Recounting the Lewis vs. Conn Championship Farce

[Most of the journal excerpts published on this blog to date deal with descriptions of Army life, musings about society and politics, and the occasional introspective journey. My father’s journals, however, are also filled with critiques of books he read and movies he saw, along with dozens of other wide-ranging topics. The following excerpt is an example — a wry description of the June 19, 1946 World Heavyweight Champion bout between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn, held in Yankee stadium and experienced by my father via radio. The detailed — and amusing — recount of the match speaks well of both the broadcast’s quality and my father’s reporting and writing skill. Perhaps he should have gone into sports writing rather than political journalism. Mike Jacobs, mentioned in the first paragraph, was the Don King of his day, a boxing promoter who exerted near total control over the sport.]

June 20, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The records set in Yankee stadium last night were not exactly those predicted in the pre-fight ballyhoo. Possibly there was as much interest in the “three-million dollar gate” as there was in the projected controversy between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn. But the gate was a flop, slightly less than two million dollars when the turnstiles stopped clicking. Though this was the second-highest haul in history, it will draw only sneers from Americans, who have no sympathy with second-best performances. Not a few cynical ladies and gents, who have recently been advised in national magazines of the stranglehold which Mike Jacobs holds on prizefighting, will no doubt derive a perverted pleasure from this financial fiasco. The sportswriters, in a sudden burst of honesty, have come as close as possible to biting the hand that feeds them. They have been hard put to find enough adjectives to describe the avariciousness of kindly old “uncle” Mike. A lot of folks get a hell of a kick out of the disappointment of greed, except when they are involved as principal parties in the drama. Of course there’s no possibility that Mike lost money on his show, but certainly his prestige was deflated just a little.

First congratulations should go to Louis, who has always been a great and fair fighter, and who suffered no loss of reputation last night. Second congratulations should go to the thousands of people who could have got into the stadium for a price, and stayed outside instead. And Billy Conn should get some kind of consolation prize for covering more space in eight rounds than any previous challenger or champion, even after deducting from the total distance the six feet which he covered in the final ten seconds.

Billy put up his best fight in the newspaper article which appeared under his name a couple days before he met Louis in the ring. He was full of Irish cockiness as he claimed right out that Louis was as good as a dead pigeon. Louis, of course, mentioned that Conn might be mistaken in this opinion, but not many people took Joe seriously. The idea was fast gaining ground that the champion was practically in his dotage. Conn himself seemed to be making a lot of this notion; he knew he couldn’t whip Louis by trading punches, but apparently he expected the Negro to drop from the sheer exhaustion of the chase. This strategy might have succeeded on a quarter mile track, with no time between rounds. But in the ring Billy kept running into the ropes and couldn’t dodge quite all of the punches that Joe threw at him.

As heavyweight brawls go, this one was a very genteel affair. Billy and Joe obviously remained good friends throughout. A couple of times Billy slipped on a corner and fell to the canvas. Joe simply stepped back and waited for him to regain his feet, being content to score his putout unassisted. Billy kept grinning every time Joe managed to get close enough to jolt him. Possibly he wanted to reassure his backers who expected him to keep out of range until Louis was staggering with weariness. “A mere tactical error,” he seemed to be saying. Then in the eighth round it was a mere tactical error which laid him flat on his back, and for once poor Billy couldn’t manage a grin.

I heard the fight in Seattle at the Servicemen’s’ Center. Approximately a hundred fellows were bunched around the big radio in the second-floor ballroom. Most of them were sailors, since the Fort Lawton authorities, apparently fearing a race riot, had imposed a fifteen percent quota of passes. That sounded to me like a typical example of brass-hat reasoning. The only riotous phenomenon which came to my attention was the laughter the fellows bestowed on the announcer’s description of Conn’s frantic race against time. The fellows got just as many laughs and were far more comfortable than the suckers who paid a hundred bucks for the privilege of shivering in a ringside seat at Yankee Stadium under the assumption that they were going to see a fight.

