.P., sufficient to win three elections and head three Guyanese administrations. There he was defeated by political trickery engineered by Washington and London and financed by CIA money funneledin by the AFL-CIO.
I went three times to Venezuela, which was, in effect, a private estate of the Rockefeller family. Its chief importance lay in its rich petroleum deposits. Caracas, a modern city of oil millionaires and paupers, boasted a fabulous university campus. On my second trip in 1960, I spoke at a student gathering on the campus. My subject was "The Expanding American Empire." Student unrest was rife at the time, the subject explosive, and the room was packed, with people standing and peering in doors and windows. With a detailed outline written on large blackboards in English and Spanish, I listed the steps, beginning in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine, by which Washington had established its power-monopoly in Latin America.
After the talk there was an animated discussion period presided over by the head of the University Economics Department. During the question period a young chap in the audience spoke up in flawless English: "You have given us a thorough outline of historical forces. I know it is not fair to ask this at the end of the period but could you, in two words, suggest a solution?"
"Certainly," I answered. "The two words are 'social revolution.' " I spoke the words quietly and enunciated them slowly and carefully. I was about to add: "That means a radical transformation of the purposes and institutions of society," but the students cut me short. The answer was like a spark in a can of gasoline. Pandemonium broke loose. The students stamped, applauded, screamed, and yelled. Completely taken aback, I looked to the chairman for an explanation. He looked uncomfortable and at a loss. The meeting had reached its high point. The students dispersed soon after in a greatly excited mood.
Two years later I went again to Caracas. By letter some of my academic friends had arranged to meet me at the airport and have me give further talks at the university. They kept the appointment, but I saw them only on a balcony, as I was taken to the office of the airport police.
Routine inspection by the customs officials found a few apples which Helen had tucked in my bag before I left home. Those were confiscated. Police began to take an interest in me when the inspector found a handful of circulars (I used the back of them for scratch paper) in my brief case. He threw them angrily in the waste can, then changed his mind and put them carefully on one side. The bills announced a series of lectures I had given the previous year in New York City. The topic was "The Socialist Century." Their next discovery was several manila envelopes marked with the return address: "Press Department Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Washington, D.C." I had been using these sturdy envelopes to hold my notes. Customs also found copies of The Nation and The Guardian, both left of center magazines, and the last five numbers of Monthly Review, with "An Independent Socialist Magazine" printed on each front cover.
It had been naive of me to carry this material into Venezuela, harmless as it was. It certainly stirred up the police. They hauled me into their office in the airport central building and went to work systematically, taking everything out of my small clothes bag and my briefcase. They searched my person thoroughly, emptying every pocket. After impounding a small penknife that I always carry to cut fruit, and taking my passport and ticket, they bundled bags and me into a police car, put a Sten gun on the floor between the seats, and drove me to Caracas.
The last time I made this trip I had to take a taxi and paid eight dollars; at least this ride was free. Police escorts are usually reserved for very important persons. I am not a VIP, but I was escorted by the Venezuelan police during my entire twenty-two hour stay in the country.
Our destination was the headquarters of the Secret Police. There the search began all over again. They looked into my soap box, opened a tin of shoe paste, and took the batteries out of a small flashlight to see what was inside. My briefcase and other papers were first searched in my presence; then they were taken into another room for an hour or so. Toward 6 p.m., after three hours' search and interrogation, Police Inspector Antonio Ramirez had me brought into his office.
"You will not be allowed to stay in Venezuela," he told me. "Your tickets show that your next stop is Baranquilla, Colombia. The first plane for Baranquilla leaves at 11:45 tomorrow morning. We are reserving a place for you on that plane. You will spend the night in the Hotel Macuto at our expense."
At the hotel I was given a splendid twin bedroom with bath. At 8:30 I had supper with two police guards at a table overlooking the water. We turned in early-a police guard in one of the beds.
From the time I was turned over to the police in the airport baggage room until the time I left the airfield twenty-two hours later one or another police guard was within reach of me every minute. The guard who shared my hotel room was a bright young chap from the Venezuelan back country. He had picked up a little English, about as much as I had of Spanish, and we got on quite well together at supper, with the second guard laughing at our clumsy attempts to communicate.
