The American Story

BOOK SIX

I

Face of Empire

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT DIED ON THE eighty-third day of his fourth term.

The Vice-President was Harry S. Truman, a sudden, brittle little man, who then became President. His notable qualifications were quick pugnacity, valor of prejudice, heroic mediocrity and an easy way with the words yes and no. As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces he could say: “All right. Let them have the atomic bomb.” That decision seemed to involve him in no prayerful anxiety. He had no capacity for awe. His coat of egotism made him impervious to both intellectuals and angels. He knew who was President.

He had a small military record. His rise from haberdashery to a seat in the United States Senate was owing to the fact that a corrupt and cynical political machine in Kansas City picked him to be its homage to civic virtue. His philosophy of government was that if you were for the people and your intentions were good everything would come out all right; and if it came out to be a Welfare State, all the better. Could you have too much human welfare?

Foreign affairs were simple too. With just common sense you could learn nearly all you needed to know about them in a few lessons, and for the rest you could ask the Secretary of State. The world’s post-war problems were big but not terrifying. If you had in your heart a true love of mankind and in your hand the magic wand of American billions you could act on them pretty well. Mankind was no abstraction to him. Mankind was an image—the image of an underprivileged man in strange and scanty clothes who never had enough money to take home on Saturday night and no way to vote the Democratic ticket.

He was not a Caesar, not a dictator, not a conscious demagogue, only a haberdasher who would think nothing of including in the price of a necktie a formula for putting down aggression in the world and giving people a chance to live with one another in a state of amity and good feeling.

Nothing could ever have been more improbable than that under the leadership of a man like that the American nation was launched on a career of global empire from which there could be no return short of capital disaster. Let the features of empire be—

(1) The executive principle of government uncontrollably ascendant,

(2) The parliamentary and judicial principles recessive,

(3) The military authority in escape from civilian control,

(4) Foreign policy supreme over domestic policy,

(5) A system of subsidized allies and satellites all over the world,

(6) The paramount war machine upon the earth,

(7) A Treasury devouring more than a quarter of the nation’s income and wanting more,

—and you will see them all.

The rest of this history is the story of a crusade that lost its way.

After victory the war machine was scrapped as if it were junk. There was never going to be another war. The United Nations would see to that. But government was not demobilized. It went on growing; it grew faster than ever before in time of peace; and its growth was almost entirely on the executive side. For a measure take this:

President Hoover had an executive staff of	42 persons
President Roosevelt fought World War II
with an executive staff of	597 persons
President Truman’s executive staff increased to	1,178 persons

In the Truman regime Federal government became so vast and shapeless that people could no longer comprehend it, and as they were unable to comprehend it, so of course, they were unable to control it, although more and more it touched to the quick the everyday transactions of private life. That was not the worst. A time came when the Federal government was aware that it had lost control of itself. The whole did not know its own parts, and the parts in many cases were self-growing and self-governing, like cancerous cells.

So at last the Congress asked former President Hoover to form a commission of experts to study government—literally to stalk it, to find out what it was and where it was and how it worked, with the hope that some kind of form could be imposed upon it. The report of the Hoover Commission was a document of many volumes; the briefest possible summary of it made a book of more than 500 pages that could hardly be called popular reading.

It found the Executive Branch of Government (government from the White House) to be “a chaos of bureaus and subdivisions.” It found agencies of government that were bigger than the whole of government was only twenty years before. It found agencies that had their own independent sources of income; agencies that in their own way administered systems of subsidy at a loss, getting money at one rate of interest from the Treasury and lending it to people at a lower rate; almost forgotten agencies that exercised powers of government over regions, with their boundaries overlapping. It said: “The present regional districts of Federal bureaus and agencies, if superimposed one on the other on a map, would show an unbelievable spider-web pattern of regional boundaries.”

It found that the government could not give a coherent account of its expenditures.

However, the idea of reorganizing the government moved very slowly against many obstacles, some of them politically impassable; and that was because the bureaus and agencies were deeply entrenched and had acquired powers of self-defense. The thought of demobilizing government, that is, the thought of less government, hardly got through at all. For all the chaos, these bureaus and agencies did one thing with zeal. They scattered money out of the public purse to millions of people, who, having once become dependent, could not easily be cut off. How, for example, could the government stop supporting farm prices out of the public purse, to keep farming profitable, without throwing into bankruptcy perhaps millions of farmers who had become accustomed to that kind of aid?

It was the same in foreign affairs.

After victory Lend-Lease was stopped, as the law required, and immediately the countries that had been receiving Lend-Lease goods without price, especially Great Britain and Russia, who had been the principal beneficiaries, bitterly complained, as if they were hurt.

