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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Business-Government Imbalance Poses Potentially Fatal Risks

[This entry begins with an analysis of the interplay between government and business in communist and fascist countries, and contrasts that interplay with America’s historically more-balanced model. From that foundation, my father revisits one of his favorite themes — the importance of individual self-expression and creativity — and discusses how America has done better than most in cultivating and nourishing the individual. Near the entry’s end, however, he cautions that “A society is thrown fatally out of balance when one group within it accumulates the power to deny expression to all conflicting interests.”

Sadly, in our current electoral season, corporations have been given carte blanche by the U.S. Supreme Court to spend endlessly and anonymously to promote their preferred candidates and causes. While Tea Partiers and other right-wing zealots worry endlessly about Big Government, they seem completely oblivious to the threat that Big Business poses to our democratic institutions (to say nothing of the threat to their own self interests…). Perhaps we’ve already reached the tipping point where American democracy is beginning to spin “fatally out of balance.”

September 10, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

Call government the chicken and business the egg. Then ask which came first, the chicken or the egg. In the Communist state it was the chicken, nor was this simply a matter of chance. In Russia at the time of the Revolution there was only a comparatively small industrial plant, and its owners were on the losing side. So, entirely aside from the Marxist theories, it was quite natural that the political organization should come first, and that it should assume complete control of the development of the nation’s industry, making it a state enterprise. Nor is it strange that the Communist leaders should believe that their way was the best way. They made it work.

In Germany after the World War, the ruling class, mostly in the person of the Kaiser, was eliminated, but German industry, already highly developed, and not greatly damaged by war, remained in the hands of its pre-war owners. Thus they, by default, became the top-dogs in Germany, and controlled the government as they saw fit. This was the prime condition of Fascism. These businessmen picked Hitler as the best front-man available, and have perhaps lived to regret their choice. But that’s debatable, since it isn’t quite clear that Hitler has ever got completely out of hand, or crossed them up badly.

In the United states, the question of the chicken and the egg remains a riddle. Business and government, through the historical accident by which our state was established at the beginnings of the industrial revolution, have grown up together and though the preponderance of power has sifted back and forth during the years, they’ve never been completely out of balance with each other. It’s this system of constantly-maintained balance between business and government which we’ve come to call democracy. It’s an extension of the system of checks and balances which was written into the original Constitution, and which is probably one of the most fruitful social theories ever formulated. Though we may have acquired it partly through accident, it’s very important today that we understand its value and function, so that we’ll be the stronger to dismiss all temptations to destroy it.

The Communist and Fascist states are both built to ignore the most pressing need of modern society, which is the need for individual self-expression. The leaders of these states have become fascinated with the idea of the mass, and have forgotten that the strength of the mass is in its individual members. And though, for a limited time, and under special conditions, it may be possible to inspire mass movements of considerable force, there is nothing more permanent in such a movement than in the display of the pent-up force in a released rocket. Both are brilliant, and soon spent.

Democratic society has few moments of this type of hysterical mass movement and in these moments it’s the least democratic. The crude techniques of mass appeal have no place in a democratic system, and should be avoided except as a last expedient at times when the state is threatened by outside force. Even then such appeals should be strongly salted with emphasis on the individual.

For the end of democratic society has never been conceived as the power of the state, but as the opportunity and happiness of the individual citizen. In a civilization which seems peculiarly suited to the creation of great Force-States, this democratic theory may appear almost archaic, and certainly very fragile. But the facts don’t bear out this fear. The United States is today the most powerful state in the world, and at the same time, among the large nations, the most democratic. We have demonstrated that mass effort can be demanded of millions of individuals without destroying their individuality. The danger among us now is that fascination with the material power we’ve built for ourselves will make us forget that the main source of this power is in the individual who is free to think for himself, and, to a large degree, free to direct his own creative activities.

