Recounting the Lewis vs. Conn Championship Farce

[Most of the journal excerpts published on this blog to date deal with descriptions of Army life, musings about society and politics, and the occasional introspective journey. My father’s journals, however, are also filled with critiques of books he read and movies he saw, along with dozens of other wide-ranging topics. The following excerpt is an example — a wry description of the June 19, 1946 World Heavyweight Champion bout between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn, held in Yankee stadium and experienced by my father via radio. The detailed — and amusing — recount of the match speaks well of both the broadcast’s quality and my father’s reporting and writing skill. Perhaps he should have gone into sports writing rather than political journalism. Mike Jacobs, mentioned in the first paragraph, was the Don King of his day, a boxing promoter who exerted near total control over the sport.]

June 20, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The records set in Yankee stadium last night were not exactly those predicted in the pre-fight ballyhoo. Possibly there was as much interest in the “three-million dollar gate” as there was in the projected controversy between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn. But the gate was a flop, slightly less than two million dollars when the turnstiles stopped clicking. Though this was the second-highest haul in history, it will draw only sneers from Americans, who have no sympathy with second-best performances. Not a few cynical ladies and gents, who have recently been advised in national magazines of the stranglehold which Mike Jacobs holds on prizefighting, will no doubt derive a perverted pleasure from this financial fiasco. The sportswriters, in a sudden burst of honesty, have come as close as possible to biting the hand that feeds them. They have been hard put to find enough adjectives to describe the avariciousness of kindly old “uncle” Mike. A lot of folks get a hell of a kick out of the disappointment of greed, except when they are involved as principal parties in the drama. Of course there’s no possibility that Mike lost money on his show, but certainly his prestige was deflated just a little.

First congratulations should go to Louis, who has always been a great and fair fighter, and who suffered no loss of reputation last night. Second congratulations should go to the thousands of people who could have got into the stadium for a price, and stayed outside instead. And Billy Conn should get some kind of consolation prize for covering more space in eight rounds than any previous challenger or champion, even after deducting from the total distance the six feet which he covered in the final ten seconds.

Billy put up his best fight in the newspaper article which appeared under his name a couple days before he met Louis in the ring. He was full of Irish cockiness as he claimed right out that Louis was as good as a dead pigeon. Louis, of course, mentioned that Conn might be mistaken in this opinion, but not many people took Joe seriously. The idea was fast gaining ground that the champion was practically in his dotage. Conn himself seemed to be making a lot of this notion; he knew he couldn’t whip Louis by trading punches, but apparently he expected the Negro to drop from the sheer exhaustion of the chase. This strategy might have succeeded on a quarter mile track, with no time between rounds. But in the ring Billy kept running into the ropes and couldn’t dodge quite all of the punches that Joe threw at him.

As heavyweight brawls go, this one was a very genteel affair. Billy and Joe obviously remained good friends throughout. A couple of times Billy slipped on a corner and fell to the canvas. Joe simply stepped back and waited for him to regain his feet, being content to score his putout unassisted. Billy kept grinning every time Joe managed to get close enough to jolt him. Possibly he wanted to reassure his backers who expected him to keep out of range until Louis was staggering with weariness. “A mere tactical error,” he seemed to be saying. Then in the eighth round it was a mere tactical error which laid him flat on his back, and for once poor Billy couldn’t manage a grin.

I heard the fight in Seattle at the Servicemen’s’ Center. Approximately a hundred fellows were bunched around the big radio in the second-floor ballroom. Most of them were sailors, since the Fort Lawton authorities, apparently fearing a race riot, had imposed a fifteen percent quota of passes. That sounded to me like a typical example of brass-hat reasoning. The only riotous phenomenon which came to my attention was the laughter the fellows bestowed on the announcer’s description of Conn’s frantic race against time. The fellows got just as many laughs and were far more comfortable than the suckers who paid a hundred bucks for the privilege of shivering in a ringside seat at Yankee Stadium under the assumption that they were going to see a fight.

Political Organizations versus Individual Rights

[Although he was a lifelong liberal in his politics, this entry — written at the age of 23 — shows that my father looked upon political organizations of all types with a jaundiced eye. He even cites the dictatorial control of John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America union, to illustrate how individuals within larger organizations are expected to march in lock-step behind the policies established by the groups’ leaders. In explaining why he could never join a political party (a stance he would later shift) or attempt a career in politics, my father says, “… politics is a game which can be successfully played only by those who regard mass power as more important than individual rights.” It’s hard to argue with that insight.]

May 26, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

In college it was fashionable to be on the liberal side of the fence on questions involving labor, Russia and similar current objects of intellectual controversy. I was a campus liberal, and fancied that some of my opinions were based on personal conviction substantiated by the “facts” in the case. I was enthusiastic over cooperation with Russia during and after the war, and in all struggles with employers the laboring man had my support, qualified only by my disapproval of the feather-bedding practices of certain unions. Apparently I was not cut out , however, in the pattern of a campaigner or a propagandist. Though I was accepted by the more voluble left-wingers as one of their number, I left behind me no record of militant support of the various liberal issues which arose from time to time. I joined the Student Action Assembly, and was actually given a post of some sort on its executive council, but I don’t now recall any contribution I made to the leadership of that organization. I accepted the notion that there was something vaguely laudable in the concern which this organization showed for the freedom of India and the liberation of the US Negro, but its connection with and effect on the actual problems was too indistinct to rouse me to any earnest endeavours on its behalf.

