Dealing with the Bomb, and an Unstable Post-War World

[After observing the friendliness of Japanese prisoners of war and noting that “practically all the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other,” my father makes his first journal entry about the arrival of atomic bombs on the world scene. He isn’t too optimistic about the prospects for the U.S., or the world at large, to do a good job of managing this new destructive power. Nor does he expect a victorious U.S. to seriously address the inequities among nations in the post-war period, despite the emergence of a modern world that “is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states.”]

December 6, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

… All along the roads here on Okinawa, as we go rumbling along on our truck, we pass Okinawan men, women and kids, trudging along singly or in groups, most of them carrying bundles of junk they’ve picked up from the dumps. It just takes a wave of the hand and a smile to get a wave and a smile in return. Some of them even make the first gesture.

Up at the dump where we took our load of scrap field wire there were some Jap PWs unloading trucks, little wiry fellows, very inoffensive-looking, who work rapidly and efficiently. On the way back we passed a truck with a couple of PW’s in the back. As we drew alongside, one of them saluted me smartly and grinned. “You know, Siggie,” I said, “practically all of the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Siggie said. “They all like to be liked.”

Not all of them, of course. A lot of people are like those Canadians I was just reading about in TIME who want to get all the Jap “rats” out of Canada, even though they may have been born there. For one reason or another, people are taught to hate certain groups of other people who happen to differ from them in color, religion, race, occupation, or social standing. But who promotes these hatreds, and why? Well, it looks like one group pitting itself against another; until a whole mythology of grievances and prejudices is built up to justify the often inhumane measures which each group practices to protect its own special interests, and finally there evolves a false morality based almost solely on power. And though this development is nothing new in human society, the new technology which produces the modern implements of power has brought us to the critical points where the largest groups, or nations, are capable of annihilating each other.

Critical people generally, and TIME magazine notably, in my limited reading of recent weeks, have been pointing up the revolutionary terror which the atomic bomb has let loose in the world. They also take the average people to task for failing to wake up and do something about it. Do what? Keep it an American secret? We sense that would be fine, if it were possible, but the troublesome fact arises that the secret is really no secret at all. Russia, we are told, will be able to produce atomic bombs in two to five years.

Well, then, how about releasing everything we know to an international commission, and leave it to the commission to control atomic research for the good of the world? To some people that makes a good deal of sense, and probably a good many people who don’t believe such beneficent control possible wish that it were. And still other people see the bomb simply as the culmination of man’s age-old, ironic lust for power, – ironic in the sense that he has been feverishly searching for the instrument which will assure his own destruction. And now he’s found it. So what the hell?

I confess that at the present time I’m pretty much of a mind with this third group. And though I recognize that such an attitude must be considered cynical by people who don’t share it, I don’t consider myself cynical for holding it. I like people, and I don’t normally enjoy seeing them get hurt. I can’t derive any satisfaction from seeing the German and Japanese people suffering the starvation and misery now which they so recently imposed upon other peoples. There was a time when I believed that somehow the common suffering of this war would lead men of all nations to put into practice what is almost universally admitted in theory, – that the modern world is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states. It may be too early to be disillusioned, but then, too, it may have been too late to hope.

My aunt Eva has for several years been trying to sell me on the Bahai group, which is but one of many groups propagating the old Christian faith in the brotherhood of man and its practical realization on earth. With the faith I am in complete accord, but of its realization I remain unconvinced. Human organization, which is always as much against something as it is for something, inevitably seems to corrupt no matter how noble its original purpose. The only true brotherhood of man occurs in the earliest years of infancy. As soon as I begin to talk and understand, I’m an American, and Hans is a German. “My country, right or wrong” expresses an attitude which honest and just people may often deplore, but which only the rarest of martyrs can ever deny. Even when one’s country is flagrantly wrong, treason remains a crime universally abhorred. But millions of men can be made to look upon murder as a virtue when the victim is an enemy of one’s country. The appeal to patriotism almost always drowns out the voice of conscience. Many Americans can feel perfectly righteous about insisting on raising their own already comfortable standard of living while millions of Europeans and Asiatics are facing a winter of freezing and starvation. Yet they would be unspeakably indignant and bitter if the scales were suddenly shifted to the opposite extreme. They can’t see how they are doing any wrong now, but if they had to change places, they would certainly feel that they were being wronged.

The funny thing is that though I understand all this, I don’t intend to do much of anything about it. I, too, look forward to enjoying the comforts of American life, even though I can’t partake of whatever further pleasure there may be in the feeling of self-righteousness.