You may think of Lend-Lease as a great pipe line, 3,000 miles long, delivering food, fuel, raw materials, machinery, motor vehicles, guns, ammunition, anything a country at war could use, and all of it for the asking to any country whose defense the President might deem essential to the security of the United States. It took some time to fill the pipe line; once it was full the goods moved in a continuous flow under pressure, as in a water main.

Now, if you are going to stop the flow, the question is, will you stop it at the outlet in Europe or at the source in this country? If you stop it at the outlet, then what will you do with the goods already in the pipe line? Well, at first it was closed at the outlet in Europe; hence the protests from Great Britain, Russia, France and others. They wanted at least what was left in the pipe line. The American government relented and closed the valve at the source. That is to say, the pipe line was permitted to empty itself, and that gave Europe a great quantity of goods that could be used in peace as well as war.

From beginning to end, the value of Lend-Lease goods delivered to foreign countries—two-thirds of it to Great Britain, one-fourth of it to Russia and nearly all the rest divided between France and China—was more than $42 billion. And if you want to know what $42 billion represents, it is roughly equal to the total assessed value of all property, real and personal, in the three states of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

In the charted curves of comparative statistics, war billions are as mountains that are not there. You cast them out. But peace time billions are supposed to be subject to the realities of arithmetic.

No one could have imagined that in the next eight years (post-war years) American aid to foreign countries, all of it unrepayable, would amount to three times the total assessed value of all property in the six New England states. This was simply a sharing of American wealth with other nations. Such a thing was unique in the world.

The impulsion to do it was a complex of motives. The American mind was in one of its apocalyptic moods. The evangel of a fraternity of nations to keep the amity of the world was hypnotic. The idea was romantic, sacrificial, aggressively anti-nationalistic, and very intolerant of the kind of patriotism that said America first. With a fervor like that working in its heart, how could the richest nation in the world isolate itself from the miseries of other nations? For the hard-thinking realist there were other arguments, such as that no one nation could hope to prosper in an unprosperous world, wherefore, beyond sentiment or any moral obligations, it behooved this nation to help the war stricken nations of Europe to regain their feet. Nor is the fact to be omitted that in the American folk-heart there was a sense of guilt at being so rich in a wretched world.

But even so, if the people had known what it was going to cost they might have been reluctant. Therefore, it had to be done one wedge at a time.

First was $1⅓ billion for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Fund. Then $1 billion for relief to be administered by the Army in defeated countries. After that, $2¾ billions for the International Monetary Fund, which was going to restore faith in everybody’s haggard money. Then more than $3 billion for the International Bank, which was to make loans for reconstruction works in the wrecked countries, and $3½ billion for the American Export-Import Bank to make loans for the restoration of the international trade, and $2 billion to empty the Lend-Lease pipe line.

For each of these appropriations the White House, the State Department and the Treasury put forth a spate of emotional propaganda, calling upon the people to save the world or perish with it, and this propaganda reacting upon Congress, produced there a state of sentiment that was almost maudlin. During the debate on what was called the Bretton Woods proposal, which provided for the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank, one Senator said: “I will cast my vote in the hope and in the prayer that man will be different in the future.” Another: “There is a deep feeling that something must be done in the world. The nations need each other as never before. They are yearning and hungering for something. So far as I am concerned, we are going to give it to them.” In the House of Representatives one said: “If the voice of the people is the voice of God we have irrefutable testimony in behalf of this legislation.” And another: “This is a bill to regulate selfishness and restrain greed among nations.” Another: “Everyone is in favor of this legislation except those who would vote against the Ten Commandments.”

So these billions were voted by very large majorities in both the Senate and the House.

The American government seemed to find the first few billions in its vest pocket. But to save Europe it would have to dig much deeper.

The Treasury was already at work on a plan to rescue Great Britain with a loan of $4.4 billion, on the ground simply that the world could not afford to let Great Britain go bankrupt and only the United States could prevent it. Nominally it was a loan. Actually the thought of repayment was not seriously entertained, least of all by the British, who thought it should have been a gift.

This loan to the British made the Russians very mad. They had been expecting an American loan of $5 billion and it was not forthcoming. That is one of the hazards of loans or grants from one government to another. They are political to begin with and give rise to bitter political jealousies.

In one year Great Britain used up her American loan, which was supposed to keep her afloat for three, and was going aground again. Not only Great Britain but Europe as a whole was worse off than she was when she began to receive post-war American aid.

Then the Marshall Plan, so called because it had its origin in a mid-summer’s night speech by George C. Marshall, the Secretary of State. He addressed himself to the countries of Europe, saying, in effect, as follows: “Just to spill American billions all over the place gets us nowhere. You have no plan. Agree among yourselves on a European recovery program to run over several years, calculate the cost of it, then estimate what you can do toward helping yourselves, and send us the bill for the difference.”