I have read enough history to admit the inevitability of political organizations, and to convince me of their general worthlessness and not infrequent malignancy. I am less and less tempted to become a partisan for any cause or group. If I were to be accused of political apathy, my feelings would not be hurt. In any political organization there are those who run the show and those who perform the paces directed by those at the top. The motives of the leaders may be idealistic or materialistic, or, in the great average, I suppose, a combination of the two. In any case, to fulfill his motives the leader must concentrate on building an organization powerful enough to defeat all organizations which stand in opposition to it. His power comes from the support, voluntary or coerced, of his followers. The organization assumes the right to dictate to its members what their action shall be in any given situation, no matter what the private opinions of these members may be. This “right” is buttressed by every device from flowery propaganda to outright physical intimidation. Thus when John L. Lewis calls a strike in the bituminous coal field, some 400,000 miners stay home from work. No doubt the majority of these men believes in the wisdom of Lewis’ order, primarily because the union’s efficient propaganda machine has made it practically impossible for them to form an independent opinion in questions affecting their livelihood. But even supposing a large minority of the miners did not believe in the wisdom of the strike, there is plenty of evidence to show that it has no practical choice of acting independently of the union. There may be the formality of a strike vote, but the union leaders need never fear that they will be repudiated by their rank and file. I use the union as the most clear cut example today of the dictatorial nature of any political organization.

It is often true that the rank and file members of a political organization exercise the voting power, but the vote is becoming an ever more meaningless symbol of freedom. When candidates and policies are chosen at the top, the individual is given nothing more than the choice of voting yes or no, and he will often be shown convincing “reasons” why it is expedient to vote yes.

Freedom may be an overrated concept, but the fact that I still value it highly will not allow me willingly to become a member of a political organization, no matter how worthy its published aims. Nor do I possess enough of the prophet or of the cynic to let me attempt to become a political leader. In college a favorite thesis of our political science classes was the need for more educated and idealistic young men in politics and public administration. Administrative jobs, I believe, offer a legitimate opportunity for such young men to perform the public service they may feel called upon to offer, but politics itself has no place for them. They will never succeed in “reforming” politics, since politics is a game which can be successfully played only by those who regard mass power as more important than individual rights. The public administrator, on the other hand, can be concerned to his heart’s content with individual rights, but the irony of his position is that he is dependent for his job, more often than not, on the power of a political machine. He may often be faced with the equivocal necessity of playing politics to hold onto his job.

Henry Thoreau demonstrated graphically how difficult it was for a man to be spiritually and economically independent in the world of one hundred years ago. I can’t agree with his ideal of complete independence, if only for the reason that it can obviously never be more than the privilege of a few isolated and fortunate individuals. I believe, in fact, that economic independence is as mistaken an aim for individuals as it is for nations. The great heresy being propagated by political leaders as zealously today as in the past is that which uses man’s inevitable economic dependence as a weapon for striking at his spiritual independence. Of course there are plenty of people who insist that the chief heresy is man’s spiritual independence. Not a few exhibit their intellectual arrogance by arguing that while freedom of thought and expression is desirable for the emancipated class of which they are members, it is too prohibitively dangerous a plaything to allow in the hands of the masses of people. Some men forget very easily by what narrow margins, hollow standards, and lucky accidents they are able to consider themselves above the masses; very few realize that the masses are much easier to find in political theory than in the world of people. Behind the mass reactions, mass demonstrations, and mass opinions reported in the newspaper there are millions of individuals with certain similarities, which are the concern of the politicians, but also with certain differences, which are the concern of the writer of fiction.

Disillusionment in the Army and in America’s Literary Scene

[The following excerpt is sure to offend some, given my father’s caustic characterization of the typical men in America’s army. Even he recognizes his “sullenly superior attitude,” which would quickly earn him an “elitist” denunciation from many in today’s America. He uses “the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks” as a springboard into a rumination about the state of American literature, and his own desire to ultimately write novels that do more than cater to the popular taste.

I like this excerpt because it illustrates my father’s ambitions and idealism as a young man, but also his realism and self-doubts. Tangentially, and sadly, one comment also references two marginalized professions of post-war America: fundamentalist ministers and book critics.  One of those groups went on to thrive in the subsequent years, but not the one that my father would have hoped.]

May 6, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The first summer that I was in the Army I wrote a letter to President Hutchins of the University of Chicago suggesting, among other things, that the Army qualified as a mass school of democracy. When he answered, he said that the only thing he remembered learning in the Army was how to avoid details. He suggested politely that I was wrong as hell.