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Disillusionment in the Army and in America’s Literary Scene

[The following excerpt is sure to offend some, given my father’s caustic characterization of the typical men in America’s army. Even he recognizes his “sullenly superior attitude,” which would quickly earn him an “elitist” denunciation from many in today’s America. He uses “the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks” as a springboard into a rumination about the state of American literature, and his own desire to ultimately write novels that do more than cater to the popular taste.

I like this excerpt because it illustrates my father’s ambitions and idealism as a young man, but also his realism and self-doubts. Tangentially, and sadly, one comment also references two marginalized professions of post-war America: fundamentalist ministers and book critics.  One of those groups went on to thrive in the subsequent years, but not the one that my father would have hoped.]

May 6, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The first summer that I was in the Army I wrote a letter to President Hutchins of the University of Chicago suggesting, among other things, that the Army qualified as a mass school of democracy. When he answered, he said that the only thing he remembered learning in the Army was how to avoid details. He suggested politely that I was wrong as hell.

Three years later I know that he was right. Very few men, I believe, have been improved by their contact with the Army, democratically or otherwise, and a great many men have been worsened, at least temporarily.  I myself have retained only tattered shreds of my respect for “the common  man of democracy” whom I fancied I would meet in mass in the Army. Actually, of course, I was looking for one of those idealistic myths which sensitive undergraduates construct during their days on campus and in the classroom

This is no “common man of democracy” in actual fact, and the Army is an institution which will soon make the most starry-eyed dreamer aware of actual facts. Most of the men of the American Army are poorly-educated, loudmouthed, undisciplined, and excessively vulgar individuals. Many of the officers, I suspect, are fundamentally members of this same class, though social pressure and fear of punishment forces them to exhibit the mechanics, if not the spirit, of civilized behavior in public.

In one sense I have gained from the Army an important lesson in American democracy. The fact that it hasn’t been the type of lesson I expected to receive has not lessened its value. The danger for me, and fellows like me, is that the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks will persuade us that somehow America has cheated us, and our former zeal for social service will turn into a disillusioned resentment. The way of the expatriate is extremely seductive to those who pass through this disillusionment to the conviction that it is impossible in America to win mass appreciation for any serious artistic work. But one may pertinently question whether a work of art, particularly in literature, can be serious when it is deliberately divorced from its national and social origins. Those who write purely to entertain, which is apparently a not unworthy motive in a world of entertainment-hungry people, may write about a 17th century English prostitute or a 20th century American race horse or a fairy princess. So far as I can remember, the so-called “literature of escape” has never been unpopular, and today there is a phenomenal demand for it. A number of young ladies, in particular, has discovered that there is great profit and fame to be gained in the writing of sexy tales of romance. Their books seem to impress favorably almost everyone except the book critics. This situation suggests that book critics are members of an obsolete profession still blindly faithful to the literary standards of a forgotten age. They stand in a class with fundamentalist ministers and a few other stubborn individualists as forlorn standard-bearers for a culture which was imported in chunks from Europe, never properly assimilated by the masses, and almost completely ignored by the population at large in the years since the first World War.

The traditions of literature as an art based on the study of contemporary conditions and characters in society has not entirely died out. Occasionally a young writer still comes to maturity with an inescapable urge to give his own honest reaction to and interpretation of the life he has observed in his society. For every ten “Forever Ambers,” perhaps, there is one “Winesburg, Ohio.” For every simple magazine of honest opinion there are perhaps twenty to thirty movie, detective, confession, and comic magazines. These proportions are not statistically accurate, of course, but they indicate closely enough the state of literature in America today.

There’s plenty to be said for following the popular taste. Even a moderately skillful writer can make a fortune if he lets his work be dictated by the demands of vulgarity and sensationalism, and hires a smart press agent. He will find Hollywood eating out of his hand. The polite disdain of a few unimportant critics is a small price to pay for such rewards. He has even satisfied the predominant American moral code which classifies right action in terms of profit and success.