In any society it’s always been hard to find a way of guaranteeing a practical degree of freedom to every adult individual, and most societies haven’t even attempted to find such a way. Industrial society, perhaps, makes it at the same time more possible and more difficult than ever before. The material and mechanical means exist which can free men from slavery to the labor of maintaining a bare subsistence. But these same means can also be used to subject men to the most terrible slavery in history. This is the slavery which makes them not slaves of themselves, or of other men, but of the machine. All human quality is sapped out of this relationship, and men can be brutalized to a point where they are themselves nothing more than machines. Something of this sort has happened to the leaders of the Nazi state.

The safest state of affairs exists in a society where no element or interest is completely satisfied, and no one is completely denied satisfaction, where everyone has an opportunity to voice his own desires and have their merits submitted to a forum of the whole. A society is thrown fatally out of balance when one group within it accumulates the power to deny expression to all conflicting interests. In such a society, sufficiency is sacrificed to efficiency. The machine-quality displaces the human-quality. Such a society cannot last…

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Modern World Threats to Creativity and Culture

[This journal excerpt revisits the theme of individual creativity, which my father saw as being threatened by many of the conveniences and distractions of the “modern” world in 1942. After all, how could the average person be creative when they were so easily drawn into passive activities such as listening to the radio, watching movies, or driving their automobiles through the countryside? Plus, people’s association with culture was fast becoming one of paying to experience its expression by others, rather than one of contributing to culture themselves.

My father, of course, would eventually see television eclipse all other forms of passive entertainment, and lived long enough to witness the emerging role of the Internet as a huge time sink. One can make a case that the Internet cuts two ways — both as a vehicle for endless browsing and superficial exchanges, and as a platform on which individuals can create and disseminate creative works with an ease unparalleled in history. On balance, though, I think the warnings my father raised in 1942 are much more apparent, and dire, today.]

January 28, 1943 (Middlebury College)

A central point in the arguments for socialism is the increased leisure time that will redound to the working classes, which they will be able to use in “a new burst of cultural feeling,” as E.C. Lindeman puts it. More efficient organization and utilization of the means of production will make comparatively short that part of the day which each individual must spend in physical labor. In other words, we put the machine in the proper place, as our slave, or, at least, as a subordinate partner, and then use our leisure time to participate in a great revival of the arts.

Maybe. We might remember, however, that our leisure life is as completely mechanized as our working life, – the automobile, radio, motion picture machine, and mass production printing presses. So we wonder if our machines really can give us new leisure, to be used creatively, or do they simply force us to live at such a whirlwind pace that we shall never really have the time for a “new burst of cultural energy.” We get our culture in such fitful and varied snatches that each one of these snatches becomes practically meaningless to us. We cram our lives up with incidentals in which we ourselves have no creative part – listening to the radio, watching sports contests, going to the movies and the theatre, driving through the countryside.

All these activities are supposedly part of the “broader, fuller life” which our machines have made possible for us. I don’t agree. If anything, the life of the common man today is narrower, even than that of the pioneer on our Western frontier a century and a half ago. Then a man was forced to produce the essentials of his own life. Though this was admittedly hard labor, it furnished a wide range in which he might exercise his creative powers. Today we don’t build; we buy. Our vaunted division of labor has been carried so far that we learn to spend our days as assembly lines, performing the simplest single operation in the manufacture of a product which we shall probably never use ourselves. For this degradation into an automaton we learn to be satisfied with a wage with which we can buy the essentials of life, and perhaps have enough left over to buy a little culture. Is it any wonder that men who find their lives crammed into such a narrow orbit sometimes go on strike. Wages aren’t their primary objective, no matter what they are told. Way down in deep they have a yearning to be men. Of course they are fighting against the feeling of insecurity, but behind this feeling is the caged fury of wild creative beings who have grown up in a society that has made the cramping of their native powers a prerequisite of existence.