Three years later I know that he was right. Very few men, I believe, have been improved by their contact with the Army, democratically or otherwise, and a great many men have been worsened, at least temporarily.  I myself have retained only tattered shreds of my respect for “the common  man of democracy” whom I fancied I would meet in mass in the Army. Actually, of course, I was looking for one of those idealistic myths which sensitive undergraduates construct during their days on campus and in the classroom

This is no “common man of democracy” in actual fact, and the Army is an institution which will soon make the most starry-eyed dreamer aware of actual facts. Most of the men of the American Army are poorly-educated, loudmouthed, undisciplined, and excessively vulgar individuals. Many of the officers, I suspect, are fundamentally members of this same class, though social pressure and fear of punishment forces them to exhibit the mechanics, if not the spirit, of civilized behavior in public.

In one sense I have gained from the Army an important lesson in American democracy. The fact that it hasn’t been the type of lesson I expected to receive has not lessened its value. The danger for me, and fellows like me, is that the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks will persuade us that somehow America has cheated us, and our former zeal for social service will turn into a disillusioned resentment. The way of the expatriate is extremely seductive to those who pass through this disillusionment to the conviction that it is impossible in America to win mass appreciation for any serious artistic work. But one may pertinently question whether a work of art, particularly in literature, can be serious when it is deliberately divorced from its national and social origins. Those who write purely to entertain, which is apparently a not unworthy motive in a world of entertainment-hungry people, may write about a 17th century English prostitute or a 20th century American race horse or a fairy princess. So far as I can remember, the so-called “literature of escape” has never been unpopular, and today there is a phenomenal demand for it. A number of young ladies, in particular, has discovered that there is great profit and fame to be gained in the writing of sexy tales of romance. Their books seem to impress favorably almost everyone except the book critics. This situation suggests that book critics are members of an obsolete profession still blindly faithful to the literary standards of a forgotten age. They stand in a class with fundamentalist ministers and a few other stubborn individualists as forlorn standard-bearers for a culture which was imported in chunks from Europe, never properly assimilated by the masses, and almost completely ignored by the population at large in the years since the first World War.

The traditions of literature as an art based on the study of contemporary conditions and characters in society has not entirely died out. Occasionally a young writer still comes to maturity with an inescapable urge to give his own honest reaction to and interpretation of the life he has observed in his society. For every ten “Forever Ambers,” perhaps, there is one “Winesburg, Ohio.” For every simple magazine of honest opinion there are perhaps twenty to thirty movie, detective, confession, and comic magazines. These proportions are not statistically accurate, of course, but they indicate closely enough the state of literature in America today.

There’s plenty to be said for following the popular taste. Even a moderately skillful writer can make a fortune if he lets his work be dictated by the demands of vulgarity and sensationalism, and hires a smart press agent. He will find Hollywood eating out of his hand. The polite disdain of a few unimportant critics is a small price to pay for such rewards. He has even satisfied the predominant American moral code which classifies right action in terms of profit and success.

The fact that I have not yet been won over to this theory of literature probably proves that I’m not capable of applying it successfully anyway. My sullenly superior attitude is no doubt a shield of vanity with which I contrive usually to hide my own incompetence and laziness even from myself. Without denying either of these charges, however, I maintain that if I do eventually write novels and stories they will be in the tradition of Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Lewis. If I do have a literary bent that’s the direction in which it turns.

To get back to the Army, which was mysteriously lost somewhere near the beginning of this discussion, I have found it disillusioning in terms of certain of my college concepts, but enormously revelatory of the type of society which produces the men who actually make up the Army. I don’t flatter myself that I have made any original discoveries. The originality in my work will have to come in my application of recognized generalities to specific characters. One thing in particular which I hope to learn quickly is how to prevent myself from spending an evening in dressing up banalities for no one’s edification.

Army Pay Rises to $100 per Month, Warranted or Not

[This entry notes the “political extravagance” of a House bill authorizing a “substantial” pay raise for officers and enlisted men — from $78 to $100 per month in my father’s case. In his tongue-in-check reporting of this “economic blasphemy,” my father allows that he’ll happily accept the government’s largess, warranted or not. He also worriedly contemplates a potential return to Okinawa (an assignment that never materialized).]

April 18, 1946 (Fort Devens, MA)

It is very easy to declaim in an rage against political extravagances wherein public money is appropriated for the undeserved benefit of a special group, – easy, that is, until you find yourself a member of just such a group. A bill just passed by the House authorizes substantial pay raises for all officers and enlisted men in the armed forces. Speaking as one detached from the issue, I will say that ninety-nine percent of all officers and enlisted men are already getting paid more than they are worth. But it happens that I am not really detached. I’m in the Army, with a rating of technician, fourth-grade, and am slated by this bill for a raise in pay from 78 to 100 dollars a month. As a man of principle, I would protest against this economic blasphemy. I would point out that it would take a generous imagination to demonstrate that I have done a month’s productive labor during my last twelve in the service. My own candid conclusion is that my value to the people of the United States, whom I have supposedly been serving during that period, has been practically nil. Yet now the Congress is on the point of giving me a 25% raise, along with all the other jokers still in uniform. I pointed out that as a man of principle I would protest this infamy. As a GI, however, I will gladly accept the extra lettuce.