The speech got no big headlines in this country; in Europe it electrified the air. The British Prime Minister said it was an event without precedent in history—one nation offering to pay the deficits of other nations for a period of years—and rushed off to Paris to arrange a grand European conference on how to make the most of it. Everybody was included. Russia and her satellites were invited. They came, bringing their worst manners, and churlishly went home. Why? Probably because they did not want Europe to be owing her salvation to capitalistic dollars.

This was a tricky moment in world politics. Europe was going to be split between sixteen Marshall Plan countries in the west and the Communist countries of the east. Czechoslovakia was on the line until the Russians seized her from behind and dragged her behind the Iron Curtain, wanting control of her industrial resources.

The Marshall Plan countries were Great Britain, France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Iceland, Luxemburg, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. They figured fast and came up with the conclusion that for a four-year recovery program they would require American aid in the sum of nearly $30 billion. They were persuaded to scale it down to a little less than $22 billion. Congress passed the necessary legislation.

To administer Marshall Plan aid there was created and euphimistically named the Economic Cooperation Administration, with Cabinet rank, with a law of its own, an ambassador-at-large, an administrator with power over the destinies of sixteen European nations, and command of American resources figuratively represented by the continuous labor of two million Americans. As there had been a Lend-Lease pipe line, so now there was a Marshall Plan pipe line, full of machinery, raw materials and means of sustenance.

The Marshall Plan idea had at first no political character. Secretary Marshall said: “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.”

However, owing to the unfriendliness of the Russians on every scene and to the systematic revival of their subversive and anti-capitalistic activities in western countries, especially the United States, American foreign policy was painfully disillusioned. How to stop the spread of Communism became its No. l problem. One way to slow it up would be to give economic support to the anti-Communist countries of Europe.

On signing the Foreign Assistance Act, that implemented the Marshall Plan, President Truman said: “This is the answer to the challenge that faces the world”—meaning of course the Communist challenge.

After that, not only the Russians but Communists everywhere denounced Marshall Plan aid as a new kind of imperialism, or as dollar enslavement, or as the exploitation of the world’s misery with sinister capitalistic intent.

Now everyone could see that the world was dividing dangerously. On one side the American power and on the other side the Russian power, and nowhere in the earth a third power strong enough to stand between these two.

 

II

Buying Allies

THE FATE OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA, WHICH WAS CONQUERED BY a Communist fifth column, caused fear of Russia in western Europe to rise to the pitch of panic. The western European countries said economic aid alone would not save them. Suppose that with American aid they were able to carry through their reconstruction works. How could they defend them against the consuming Russian horde, which, as all the military authorities agreed, could march across Europe in two weeks?

Out of this fear rose the thought of collective security. President Truman said: “The heart of our support is economic assistance. To be effective, it must be coupled with sufficient military strength to give the free peoples of the world some sense of security while they rebuild.”

There had been formed what was called a Western European Union; but its total military strength was not equal to the strength of Russia. Now suddenly the principal members of that Western European Union asked the United States and Canada to join them in a North Atlantic Pact which would guarantee the security of these ten western European countries, namely: Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy and Portugal.

President Truman and the State Department embraced the idea with instant enthusiasm. Within nine months from the time it was proposed the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by all twelve nations and ratified by the United States Senate, and President Truman was calling for the rearmament of western Europe with American dollars.

With such haste, and with no profound debate in the press, in the forums or among the law makers, the first book of American history was violently closed and the second one opened with a global flourish.

The heart of the North Atlantic Treaty is this: The twelve signatory nations—the United States, Canada and ten European nations—severally and collectively agree, and so bind themselves, that an armed attack upon any one of them shall be considered an attack upon all of them, and they shall conduct themselves accordingly. Thus an attack upon Portugal or Norway, for example, would be deemed an attack upon the United States. Turkey and Greece signed later.

By this treaty the United States assumed an unlimited obligation to go to war under circumstances it could not foresee; under circumstances it could not control.

The Marshall Plan came to an end in four years, as required by law, but nothing happened to the pipe line. It was handed over to another euphemistically named organization, the Mutual Security Agency, which continued to administer foreign aid at the rate of $6 to $8 billion a year. Only now foreign aid began to be militarized. Less and less of it was for economic reconstruction, which in Europe had been very successful, and more and more of it to subsidize armies and armaments. The Marshall Plan countries now were the North Atlantic Treaty countries. They organized what they called the European Defense Community, in which they were going to pool their entire military strength. To this European Defense Community the American government contributed air power, naval power, a great atomic bomb base in England with the bomb stock-piled around, military structures, ground troops, enormous quantities of armament and a supreme commander—all of this besides helping the North Atlantic Treaty countries with money to pay their pro rata share of the cost of creating a defense system that might scare the Russians.

Undisguisedly and with avowed intentions, the American government was arming 225 million people in western Europe. Against whom? Against the Russians.