No malevolent “ruling class” has consciously willed this situation. We grow up learning to listen to the radio, to watch movies, to ride in automobiles. Most of us never have a chance to be born, in any creative sense. We become culturally lazy by learning to admire the cultural activities of a few outstandingly creative, or skilled, persons in our society, and worse than this, we learn to look upon this admiration as a privilege, by often being forced to pay for it. We become hero-worshippers, and forget that we ourselves might have become heroes.

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The Need to Continually Replenish the Democratic “Idea”

[In this second section of his 11/11/42 entry, my father expands on his initial discussion of the democratic faith (previous post) to examine the need to keep reviewing and replenishing the “idea” of democracy. He posits that the material benefits that accrued to Americans thanks to the success of their democracy lulled people into letting the vigorous idea of democracy wither and nearly die. Hitler, he says, was able to take advantage of this “sickness of America.”

My father contends that all great ideas, democracy included, must be continually debated, mutated and improved. When he writes “The doctrine of consistency is the doctrine of death” it is hard not to think of present-day conservative dogma, including the judicial philosophy of “originalism.” Proponents of this approach seek to interpret and apply the U.S. Constitution in a way wholly dependent upon the (somehow divined) original intent of its writers. As my father suggested, better to think of the democracy defined by that Constitution — and of the Constitution itself — as a living idea that must evolve to reflect the needs and the realities of the world in which we live.

One note, also, on the “political incorrectness” of my father’s writing, in which, for example, he repeatedly refers to the ideas and achievements of “men.” Though jarring to today’s ears, his usage — and, I’m sure, his own perspective at the time — gives an accurate representation of former societal norms.]

November 11, 1942 (Middlebury College), con’t.

… Emerson doesn’t exaggerate the need for self-reliance. It is another thing from isolationism, from independence of other men in the material relationships of economic life. The society in which men live functions according to many ideas that certain men have conceived and applied. But ideas are not permanent in the sense that a concrete bridge is permanent. They live only by constant nourishment in the minds of men. Furthermore, they cannot be passed as entities from one mind to another. Each man must develop his own ideas for himself. If a healthy margin of the members of any society do not keep alive the common ideas by which their society functions, then it must deteriorate. And it will surely fall apart with widespread disaster if the deterioration is not stopped in time.

That has been, and still is, the sickness of America, and of all the democratic societies. The Ideas worked too well, in the sense that under them life became so pleasant that its material benefits came to be ends in themselves. The great ideas that were productive of these ends, and without which they could not be achieved, were allowed to stagnate. They did die out of the minds of men. Words were substituted for them, and people forgot that words are only the menial tools by which ideas are transmitted from man to man, and are not themselves ideas.

We were suffering from this death of ideas among us long before Hitler arose to take advantage of us. In fact, he was able to take advantage of us only because he challenged us with his ideas for a new society and found us wanting weapons to oppose him. That time is past. We are finding our weapons, and it is not too late. But the lesson we have learned must not be forgotten. When men lose ideas, they lose everything. They function automatically and blindly under dead forms, and are gradually suffocated. We came awfully close to suffocating. We haven’t really caught our breath yet, but in time we shall catch the second wind of new and living ideas of democracy and the world will see a stride that can’t be matched.

All that has life must change. Ideas are no exception to this rule. If they are kept alive, there will be constant additions and mutations in them. This is the work of the individual man. The doctrine of consistency is the doctrine of death. The dead mind is the consistent mind. The mind that lives accepts every challenge to it, and moves forward when the occasion demands by leaps and bounds, holding precedence of no account, and the opinions of other men no barrier. Emerson was right; he is right.

I do not rule out the past. The past is a storehouse of treasure for him who looks aright, for the man who searches through it to know the accomplishments of minds that have lived before him, to serve as the firm foundation for the accomplishments of the mind that lives in him. It would be foolish to make originality a barrier to profiting from the mistakes of others, – certainly no exhibition of the good Yankee trait of economy.

This is a new world, new every hour, every minute. I am a new man, and this is my world. “What is the purpose of living?” the cynics ask. Well, I have the purpose, and I was once a cynic. The purpose of living is to use the mind at its full capacity to keep alive the ideas which are the basis of the moral functioning of society, and to give new life to these ideas by applying them. 