Of course, a man can claim that he deserves some compensation for mental anguish, even though his anguish may be of no particular benefit to anyone else. I am at present suffering an anguish which would probably bring a rather fancy price in the open market, in the sense that most people would be willing to pay good money to avoid having this particular anguish for themselves. I refer to the fact that I am apparently on the point of shipping back to Okinawa. Come on folks! Step right up! Who’d like to have a nine-month vacation with pay on Okinawa, with transportation both ways paid for by the government? Well, look at the people running. But they’re running with their backs to me, which I take as an indication that no one wants to go to Okinawa, not even those many poor souls who have never had the privilege of visiting that island before. And it’s only because I’ve been there before that I’m willing to offer my opportunity to some less fortunate sucker.

True, my orders don’t say that I’m going to Okinawa, – not yet. They just carry me as far as Fort Lawton in Seattle, and also provide for a seven-day pre-embarkation furlough. I’m not always as stupid as I am sometimes. The boys who stayed behind laughed when I left Okinawa last December. “You’ll be right back here next spring about the time we’re leaving for good,” they said. I laughed back and told them there wasn’t a chance of it. Now I expect to feel slightly embarrassed when I meet a bunch of the old SIAM boys embarking from Machinato Point, just as I am landing there.

Of course, I may ship to Japan.

And the Phillies may win the National League pennant.

At Ft. Devens Awaiting New Orders

[Following a three-month furlough he received for reenlisting, my father had reported to Fort Devens, Mass. where he awaited his new assignment orders. He had spent his furlough with his family in North Troy, Vermont, while making several trips to visit with friends at Middlebury College and in New York and Rhode Island. This entry paints the scene at Fort Devens, as new recruits mixed with returning veterans, and as my father contemplated his choice to reenlist.]

April 6, 1946 (Fort Devens, MA)

At Fort Devens on these April days a hard wind blows from the West, and it isn’t an exuberant breath of Spring, but a saucy reminder that Winter is not dead, but is simply in retirement for a few months, and not yet too far away to send back a sharp reminder of his recent reign. This is the first day of the baseball season, too, but if the teams insist on playing in Boston, they will do plenty of shivering. Here at the Fort the ground in most places around the barracks is bare gravel. The wind scoops up clouds of gritty dust and sprays the soldiers who are standing in formation or walking up and down along the streets. These soldiers are a restless bunch for most of them are here only for the week or so of processing preliminary to their assignment overseas or to some other camp in the country.

There are always several hundred eighteen year old kids drafted into the Army for the first time. For a few hours they walk about in their civilian clothes. Then they go through the clothing mill, and emerge from its stacks of clothes and equipment dressed in wrinkled green fatigues, GI shoes, with duffel bags full of their new possessions rolling on their shoulders,. Now they are soldiers, and can write their names on painted walls: “Joseph Blow was here.” They take their tests, are classified, and wonder where they’re going. In their spare time of waiting around, they begin to learn how to dodge details. One morning after they have been here about a week they’re called out into the wind-swept area in front of the orderly room to hear their names called off on the shipping list. By nightfall the barracks they have just emptied are filled again by other kids dressed in civilian clothes struggling to make up their first GI bunks.

These days, too, there are many older men who have reenlisted, and are returning to camp from their furloughs. Some have been out of the Army as long as half a year and are back now because civilian life didn’t meet their expectations. One fellow explains that he tried three or four civilian jobs, and none of them suited him. A few are former reserve officers who are taking advantage of the provision which allows them to reenlist as master sergeants. They mix in readily enough with the other men, or it might be more accurate to say that the other men gravitate to them as to symbols of splendor suddenly brought within their reach. The majority of these older men have seen more than three years service, and their overseas time ranges up to forty-two months. Most of them have signed up for the three-year hitch and probably intend to make an Army career. The rest, for various reasons, have chosen to sweat out the GI life for one more year before calling it quits.

I have several times during the past week taken a dim view of my remaining ten and a half months of service, have cursed myself for making a foolish choice. Had I waited on Okinawa, I’d be getting my final discharge at just about this time. But my most foolish mistake now would be to maintain this attitude of regret. I must remember that I didn’t find the past three months at home too exhilarating. The externals of life, after all, are largely incidental. If I have something to do in the way of writing, I can work at it as well in the Army as out, and perhaps better. If the Army has accentuated certain personal problems, I can at least hope to make some progress towards solving them while I’m still in the Army. In some salubrious hours I’ve looked forward to this year as a great opportunity. Though I’m not as trigger-happy with my high resolves as I was a few years ago, I still know that I can make just about as much of my time as I choose. My main change from my college days is perhaps a lessening of my confidence in my ability or willingness to choose wisely.

