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.

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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.

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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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War’s Brutality, and Americans’ Smug Self Image

 [Often in his journal entries about World War II, my father exhibited an empathy for our German and Japanese enemies — especially the civilians in each country who he understood weren’t all that different from America’s citizens. His ability to see the world clearly, and to avoid being swept up in the sloganeering and mob-think of the moment, was a trait he exhibited throughout his life. Thus his later dismay at the Bush Administration’s fear mongering and demonizing, which it used in its successful post-9/11 efforts to push our country into the unnecessary and misguided Iraq war.]

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

The war with Japan has been waged with relentless ferocity from the very beginning. Every battle has been one of annihilation; the fact that the battlefields have been isolated islands may explain this. Whichever side happens to be losing has no hope of escape and has been convinced that death is a better choice than capture by the enemy. We have now broken deep within Japan’s defenses, and are plastering the home islands daily with our big bombers. Thus it happens that the Japs are catching the hell they hoped to pour on us. Fair enough, we say. They asked for it, and now we’re giving it to them. But sometimes I wonder at the feelings this brutal conflict stirs in us. We read of the flattening of whole square miles of Japanese cities with considerable satisfaction, – Serves them right! the dirty bastards! Yet in those ruins there must be the mangled bodies of thousands of ordinary Japanese people, inoffensive, hard-working people, proud of their country, no doubt, as we are proud of our country. This is obviously the same ruthlessness bombing of civilian populations which we damned when the Germans did it all over Europe, and the Japs in China. War, after all, moves ahead by destruction, and the more destruction the better. But in smugly believing that the Jap people somehow morally deserve their agony, which was an inhuman crime when the British and the Chinese were suffering it, simply highlights the easy habits of self-deception by which nations can allow themselves to condone war in the first place. War is convenient in that it allows us to direct all our fury against an enemy for faults which in peacetime we sometimes have the candor to see exist in ourselves. Now that we’re coming head on against the problems of peace, which demand the constructive qualities we’ve assumed we possess in unusual degree, as opposed to our enemies, we’ll find just how far our assurance was justified.

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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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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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Dewey’s Style versus FDR’s Substance

[Here my father critiques Thomas E. Dewey, then the governor of New York and the Republican presidential candidate, and charges that he is not a man of firm principal or real substance. Franklin D. Roosevelt, by contrast, is a “real man” with real principals, my father argues, even while acknowledging that FDR sometimes deviates from those principals when politics requires.

I think my father’s take on what helped make FDR a great American president is largely on target, as his assessment of the compromises even great presidents must sometimes make. Barack Obama has made more compromises and, probably, more deviations from his core principals than I wish he had, but I don’t doubt that Obama holds genuine democratic and moral principals that I and many others share. Unfortunately for him and his measured, professorial demeanor, style counts far more than substance in today’s 24-hour, entertainment-driven media.]

September 24, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

… Willy-nilly, we’re breeding a society of specialists, and losing the faculty of being men in the old moral sense. Some hack writes Dewey’s speeches, after being told by experts just what the public wants to hear. Dewey raises his aggressive mustache above rostrums and reads the speeches to the people. Oh, sure, he must agree with them “in principle.” But where and what is the meaning of principle in this mechanic process. A principle is born of passionate conviction in one human mind, and that mind alone, which has felt its creation, can give it meaningful expression.

Yes, this is politics, not ethics or aesthetics. But even in politics there should be men of genuine principle, and no efficient pleaser of the public taste can be such a man. Dewey is a man who has learned how to put a nice taste in people’s mouths. That, he’s been assured, is the way to win votes and elections. And it’s also the way to eat out the moral foundation of the nation. He’s just the latest of the bright young men to further the art of making unscrupulous statements in a decorous manner. Who can imagine Dewey writing a Declaration of Independence? or even an Atlantic Charter. And even if he did produce such a document, it would need behind it such a moral force of character as he doesn’t have.