The fact that I have not yet been won over to this theory of literature probably proves that I’m not capable of applying it successfully anyway. My sullenly superior attitude is no doubt a shield of vanity with which I contrive usually to hide my own incompetence and laziness even from myself. Without denying either of these charges, however, I maintain that if I do eventually write novels and stories they will be in the tradition of Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Lewis. If I do have a literary bent that’s the direction in which it turns.

To get back to the Army, which was mysteriously lost somewhere near the beginning of this discussion, I have found it disillusioning in terms of certain of my college concepts, but enormously revelatory of the type of society which produces the men who actually make up the Army. I don’t flatter myself that I have made any original discoveries. The originality in my work will have to come in my application of recognized generalities to specific characters. One thing in particular which I hope to learn quickly is how to prevent myself from spending an evening in dressing up banalities for no one’s edification.

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Reflections on Post-War Seattle, New Year’s 1946

[One more vignette of post-war Seattle, written on New Year’s 1946. As a 20-year resident of the city’s suburbs, I find many of my father’s observations of mid-1940s Seattle quite interesting (the aversion to umbrellas remains strong, but is no longer universal). It seems that the good citizens of Seattle were more than happy to make a profit off the returning troops, who for all their drinking and partying couldn’t — to my father’s mind — conquer the “loneliness of spirit” that they shared with most other Americans.]

January 1, 1946 (Seattle, WA)

Seattle is one of the northernmost of US cities, but, being within breezing distance of the Japanese current, its winters are not as severe as they are exasperating. It’s an unusual day when a little rain falls. On a usual day a lot of rain falls. No one really worries about getting wet, but accepts his daily soaking as a matter of course. I haven’t noticed an umbrella during ten days in Seattle.

Seattle, like most other American cities, is much less impressive as an old acquaintance than as a bustling stranger. As a port city, it sees more than its share of soldiers and sailors, and sees them only as short-time transients bent on having a good time. Entertainment is a booming business for Seattle people, and the boys in the service are never in any doubt that it is a business. They pay top prices for anything that’s offered to them, and most of what they get is second-rate, or worse. But the simple pressure of their numbers makes them powerless to protest, and most of them have enough money to give them a “what-the-hell” attitude. But among themselves they curse the city volubly.

No doubt the good people of Seattle do a little private cursing of the troops. The boys go into town to get drunk and look for girls. These are the things they’ve been dreaming about most avidly during the months overseas, and as they come plowing deep into Puget Sound on the ships, they begin to build Seattle up into the Mecca of their longings. The people of Seattle apparently don’t make much objection to the damage done their city’s morals by the uniformed pilgrims, but they probably grow quite weary of their streets reeling with drunken, brawling, flirting kids.

On First Avenue are the military trinket stores and the penny arcades. Most of the boys make a bee-line from the ships to the trinket stores to stock up on the stripes, patches, medals, buttons, theater ribbons, overseas “hershey bars,” caps, and hash marks which become the visible marks of glory. Then, after everything is sewed and pinned in place (often at the USO on Second Avenue), they launch off into the city to consume and conquer. Several hours and a good many dollars later they drift back to their ships and barracks to boast or bitch, according to their respective fortunes.

The only regular stage performance in Seattle is a dingy burlesque show at the Rivoli on First Avenue. (Sin, by the way, is arranged symbolically in Seattle. It parades in its rawest forms along First Avenue, which is the waterfront, becomes more refined on each succeeding avenue up the hill, and is sophisticated practically beyond recognition by the time one reaches Sixth Avenue.) The movie theatres, which carry such piquant names as the Blue Mouse and the Music Box, are mostly all owned by a Mr. John Hamrick. Mr. Hamrick had a very mediocre offering for the Christmas season. “The Stork Club,” featuring Betty Hutton and Barry Fitzgerald, was as good as anything going, and it was not good at all. But the theatres stay open all night, and draw the bulk of their late-evening patronage from boys on pass who have no other place to go.