In the American press, in the debates of Congress, in official statements from the executive heads of government, the enemy was no longer referred to in oblique diplomatic language. He was identified by name and warned what would happen to him if he started anything. And when, besides arming western Europe, the Americans began to build themselves a new war machine in place of the one they had scrapped at the end of the war—this one to be the most terrible in the world—it was aimed straight at Russia.

The Russians retorted by using the United Nations as a forum from which to denounce the Americans as capitalistic war mongers, who, in order to destroy Russia, would bring on World War III and fight it with atomic weapons. Then behind the Iron Curtain they produced an atomic explosion, which could be heard outside, and that was to prove that they, too, had the atomic bomb.

But their formidable answer was strategic. They moved the axis of the cold war from Europe to Asia, where they incited the Chinese, who incited the North Koreans, who invaded South Korea, intending to take the whole of Korea behind the Iron Curtain.

What the military theorist already knew, now was realized in fact, namely this: that by reason of occupying the heartland of the world, reaching from the Baltic Sea in Europe all the way around to Alaska in the Northern Hemisphere, Russia and her satellites were able to choose both the time and the battlefield. For the Americans and their kind of warfare Korea was the worst battlefield there was, and on the other side of the world.

Under the Truman Doctrine, which pledged the United States to resist further Communist aggression anywhere, the Americans were morally obliged to go to the aid of South Korea, alone at first, when President Truman immediately ordered General MacArthur to move in from Japan. A few hours later the United Nations, in the willful absence of the Russian delegates, denounced the North Koreans as aggressors and adopted Mr. Truman’s war. That made it nominally a United Nations war, and it was fought under the United Nations flag; actually it was America’s war. Only sixteen of the fifty-five non-Communist members of the United Nations contributed anything, and that very little; the Americans bore 90 per cent of the cost and roughly that proportion of the casualties, save only the South Koreans, who were the victims and fought heroically and suffered relatively the heaviest casualties.

It was an absurd war. American power became imprisoned in it. The Americans could not afford to lose it; neither could they afford to win it. If they lost it, or abandoned it, they would lose face forever in Asia. On the other hand, to win it they might have had to conquer China, which was an appalling task to contemplate, besides at the same time alienating their United Nations allies, most of whom, and especially Great Britain and India, were for confining the war to Korea and coming to terms ultimately with Communist China.

It lasted three years and came to a stalemate, called a truce—a very uneasy truce, with Korea divided across the middle as it was before—Communists entrenched in the North, bitter anti-Communists entrenched in the South. It was the first foreign war from which the Americans ever came home without victory. For the Russians it was a cat’s paw game. They had no casualties; the Chinese and the North Koreans did all the dying on the Communist side; and the Russians could gloat over the hole it made in the American purse.

Meanwhile the political climate of Europe had been changing. The European Defense Community had begun to look like a large real estate development, not going very well—the streets laid out, the signs up, an unfinished town hall, a barracks, great piles of building material lying about, a boiler rusting on the ground, but nothing like a live community beginning to take place.

The explanations were various. First of all, people were groaning under their share of the cost; and they were resenting it that the rich Americans kept exhorting them to produce, produce more, and hurry! hurry! before the Russians could get them. The British had refused to put their troops into one big army. The French were afraid to include West Germany, lest German militarism be revived. The theme of Russian propaganda—peace, co-existence and a revival of east-west trade—had made an impression in Western Europe, whereas in the United States it was discounted. Moreover, in each of the principal North Atlantic Treaty countries there was a Communist party, reminding the people that if war came Western Europe would be the battlefield. Although ultimately perhaps the Americans would liberate them, they had been liberated before; and did they remember what that was like? Fear of the Russians was subsiding. If the Russians were going to attack Western Europe, why hadn’t they done it already? Why were they waiting for Western Europe to grow stronger?

At the very source of all this feeling and rationalization were two poisonous springs. One was dislike of the rich Americans and one was distrust of American leadership in the affairs of the world.

The dislike could be easily understood. The Americans were everywhere, exercising the preemptive power of their dollars, in many places so numerous and so established that one might be confused as to which was the foreigner, the American or the European. Who were these Americans? They were ambassadors-at-large and superfluous ministers, sometimes three or four in one capital. They were special representatives of the President and of governmental agencies and processions of Very Important Persons, and, in train with these, experts, observers, economic advisers, delegates, sponsors, survey committees, social scientists, research teams from private American Foundations, and so on, all anxious and competent to tell West Europeans what they should do and how they should do it and ready to impart, at no cost whatever, the sorcery of American know-how. Then generals and the brass that goes with generals, and soldiers, sailors, aviators and service forces, with their own hotels and playgrounds and recreational resorts, all of them spending dollars in a manner to make the native people feel inferior in their own cities and streets and waysides.