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Democracy as a Political and Spiritual Base

 [The following is the first section of a long entry in which my father identifies democracy as his “base.” The catalyst for this essay was an Armistice Day talk delivered by Pierre de Lanux, a French writer and diplomat. My father suggests that each person needs to stuggle with and answer questions about democracy before becoming a true adherent to the democratic “faith.” The majority of Americans who have not “examined the foundations of their faith” represent a great danger to the country, he argues. This danger certainly hasn’t disappeared in modern-day America, where large numbers of people are swayed by superficial slogans and charismatic “leaders” (Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, etc.), and where anti-intellectualism has become a badge of honor. ]

November 11, 1942 (Middlebury College)

… Pierre de Lanux spoke in chapel this morning. He read a paper on the significance of this Armistice Day. The ideas weren’t new, but he gave them distinction with his French fire and charm. I wonder what was in his mind about France at the moment of his reading. Hope, perhaps. For the German armies are marching into the unoccupied territories, and that could mean the end of the humiliating armistice. It can mean that all Frenchman will be united again in their resistance to Hitler, and not painfully divided into the free French, and the traitors. It must have been hard on true Frenchmen to bear this shame of their country. France reduced in a few months of fighting from one of the great champions of liberty and democracy to a vassal of a barbarian state? It didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t possible. Resistance has continued. The stories of uprising, and hostage-shooting have probably been only an indication to us outside of a common spirit of defiance within that country. I hope so. I hope that it is ever so wherever men have known freedom.

I seem to grow vaporous, I know, but it is clear in my own mind what I mean. I could not say this a year ago, but now I know. I have found my base, and I shall not be shaken from it, though explore it more I must, and that thru the rest of my life. My base is democracy. Not a strange choice, you may say, for one who has grown up in a democratic country. But I who have made the choice do not look at it that way. A country is not democratic, strictly speaking. A country is a portion of the earth’s surface where people live. The characteristics we carelessly confer on a country are really those of its people, and not of all of its people, at that, and not of any two people in exact similarity.

There are a lot of people in this country who are not democratic. Those that openly profess themselves of different creeds are not so much to be feared. They are known; they may be fought on their own terms, and the fight, so it be conducted rationally, cannot fail but be salutary for all sides concerned. It is the great mass of people who have not examined the foundations of their faith that holds the great danger for America. If a man does not know where he stands, he may be easily induced to stand anywhere. If he passively accepts the proposal that he is a member of a democratic nation, that is not enough. He must ask himself, “Why democratic? How democratic?” If he finds the answers to these questions himself, then he is a trustworthy champion of democracy.

I am in the process now of asking myself “Why democratic? And how democratic?” I have not found all the answers. But I am on their trail, and I am conscious of the fact that I have taken my stand. When I say it is good that the people of France may again be united against Germany, the price that they must pay in physical suffering and death is not absent from my mind. But I know now that I am willing to pay that same price when the time comes, for it will preserve to me the serenity of mind and the purity of spirit which man must come to look upon as his most prized possessions if he is to be worthy his name.

I know that there are many people to whom these words will carry little meaning. Until so recently have I myself mistrusted them, in fact, that I am surprised with the confidence with which I use them now. But I am willing to accept this confidence as evidence of spiritual growth. And in explaining this last, I can say only that it is a consciousness of an integrity of myself with the rest of the world which I have not had before. The shapes are dim as yet, but they are appearing. Experience of day to day fits more and more into forms and patterns, and I am conscious of the process. I can’t claim that it is mystical, but it is certainly more than material. My attitude towards the creeds of particular sects is unchanged, and is only a reflection on this side of me of my basic individualistic bent, of my natural dislike for imitation. If I discover spiritual realities, and eventually shape them into a pattern that may properly be called a religion, it will be what I myself have found and discovered, not what someone else has handed to me ready made…

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