There’s one thing about Seattle, and about any other American city, that most fellows can’t understand, because they’re products of the city way of life. They’ve learned to depend on the mechanical, commercialized dispensers of “pleasure,” which never really please. The human spirit has probably never before been more completely neglected than it is in America today. Even lovemaking has no significance beyond its physical thrills, and the most intimate moments are shared by fellows and girls after an evening’s, or even an hour’s, acquaintance. There is in almost every American a tremendous loneliness of spirit coupled with an ignorance of the means of spiritual fulfillment. Spending money is the most obvious opiate for his vast restlessness, and just now he has plenty of money. Probably during this New Year of 1946 Americans will spend more money to satisfy personal wants than ever before, and then come to the end of the year as dismally dissatisfied as ever.

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Knowledge versus Wisdom, and Faith in the Crosshairs

[In this long and “heavy” journal entry, my father starts by discussing the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, but then moves into an assessment of religion as a particular — and at-risk — form of wisdom. His attribution of the 1940s information explosion to the availability of high-speed printing and cheap paper seems incredibly quaint when viewed from our Internet-powered age of instant access to almost any “fact,” scholarly paper or book. If anything, however, the adage he cites “that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it,” seems more on target today than ever.

Later in the entry, my father explores the collision between intellectual speculation and inquiry and the institutionalized wisdom, or faith, of religion. This analysis is just one of the internal debates my father depicted in many of his early journal entries, as he sought to define and adopt a “personal faith” of his own.]

March 20, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

I think I remember it being said by someone who should know that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it. There is a certain charm in the facility of this statement, and perhaps a certain amount of truth in it. At any rate, it needs considerable dissection into its roots before it can have much meaning.

The profession of scholarly research, with its offspring of popularized writing, has reached a proportion in our day sufficient to keep the book and magazine markets flooded with discussions, analyses, expositions, and criticisms of the details of life and thought in every culture which has preceded our own. Probably this phenomenon is due to the development of high-speed printing, combined with the mass production of cheap paper, but the cause doesn’t interest me as much as the effect.

This research ranges all the way through the mechanic trades and arts to the religious beliefs and practices of former civilizations, and while one individual will usually be interested only in a small segment of the whole span, these studies are easily available to almost anyone with the interest and the time to consult them, and this availability is common knowledge. People today live in a house in which the back door is perpetually wide open on all that has gone before, and there is no selectivity in displaying this vista of the past. People no longer look back through the carefully-oriented lens of myth and tradition, but through the clear, indiscriminate glass of historical fact. Though the many histories written from a nationalist bias must modify this analogy, it is not particularly such works which I have in mind here, but rather the objective studies of scholars in the myriad fields now open to research.

Apparently, then, there has been a vast and accelerating increase to common knowledge in our era. The popular quiz programs on the radio attest to a mania for the acquisition of diverse and often unrelated items of information. But whether wisdom has decreased in proportion to this increase in knowledge is another question, if we mean by wisdom the ability of a human mind to correlate the facts of experience and of history into meaningful patterns which may serve as a reasonably dependable guide to future action. When a certain pattern of wisdom comes to dominate a whole community, it may be called a religion, or, at least, an ethical system, if the ceremonial and supernatural accoutrements usually associated with a religion are lacking. We see that most communities in the past have, each in itself, been dominated by one special religion or ethical system, accepted without question by the majority of its members, and, furthermore, denying the right of all rival religions or ethics. Catholicism, for instance, held a practically exclusive grip on the peoples of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It acted as a mold, determining the directional flow, within narrow bounds, of even the brilliant minds of the period. To all men it was both a discipline and a bond. It undoubtedly quickened the communal spirit, but it also bound society to the status quo by putting penalties on the speculative mind. The powerful predisposition to faith all but annihilated the habit of inquiry which had gained great strength in the classical civilizations. So if faith is equivalent to wisdom, the former faith-cultures have been wise far beyond our own, for faith and inquiry tend to exclude one another and ours is predominantly an inquiring culture, at least in those realms where faith has formerly held the upper hand; namely, in religion and ethics.