Franklin Roosevelt is a smart politician who has at times sacrificed principle to political expediency. But the great difference from Dewey is that he is accepted as a man of principle, in spite of his often serious deviations from that principle. Obviously these deviations are dictated by the necessity which faces every president of maintaining the support of more or less unprincipled political groups to further the progress of laudable legislation and statesmanship. It’s the old question of whether the ends justify the means, and a man who wishes to remain an effective president can’t keep the question in academic suspension. He must constantly do something, and hence must constantly outrage the sensibilities of some. If he keeps the outraged people in an impotent minority, however, he is politically successful, and has as free a hand as any democratic leader can ever gain to act according to his principles. This, I believe, is the theory that FDR has accepted for himself. It makes him considerably less than a saint, but it also makes him a great President. His speech to the AFL teamsters yesterday was the speech of a real man, sarcastic, humorous, hearty, frank, boastful, humble, and hopeful, – altogether, the words of a much “younger” man than any which have passed the lips of the Dewey organism.

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Japan as our Enemy, China as our Friend

[This entry provides a glimpse into a time when Americans were sympathetic to the Chinese, and united in their disgust of the Japanese. My father recounts viewing an Army film about Japan’s war against China, a film of “honest propaganda,” in his estimation. He also employs the now-pejorative “Jap” label in his writing, which was true to the times and circumstances, but jarring to today’s ears. At the entry’s end, he remarks on the astonishing willpower and self-sacrifice of the Chinese people, traits still in evidence today as China assumes an ever-more imposing role in economics and world affairs.]

July, 8 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

Yesterday I read in TIME a brief summary of China’s seven years of declared war with Japan. Then this morning I saw the Army Orientation Film, “Battle of China.” This was the best of the series, surpassing even the “Battle of Britain.”

When I saw the title of the film, I was a little disappointed, and I knew why. It was because I was afraid that the subject wouldn’t afford the terrific action shots which have come out of the European war. I was wrong, but the remarkable thing is that desire to watch destruction and death on the screen, – bombs tearing out the vitals of cities, cannon and rifles spitting fire at men, airplanes zooming into combat. It’s the same in any disaster. Fires, floods, tornadoes all have something in them which fascinates us, much as we intellectually shudder at the destruction and suffering they cause. Is it that in these moments we see clearly rampant those forces which pay no attention to our human will, and we are struck with awe at the knowledge of our helplessness?

Another thing I noted was a disgust bordering on physical nausea at the sight of Chinese people being bombed, and tortured, and killed. But when Jap soldiers were being killed, I felt only that delight with which we used to see the approach of the posse in the nick of time in the Western movies. My subconscious mind made the elementary distinction between good men and bad men, and I was cheering for the good. In part, this was a result of the picture’s skill in presenting just that argument. Some of the fellows recognized this fact, and resented the picture, so great is their unsophisticated protest against anything which smacks of propaganda.

But the important question is whether or not that propaganda is honest. My feeling is that in this picture it was honest enough. China’s ancient civilization and the peaceful habits of her people were stressed, as was her long struggle for national unity in this century. Unmentioned was the feud between the Central Government and the Communists, and the fact that the Kuomintang has not escaped some of the pitfalls of one-party government. [Note: At the time, the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, held power in China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek. In a marriage of necessity, the Kuomintang in 1937 had marginally united with its long-time enemy, the Chinese Communist Party, in mutual opposition against the Japanese invaders.] But these are faults on the surface of the national character, so that their omission doesn’t result in a serious distortion of that character.

On the other hand, the rapacity and brutality of the Japs were stressed, in pictures of smirking conquerors, grand strategists of world conquest, bombers of open cities, and rapists of whole civilian populations, as at Nanking. I believe that the impression generated in us was justified. For the Japs are desperately sick with the disease of nationalism, and are not fit members of a civilized community of nations. Perhaps it’s unjust to judge a nation by the actions of its armies in war, but to those who have felt the scourge of these armies, there’s no other choice. And it’s been tragically long demonstrated that these armies understand no argument except that of opposing force. We may fancy, in the abstract, that war offends our highest moral sense. But this reflection is a luxury reserved only for those who haven’t been attacked.