European distrust of American leadership lay in another dimension.

For a generation or more the American ego had been swelling on such phrases as “America’s turn to assume world leadership,” or “Americans now must accept their world responsibilities.” And what did these phrases mean? Nothing. World leadership, like world dominion or world conquest, is one of the fatal delusions. At any given period of time several great powers will be acting in the world, competitively perhaps, and each one is bound for good or evil to put forth its strength. In each case little powers, seeking protections and advantage, fall into the orbit of the great one and revolve around it, as if by a law of celestial mechanics. If the great power puts forth its strength in a manner to keep the equilibrium in its own sphere its system may hold together, not forever but for a long time. It is always subject to astronomical disaster. If it grows too fast by accretion it will explode; if it interferes too much in the affairs of the little powers that rotate about it, then it will suffer internal convulsions.

But where in this stable planetary arrangement, even when it works, do you find any sense of direction, any meaning of towardness? When you speak of world leadership you must imply that one great power has the wisdom to know where the world ought to be going and is resolved to take it there. Then its system begins to collide with other systems and there is chaos in the heavens.

In World War I the Americans exerted their strength to make the world safe for democracy. That was an unattainable object because, first, democracy was something nobody could define, and, secondly, half the world did not want it. However you define it, the life of democracy in the world was much less safe afterward than before.

In World War II they exerted their strength again to put down aggression in the world and to confer upon mankind the four freedoms, especially freedom from want and freedom from fear. What was the result? They put down one aggressor and raised up a worse one, the old spectre of famine returned and fear became the controlling emotion of the whole world, even the fear that civilization might perish.

It was only when Europe was in trouble that her statesmen intoned American slogans and acclaimed American leadership. What they wanted, as it always turned out, was not American leadership but American billions with no strings attached. The British view was that the Americans were to be cajoled, not followed. They were censorious of American capitalism while eating the bread of capitalistic dollars. Actually they used American dollars to support the second largest socialistic experiment in Europe, and then, as a challenge to American foreign policy, they threw their diplomatic weight to the side of Communist China; and this was a source of acute embarrassment to the Americans in their conduct of the Korean war. But if for any of these reasons the United States had cut Great Britain out of its scheme of foreign aid, that would have been dollar aggression.

 

III

The Top of the World

BUT THERE IS ALWAYS THE TOP OF THE WORLD, WHERE MANY proud people have passed in unpredictable succession, some of them leaving faint ruins, some of them nothing, not even foot prints. A nation arriving there is like the measuring worm that has climbed to the end of the stem and feels slowly around and around in space. There is no place to go from there; so he turns around and climbs down again, as if even the view had been disappointing.

Let the year be 1953. If that was not the top of the world for the Americans, it was very near to it; the view was magnificent and frightening.

What was in it, so frightening?

First the spectacle of a richest country in the world with no frontier—geographical edges, but no frontier. Or if there was a frontier, where was it? In the middle of Germany or in the Pyrenees? In Korea, Formosa, Indo-China or Persia? The Americans could not say where it was. It was wherever the Russians or the Communists might threaten to commit a new act of aggression.

American armed forces were stationed in forty-nine foreign countries, scattered over six continents. A quarter of the American army was in Germany.

What were these armed forces doing all over the globe?

They were defending the free world, on the ground that defense of the free world everywhere was vital to the security of the United States. The difficulty was that nobody could say precisely what the free world was. What were its boundaries and who were its people? If you supposed the free people of the world were those who were free from dictators, then you had to account for Mr. Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, who was counted on the free side and was receiving American aid, on the ground that he had turned his face from the east to the west.

Then was it east versus west? Were Americans defending the west against the east? In that case, what were they doing in Asia? Defending Asia against Asia? And as if they had forgotten what World War II was about, they were defending also Germany and Japan and urging them to rearm to resist aggression who only a little while before were themselves the aggressors.

What else was in that view from the top of the world?

A people alternating between moods of megalomania and seizures of fear.

In one state of mind, by treaties and pacts outside the United Nations, the United States had pledged itself to defend forty foreign countries—not contiguous countries, not countries arranged in any system of common interest, but countries spread over the whole world—Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and South America.

The alternating fear was irrational.

When the American Colonists fought for their independence they were fewer than four million, with no industry, almost no arms, and no money; and their enemy was mighty Great Britain, then at the top of the world.

A generation later the same Americans were ten million, but still with no military or industrial resources; in that condition they defied a coalition of European powers, saying: “We are sovereign on this hemisphere. Stay away.” That was the Monroe Doctrine. They did not propose to meddle in the affairs of Europe; neither should Europe meddle in theirs, on pain of war.