Before we turned in, my escort and I walked along the waterfront. It was a majestically starry night, with the heat of the day relieved by a delicious wind sweeping over the Caribbean. As we approached the hotel on our homeward walk, the young police officer said in a low serious voice: "I am sorry that you cannot stay longer with us here in Venezuela." I replied, in Spanish, "Yes, it is a pity." We were under the hotel portico. We picked up our key and turned in. From then on neither of us said another word.
In Baranquilla where the next day's plane dropped me I cleared customs without any trouble, got a room in a hotel, and had just taken a shower when there was a knock on my door. Two men in uniform showed me their credentials from the Department of Immigration and told me, curtly, to get dressed and come with them to the headquarters of the Colombia Secret Police, where I was searched all over again. Apparently the police, advised from Caracas, had been waiting for me at the airport but had missed me. As I had entered the country when I left the airport I was officially in Colombia as an unwanted foreigner.
I asked the Chief of Immigration if I was under arrest. He replied, "No, only detained." The detention lasted for parts of four days, which I spent incommunicado, under guard, in a barred room of the Baranquilla Secret Police Edificio.
During this time I was visited by the American Consul who explained that I was to be deported. The Chief of Immigration, the United States Consul, and the local officials of Pan American airline on whose ticket I had been traveling, cancelled my round trip ticket and put me on the first plane back to New York, at my own expense.
The plane stopped over in Caracas for half an hour. Although only a transit passenger, I was again picked up by the airport police, taken to their office, and detained until I protested: "My luggage is on that plane; either take off the luggage or put me back on the plane." They put me back on the plane just before takeoff.
Reaching New York I went to see a lawyer friend, Dave Freedman, who gave his opinion that the deportation and seizure of my ticket amounted to no less than kidnapping and confiscation of my property, but that unless I wanted a long drawn-out court case there was not much I could do. I went over to Varig Airline, bought another round trip ticket through South America, avoiding Caracas, and reached Rio de Janeiro in time to help with arrangements for the Conference on Solidarity with Cuba, which had been the main purpose of my trip.
Others attempting to travel to the conference had less success than I. Ninety-five visas from all parts of the world were either denied outright or delayed so long that the delegates could not reach Rio in time for the conference. Two of those refused were J. D. Bernal, the British scientist, and Janet Jagan, wife of Cheddi Jagan, then Prime Minister of Guyana.
At the time of the Intecontinental Congress, Santiago Dantas, Brazil's finance minister, came to the United States to get a $400 million loan. He got most of what he wanted, with strings attached, and I think one of these strings was to stop the conference, and if that was not possible, then to prevent delegates from reaching Rio.
The conference was supposed to be held at the Press Correspondents Club in Rio de Janeiro. Use of the club was cancelled at the last minute. Then the Navy Yard workers offered their hall in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio.
Matured under trying, harrying conditions, the Continental Congress was a step of importance in the organization of a heightened fight against imperialism, for democratic revolution, and eventually for a socialist Latin America. Despite government pressure, despite the use of troops, despite provocative full-page newspaper advertisements attacking the conference and inciting to violence against it, despite U.S. State Department interference, the congress was held. And it was received warmly by the people attending it and by the people who came in contact with the delegates.
* * *
I have visited Asia several times: the Far East, the Near East, Middle East; Japan, China, Siberia, the Central Asian Soviet Republics; India; Ceylon; Indonesia; Singapore; and oil-rich western Asia. Most of the earth's land mass is Asian-Asia is the largest of the continents-and more than half of the human race lives in Asia. China alone, with its 750 million inhabitants accounts for more than a fifth of mankind. India adds another five hundred million. Man's history was written chiefly in Asia for several thousand years. Europe, especially Western Europe, is a Johnny-come-lately on the world stage. Between 1450 and 1900 the West conquered Asia, reducing much of it to colonial status. Since 1900 Asia has begun reoccupying its rightful place as the planet's geographical, population, wealth, and power center.
