[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.
Paul Davis Journals Blog 