Even the Catholic church, which still adheres to the medieval insistence on the unity of faith, has many members who are beset with doubts. As for members of the Protestant sects, they have so long enjoyed the privilege of the individual interpretation of their faith that the discipline of communal faith has disintegrated in their churches to the vanishing point. There has probably never before in any civilization been so universal a disrespect for the exclusive claims to right which one faith makes over another. And no searching into religious faith, no reexamining of religious faith can hope to restore its former force in society, for the critical analysis of a faith is tantamount to an admission of its inadequacy under conditions of the present. If it filled the human need for faith, there would be no need to question or examine it. A living faith quite subconsciously determines the lines of intellectual development and material operation in the society of which it is the organic foundation; when a given faith must be submitted to objective study, it’s either dead or dying.

That there is a definite human need for faith is illustrated by the preoccupation of many of the best minds of our day with the formulation of a personal faith. First comes the feeling of estrangement from the traditional faiths of the past which are still artificially imposed on the majority of children at the same time that their secular schooling inculcates in them the rudimentary habits of inquiry and scientific skepticism, which, whatever their ultimate value, are consistent with the conditions of twentieth-century life. The average child, perhaps, comes to see the discrepancy between his imposed religious faith and his naturally-acquired habit of inquiry, but he pushes his discovery no further than the mediocre compromise which results in a dormant intellect and a sentimentalized faith. Those who are compelled to push on farther will almost inevitably run into a period of cynicism in which all values are questioned. Finally, the man whose creative impulses are thwarted by the sterility of cynicism, brings himself to the point of making a definite choice between scientific skepticism and traditional religious faith. It is now an exceptional case when the latter is not discarded in favor of the former. We are indeed a civilization between faiths, but not a civilization without faith, nor yet a civilization without wisdom. Widespread industrialization has long demanded a new faith, which has meant the spreading discredit and slow crumbling of the old faith, with all its giant reverberations in institutional life. Therein lies the high drama, both tragedy and comedy, of our times.

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American Fascists and the America First Movement

[This entry illustrates my father’s life-long omnivorous reading trait as well as his enduring skepticism of politicians and others who engaged in anti-democratic actions under the guise of “patriotism.” The book he references is Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, published in 1943 and written by John Roy Carlson, one of the pen names used by investigative journalist Avedis Boghos. The book, in part, explored the fascist, pro-Nazi leanings of many of the politicians who joined the America First organization, which lobbied to keep America from entering World War II. Once again, my father’s words reverberate with meaning for today’s polarized political landscape, where obstructionist right-wing politicians exhibit nothing but “contempt for the middle-of-the-road compromises of the democratic system.”]

May 16, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

Today I finished Under Cover. It was most surprising to me to find how deeply the Fascist philosophy has penetrated the minds of political big shots like Senators Nye, Wheeler, Taft, and other members of Congress, though I wasn’t unaware of their apparent leaning in that direction. Such men may not call themselves Fascists, but their inflated “patriotism” which makes “America First” a great ideal for them is the beginning phase of just such an unhealthy nationalism as has produced dictatorships in many countries.

Along with the extravagant concern for the power and purity of one’s own nation there comes a contempt for the middle-of-the-road compromises of the democratic system, a cynical disdain for the “mob,” and a distorted conception of the destiny of one’s own “race.” This last fallacy makes the persecution of the Jews, Negroes, and other relatively defenseless minorities the proper concern of those in power. No sensible democrat claims that such persecution is absent from American democracy. But he knows that the democratic philosophy makes it morally binding on all sincere citizens, whether in the government or out, to try and eliminate persecution and discrimination. He isn’t discouraged when democracy fails of complete fulfillment in his country, because he knows that it’s doing an immeasurably better job of maintaining human freedoms than are Fascism and Communism in other nations. He believes, too, that social conditions are gradually improving wherever democratic government is kept alive and healthy. So he’s willing to fight for his system wherever he sees it challenged, at home or abroad. 