Japan led this Asian procession from subjection to self-sufficiency, from dependence to sovereignty, from nonentity to planetary mastery. Japan won its title as a world power by defeating China in 1895 and Russia ten years later. Out-maneuvered and out-classed in the war of 1914-18, defeated and humiliated in the war of 1939-45, with its major cities in ruins, stripped of the war booty which had accumulated after 1895, Japan has made an astonishing comeback in the past two decades. Economically Japan is the one country in Asia that can produce anything from a watch to a 250,000 ton oil tanker and market it in competition with the other industrialized nations. With its hundred millions crowded into a space about the size of California, Japan has cleared away its war ruins in record time and is building an automated economy and a modernized political system that classes it among the planet's five top-ranking world powers. Still lacking a military apparatus corresponding to its top power status, Japan is providing the geographical, economic, and political bridge-head which Washington has been using and hopes to use in its campaign to dominate and exploit the Far East, as it dominates and exploits the Americas. In a very real sense, the oligarchy which operates Japan is a comprador or middleman managing an Asian branch of the American empire located on the Japanese archipelago.
I visited Japan for the first time in 1927. Since then I have gone back periodically to admire the masterful way in which the Japanese have compensated for their shortage of raw materials, risen from the ashes of their crushing military disaster in the early forties, and re-established themselves as a topranking world power. During the first visit to Japan after war's end in 1945 I remember particularly the meetings arranged in the universities of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto by my fellow economists. The graduate students and professors who attended these meetings came well prepared for discussion on the American Oligarchy, United States policy in Asia, and political opposition in the United States. I have taken part in many meetings in many countries, both inside and outside academic circles. It has never been my good fortune to participate in intellectual give-and-take on a higher level-more searching, in better humor and more even-tempered, with a greater feeling of satisfaction in having thoroughly canvassed a particular area of subject matter, than in those meetings in Japan with my Japanese colleagues.
China has moved less rapidly than Japan into world power status. Japan began modernizing a century ago. China's new ruling oligarchy took over only in 1949. Behind it lay a half century of turbulence and chaos which began with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and continued through a time of troubles that included revolution, civil war, and military occupation by Japan. In 1900, China, under the Manchu emperors, rested on an agrarian economy. Its internal life was directed by a semi-feudal oligarchy. Its foreign relations and the modern aspects of its economy were in the hands of western occuping powers. Today China is one of the major world powers. Its internal life is still tumultuous, but it is a sovereign country, animated by a burgeoning nationalism, modernizing its economy and pushing for leadership in directing the affairs of Asia.
I was lucky enough to visit China twice, once before the 1949 takeover and once in the 1950s. Later attempts to travel there (in 1967-68) were frustrated, first by Washington's State Department and later by the Red Guards who were in control of China's consulates and embassies.
During a month's stay in the winter of 1957-58 I found a China completely transformed since my first trip there in 1927. The Communists had eliminated the scourges that were rife thirty years earlier. Education, free for all, was being rapidly extended. Industrialization was being enthusiastically promoted. Factories were using, inventing, and producing new machines. Cooperatives in agriculture, in trade, and in handcrafts had become a prominent feature of Chinese economy. Since liberation, land, and other national resources and public utilities had become public property. A flood of energy, idealism, and high striving marked the mood of China at that period.
Soviet scientific, technical, and financial aid was at its peak. In literally hundreds of projects Soviet experts were providing the skills while Chinese apprentices were learning new techniques and Chinese workers were furnishing the manpower. Thousands of Chinese students were in the Soviet Union, studying in the institutes and universities and practicing their newly acquired knowledge in Soviet productive enterprises.
Helen and I had gone to China after an extended visit to the Soviet Union, so that we had seen both sides of this inspiring cooperative program which was being carried forward under the joint auspices of the two largest countries engaged in socialist construction. Two years later, in 1960, the monumental cooperative enterprise between the two giant socialist countries came to an abrupt end. Soviet technicians were withdrawn from Peoples China; Chinese students left the Soviet Union. Between 1951 and 1960, however, socialist construction in China had bounded forward in spectacular fashion. Since 1960, China's very considerable advances in science and technology have been the result of Chinese energy and competence.