A Sardonic Critique of the Atomic Bomb

[My father’s rather pessimistic worldview as well as his wit are in evidence in this journal entry about the atomic bomb. (His use of the first-person plural “we” to express his opinions is somewhat unusual for him, however.) Written about half-a-year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this essay characterizes the development and use of atomic bombs as “simply the latest in a long series of inventions and situations which man has used to make himself seem a bit more important than he actually is.” Despite causing people to worry about humankind’s survival — and, perhaps driving them see a movie now rather than later given that “any day now an atomic bomb could conceivably close the show and your interest in it simultaneously” — my father has little doubt that the new weapons “should be an overwhelming success.”]

March 21, 1946 (location unknown)

This is the year when the world is absorbed with the power-play between the United States and Russia, and with the forthcoming atomic bomb test at Bikini lagoon. These events no doubt have an important bearing on the question of war and peace, and even of ultimate human survival on this planet. There used to be some conjecture, mainly in the Sunday supplements, about the remote possibility of our sun flaring up and baking us to a crisp, or of a collision between our little planet and some vast marauder from outer space. Another favorite theory had the sun cooling down after some millions of years until life should be extinguished on this planetary chunk of ice.

Since last summer these theories have been relegated to the category of harmless bagatelles, strictly for children. And even as we write it, we detect an odious patronizing note in our reference to the kids, not at all fair to them. For years they’ve been ardently supporting Buck Rogers, Superman, and company while we have smiled indulgently, or scoffed, perhaps. Now that our scientists have released atomic energy, we find that our kids have intuitively been forging down the right track, and left us behind in our ivory towers. But now that the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shattered our complacency, we’re still a little confused. It may indeed be true, as we have been warned by various authorities, that we are threatened with mass extinction unless we do something about it very soon. Fine, – we’re agreeable, but what are we supposed to do? After all, we have only the haziest conception of how the contraption works. We don’t even know what it looks like, and have to trust our newspapers and magazines for an account of what it does. We can offer one suggestion strictly from the layman’s point of view. If these A-bombs are the dangerous toys that our scientists claim, why don’t we just dispose of our present stocks in some out-of-the-way place, and then discontinue production from this time forward? To please those who are patriotically-minded, the disposal could take place on this coming Fourth of July.

But we are being facetious, and we admit it. In our exceedingly complex civilization, so simple a solution is utterly impracticable. Imagine every nation in the world promising never to fool around with atomic explosives, not even out of curiosity, and then keeping its promise. The results in technological unemployment alone are frightening to estimate. Thousands of scientists and technicians the world over would be thrown out of work. Of course, men of their ability and training might be enlisted in the struggle to produce the food, clothing, and shelter which alone can save a reported quarter of the population of the globe from untimely and uncomfortable death, but the difficulties of adjustment between two such divergent types of work are probably too great even to be considered. It must be somewhat discouraging to these men, however, to see how far the old natural scourges of famine, disease, and exposure are still outstripping the destructive power of their newest explosive.

We suspect that this atomic bomb is simply the latest in a long series of inventions and situations which man has used to make himself seem a bit more important than he actually is. Being too intelligent to enjoy life entirely on the low level of appreciation of the beasts and birds, he needs to dramatize his life by devising real or imaginary threats to his already troubled existence, – everything from an inscrutable and vengeful God to an excess-profits tax. He feels most alive when he is in danger; his senses are keyed up to an unusual awareness of this life which becomes suddenly so valuable when it appears that it may have to be cashed in tomorrow or the next day. You’ll think twice about putting off seeing “Life With Father” until nineteen forty-eight or nine when you realize that any day now an atomic bomb could conceivably close the show and your interest in it simultaneously.

Of course this is rather a risky game which man has been playing with himself. It has to be. If no one got  hurt or killed in these various experiments with predestination and mechanics, the farce would become too apparent, and people would lose interest. I imagine that this point might be demonstrated by the slackening of popular interest in religion since the terrors of hell fire and the imminence of divine intervention have been generally discounted. Throughout history those enterprises have enjoyed the greatest interest and support in which the members have most recklessly invoked their own death and destruction. By this criterion, the atomic bomb should be an overwhelming success.

Reflections on Post-War Seattle, New Year’s 1946

[One more vignette of post-war Seattle, written on New Year’s 1946. As a 20-year resident of the city’s suburbs, I find many of my father’s observations of mid-1940s Seattle quite interesting (the aversion to umbrellas remains strong, but is no longer universal). It seems that the good citizens of Seattle were more than happy to make a profit off the returning troops, who for all their drinking and partying couldn’t — to my father’s mind — conquer the “loneliness of spirit” that they shared with most other Americans.]

January 1, 1946 (Seattle, WA)

Seattle is one of the northernmost of US cities, but, being within breezing distance of the Japanese current, its winters are not as severe as they are exasperating. It’s an unusual day when a little rain falls. On a usual day a lot of rain falls. No one really worries about getting wet, but accepts his daily soaking as a matter of course. I haven’t noticed an umbrella during ten days in Seattle.