A most startling revelation, in this machine age, was the tremendous power of a people who are willing to work with little more than their bare hands. Our gigantic and efficient machines destroy our faith in our own unaided powers. The Chinese, who built the great Wall hundreds of years ago, have not forgotten what men can do for themselves, if they have the will. These Chinese carved the Burma road through the world’s most formidable mountains in less than a year; they tunneled shelters in the sandstone cliffs for the whole population of Chunking; they moved their entire industry, literally on their backs, two thousand miles into the interior of their country. The most powerful scene in the picture shows long lines of straining coolies, their backs bent horizontal to the ground, pulling a fleet of river boats up through a mountain gorge, against the rapids of the river. Not many of us can really understand such extremes of self-sacrifice. I know I can’t. But it must be these that are the secrets of China’s continued resistance.

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Lack of Leadership, and America’s “Rotten Core”

[Here, my father uses the racism faced by African-American contralto Marion Anderson and the story of a Japanese-American ill-served by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to conclude “there is something rotten at the core of our national life.” He suggests that the failure to live up to Christian-democratic ideals can be traced to the lack of real leadership in America, where even the President “can very rarely speak the whole truth, especially when it’s bitter, and most-needed, because this would be politically inexpedient.” How little things have changed, given our current world of hysteria over the building of Islamic mosques and the blatant racism evident in many of the “birther,” “secret Muslim” and “Kenyan anti-colonialist” attacks on our first black President.]

May 6, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

While at [Jefferson Barracks], I had the opportunity to go into St. Louis one night and hear Marian Anderson sing. It was an experience I still remember with intense pleasure. Marian Anderson not only had a  beautiful voice; she was a very gracious lady. It makes me ashamed to remember that here is a whole section of our country where it would be practically impossible for this great artist to give a recital, and that out of this very state of Mississippi there is a man by the name of Bilbo who fiercely champions in the United States Senate the cause of “white supremacy.” [Note: Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democratic U.S. Senator from 1935-1947 and, earlier, a twice-elected Mississippi governor. He was an open member of the Ku Klux Klan.]

There seems to be plenty of the same kind of people in the North, and in the West, too. Just this week in LIFE I read of the sorry plight of a Japanese-American who was recently hounded out of a New Jersey town where he was sent by the WRA.

I believe that the soldiers who worry about these conditions on the home front form a very small minority. Most of the fellows don’t connect their parts in this war with the preservation of Christian-democratic ideals. The thoughtful letters from soldiers which appear in the magazines and newspapers are perhaps interpreted by some as a hopeful sign. But these letters represent but a few thousand out of millions.

Though I keep well-posted on the news, I know that I frequently let myself forget the disquieting events which are occurring throughout the country, or, if I think of them, it’s with a rather hopeless feeling of resignation. What can I do? Write a letter?

Actually, however, I’m not in a mood to allow myself the luxury of cynicism, and haven’t been since I came into the Army. I’ve learned that the progress of civilization is often at an indiscernible pace, but that as long as there are men and women who have the faith to work for the betterment of their society, there is still progress, even though it doesn’t make the daily headlines…

It seems that our schools, as a system, fail to teach us faith in, or even respect for, the ideals of democratic society. This failure, of course, is shared by our churches, our public leaders, and by our families themselves. Nowhere in the institutions of our society is there a profound conviction in the values on which these institutions are founded, or, if the conviction is there, it no longer characterizes the institutions. The continuing neglect of their fundamental values naturally reduces the effectiveness of the institutions. Instead of serving their valid purpose of invigorating and strengthening our society, they become centers of disintegration. Even in this very serious crisis of war, they cannot bring any real unity of faith and purpose to the American people.

The lament over the lack of an integrating faith, both religious and political, is an old one, but there is little evidence that it is being heeded constructively. By this I don’t mean to say that there aren’t many thousands of people who are doing all that they can, which is considerable. But it doesn’t seem to be enough. There’s something rotten at the core of our national life, and I think I have an inkling of what it is.