* * *
The State Department in Washington made a considerable effort to keep us from travelling at all, let alone to China. It may not be generally known or remembered that prior to World War One, United States citizens needed passports only to go to Russia or Turkey. Buying a steamship ticket to Europe was as lacking in formality or red tape as buying a railway ticket today.
After 1914 passports were generally required for travel abroad. Much tougher limitations were established after World War Two, and the Passport Office began to build secret files on citizens who were considered unfit for travel. The victims were not allowed to see the evidence against them nor to confront their accusers. Finally, after suits had been brought against the Secretary of State, an appeals board was set up, staffed by State Department personnel.
Article 13 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights reads: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." We had never had any trouble getting passports until 1952, by which time the Passport Office had evidently reached an unfavorable opinion of us. Our applications were simply ignored. After several months of silence, we asked for and obtained an interview with Mrs. Ruth Shipley, then head of the Passport Office.
She was barely polite, not even asking us to sit down when we were ushered into her office. Standing behind her desk, she questioned us rather sharply on some of our expressions of opinion and activities. Then she said in a hard, accusatory voice, "I have evidence here that you advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence." We demurred quietly and explicitly, saying we were pacifists and not in favor of killing or violence. "We would like to see the evidence," we added.
"It is here," she replied, fingering a three-inch-high dossier of papers on her desk.
"I should like to see it," I said.
Mrs. Shipley fumbled through the heap. "The security officer who was to have been here for this interview has not shown up," she said finally and rather helplessly. "Can you come back at this same hour tomorrow?" We agreed.
The next day we went back to a very different reception. On the previous day Mrs. Shipley had made a public accusation against us. Obviously neither she nor her security officer had been able to discover any evidence that would support the accusation. The result of the interview was that she would consider our applications anew. After several months more of writing back and forth passports were issued, good only for Sweden, Britain, France and Holland (respectable Western European countries) and limited to a period of only six months.
In October, 1954 we again applied for passports, this time without restrictions. Again we had to go to Washington, where we faced two examining officers and a file of documents. A sample question: "Did you on such and such a date speak in Santa Barbara for the Communist Party?" "No," I answered. "I was not in California at the time, but if I had been asked I most certainly would have. I will speak wherever I am asked, even in the State Department."
Their reports of my speeches and activities were sloppy. One particularly incoherent report dealt with a talk I had given in Buffalo. It made no sense. "You are an educated man," I said to the examiner. "Can you make head or tail of that report?" "No," he said sheepishly, "I really cannot." "Neither can I. Would you mind telling us who sent in that statement?" "They do not give us the names," the examiner said. "They merely assure us that the reporter is trustworthy."
During the three previous years I had addressed close to six hundred meetings. The State Department and/or the FBI had apparently monitored many of these gatherings. Some of their representatives were unacquainted with social science and could not correlate the ideas I had presented. The garbled reports of these men were the evidence against us.
"Look here," I said to the examiners. "I have been writing down my ideas on public questions for half a century. In the Library of Congress you will find about fifty books I have written, some of them with my wife. If you want to know our views, send a trained man to the library. We stand by every word we have written. Why waste time with the ill-reported scraps and fragments you have been reading us?"
But the State Department prefers to rely on its own reporters. Fifteen months elapsed before we received the passports we requested. In December of 1957 we went from the Soviet Union to forbidden territory: China. All American passports were marked: "Not good for travel to or in Communist China." That we had not used our passports in China was brushed aside: our passports were cancelled on our return home and we were called again to Washington. A stenographic report was made of this interview, which we used to write a pamphlet, entitled Our Right to Travel.
Pointing out that we were students of social science and writers on public affairs, we said: "If the experiments now being made in People's China provide a workable alternative to the western way of life, and our visit has convinced us that they may do so, it is vitally important for people everywhere to know the facts.... Instead of obstructing, the State Department should make every effort to encourage and facilitate our travel in China in order that our report on developments there should be as informative and complete as possible."
Mr. Carroll H. Seeley, of the Passport Office, raised a question that was important to the State Department: "While you were in China, did you contact any other Americans?" "Yes," we replied. "Could you give us the names?" "No." "Don't you recall them?" "I am not an informer, not an agent, and I don't mention names or addresses or anything of that kind."