Seattle, like most other American cities, is much less impressive as an old acquaintance than as a bustling stranger. As a port city, it sees more than its share of soldiers and sailors, and sees them only as short-time transients bent on having a good time. Entertainment is a booming business for Seattle people, and the boys in the service are never in any doubt that it is a business. They pay top prices for anything that’s offered to them, and most of what they get is second-rate, or worse. But the simple pressure of their numbers makes them powerless to protest, and most of them have enough money to give them a “what-the-hell” attitude. But among themselves they curse the city volubly.

No doubt the good people of Seattle do a little private cursing of the troops. The boys go into town to get drunk and look for girls. These are the things they’ve been dreaming about most avidly during the months overseas, and as they come plowing deep into Puget Sound on the ships, they begin to build Seattle up into the Mecca of their longings. The people of Seattle apparently don’t make much objection to the damage done their city’s morals by the uniformed pilgrims, but they probably grow quite weary of their streets reeling with drunken, brawling, flirting kids.

On First Avenue are the military trinket stores and the penny arcades. Most of the boys make a bee-line from the ships to the trinket stores to stock up on the stripes, patches, medals, buttons, theater ribbons, overseas “hershey bars,” caps, and hash marks which become the visible marks of glory. Then, after everything is sewed and pinned in place (often at the USO on Second Avenue), they launch off into the city to consume and conquer. Several hours and a good many dollars later they drift back to their ships and barracks to boast or bitch, according to their respective fortunes.

The only regular stage performance in Seattle is a dingy burlesque show at the Rivoli on First Avenue. (Sin, by the way, is arranged symbolically in Seattle. It parades in its rawest forms along First Avenue, which is the waterfront, becomes more refined on each succeeding avenue up the hill, and is sophisticated practically beyond recognition by the time one reaches Sixth Avenue.) The movie theatres, which carry such piquant names as the Blue Mouse and the Music Box, are mostly all owned by a Mr. John Hamrick. Mr. Hamrick had a very mediocre offering for the Christmas season. “The Stork Club,” featuring Betty Hutton and Barry Fitzgerald, was as good as anything going, and it was not good at all. But the theatres stay open all night, and draw the bulk of their late-evening patronage from boys on pass who have no other place to go.

There’s one thing about Seattle, and about any other American city, that most fellows can’t understand, because they’re products of the city way of life. They’ve learned to depend on the mechanical, commercialized dispensers of “pleasure,” which never really please. The human spirit has probably never before been more completely neglected than it is in America today. Even lovemaking has no significance beyond its physical thrills, and the most intimate moments are shared by fellows and girls after an evening’s, or even an hour’s, acquaintance. There is in almost every American a tremendous loneliness of spirit coupled with an ignorance of the means of spiritual fulfillment. Spending money is the most obvious opiate for his vast restlessness, and just now he has plenty of money. Probably during this New Year of 1946 Americans will spend more money to satisfy personal wants than ever before, and then come to the end of the year as dismally dissatisfied as ever.

Service Member “Waywardness” in Post-War Seattle

[My father returned from Okinawa to the States in mid-December 1945 on the troop transport U.S.S. Mellette, arriving in Seattle just prior to Christmas. In this journal entry, he captures the post-war scene in Seattle, as idle servicemen kill time in the way that idle servicemen will do. My father’s discussion of this “waywardness” and his analysis of its roots includes one of my favorite lines from his journals to date: “The American is no more inherently immoral than the men of any other race or nation, but more than all others in this unbalanced world he suffers from an excess of civilization and a paucity of culture.” I think that description sums up the current American scene quite nicely as well!

Anyone reading only this journal excerpt might infer from the mention of “spiritual destruction” that my father’s bleak view of affairs was driven by a Biblically based puritanism. As earlier posts have illustrated, however, my father was more interested in establishing a personal spirituality and faith model than in adopting any formal religion. The excerpt’s final paragraph, in which he speaks of men losing the capacity for an “inner life” expresses the true source of his dismay.]

December 27, 1945 (Seattle, WA)

The streets of Seattle in the winter are cold and wet, rain is almost always in the air, and soldiers and sailors are always in the streets. Most of them have no place to go, and nothing to do. They just walk up and down the streets in pairs or small groups, always chattering, never pausing to think, because what is there to think about? The war is over, and now, just like after a big game, they want to get home. But the stadium covers the world, and not everyone can leave at the same time. Those who have to wait are impatient, lonely, and rebellious. The days drag slowly at best, and liquor, girls, and gambling are the surest ways to kill time. The arm of military authority relaxes, the excitement and danger of battle are gone, and the GIs drift into a frenzy of dissipation which shocks the world. They rage and riot in Paris, they sow a bumper crop of babies in the arms of the late enemy in Germany, they supply and patronize the black market in Rome, they drink themselves to death in Japan. And beneath these various spectacular outbursts there is the steady tempo of gambling, drinking, and whoring which daily involves millions of America’s fine young men in uniform. There are exceptions, of course, but they are too few to alter the scene appreciably, and their number, I suspect, loses more to the great temptations than it gains in new recruits.