Now that they were 160 million, with roughly half the industrial power of the world in their hands, with a navy equal to the next largest two, the paramount air force and the atomic bomb in stockpiles—now suddenly they were afraid to stand alone in their own hemisphere. Was it vertigo? It was at any rate the official theme. Their Presidents and their statesmen were telling them publicly that they could not stand alone. They must have allies, even if they had to buy them. They had won two world wars and they were committed to defend the whole free world, whatever that was, but alone they could not be sure of saving themselves.

By this fear American foreign policy was conditioned. It followed that the Americans lost control of their own foreign policy. Control of it passed into the hands of allies and enemies—into the hands of allies, since if they were vital to the security of the United States, as they were told, they found themselves in a strong trading position and could demand to be appeased; and into the hand of the enemy, since by act of aggression, or by threat of it, he could oblige the Americans to make new political commitments, as in Korea.

Thus by their own thesis the Americans had put their country’s security, maybe even its life, in the hands of foreign countries. All the more for that reason their statesmen exhorted them to hold fast to that jerry-built system of collective security called the United Nations, where they were out-voted, where they were obliged day after day to receive insults from the Russians, who held a permanent seat in the supreme Security Council, and where, like a sickening fog, there was one all pervading hostility, which was the natural hostility that all other nations feel toward the one that happens to be at the top of the world.

What of peace?

It was not there. The thought of imposing peace on the world by force is from the Book of Empire. Pursuing it for more than 40 years the Americans had arrived at a permanent war economy.

What of friendship?

There is no such thing as friendship among nations. In eight post-war years the amount of American aid delivered to foreign countries was $40 billions. It was for everything you could imagine, including baby food, and in one case an increase in the American national debt to enable Great Britain to pay off part of her national debt, on the ground that that would be good for her credit. Yet there was probably not a country in the world that had consumed American aid where you could not see on the city walls, in crude lettering: “Americans, go home!”

During all that time the Americans’ prestige had been steadily declining. In Europe they were tolerated. In Asia they were hated. And if you had asked an Asian to say what the Americans were fighting for, he would have said: “For the white man’s supremacy in the world.”

So it was that in the year 1953 the American was probably the most misunderstood political animal that ever lived in the world.

His idealistic intentions were besmirched. He had shared his wealth with other people, prodigiously, and his motives were suspect. In every cooperative undertaking among the nations he willingly took the heavy end of the burden, and it was never enough. He tried to take ideas of freedom to people who could not understand them; who cared much more about something to eat.

Seeing this, under a program called Point Four because it happened to be the fourth point in one of Mr. Truman’s statements of benign foreign policy—under that program he adopted all the backward people of the world, meaning to bring them toward the American way of life by teaching them American know-how and training them in it. To thirty-five backward countries in the Middle East, in Africa, Asia and South America, the American sent at his own expense missions of experts, engineers, agronomists, geologists, sociologists, medics and sanitationists; he would teach them how to save their babies, how to water their arid lands, how to produce more food, how to catch more fish, what to do with their sacred rats, how to use tractors in place of wooden plows; and along with this education, the tools, better cows, better chickens and mules in place of donkeys.

These missions, generally expecting to be happily welcomed, were amazed at the difficulties they met, ranging from superstition to active hostility. The results were dim and very uneven.

Backward people have one thing in common with forward people. That is pride. They do not like to be called backward. Moreover, even those who were intelligent, some educated in western universities, were troubled by the thought of what might happen if suddenly the immemorial balance of life were upset. Suppose, for example, the sanitation engineers and the medics reduced the death rate faster than the agronomists could increase the food supply. You would have then a problem of over-population, and nobody would know what to do about that.

Briefly, the kind of world this romantic American believed in had no reality. Therefore as he tried to act upon it he was bound to be frustrated, and was often more ridiculous than heroic.

The one thing he succeeded to do—and it was the last thing he meant to do—was to impose upon it a pattern of total war.

Until he put forth his endless billions and his incomparable industrial power, war had been a limited business—limited, that is to say, by the amount of manpower and material the countries immediately concerned could afford to put into it, and ended always short of unconditional surrender in some kind of negotiated peace under which people went on living again, with only a big debt to pay. What the American did to that pattern was defined by General J. F. C. Fuller, a British writer on military solutions, who said:

“We Europeans are a truclent congeries of nations who have been fighting each other for upward of 2,000 years, and we dislike outside interference. In 1917 had you [the Americans] not stepped in, we should have been forced to come to terms between ourselves by a negotiated peace that could not have been worse than the one established. Again in the last war you got entangled in the European brawl. But for Lend-Lease the war could not have continued for long. Again there would have been a negotiated peace, which could not have been as bad as the present so-called one.”

In World War I and again in World War II the American’s idea was one last big war to end war. What his contribution did was to make war so much more terrible and costly than before—unlimited war—that powers of the second and third magnitude were made helpless, and the world was divided between the only two that could contemplate war or afford to maintain a modern war machine.