The old cry of “Let’s set our own house in order first” will soon regain sufficient strength to kill our present feeble and fumbling attempts to set in order a world house in which our own country is but one of the rooms. We’ll go ahead with a lavish job of redecorating our own room, and then won’t we be surprised when it’s ruined by the rest of the house falling in on it!

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The Limits of Letting Public Opinion Drive Public Policy

 [In a long journal entry — close to 4,000 words — on July 22, 1945, my father opined about foreign policy, the imperative of the United States to engage in reconstruction, the downside of public opinion driving public policy, and a host of other topics. In this first excerpt from that entry, he notes the proclivity of the “everyman” American, Sam Jones, to worry more about a steak dinner today than a recurrence of world war 15 or 20 years into the future. My father’s comments about the need for political leaders willing to buck the pressure of uninformed public opinion seem apropos to the present day (as his journal writings often do). Another of his statements that remains true for our times: “…we easily persuaded ourselves that national good was necessarily universal good, and failed to perceive that certain of our cherished advantages were maintained directly or indirectly at the expense of other parts of the world.”]

July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

… Basically, these war years, with their extravagant spending of men and material, have outraged the practical “business sense” of the common American who carries on the national business, be he civilian or soldier. Right now, he’s getting angry about our large scale handouts to our Allies, and President Truman, his perfect representative, is apparently telling the boys at Potsdam that from now on it’s “put up or shut up.” This attitude is generally applauded, and rightly so, if we don’t let ourselves get talked or scared into “practical” deals which end by increasing, rather than diminishing, the various frictions still existing among the nations. But that’s a big IF, and will often call for national policy which demands present sacrifices as the investment in future security. UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration] presents such a situation now, and we don’t seem willing to go very far beyond a profession of good intentions. Exasperated, but well-fed Americans get the preference over starving Europeans. And later many Americans will become exasperated at these Europeans for embracing Communism after we’d gone to the trouble and expense of liberating them from Fascists totalitarianism. We’ll never know how quickly the sweets of liberation can pale on an empty stomach.

As a nation we’ll make these “mistakes” simply because a steak dinner today seems more important to Sam Jones and his family than another world war fifteen or twenty years from now. That doesn’t mean that Sam Jones is a bad or irresponsible man, but it would seem to mean that he’s a poor man to entrust with the shaping of American foreign policy. Yet Sam Jones, taken by the million, is public opinion, and we are told with authoritative finality that American foreign policy between these last two wars was increasingly isolationist and appeasing because public opinion would allow nothing else. “We knew what was coming,” many of our leading statesmen have said, “but we were powerless to act because of public opinion.” Of course, one seriously questions the omniscience of most of these bleating sheep, but at the same time one must admit a measure of truth in their argument. If important information was made available to the members of Congress, information which revealed the extreme danger of our position in an Axis dominated world, and if these men, reflecting the naturally limited viewpoint of their constituents, refused to believe in the significance of this information, refused, possibly for reasons of election strategy, to pass it on to their constituents, and thus left us dismally unprepared when the strike came, then our foreign policy set-up is certainly inadequate.

There is always pressure for various changes in any governmental system, and unimportant changes in both personnel and procedure are constantly being made. Over a period of years these minor changes may add up to a real change in political philosophy. This is evolutionary development, and has been a privilege of the American people since 1789, with the exception of the Civil War. At that time the revolutionary concept of the right of secession from the Union was advanced, and it was denied only at the cost of a bloody war.

The present war has been as much a Civil War as that war between the North and the South, but because it concerns a world union of “sovereign” nations rather than a continental union of “sovereign“ states, because the apparent national differences of the peoples involved have obscured the basic philosophical issue, we, as the victor side, are likely to bungle the victor’s responsibility of directing reconstruction even worse than we did after our Civil War, when the issues were relatively clearer. The German and Japanese totalitarian governments have been a mortal challenge to our own democratic institutions. This challenge could hardly have been made with such ferocity if democratic government had seemed as fair and advantageous to the rest of the world as it seemed to us. In other words, we easily persuaded ourselves that national good was necessarily universal good, and failed to perceive that certain of our cherished advantages were maintained directly or indirectly at the expense of other parts of the world. And to bring it closer home, we may as well admit that during the thirties the democratic way of life left several million Americans out in the cold of economic privation. Had these millions become a majority, or seized political power while still a minority, Americans might possibly have found themselves attempting the desperate cure for their ills which the Germans tried under Hitler….

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