The Holocaust and Circumstances of Birth

[My father had no illusions about his own fallibility, and he was too intelligent to think he was innately superior to America’s war-time enemies. As he notes here, only the circumstance of his birth in the United States may have separated him from the Germans engaged in the terrible malevolence of the Holocaust. Knowing this, my father also understood the burden of responsibility he carried to promote the compassionate and inclusive philosophy into which he had been born and raised.]

May 6, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Last week TIME printed pictures and reports from several of the German concentration camps captured by the Americans. This week there was additional evidence, about Dachau; LIFE printed pages of the horror, – human bodies, broken, burned, beaten, starved, – piles of bodies so vast and horrible that the sense of individual tragedy is blurred, and the mind fails to comprehend the meaning, if there is any meaning, to such utter bestiality. Then this afternoon it came over me, while I saw these scenes repeated on the theatre screen, how slender a thread of chance had prevented me from being one of those beasts, or one of those victims. We are all men, and partake of the same nature, and ultimately know the same capabilities, even of degradation. Had I been born in Germany, and been educated a German, and caught up in the Nazi madness at the age of eleven or twelve, I could have been one of those German boys who burned the despised swine in the warehouse, and machine-gunned those few who broke loose and fled. I know there is cruelty in me, and more than once I have exulted in it. But what is important is that I’ve had the chance to learn a way of life which can keep in check the brute in me, if never wholly eradicate it. Very well I know that it isn’t the only way of life, or a perfect way of life. But by its principles men are, at least, strongly influenced to live peaceably together, to respect the rights which all men share alike in a common humanity. This morning I finished the philosopher Spinoza’s pure exposition of those principles, and knew that they were in harmony with the ideas of man and society which I have learned to love. If I falter now in my fight to keep those ideas living among men, after I’ve seen so clearly what men can become when these ideas die in them, or are never born, the fault will lie with no one but me.

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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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Chaos in the Classes at Air Cadet College

[At the time of this writing, my father had been accepted into the Air Corps and had subsequently qualified (at his previous Jefferson Barracks, Missouri post), for Aviation Cadet training. He had been sent to Carbondale, Illinois in mid-February 1944 for four months of academic instruction at Southern Illinois Normal University (SINU). The five-day-per-week instruction covered physics, math, English, geography and history, and was supplemented with physical training, drill and cross-country running.

My father was thrilled to have made it into the Air Corps, and also happy to find himself in the familiar routine of attending college-level classes at SINU. As this entry illustrates, however, he was less than impressed with the academic habits of his fellow trainees. He also bemoans the absence of any guiding philosophy or ideology motivating his peers. It’s interesting — and telling — that he suggests his own differences in these regards made him “the world’s worst soldier.” His description of the inability of the trainees to engage in meaningful discussions — “All that mattered was that each one should fire his salvo, and then retire only long enough to reload” — seems depressingly familiar to anyone who follows present-day political discourse, especially as practiced by the gun-enamored zealots of the far right.]

March 26, 1944 (Carbondale, Ill.)

I am the world’s worst soldier. Now that may be a slight exaggeration, but it’s intended only to give force to the basic truth of the statement, that as a soldier, I stink. Of discipline I approve, but not the military kind, applied from outside with loud-mouthed threats. I want a discipline that stands stiff inside me, like my bones, and which can no more be shed than these.

I say that most of the boys here in the CTD [College Training Detachment] are not disciplined, and, on the contrary, many of them are very loose and lax. It’s in the classrooms that their inability to achieve a harmonious compromise between themselves and the group of which they are part is most clearly revealed. They are high school playboys, for all their uniforms, only semi-civilized, and with token educations. A sentimentalist might see in them a native American “culture,” but to me it looks like a compound of ignorance and egocentricity, which two terms may be considered in large part synonymous.

They breeze into the classroom, and either prostrate themselves in their chairs or crowd to the windows. There is no order, no restraint. They cudgel each other with various gleaming excerpts from their personal lives. The room is alive with noise.

When a teacher enters, one or more of them trumpets “Attention!” and the mass rises for a moment to various approximations of that attitude. But it is a empty gesture, a simple conditional reflex without meaning. No order results. The quack of voices fills the room again almost before the echoes are silent. The boys give no respect to the teacher, and this is not an affront from them, but an evidence of their lack of understanding of their civilized positions in that gathering. The jungle law prevails, – every man for himself.

Order, when it is achieved, is an accident, not a cooperative accomplishment in which anyone can have confidence. It is at the mercy of the first boy who receives an impulse to snap his trigger tongue. It means nothing that the teacher may be in the midst of his exposition. Joe suddenly sees the light, and he must immediately deliver himself of it. Often the appeals of the teacher for order and silence have little effect, and never a permanent effect.