There are far too many leaders in America, and there is a corresponding lack of real leadership. There is no one person, no one institution, which can speak with authority to all the people, and speak the truth, – not even the President of the United States. He, it is true, can speak with considerable authority, especially in war-time, though Congress still has many ways to hamstring that authority. The President, however, can very rarely speak the whole truth, especially when it’s bitter, and most-needed, because this would be politically inexpedient.

The ministers, if they have the courage and the insight, can speak the truth until it hurts. But the ministers can no longer speak with authority. There is too much division in the Christian church itself, and too much disbelief among the people. The teachers can tell the truth about some things, and with considerable authority, but their influence is mainly limited in a person’s life to his few years of school, and even during these years is often counteracted by the student’s experience outside of school.

The writers are free to write what they please, but the people are free to read what pleases them, so that too many writers, who might do better, write simply to please.

Thus the American people as a whole never hear the truth about themselves and their duties and responsibilities spoken to them with authority. They grow up in an intellectual atmosphere of pleasant myths, romantic idealism, and easy optimism.

Where will all this end? I only know that the main serious conflicts in American society are apparently very much similar to those which have ended in dictatorships in many countries. And democratic process, as we practice it half-heartedly, and sometimes cynically, does not seem capable of resolving these conflicts.

When I look for a solution to the problem of leadership, I run into a dilemma. For inevitably I must try to conceive a government both more authoritative and more democratic than the one we have now, a government which can aggressively protect and promote its basic democratic philosophy, and at the same time give more real meaning to the democratic freedoms. 

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Nazi Philosophy of Destruction versus Christian Morality

[The Nazi strategy of destroying towns and villages while retreating has my father contemplating the importance of Christian morality — and its emphasis on creativity — as a countervailing force. Although my father didn’t adhere to some of Christianity’s core faith beliefs and symbols, he recognized the importance to the war effort of the moral system that these beliefs promoted.]

October 8, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

The shape of the Nazi scheme for the great withdrawal to the Fatherland begins to appear in the utter destruction they are leaving behind them in Russia and Italy. They will not return to the places they’re leaving now, and they know it. So they will attempt to stamp death indelibly upon all the places they have occupied, – to drag all of Europe down into hell, as Hitler has already threatened. We have heard for months of the rape of Russia, of the systematic destruction of all that represents civilization. There are no military objectives for the Germans. Just this morning we read that in Naples hundreds of tons of high explosive, planted in the basement of the post office, exploded yesterday, killing hundreds of people.

This is the way it will be all across Europe as the Nazis retreat. Towns will be completely blotted out, and great cities reduced to rubbish. The terror in Europe will grow more intense, as the advances of the Allied armies will come to mean not liberation, but torture and death. People will not dare to stay in their own homes, for fear that they will blow up. Water supplies will be polluted; there will be no food.

From our point of view this is senseless, and utterly criminal, but to the Nazi mind it probably appears as the supreme logic of their philosophy. For it would seem that that inner drive, which in most civilized human beings has been turned to creative ends, has been perverted in the Nazi mentality to a terrible force of destruction. It is possible that a Nazi commander surveys the ruins of a pillaged city with the same triumphant elation that Michelangelo feels as he stands before his completed David.

“Build thee more stately mansions,” someone says in the Bible. And so far as I can remember, the Bible is often stressing creation, even though metaphorically, as of the soul. Creation, and respect for those who create, for God, the supreme creator, are among the teachings of Christianity, and are in the foundation of the general morals of Christianity. If the Nazi terror is indeed the result of the deliberate destruction of Christian morals, that is reason enough for the preservation of these morals.

I have spent much time arguing with myself and with others over the technicalities of the Christian religion, – God, miracles, the true nature of Jesus. To me, these are matters of unimportance, because I believe that the moral system they are employed to inculcate is of major importance. But I guess I was wrong to argue, if for most people the moral system has meaning only through these symbols. And it is also true that a faith in the strength of these symbols is translated into a corresponding moral strength in the believers which otherwise might not be there.

So why continue arguing over nonessentials? The essentials themselves are being brutally challenged today, and my whole fight should be directed against the challengers. That bomb in Naples was not planted to kill men and women, but to kill beliefs and faith and morals and whatever else has been instrumental in the building of Western civilization. 

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