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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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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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A School Teacher’s Life

[The following, a vignette about an elementary school teacher my father met at a USO dance, is typical of the profiles of people he regularly entered into his journals. This entry — the last in his fourth journal — provides a glimpse of a young woman’s career and family life, her approach to teaching and her unselfconscious prejudice. My father’s description of the teacher’s salary and class size also provides an interesting point of comparison to some current hot-button educational debates.]

February 7, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

Bernice Wildhaber is a thin blond girl of about 22. She lives in north St. Louis, and teaches fourth grade in grammar school. Ever since she was little, she wanted to be a teacher, and she never lost the ambition. For a while she thought of joining the WAC’s or the WAVE’s, but finally it seemed to her that teaching school was just as patriotic.

“Much more important in the long run,” I said.

She really loved teaching school. I wouldn’t be bored by hearing her tell about it, would I?

“No, not a bit. My father’s a school teacher, and maybe some day I’ll be one, too.”

Well, that was good. Most fellows ran the other way when they found out she was a school teacher. She had forty-five kids in her class, all of them Jewish youngsters. And they were the best bunch any teacher could wish for. Very clean and neat, and most all of them unusually bright. They didn’t misbehave at all. The only thing was that they loved to talk. They talked all the time…

I asked her if she hoped to go on to high-school teaching. O, no, she wanted to stay right where she was. She wasn’t smart enough to teach high school, and it was too much trouble to get a master’s degree.

She’d gone to teacher’s college right in St. Louis. Anyone who wanted to teach in St. Louis had to go there. But she was still technically a substitute teacher, getting paid by the day. So she could hardly ever afford to miss a day. That meant six dollars. None of the girls in her class had been given their appointments yet. She didn’t know why, except that there was a lot of trouble on the school board, and they’d changed over to a new system of appointing just about the time she’d started.

I asked her if she’d tell me how she went about teaching English grammar. It was the ancient traditional method, – anatomizing the parts of speech, drilling on the irregular verbs. Since she said that the kids seemed to enjoy this stuff, I didn’t tell her how much I’d hated it.

Instead I asked if she had them do any original writing. Yes, but not nearly as much as in the two previous grades, where they had to write a little story almost every day. She only had them do one about twice a month now. For one thing, she hated to correct the papers. That was one thing she hadn’t counted on before she started teaching. She figured that the papers would be fun for her…

Her whole family was working. Her father drove a bus, and had to get up every morning at three-thirty. He was done a little after noon time, and always slept for about three hours as soon as he got home. Then in the evening he went to bed at nine-thirty, and the house had to be quiet after that. Her father listened to all the commentators, unless there was some program the girls wanted to hear more, which was often. Her mother worked in a dress factory, and her sister, who was two years younger than she, was a stenographer.

She’d never had a real vacation, because every summer she felt she had to work. Last summer she’d put in several weeks at the Ordnance plant, – weighing and gauging fifty-caliber bullets. But it was terribly boring, and she did quit in time to take two weeks off. She was certainly glad to get back to school, though she hadn’t thought she would be when she finished in June.

This summer her father had told her she’d have to take a vacation, to gain some weight. She’d lost weight from worrying during the summers she was supervising playgrounds, and she hadn’t been able to gain it back. A while ago she had her father get her a case of beer, because she’d heard that a bottle of it every night would give her weight. But she hadn’t liked it at all, and after a doctor told her it wouldn’t do any good, she started taking vitamin pills instead.

When I told [her] that it was a funny thing, but I couldn’t remember a single one of my grade school teachers, she said it was almost the same with her, except she’d gone to a convent all the way through high school. There weren’t any teachers there, – just nuns. She skipped first the fourth, and then the seventh grades, so that by the time she started high school, she was two years younger than the rest of her class, and painfully aware of it. The girls had their own class clubs, but they wouldn’t admit any “skips.” When she was thirteen, though, she shot up practically to her present height. Things weren’t so bad after that.