Cruelty is inherent in their egocentric attitude. There is little conception of the effect their remarks may have on other people. The first day that a woman teacher took over Mr. Cox’s geography class, many of the boys made insulting or unkind remarks about the old man, who was very probably a personal friend of our present teacher. They didn’t have the sense even to be quiet after her first defense of him, but hooted her words and launched back to the attack.

Discussion is impossible. Several times we attempted it in Dr. Barnes’ history class. Practically no one was allowed to complete a statement of his particular opinion, not even Dr. Barnes. He was, in fact, interrupted so persistently that he often had to give up. The boys were of no mind to give fair hearing to each other’s opinions, and to allow their own to be modified. All that mattered was that each one should fire his salvo, and then retire only long enough to reload. The general ignorance of any philosophy or philosophical method was pathetic. The attitude towards learning was that its value depended upon its date, with anything earlier than the twentieth century of no value at all. History they viewed as a partitioning of centuries behind closed doors, and what use to open the doors?

Their civilization deficiency shows plainest in their attitude towards examinations. We here in the CTD are supposedly living under a system of Cadet Honor. This idea is openly raped at every examination. I’ve been surprised even by fellows to whom I’d attributed some measure of maturity. Their cheating is not on the sly among themselves, but a frankly-undertaken group enterprise. Honor is to them a word, not a discipline; they are enough aware of their deficiency to use the word with open cynicism.

They are equally cynical of many other words, such as patriotism, freedom, democracy, and the like. This is because they have never thought their way through to the rules of life of which these words are simply the shorthand symbols. Their response to orders has no higher motivation than fear. They defy orders whenever they think they can get away with it.

These boys are not ideological soldiers. Since they have no ideas, how can they be expected to fight for ideas. Though the Army may be doing some good with its indoctrination program, the main emphasis is still on glory, – pride in the unit, ribbons, medals, citations, advancements in rank.

I’m writing only about what I see and hear, and it may be that I see only the surface, and hear only the immaterial. My generalizations about the American Army as a whole are guesswork, and I’m not making any predictions on my personal conclusions. But I’ll ask a question. If most of the boys come back from the wars without definite ideas about why they’ve been fighting and what they’ve won, why, then, will they have been fighting, and what will they have won? Will the answers be provided by act of Congress, or presidential declaration? Is [there] any wall against cynicism, despair, and general emotional instability, except an integrated philosophy of life, both personal and social? 

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War-Time Politics Clash with Democratic Ideals

[My father begins this entry referencing a column by Raymond Clapper, a syndicated writer at The Washington Post. In researching Clapper, I see that he died two months after my father cited this column, perishing in a military plane crash while on assignment in the Marshall Islands. This journal entry is interesting largely as a snapshot of the war-time political maneuverings going on, including the Cairo and Teheran conferences attended by the major allied leaders. My father’s comments about the challenges and calculations associated with the Middle East are interesting, of course, in light of our current ensnarement in that region. My father also expresses disappointment about the undemocratic deals being struck by the major powers (although he accepts the economic and military strategy behind some of them). His description of the U.S. as “a nice kid who got dragged into a drunken brawl,” seems apt.]

December 9, 1943 (Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo.)

Raymond Clapper said it in his column, and I’ve been trying to think just how to say it here. He said there was something disquieting about the way these Cairo and Teheran conferences were held, especially in the rotten treatment of the correspondents. Apparently they didn’t get to first base. For certain, they’ve made all kinds of formal protests themselves, and undoubtedly plenty of informal cursing, but the only news they could get sounded like the wirings of a garden party.

Clapper went on to recall a saying that part of the greatness of great men consists simply in their being there. Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang are the men who are there. And in this sense they are indispensable men. They are making decisions that will affect hundreds of millions of people for years to come. On the face of them, then, these conferences seem almost the antithesis of democracy.

But there’s this to say about the press. The correspondents did miss out on this most important news of the year. But in the nature of things, there wasn’t much of importance that could be told, anyway, so far as the military decisions are concerned.

The political decisions are another matter. There was the formal declaration guaranteeing the independence of Iran. This was built up as an application of the Atlantic Charter, but it’s main purpose was probably to reassure all of the peoples of that section of the world that the big Western brothers aren’t out to gobble them up this time. And it’s also intended to sooth the French leaders who’ve been having trouble with little Lebanon, and charging the British with a plot to remove their influence from the near East.