The American is no more inherently immoral than the men of any other race or nation, but more than all others in this unbalanced world he suffers from an excess of civilization and a paucity of culture. His amiable lack of principle and value is camouflaged behind such vague phrases as “traditional American idealism” and “the democratic spirit.” His ingenuity is genuine and sterile, for by it he only adds to the dazzle and comfort of a civilization which has already reduced him far down the road towards his spiritual destruction. He’s a barbarian who worships daily at the shrines of Flesh and Money and Self, and tolerates just as much religion of the true God as will salve his vestigial conscience and do no harm to his worldly pursuits.

If the boys in khaki and blue ever stop to question the wisdom of their waywardness, they content themselves with the explanation that they act as they do because they’re not at home. In other words, the determinants of their morality are external, – geographical limits and family relationships. I’ve found that most fellows are filled with stories of their families and work at home, but in ordinary conversation with their fellows, their proudest achievement is to outdo each other in stories of drunken binges and seductions. They live so much on the surface that they themselves lose sight of their capacity for an inner life, and from long neglect, no doubt, they gradually lose much of their original capacity.

Dealing with the Bomb, and an Unstable Post-War World

[After observing the friendliness of Japanese prisoners of war and noting that “practically all the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other,” my father makes his first journal entry about the arrival of atomic bombs on the world scene. He isn’t too optimistic about the prospects for the U.S., or the world at large, to do a good job of managing this new destructive power. Nor does he expect a victorious U.S. to seriously address the inequities among nations in the post-war period, despite the emergence of a modern world that “is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states.”]

December 6, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

… All along the roads here on Okinawa, as we go rumbling along on our truck, we pass Okinawan men, women and kids, trudging along singly or in groups, most of them carrying bundles of junk they’ve picked up from the dumps. It just takes a wave of the hand and a smile to get a wave and a smile in return. Some of them even make the first gesture.

Up at the dump where we took our load of scrap field wire there were some Jap PWs unloading trucks, little wiry fellows, very inoffensive-looking, who work rapidly and efficiently. On the way back we passed a truck with a couple of PW’s in the back. As we drew alongside, one of them saluted me smartly and grinned. “You know, Siggie,” I said, “practically all of the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Siggie said. “They all like to be liked.”

Not all of them, of course. A lot of people are like those Canadians I was just reading about in TIME who want to get all the Jap “rats” out of Canada, even though they may have been born there. For one reason or another, people are taught to hate certain groups of other people who happen to differ from them in color, religion, race, occupation, or social standing. But who promotes these hatreds, and why? Well, it looks like one group pitting itself against another; until a whole mythology of grievances and prejudices is built up to justify the often inhumane measures which each group practices to protect its own special interests, and finally there evolves a false morality based almost solely on power. And though this development is nothing new in human society, the new technology which produces the modern implements of power has brought us to the critical points where the largest groups, or nations, are capable of annihilating each other.

Critical people generally, and TIME magazine notably, in my limited reading of recent weeks, have been pointing up the revolutionary terror which the atomic bomb has let loose in the world. They also take the average people to task for failing to wake up and do something about it. Do what? Keep it an American secret? We sense that would be fine, if it were possible, but the troublesome fact arises that the secret is really no secret at all. Russia, we are told, will be able to produce atomic bombs in two to five years.

Well, then, how about releasing everything we know to an international commission, and leave it to the commission to control atomic research for the good of the world? To some people that makes a good deal of sense, and probably a good many people who don’t believe such beneficent control possible wish that it were. And still other people see the bomb simply as the culmination of man’s age-old, ironic lust for power, – ironic in the sense that he has been feverishly searching for the instrument which will assure his own destruction. And now he’s found it. So what the hell?

I confess that at the present time I’m pretty much of a mind with this third group. And though I recognize that such an attitude must be considered cynical by people who don’t share it, I don’t consider myself cynical for holding it. I like people, and I don’t normally enjoy seeing them get hurt. I can’t derive any satisfaction from seeing the German and Japanese people suffering the starvation and misery now which they so recently imposed upon other peoples. There was a time when I believed that somehow the common suffering of this war would lead men of all nations to put into practice what is almost universally admitted in theory, – that the modern world is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states. It may be too early to be disillusioned, but then, too, it may have been too late to hope.

My aunt Eva has for several years been trying to sell me on the Bahai group, which is but one of many groups propagating the old Christian faith in the brotherhood of man and its practical realization on earth. With the faith I am in complete accord, but of its realization I remain unconvinced. Human organization, which is always as much against something as it is for something, inevitably seems to corrupt no matter how noble its original purpose. The only true brotherhood of man occurs in the earliest years of infancy. As soon as I begin to talk and understand, I’m an American, and Hans is a German. “My country, right or wrong” expresses an attitude which honest and just people may often deplore, but which only the rarest of martyrs can ever deny. Even when one’s country is flagrantly wrong, treason remains a crime universally abhorred. But millions of men can be made to look upon murder as a virtue when the victim is an enemy of one’s country. The appeal to patriotism almost always drowns out the voice of conscience. Many Americans can feel perfectly righteous about insisting on raising their own already comfortable standard of living while millions of Europeans and Asiatics are facing a winter of freezing and starvation. Yet they would be unspeakably indignant and bitter if the scales were suddenly shifted to the opposite extreme. They can’t see how they are doing any wrong now, but if they had to change places, they would certainly feel that they were being wronged.

