Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by flood or fire advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks. Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every private act—a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician—becomes a public act. Every private right—to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing press—becomes a public right. Every private institution—the hospital, the church, the club—becomes a public institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.
The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought—and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an “authoritarian personality.” A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand—the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens—95 per cent or so of the population—duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.
The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul, consuming its members for its own purposes. For the duration of the emergency the city does not exist for the citizen but the citizen for the city. The harder the city is pressed, the harder its citizens work for it and the more productive and efficient they become in its interest. Civic pride becomes the highest pride, for the end purpose of all one’s enormous efforts is the preservation of the city. Conscientiousness is the highest virtue now, the common good the highest good. (Is it any wonder that the German people, whose nation disorders the world, have established the world’s best-ordered cities, the Milwaukees of America as well as of Germany?)
What if the emergency persists, not for weeks, months, or even years, but for generations and for centuries? Unrelieved sacrifice requires compensation in the only specie available. Peoria—let Peoria be our beleaguered city—is seen, little by little, to be different from Quincy, Springfield, Decatur. It is something special to be a Peorian, something, if say so we must, heroic. Tales of the founding of Peoria, once taken lightly, reveal that our city was no ordinary city to begin with. Legends turn out to be true. No wonder Peoria sticks it out, sees it through; see the stuff Peorians are made of, always were. Peorians are superior people, superior blood and superior bone; their survival proves it.
Their ancestors, they recall, established the city against the most fearful odds; their descendants will deliver it against odds more fearful still. There will be a New Peoria, a Greater Peoria, a Thousand-Year Peoria. The world will ring with its timeless fame, kneel at its topless towers. And Peoria will be a model to mankind; Peorian courage, Peorian endurance, Peorian patriotism—these will be a model to a world that, because it has never been tried like Peoria, has grown soft, decadent, plutocratic, has fallen prey to rot and to the parasites that rot carries with it.
And whom, meanwhile, among Peorians, have we called to the helm in our hour, our aeon, of struggle, in our place of danger?—Peorians who are tried and true, men who have served their city and never disserved it, men who have represented the best of Peoria to the world, who have always known its glories and extolled them. We want the Old Guard, not the avant-garde; the doers, not the do-nothings; the clear thinkers, not the skeptics; the believers in Peoria, not the complainers and the cranks. We don’t want the men who always wanted to make Peoria over and who see our trial as their opportunity; this, of all times, is no time for divisiveness.
The things that a country honors will be cultivated there. What shall we teach the young Peorians, who will follow us? What life shall we hold out to them as the highest life?—Why, the life they will have to live to deliver their city, in a Peoria oppressed and encircled. The flabby and effete must go, and with it the dabbling, the faddism, the free thinking that squander our people’s time and their energies, divert them from the overriding need of their city, and debase their tastes and their morals. Peorianism is, as Daniel Webster would have said, foursquare, rock-ribbed, copper-sheathed; red-blooded; undoubting and undivided; staunch, stern, rugged, simple, brave, clean, and true. Every influence on our people (above all, on our young people) will be Peorian.
We Peorians cannot live as others. We would not if we could. See them—Quincy, Springfield, Decatur—hopelessly unprepared for a struggle such as ours, with their niggling parliamentarism (the Lend-Lease debate; the Army-McCarthy hearings), their democratic corruptionism (Teapot Dome; the five-per-centers), their corrosive individualism (Tommy Manville; H. D. Thoreau). See them fattening while Peoria hungers. See them exploiting Peoria’s prostration. Quincy, Springfield, Decatur, have always hated Peoria. Why? The answer is suddenly obvious: because we are better than they are.
Why do the Poles, egged on by the English, or the Serbs, egged on by the Russians, begin these world wars against Germany? The chauvinist braggadocio of my ten Nazi friends—excluding the teacher and, to a lesser degree, the cabinetmaker and the bank clerk—was of an order, I thought at first, that I had never before encountered. And then I remembered: the “new boy” in the neighborhood at home, on the Calumet Avenue of my childhood, ringed round by the neighborhood gang and trying to brazen it out alive. “Betcha my father can beat your father.” Betcha my fatherland can beat yours.
“The whole world has always been jealous of Germany,” said my friend the bill-collector, “and why not?—We Germans are the leaders in everything.”
“We Germans,” said my friend the tailor, the only one of the ten who deserved to be called an ignoramus, and a lazy ignoramus to boot, “are the most intelligent people in the world, and the hardest working. Is it any wonder that they hate us? Have you ever seen a Jew or an Englishman work when he didn’t have to?”
“Twice we have had to fight the whole world, all alone,” said the baker. “What good are the Italians or the Japanese?”
But I could always count on the tailor to go the whole hog: “We won both wars, and both times we were betrayed.”