The great democratic ultimatum to the German people, which many hopefuls had predicted, was not forthcoming. And this is probably because Roosevelt was the only one who was ready to issue it. Stalin has used some fine democratic language lately, but Russia is yet a long way from the methods of democracy, though their racial democracy is way ahead of ours. And England may be democratic, but she still has a huge subject empire whose millions of people might think they deserved a democratic chance before the Germans.

So we got only a very general declaration of good intentions, and a determination to cooperate. There is no doubt that Poland and the Baltic states will go to Russia by graceful default. At least, Churchill and FDR probably are praying it will be graceful. Personally, I think that this arrangement is a good thing from the economic and military points of view. But whether the peoples of these countries will figure that they have tasted the read-meat promises of the Atlantic Charter is another matter. To them, it may seem much more like a Munich sellout, before the glorious days of international idealism.

Eliot Janeway, in FORTUNE, thinks that Roosevelt is on the way to pulling another Wilson, – political isolation at the very time when he most needs the support of a majority of the nation. It seems to be a question of how far he can irrevocably commit the nation without the support of Congress or the people. Thus far he hasn’t taken the bold, but sincere, chance that Wilson did with his Points. He attends Conference after Conference; each time we hear that he’s worked out with the other leaders war plans for the months ahead. But actual political decisions, from all that has been revealed, have been so thin that sometimes one sees right through them and wonders if they’re really there. Too often, our actual political management in the field speaks much louder than these declarations, and not in the same voice.

I think that many Americans feel cheated, and ashamed, because of the deals our government has made with European rightists, reactionaries, and outright Fascists in North Africa, Vichy, Spain, and Italy. I know that I feel ashamed of these deals. There’s talk now of a deal with Franco.

It may be that this is the hard realistic way that nations must work together in the world. But if it is, a lot of us Americans have been brought up wrong. We have been told that our country is the foremost champion of democracy in the world. We expected that our country would stand on democratic principles in all of its business with other nations. But now we have a feeling that the US is very much like a nice kid who got dragged into a drunken brawl. He may protest a little at what goes on, but who the hell gives a damn! Come on, kid, you’re here, so you may as well join in and have some fun!

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Idealism As a Defining American Characteristic

[At this writing, my father had moved to a new Army camp in Texas, Camp Fannin. He comments on the idealism that underlies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and a number of famous political speeches and documents. My father also notes his own shift from cynicism to embrace of the idealism expressed, which he considers a defining characteristic of the country and its citizens. It’s fair to say that cynicism largely has won the battle over idealism in the U.S. in recent decades, with one of the rare exceptions, perhaps, being the collective idealism inspired by the Obama Presidential campaign. Post election, it didn’t take long for our dysfunctional federal government and its crop of self-serving elected officials — combined, of course, with the hope-crushing recession — to snuff out most of that idealistic sentiment. So is an America without idealism, in all its impracticality, still America?]

September 25, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

This week I’ve been reading a Pocket Book Anthology of American literature, which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Washington’s Farwell Address, a part of Jefferson’s first inaugural speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Wilson’s War Message to Congress, FDR’s speech on the Four Freedoms, and Wallace’s “Price of Free World Victory.”

In every one of these papers, which have played such tremendous roles in American history, there run the same words of high idealism, of devotion to the concept of human freedom under law, of deep respect for the Christian morality. Two years ago I was in a mood to sniff out of these words all kinds of shameless hypocrisy. Today I am proud of these words, and proud to be a member of the nation that has attempted to live up to their high challenge. The very fact that the mark is held so high guarantees many failures in our attempts to reach it, and the consequent ridicule or curses of those who choose to consider our experiment cynically. But now I know that I myself would far rather lay myself open to this ridicule and cursing than to play the “safe” game of flattering power, wherever it exists, for the simple reason that it is power. That may be a good way to keep the flesh stirring, but it’s a sure way to kill the creative spirit.

It’s not all dismaying to come to the realization that most Americans usually disavow the idealism that is the core of American greatness. They do this for many reasons, but largely because for most of their lives they are practical businessmen, and idealism is impractical. On a certain plane of reasoning they are perfectly right. It’s on this plane that a national policy of isolationism works out to be practical. I’m going to offer the thesis that on this plane they are not distinctively Americans, for I believe that the distinctive thing about America is its idealism. The bright fact about the American people is that, however much they belittle idealism in their personal lives, they are proud of it in their national life, and continue to put the reins of government in the hands of idealists.

Every nation has had men of the moral stature of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson (I believe), Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR (I hope), but no other nation has so consistently made them its political leaders. And this, I believe, is the sole justification needed for the democratic forms of government. It overwhelms all those criticisms which can possibly be raised against it.

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