The funny thing is that though I understand all this, I don’t intend to do much of anything about it. I, too, look forward to enjoying the comforts of American life, even though I can’t partake of whatever further pleasure there may be in the feeling of self-righteousness.

The old cry of “Let’s set our own house in order first” will soon regain sufficient strength to kill our present feeble and fumbling attempts to set in order a world house in which our own country is but one of the rooms. We’ll go ahead with a lavish job of redecorating our own room, and then won’t we be surprised when it’s ruined by the rest of the house falling in on it!

A Soldiers’ Bull Session: Capitalism versus Communism

[In this entry, my father recounts a late-night debate about politics and economics among the soldiers in his tent. Many of the comments reported touch on issues that remain hot-button topics today. They include the lamentation that “politics always seems to boil the scum to the top” and the fair observation that a Constitution “written over a hundred and fifty years ago for a little colony of thirteen states” might need some tweaking to remain relevant in the current America. If only the conservative “originalists” on the U.S. Supreme court could exhibit such common sense!)

September 29, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

I come back to the tent about eleven-thirty after an evening of bridge. The only light is at Fisher’s improvised work bench, where he sits with black-bearded head bent forward, puzzling over some piece of electrical equipment. But there are voices in the dark. Old Buck and Stan Graham are deep in a discussion of economics and politics. Right in this one tent we have concentrated the best bull-shooters in the whole platoon. Last night it was Army organization, and war responsibility. Tonight it’s communism versus capitalism. These guys are so serious that they can complete one of these discussions without once bringing in women or sex. Of course, they’re never completed in the sense that unanimous conclusions are arrived at. They die out either from the exhaustion of the participants, which is rare, or from the intercession of perverted individuals like Tom Pearson, who believes in going to sleep early because he can’t help waking up early in the morning.

The discussion tonight is even more hopelessly abstract than usual. “I’ve read, or, er, I’ve heard it said,” Buck says, “that capitalism is just the thing for a young country – “

“That’s right,” Stan breaks in, “it’s OK as long as she’s expanding, as long as there’s a frontier. But now the frontier is gone.”

“Yes. Yes.” Buck says. “That’s just what I mean. So now I think that this country is ready – er, really needs some kind of economic regulation.”

“Yeah,” Stan says, “and then we come to a situation where we’re advocating just the things we’ve been fighting this war to prevent.”

“Well,” Buck says, “I think we ought to have a group of economic experts study the situation, and then make an honest report to the people on just what has to be done to stop depressions.”

At this point I enter the discussion and explain that a large number of such studies have already been made, and the reports are available to the public for whatever they’re worth. But Buck says he’s never heard of them. Then I try to explain the dilemma that arises when anyone attempts to press economic sanity through the maze of American politics.

“Well,” says Buck, “it seems to me that if we could educate the people on those things…”

Here again I’m skeptical. I point out that good education demands exceptional teachers, and there aren’t enough exceptional teachers to go around.

“Yep,” Stan agrees, “you can’t get a good man to work for nothing, and that teaching’s one of the lowest-paid professions.”

Then Buck starts working around towards communism again. Joe Graham comes in and says that communism, without the dictatorship part, is the only solution.

“Sure,” I say, “but just take away Joe Stalin and the club over a man’s head, and see what happens to your communistic system.”

Buck has an idea of more “personal” government at the township level. “The township is a closeknit unit, and, with the right kind of supervision, there hadn’t ought to be a single person in it on direct relief.”

I don’t seem to agree with anything that Buck has put forward. “What about the huge cities?” I ask. “That’s where most of your unemployment is. And besides, local economic problems are only tiny segments of disorders that have to be considered on an international scope.”

Stan tries a new tack. “I don’t know why it is,” he says, “but politics always seems to boil the scum to the top. Now if we could have some kind of group down in Washington, and salaries high enough to attract good men, and let this group hold a whip hand over all the sonsabitching senators and representatives, maybe we’d get something done. If they didn’t do a good job, they’d just get their asses booted out of there…”

“And we get some guys just as bad in their places,” I say.

“And how would you know when they’re doing a good job?” Fisher asks.

“Well, you’ve got something there,” Stan admits. “Look, fellows, I’ll tell you what. Don’t you just think that a Constitution that was written over a hundred and fifty years ago for a little colony of thirteen states might be a little obsolete today?”

“You’re absolutely right!” Buck agrees. “Now if we could just make the right changes…”

“Listen,” T. J. Pearson breaks in with a weary voice, “there’s a bunch of guys in this tent you have to shake their asses to get them out of bed at seven in the morning for breakfast, and that starts talking politics at eleven-thirty at night. That’s the one thing that’s wrong with the American way of life.”