 

IV

Looking Back

FOR ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS THE AMERICAN omen was splendid in isolation. What it signified was nothing already known. It was not a continuation of anything. It came from nowhere. It was original, improbably born, improbably nurtured, and did not belong to this world; deriving its luminousity from these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (From the Declaration of Independence.)

Man was free in the device of his own being. He was born that way. Always before it was government that conferred freedom. Now for the first time man did not owe his freedom to government; he owed nothing to government, because government was his own instrument and he could do with it what he liked.

Then in one generation three events worked a metamorphosis.

The first was World War I, which shattered the tradition of non-entanglement in the quarrels of foreign countries. It was a precious vase and could never be restored.

The second event was the Great Depression, the severity of which was owing partly to the giddy behaviour of this country in its first experience as the world’s banker, and partly to the fantasy, largely supported by American credit, that World War I would never have to be paid for.

During the Great Depression the imperious tradition of limited government was sacrificed, and the ground principles of free, competitive enterprise were compromised beyond redemption.

The people were willing. They were not coerced. They were writhing in economic pain. Many forgot and many more seemed no longer to care that unless they absorbed their own troubles instead of unloading them on a paternalistic government they would never again be as free as their fathers were.

If the government intervened to increase the bargaining power of labor, in order to keep wages rising, it would thereafter control the labor contract by law. If it took extraordinary measures to restore the farmer’s profit it would have to mind his sowing and reaping. If it undertook to provide social security it would have to make thrift compulsory. And so on.

Nevertheless the clamor for relief became a frenzy. There had been bad depressions before and always the people had demanded relief; but always before the government—limited government—had said no. Now it was saying yes and making political capital of it.

It is hard for the government to say no. On the other hand, relieving everybody out of the public purse is but a postponement of evil. That is why the New Deal was never able to bring about Recovery.

The government has no money of its own. Its resources are two. By exercise of the tax power it can take from these and give to those. That it did. Secondly, it can print money and scatter it. That also it did.

The public purse, continuously so replenished, was opened for unemployment relief, for the relief of agriculture and for the relief of those called the underprivileged, who are always poor and who suffer extremely in bad times. Many of these were set up in ideal villages and on farmsteads under direction of Federal bureaus, thus becoming wards of the government, and were never so well off before.

Farmers accepted regimentation and marketing control in return for guaranteed prices; if nevertheless they produced a surplus which might cause prices to decline the government would take it off their hands.

The banking world, sooner than take its own losses, accepted government control of banking and credit.

Public credit was invoked to save millions of private debtors from the sheriff’s hammer. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation loaned public money to railroads to pay off their debts in Wall Street.

And business generally, meaning private enterprise as a whole, in return for illegal permission to limit competition and raise prices, embraced the principle of a Planned Economy.

The debacle was complete.

Laissez faire was dead. But the formal obsequies were postponed for ten years. In 1946 Congress passed the Employment Act. This was not an emergency law. The enactment of it caused no furore. Yet it was a law of revolutionary purport and delivered into the hands of government ultimate control of the American economy. Under this law the government assumes the following responsibilities:

(1) To maintain full employment in the nation;

(2) To keep the economy in a state of equilibrium;

(3) To see that people have at all times plenty of buying power;

(4) To save the country from depressions, and,

(5) To use its total power to these ends.

Whether or not with all its power the government can do these things had never been proved; yet it was certain that it could not attempt to do them without touching much more deeply all the ways in which people make their bargains, sell their labor, produce and exchange wealth with one another. Free markets would survive, if at all, only by bureaucratic sanction. Without free markets people could not be free, or free only to charge and pay what prices the government permitted and to conform production to an official pattern.

Of the three events that worked the metamorphosis, the third was World War II. We are not yet far enough away to comprehend that this was the incomparable disaster since the Fall of Man, and a penalty perhaps for the same sin, namely, vanity of knowledge. The temptation was power, and the last form assumed by the illusion of power was the atomic bomb.

All that we can see from here is that World War II launched the American on a career of empire—in one way the strangest empire that ever existed, with everything going out and nothing coming in. Even if it were only to police the world, that is a service for which the world should pay. Policing is a costly business. The Romans policed the world and kept the Pax Romana, and got the cost of it back in taxes; the British policed it and kept the Pax Britannica and got theirs back in the terms of trade. The American pays for the privilege and rationalizes it by telling himself it is for the security of the United States.

The three experiences that changed so many ancient signs had no shape of necessity. The American went forth to meet them. Why? What was new in his thoughts and passions that moved him to trample down his traditions? Why, for example, did the people willingly embrace the New Deal, seeming not to care in the least that it infringed their liberties? To do this they had to overcome the strongest political instinct they possessed, namely, fear of big government. Economic pain does not explain it entirely; moreover, the New Deal continued to be popular after the pain was gone.