After we began talking about teaching again, I supposed that they were studying the geography of some part of the world. Yes, they were just beginning the Belgian Congo tomorrow. They’d finished last week with Egypt and the Nile Valley. She’d been very pleased with a test she’d given them. Usually she wrote the answers on the board along with the questions, because they had so much trouble with them. But this time she’d given them ten blanks to fill in with things she’d especially stressed, and they did surprisingly well.

Did she ever attempt to tie in events of the war with places they were studying? No, no, she didn’t know enough about it to attempt doing that. Last week, though, one of her uncles, who had been to North Africa, came home on furlough, and she had him speak to the class, since by a coincidence they were studying the Sahara desert at that time…

I wondered if Negroes went to the same schools with white kids. Oh, no, they had their own schools, including three high schools. She wouldn’t be able to teach a class herself if there were Negro children in it. She wasn’t prejudiced. But she was sort of affectionate, and often she put her arm around different kids who came up to see her at the desk. And she couldn’t possibly do that with Negro children.

She’d been coming to the USO off and on for over a year now. It was really the nicest place the girls could go, even though there was an awful lot of red tape to getting on the list. She was glad to give me her address and phone number, and if I couldn’t see her again before I shipped out, well, to write to her, anyway.

I said I would.

[Followed by an entry dated 3/21/46: (But I never did)]

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Reflections on John Dos Passos’s “USA”

[Having just read John Dos Passos’s USA, my father reflected on the author’s depiction of society in the early 1900s, including the stagnation of the “propertied class” and the qualified “revolution” of the workers. My father appreciated Dos Passos’s ability to see both sides of the social debate, and my father generally strove to match this kind of balanced objectivity in his own observations and critiques. His analysis that the New Deal prevented, rather than caused, a revolution has meaning today in the context of the various federal efforts to mitigate the current recession’s effects. Unfortunately, it’s no easier today than in the past to counter criticism of the government’s efforts with a “things would have been much worse” defense of those efforts.]

January 26, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

…Yesterday I finished Dos Passos. In the last paragraph of the narrative, Mary French says, “Say, Rudy, if Ada Cohn calls up again, tell her I’m out of the office… I have too much to do to spend my time taking care of hysterical women on a day like this.” She put on her hat, collected her papers, and hurried over to the meeting of the committee.

When you know the situation and the characters, that paragraph sums up a lot of Dos Passos’ ideas and hopes. Ada Cohn is a rich Jewish girl, a dilettante musician. Mary French is a radical social worker. She and Ada become friends during college days at Vassar. The night before, they’d gone to a Greenwich village party given by Eveline Hutchins, a jaded member of the idle rich. Next morning the papers carry the story of Eveline’s suicide. That’s why Ada’s hysterical. Mary herself is terribly discouraged by the impending failure of the strike on which she’s working. But Mary, you see, has a cause to work for. No hysterics for her. She hurries off to a meeting of the strike committee. The year is about 1928.

That’s Dos Passos’ way of summing up what seemed to him the significant trends in the social history of the USA at that time. The rich propertied class had lost contact with creative living, was collapsing, stagnating; the “revolution” of the workers, on the other hand, was not strong enough to take over the state, as had happened in Russia, but the workers weren’t giving up.

If Dos Passos had been a professor, and written his book as a text, he might have called it The Radical Labor Movement In the United States 1900-1928. But he had more of a mind for people than for statistics, so he wrote as he did. He himself was on the radical side, but he saw more than the shortcomings of those on the other side of the tracks. He understood how faction and treachery within his own ranks had as much to do with the failure of the cause as did interference and persecution from the outside. Because of this objectivity, his work deserves a high rank as history, and powerfully drawn history. It burst far beyond the bounds of narrowly defensive propaganda put out by some “party-line” communists.

The conditions which Dos Passos describes, – the strikes, the beatings, the massacres, the official murder of civil liberties, – have never been part of my America. Yet I know that they happened, and still do happen. But to speak now of a revolution sounds ridiculous. The New Deal wasn’t a revolution. In fact, it probably prevented a revolution by restoring to the working people enough economic security to keep them from resorting to violence. But this security was largely restored through the channels of the existing industrial machine, and the owners of that machine remained in power.