Another examiner, James F. Brooks, asked if we would again travel in violation of geographical limitations if we were granted passports.
I replied, "If it seemed best to do so, yes. We drive a great deal, and when we drive on highways we obey the traffic restrictions punctiliously unless something happens that leads us to depart from traffic regulations. We feel the same way about any regulations. If they are reasonable, we abide by them. If necessity arises, they are only traffic regulations. They are routine restrictions. We think of a passport as an impertinence. The world today is in a very perilous situation and one of the steps we have to take is to get beyond national loyalties and national frontiers to a higher loyalty, which is the loyalty to the human race, humanly speaking, and to an international authority, politically speaking. We think of the limitations written into the passport as routine regulations."
"I have no further questions," Mr. Brooks said, after handing to the chairman of the session "the third and final exhibit, a book entitled The Brave New World, written by Mr. and Mrs. Nearing and published in 1958 concerning their travels in Communist China."
Six weeks after the hearing we received a long letter from Frances G. Knight, Mrs. Shipley's successor as director of the Passport Office. She said the State Department had "concluded that further passport facilities should be refused to you."
Contrary to the old saying that you can't fight City Hall, the citizen is more powerful than he is apt to think. The State Department kept us penned in the United States for a time and then gave up. Lately our applications have been approved in tolerable time, albeit not speedily. There have been no further hearings.
* * *
In India, during my last two trips to that country, I had the chance to meet many students and young people at meetings arranged in high schools, colleges and universities. I found Indian youth unbelievably sold on the American Way of Life. They had swallowed the American bait, hook-line-and-sinker, literally believing the nonsense that America was a land of milk and honey for all, that its streets were paved with gold. Pro-American propaganda was being sedulously distributed by United States information services, by Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, by the American Embassy and consulates, skillfully using the Indian press and other channels of information.
As we went about India, in almost every Indian city American professors, scientists and experts were giving public talks, distributing scholarships, arranging cultural exchanges as part of this pro-American propaganda wave. We were astonished by the extensive 'takeover of Indian communication media by representatives of the United States industrial-military complex.
There was a valid explanation for this pro-American push. The Korean War of 1950-53 and the current strife in Vietnam had built! up a formidable barrier of anti-American sentiment which was proving a real obstacle to another Washington led conquest of Asia. China was being labeled Enemy Number One, as Germany had been the enemy in Europe a few years earlier. The United States was separated from China by five thousand miles of ocean. An effective campaign to reconquer Asia must cross that water barrier.
Minor wars in Korea and Vietnam had proved that even a small war could not be carried on easily across the Pacific. The transport of materials and manpower and their placement on Asia's mainland strained available resources to the utmost. The encirclement and subjugation of China was a major enterprise.
Materials could be fabricated in Japan and delivered to the mainland. This was done successfully in both Korea and Vietnam. The real problem was manpower. For years, leading United States military experts had been warning: do not get bogged down in a land war in Asia; let Asians fight Asians. Experience in Korea and Vietnam showed the soundness of this advice. Yet in the final showdown manpower would be needed to reconquer Asia, manpower in millions.
Outside China there was only one source from which these millions might come-India. Among India's 500 million there were anywhere from 25 to 40 million unemployed or partly employed young men. Many of them were well-trained. If the American Way could be sold to Indian youth, young India itself might rush to the defence of Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way of Life. Hence the pro-America crusade in India, promoted by American spokesmen.
In meeting after meeting with young Indian people I did my best to point out the forces at work and the grave danger that threatened those Indians who were acting as cat's paws for the American Oligarchy. In some cases I succeeded and my audiences said that they knew what was afoot. In other cases young Indians said to me: "You don't know what you are talking about. You have no idea what wonderful things the United States is doing for Indian youth!"
In the course of these last decades I have gone, time after time, from my home base through Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and back again to New England. Each time that I returned to our subsistence farm in Maine I was increasingly convinced that the socialist countries were moving ahead to their goals, that the western capitalist countries were drifting, rudderless, and leader-less, on a sea of troubles, even though the chief cities of Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, and Vienna glittered in spots with luxury and were filled with movement and activity. So was Versailles on the eve of the French revolution.