The seeds of statism, socialism, Fabanianism, Marxism, and anti-capitalism had been blowing this way from Europe for a long time and had never produced here a crop larger than an anarchist’s beard—not until the gardeners appeared. The gardeners were a cult of intellectual disaffectionists, rising out of the academic world, all owing much, perhaps too much, to the capitalist dollars with which education was more richly endowed here than anywhere else in the world.

They were teachers, writers of text books, doctors of political science, and believed nothing good of American capitalism, which they never understood, supposing it to be like European capitalism, which was not so. They thought the poor were poor because the rich were rich, and adopted the poor not for love of them but out of hatred for the rich. They were academic revolutionaries, in revolt against their natural and historical fathers. They had nothing to offer capitalism; therefore, capitalism had nothing to offer them. Revolution would be their opportunity, if a leader came to make it; meanwhile their business was to destroy the old Copy Book Maxims and erode away all traditional American values. Patriotism was a racket. Nationalism was but an arrogant assertion of one people’s superiority. Individualism was anarchy. And freedom—what was that? The idea of freedom had been imposed by the strong on the many, and sometimes it meant the freedom to starve. Not one of them could have understood the emotions of the returned native whose first act on debarking from a ship in South Street was to kneel and kiss the cobblestones, for joy at being in his own free land again.

Their philosophy was pragmatic, derived from their hero John Dewey. Anything that worked was right because it worked, except of course capitalism. Their morals were worse. The law of expediency was higher than any principle. If in the name of social justice, as they might define it, private property were confiscated and the integrity of contract destroyed, that was all right. And they hated above all else the profit motive.

Then came the Russian Revolution. The Bolshevik, no matter what else, was a man of strong entrails. He did not mind spilling blood to bring his world to pass. Moreover, he had the scientific technique of revolution. His appeal to the intellectual disaffectionists, too pale to start a revolution of their own, was irrestible. It immediately reddened the text books they wrote, their teaching, and their contributions to the academic literature of economic and political science.

Before the Great Depression, four student generations had been exposed to the alienating influence of this new education; and the disaffected intellectuals, all with one voice, acclaimed the Depression as proof of their thesis that the profit motive could lead only to disaster and that capitalism was morally and economically bankrupt. The curious fact was that the leaders of capitalism, all in a panic, behaved as if they were guilty.

But for all of that, it was no activity of the intellect that moved the American to return to Europe with his sword—to the Europe from which his forefathers fled. After the first time his disillusionment was so bitter that he vowed never, never to do it again. The fathers had been right. Americans should have nothing to do with the quarrels of Europe. Then, within one generation, he did it a second time.

Why? The spectacle is one that will not easily dissolve in the generalizations of history. There was no profit in it. There was nothing he could get out of it, and in each case he made it a stipulation that he would take nothing for himself.

It is a familiar saying that leadership was the decisive factor. It is undoubtedly true that if either the Wilson Administration or the Roosevelt Regime had been resolute against war the country could have been kept neutral. There was not only a strong habit of isolation; there was a powerful tradition behind it. That could have been built upon to almost any point, in place of the war fever; but in both cases isolationism became a word of reproach and a political liability.

On the other hand, if the people had been resolute against war they could not have been pushed, led or lied into it. This holds notwithstanding the fact that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor instantly united the people for World War II. That was a simple reflex action. Yet anyone who will read the diplomatic history of American-Japanese relations must realize that the Japanese were goaded into making the attack. If the Roosevelt Administration had not been looking for the perfect pretext to enter the war against Hitler the attack on Pearl Harbor might have been averted—even afterward Hitler was the No. 1 enemy.

Many forces were acting. Not all of them visible. That would be so. But one may well believe that the controlling truth was romantic.

Both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt were Messiahs, one by temperament and the other by evolvement. Thus in each case there was the messianic voice of a President calling to something in people that was stronger than reason. The only name for it would be the crusading spirit, which was latent then and always had been.

Since the Colonial Revolution, liberation had been the most evocative word in the American language. In neither World War I nor World War II was there a single selfish or self-regarding slogan. For what was written on the banners? Peace Without Victory. The Armageddon of Right Against Might. A New World for Mankind. Down with Aggression. It was not art of title making that caused General Dwight D. Eisenhower to name his book “Crusade in Europe.” That is what he thought it was.

You could make a list of slogans derived from fear; but they were afterthoughts and, anyhow, the fear was unreal.

From the point of view of a cynical world the American who entered two world wars and won them both, when his own interest was not paramount, was either an inscrutable hypocrite or an unbelievable romantic, and in either case a dangerous possessor of the world’s ultimate power. And afterward, unconsciously perhaps, the only symptom of a unifying thought in the world was distrust of that American power.