Was this a triumph of the American democratic system? Have the men of property at last learned the responsibility of property? Can the unions settle peacefully their differences with the managers without the domination of both by government? And if government domination of both groups becomes necessary, can the real values of democratic society be maintained and strengthened?

Those are some very general questions for a liberal democrat today. I didn’t ask them to answer them here, because I don’t know the answers. To me now they’re like sign posts on the road.

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Conflicted Sentiments about Participating in the “Great War”

[My father’s perspectives about the war effort, about religion, about democracy and about politics continually mutated and evolved, so it would be a mistake to associate any point-in-time journal entry as a definitive statement about his life-long views. In this entry, he comes across as somewhat depressed and cynical — certainly with regard to a famous fighter pilot of the time, Eddie Rickenbacker, and his story of being saved from starvation by a seagull. In October 1942, Rickenbacker was a passenger on a B-17 which ran out of fuel and ditched in the open water of the Central Pacific.  On the eighth day adrift in a raft with the plane’s crew, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker’s head, he captured it, and it served both as a small meal for the survivors and as fishing bait. After 24 days adrift, the men were all rescued, and the seagull became a heaven-sent symbol for Rickenbacker, confirming his strong Christian faith. At the end of this entry, my father’s skill in prognostication proves a bit shaky; contrary to his closing statement, he never did marry Jeanne, despite their shared doubts about God.]

January 22, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

… And when they ask me Were you in the Great War, I shall answer Yes little children I was in the Great War. And when they ask Were you brave, I shall say No I was not brave at all and I thought the Great War was a hell of a way to be wasting my time, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Besides, I figured a substantial service record might help me later in a political way, even though I would know that it didn’t mean a damn thing. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever even get into politics, but it was one of those things that could happen.

But weren’t you proud to be fighting for the American Way of Life and democracy? No, I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t proud. I was ashamed when I met Negro boys, and knew I was worrying about if they thought I held something against them on account of their color, and I was angry when I heard Southern boys talk about Negroes as if they were animals. I was disgusted when I heard the radio announcers plugging War Bonds “to keep the materials of war moving to the front lines.” I was perplexed when I saw the railroadmen and the steelworkers threaten strikes, and Congress refuse to tax adequately, refuse to support subsidies, and the President refuse to forget the Fourth Term and politics. I was hopeful when Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill didn’t fail at Teheran, but I was apprehensive when the Polish border question festered and wouldn’t heal. I was disappointed when the little, insignificant men continued to stay in power in the Republican party. I was happy when letters came from my friends and from home. And I was lonely for the life at Middlebury, and for girls, – always lonely for girls. Yes, I was a lot of things in the Great War, but I wasn’t proud.

And they won’t ask me this, but some of them will wonder why I didn’t find religion in the Great War. Men are supposed to find God in times like war. Eddie Rickenbacker did, and God saved him from death in the Pacific wastes. (Of course, there were a lot of other fellows He didn’t save from the wastes of the Pacific, but they naturally couldn’t come back to stir up a fuss with their side of the story.) Eddie had the floor all to himself, and boy! did he get to feeling wonderful and full of loving kindness. He even went so far as to say that the Russians were fine people.

But I kept on thinking Eddie Rickenbacker sounded kind of silly, and I could almost scream whenever I heard about that goddam seagull.

Once in a while I’d say Well for christsakes I may as well make a stab at it, but nothing ever came of my momentary intentions, except maybe I’d go to Sunday chapel and get mad at different things the chaplain said.

When a letter came from Jeanne in which she said that she couldn’t see why a God was necessary, and wasn’t I surprised and shocked, I wrote back that I was surprised and delighted, and to myself I said that settled it, I’d marry Jeanne. (I’d already figured I’d marry her, anyway, but that settled it.)

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