Each time that I returned after several months spent abroad I entered another United States, and felt a stranger in a strange land. Who could have imagined in the early part of the century that after a brief foreign sojourn I would return to these shores and find large sections of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington smoking ruins, sacked, and looted? Who could have foreseen the mounting drug addiction among the population, the vicious crime waves, the riots, the police ferocity? Each time I asked myself, incredulously, can this be home?
This affluent, drugged, debauched, corrupted, polluted, deluded nation is a country I never envisioned in my youth. It is an alien and hostile land. When I return to it I cannot say happily, "I am going home." Instead, I must gird myself and prepare to return to a foreign and none too pleasant habitat.
* * *
I was fast asleep politically and was taken completely off guard when war began in 1914. I was barely awake in 1917 and only dimly aware of the significance of the Bolshevik revolution. But I was quite aware of the stupidities, injustices, excesses, and inequities of capitalism and was looking eagerly for the coming of an alternative social system. It was to assist in this immense task that I was alerted and called upon to leave my subsistence homestead at three-score and ten years and to spend the next two decades doing what I could to enlighten myself and others as to the fate that faced the western world. For the past half century I have had my eyes rubbed wide open by a drama of world events which I have observed at first hand and helped to report, move by move and play by play.
While these events were taking place, directors and producers in Hollywood and many other studios have been staging make-believes aimed to divert, amuse, and sometimes to inform. But for me the real show of the twentieth century has been the unfolding drama of war, empire building, revolution, and socialist construction that marked the apex and the early stages of decline in western civilization.
As I have watched this fateful drama with its three billion actors and extras, it has become increasingly clear to me that humanity must work out an agreed plan, program, and schedule of procedure, call it a World Federal Constitution and Bill of Rights if you will-and then must follow the plan. The alternative is the continuation of the Great War to its logical end-extermination-or at the very least, another Dark Age of gestation and inaction.
Against the tremendous background of this planetwide drama we should be working toward a cooperative planetwide association of sufficient breadth and depth to replace the disintegrating remnants of early twentieth-century monopoly-capitalism and the earlier forms of socialist construction.
To carry out my assignment received in 1953 I have tried, while watching and waiting for the dawn, to learn the facts, to identify the forces in play and communicate my findings to those who will listen or read.
I have had six major social concerns:
1. The ability of the human race to make a sustained effort to provide a good life for all. Lenin asserted this possibility. Spengler questioned it.
2. The capacity of homo sapiens to use technology for production and construction and at the same time prevent the destructive minority of mankind from using technology for self-extinction.
3. Can the institutions of civilization be made to contribute more than they detract from the good life?
4. Can social science and social engineering be made into a major field of endeavor for the efforts of aspiring youth?
5. What is the role of the American Oligarchy in the drama of western civilization?
6. What part can socialism play, particularly socialism in the Soviet Union and China, in the unfolding planetary drama?
These are factors basic to man's role in social history and to his future on the planet. The specific tasks I have undertaken are:
1. Participating in and contributing to anti-war and anti-imperialist organizations and demonstrations.
2. Joining all the national peace movements and organizations, including the World Council of Peace, whose international conferences I attended when possible.
3. Keeping in touch with world events and writing about them in Monthly Review.
4. Spending large parts of several years in educational excursions through darkest America and reporting them (notably in USA Today).
5. Re-examining the Latin American sector of the western hemisphere nucleus upon which the American Empire was being built.
6. Visiting most of the capitalist countries; reporting these journeys in Socialists around the World.
7. Going to all of the socialist countries in the world, except North Korea, North Vietnam, and Outer Mongolia, reporting my observations in The Brave New World and Socialism in Practice.
This was the background against which I watched and waited for the dawn. What was mankind as a whole prepared to do at this critical stage of social history? Would the restless, impatient minorities rally their forces, agree on a program and a set of immediate demands and push forward resolutely, unitedly, persistently, until their demands were met? Was socialism the next stage in social evolution?