Material Power Trumps Moral Power in America

[My father wrote with some regularity about the intoxicating and corrupting effect of material wealth and power. Often, as in the following entry, he contrasted the power of military might with the different — and fading — power of democratic ideals and morality. Sadly, is seems my father was correct in suggesting that it was an “anemic hope” that “men in the democratic nations may learn to make their material power serve the moral ends for which they claim to stand.”

America’s recent history of pre-emptive (and misguided) war, Presidentially sanctioned torture and the elevation of tax cuts over critical programs for the poor and uninsured indicates a moral compass gone seriously awry. The rhetoric of the Obama Presidential campaign pointed toward a more promising path, but the rhetoric proved no match for the self-interests, partisanship and cash-fueled agenda that characterizes our broken “democratic” system.]

March 16, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Our whole cultural climate today breeds in us inevitably a respect for power. Obviously in war it’s power that predominates above all other considerations, and the side with the greatest material power, applied to instruments of war, wins the victories. At least for the short run, moral considerations are lost in the shadow of mechanized power. I well remember a dread admiration I felt for the German war machine in the Spring of 1940 as it crashed into France, and rolled the Allied armies back onto the beach at Dunkirk. Though I could see the threat which these triumphs created for the very survival of the Western democracies, including my own country, not yet directly involved in the war, I could still not avoid a certain astonished delight in the then unbelievable audacity and power of the German armed forces.

Now we have seen five years of war since those days, and have had plenty of opportunity to marvel at the slow accretion of power by the Allies. Our only effective answer to the Nazi power has thus far been power of the same order, and on an even larger scale. We have not succeeded yet in putting anywhere near the same power behind our democratic philosophy. This is possibly because a different sort of power is needed, a power that is often atrophied in our development of material power. That is moral power. Though these two categories of power need not be mutually exclusive, they have thus far tended so to be. The only legitimate reason for continued faith in a democratic political philosophy, however, is the hope that men in the democratic nations may learn to make their material power serve the moral ends for which they claim to stand.

This usually seems to be a rather anemic hope. We are sponsoring a world organization in which material power alone will determine the ruling nations, and many of us, I believe, have passed from an acceptance of this situation as the practical inevitability to a condoning of it as the right, – the moral right, of the victors. This leads us to a condescending attitude towards the smaller nations, and the weakened nations, such as France. In our mind grows the conception of nations as power units of varying importance, and not as aggregations of individuals like ourselves, with much the same needs and aspirations.

Traditional American idealism is not dead, but it is considerably watered down by the skepticism of a large section of the American people. This is probably just as well, since our idealism has most often been used in the past as a mask for realistic financial operations which very largely contradicted the ideals in whose name they were made. Thus American democracy is suspect among the American people as well as among many peoples abroad. Perhaps this is the condition which will ultimately lead to its reaffirmation in practical foreign policy and trade.

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Jitterbugging While the World Burns

[My father often wrote of being lonely during his time in the Army, and found occasional solace at USO-sponsored dances. In this stream-of-consciousness entry, he moves from idyllic memories of New England to the scourge of war to the numbing effect of superficial social niceties.]

February 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

To write of the hills of home in such a way that the chance reader, whoever he is, and wherever he may be, will be transported by imagination to a land of verdant green, where the tall pines stand straight on the mountains, whispering the summer breeze through their boughs, and the white clouds billow silently above their tips. There in those hills is such a world as many millions of the world’s orphans have never dreamed of, a world that never heard a shell burst, and knows only the rifle crack of the hunter, a world where men walk upright and unafraid, and where children laugh in the sunshine. On the newsreel screens armies clash amid the fearful hell of war, and this is but the shadow of a far more awful substance which has already scarred and blackened half the world. My star points to those lands, and there in good time I must go, to see boys like myself spill each other’s blood and crunch their bones with the passionless steel weapons of modern civilization. There, in Germany, Burma, China, in the islands of the Pacific, in France and the Low Countries, yard by yard down the bloody boot of Italy, in Sicily, in Africa, and back across hundreds of miles of Russia lie the rotting corpses and bleaching bones of millions of people, soldiers and civilians, men and women and children, and these uncounted wasted lives are the ineradicable monument to a way of life in which human life became a commodity, – something to be traded [not] by the dozen and gross, but the thousand, and by the hundreds of thousands for the ambitions of a new race of mastermen. Mastermen, – can they even be called men? What strange horror has burned out of them that spirit which we had come to believe was the essence of humanity? What mechanic terror made them forget honor and justice and love?

Oh Europe, what monsters are bred in your blood-drenched soil! And now the poison virus of your militarism has infected the sleeping civilizations of the East, and is wakening them to a martial frenzy which may yet rush out of the Asiatic vastnesses to destroy forever the European war breeders.

On the floor the boy and girl dancers cavort and wriggle through their mad routine. The drums beat beat beat, and the saxophone blare splits the air. Shuffle shuffle shuffle, whirl and dip, beat beat beat, trombone moan. This is the dance, while the world is burning up.

If I were completely honest, my dear, I’d tell you that I’d never had a more wretched time in my life, but having somehow been schooled to the habits of social hypocrisy, I will smile at the right time, and try desperately hard to make enough clever remarks to keep the evening from appearing outwardly as sour as we both know it is underneath. Yes, I was lonely, and I hunted you down, and made a date, because I’ve let the dismal common talk of dismal common people blot out my sense.

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Discipline as the Essence of a Meaningful Life

[If nothing else, my father was a disciplined man, as evidenced by his journal writing itself, as well as by the prodigious reading, writing and scholarship practices that his journal entries reveal. In this brief entry, he contemplates “discipline” in two senses of the word — as a field or philosophy to which one dedicates himself, as well as the efforts and practices that one expends in pursuit of that cause. He ends with an interesting take on the role of the artist, working in the space between the disciplines of religion and science. (My father wrote this entry at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he had been transferred for additional infantry training.)]

January 23, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The compelling need in every man’s life is for a discipline. The best-integrated and most productive lives are those which are built around the sternest disciplines. I thought of this tonight while watching Jose Iturbi play the piano in “Music For Millions.” “There’s a man,” I said to myself, “who’s[sic] life means something to himself and to many other people. That’s because it’s a disciplined life concentrated towards a well-defined end. It doesn’t waste itself.”

In religion, it isn’t this particular creed or that certain dogma which really matters, and those who see nothing but the creed and dogma have not grasped the essence of their religion. That essence is discipline, as it is also the essence of art, and the essence of scholarship.

Every life observes some discipline, but in most lives these are disciplines of a low order, the animal regimen of feeding and sleeping and sex release. These can almost be called reflexes, the biological habits by which life has maintained itself since its mysterious appearance on earth.

The higher disciplines are those which employ the human mind, or call for a conscious refinement and orientation of the emotions. At a middle stage are such disciplines as those of the military man, or the skilled technological worker. Minds which can no longer respect religion for its truth must still admire its discipline in the many great men and women who are still among its adherents. The scientist, after all, is basically at one with the profoundly religious man in his devotion to a system of laws. There is something in certain areas of science, however, which excludes certain religious experience, and in religion, likewise, something which will not admit all of science. The great artist, it seems to me, stands between science and religion, and is capable of using experience from both in his own greatest discipline, the discipline of creation.

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Last of the Code-Room Arias

[One more of my father’s youthful poems, which he wrote while attending a 13-week radio course at The Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He called the handful of poems he composed while attending the radio school “code-room arias.”]

December 21, 1944 (Fort Benning, Ga.)

Last of the code-room arias:

I like to think I ride a wave across the years,

I like to think its massive swell will bear me safe

Across the rocks and coral reefs.

But when I stop to think where all waves go,

I wonder whether mine, at last, will roll up some white beach

And spend itself caressing warm white sands,

Or whether it will dash on some black rock crag

And there explode in furious spray.

I don’t know which end I’d prefer.

Sometimes it’s good to dream of sand;

But other days I crave the rock, –

The sudden, scintillating crash

Resolved to chaos,

Bold and final.

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A Poem on Fighting and Dying in War

 [My father enjoyed reading and writing poetry, and his journals contain a number of poems he penned in different periods of his life. I can’t claim much expertise as a poetry critic, but, perhaps, the following poem that my father wrote at the age of 22 isn’t half bad… (Due to the limitations in this blog’s formatting options, I don’t seem able to break the poem into the four-line stanzas of my father’s original.)]

October 23, 1944 (Fort Benning, Ga.)

… This is a poem I wrote several weeks ago in a short space of time, and called it, deceptively, perhaps:

Thoughts of a Soldier Whose Comrade Died Beside Him

                The night flows full of bitter tears

                After a day of darkened sun;

                Tread across our brains the fears

                And hopes of battle, not quite won.

                Why did we come to this dead land

                Which must have lived before we came?

                In holes of stench and blackened sand

                Are we the men new-born to fame?

                Is this our victory, when the earth

                Is deep drenched down with juice and blood

                Of boys who longed for girls and mirth,

                And found instead death in the mud?

                But still, you say, these boys who die,

                And earn a nation’s hero-praise,

                As well, perhaps, that they should lie

                Insensate here, as taste the days

                Of crawling age, and slacking power,

                When, down the dreams of dreaming youth

                Crash victim to the sloth-worm’s hour

                In the last tragic act of truth.

                They didn’t want to die, no more than you

                In the grim years you’re counted sane,

                Except there may have been a few

                Who felt the sharp sweet stab of pain

                Which comes to every earth-bound slave

                That time he hears the rushing feet

                Of heavenly men who come to save,

                When he admits that life’s a cheat.

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