Army Pay Rises to $100 per Month, Warranted or Not

[This entry notes the “political extravagance” of a House bill authorizing a “substantial” pay raise for officers and enlisted men — from $78 to $100 per month in my father’s case. In his tongue-in-check reporting of this “economic blasphemy,” my father allows that he’ll happily accept the government’s largess, warranted or not. He also worriedly contemplates a potential return to Okinawa (an assignment that never materialized).]

April 18, 1946 (Fort Devens, MA)

It is very easy to declaim in an rage against political extravagances wherein public money is appropriated for the undeserved benefit of a special group, – easy, that is, until you find yourself a member of just such a group. A bill just passed by the House authorizes substantial pay raises for all officers and enlisted men in the armed forces. Speaking as one detached from the issue, I will say that ninety-nine percent of all officers and enlisted men are already getting paid more than they are worth. But it happens that I am not really detached. I’m in the Army, with a rating of technician, fourth-grade, and am slated by this bill for a raise in pay from 78 to 100 dollars a month. As a man of principle, I would protest against this economic blasphemy. I would point out that it would take a generous imagination to demonstrate that I have done a month’s productive labor during my last twelve in the service. My own candid conclusion is that my value to the people of the United States, whom I have supposedly been serving during that period, has been practically nil. Yet now the Congress is on the point of giving me a 25% raise, along with all the other jokers still in uniform. I pointed out that as a man of principle I would protest this infamy. As a GI, however, I will gladly accept the extra lettuce.

Of course, a man can claim that he deserves some compensation for mental anguish, even though his anguish may be of no particular benefit to anyone else. I am at present suffering an anguish which would probably bring a rather fancy price in the open market, in the sense that most people would be willing to pay good money to avoid having this particular anguish for themselves. I refer to the fact that I am apparently on the point of shipping back to Okinawa. Come on folks! Step right up! Who’d like to have a nine-month vacation with pay on Okinawa, with transportation both ways paid for by the government? Well, look at the people running. But they’re running with their backs to me, which I take as an indication that no one wants to go to Okinawa, not even those many poor souls who have never had the privilege of visiting that island before. And it’s only because I’ve been there before that I’m willing to offer my opportunity to some less fortunate sucker.

True, my orders don’t say that I’m going to Okinawa, – not yet. They just carry me as far as Fort Lawton in Seattle, and also provide for a seven-day pre-embarkation furlough. I’m not always as stupid as I am sometimes. The boys who stayed behind laughed when I left Okinawa last December. “You’ll be right back here next spring about the time we’re leaving for good,” they said. I laughed back and told them there wasn’t a chance of it. Now I expect to feel slightly embarrassed when I meet a bunch of the old SIAM boys embarking from Machinato Point, just as I am landing there.

Of course, I may ship to Japan.

And the Phillies may win the National League pennant.

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A Soldiers’ Bull Session: Capitalism versus Communism

[In this entry, my father recounts a late-night debate about politics and economics among the soldiers in his tent. Many of the comments reported touch on issues that remain hot-button topics today. They include the lamentation that “politics always seems to boil the scum to the top” and the fair observation that a Constitution “written over a hundred and fifty years ago for a little colony of thirteen states” might need some tweaking to remain relevant in the current America. If only the conservative “originalists” on the U.S. Supreme court could exhibit such common sense!)

September 29, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

I come back to the tent about eleven-thirty after an evening of bridge. The only light is at Fisher’s improvised work bench, where he sits with black-bearded head bent forward, puzzling over some piece of electrical equipment. But there are voices in the dark. Old Buck and Stan Graham are deep in a discussion of economics and politics. Right in this one tent we have concentrated the best bull-shooters in the whole platoon. Last night it was Army organization, and war responsibility. Tonight it’s communism versus capitalism. These guys are so serious that they can complete one of these discussions without once bringing in women or sex. Of course, they’re never completed in the sense that unanimous conclusions are arrived at. They die out either from the exhaustion of the participants, which is rare, or from the intercession of perverted individuals like Tom Pearson, who believes in going to sleep early because he can’t help waking up early in the morning.

The discussion tonight is even more hopelessly abstract than usual. “I’ve read, or, er, I’ve heard it said,” Buck says, “that capitalism is just the thing for a young country – “

“That’s right,” Stan breaks in, “it’s OK as long as she’s expanding, as long as there’s a frontier. But now the frontier is gone.”

“Yes. Yes.” Buck says. “That’s just what I mean. So now I think that this country is ready – er, really needs some kind of economic regulation.”

“Yeah,” Stan says, “and then we come to a situation where we’re advocating just the things we’ve been fighting this war to prevent.”

“Well,” Buck says, “I think we ought to have a group of economic experts study the situation, and then make an honest report to the people on just what has to be done to stop depressions.”

At this point I enter the discussion and explain that a large number of such studies have already been made, and the reports are available to the public for whatever they’re worth. But Buck says he’s never heard of them. Then I try to explain the dilemma that arises when anyone attempts to press economic sanity through the maze of American politics.

“Well,” says Buck, “it seems to me that if we could educate the people on those things…”

Here again I’m skeptical. I point out that good education demands exceptional teachers, and there aren’t enough exceptional teachers to go around.

“Yep,” Stan agrees, “you can’t get a good man to work for nothing, and that teaching’s one of the lowest-paid professions.”

Then Buck starts working around towards communism again. Joe Graham comes in and says that communism, without the dictatorship part, is the only solution.

“Sure,” I say, “but just take away Joe Stalin and the club over a man’s head, and see what happens to your communistic system.”

Buck has an idea of more “personal” government at the township level. “The township is a closeknit unit, and, with the right kind of supervision, there hadn’t ought to be a single person in it on direct relief.”

I don’t seem to agree with anything that Buck has put forward. “What about the huge cities?” I ask. “That’s where most of your unemployment is. And besides, local economic problems are only tiny segments of disorders that have to be considered on an international scope.”

Stan tries a new tack. “I don’t know why it is,” he says, “but politics always seems to boil the scum to the top. Now if we could have some kind of group down in Washington, and salaries high enough to attract good men, and let this group hold a whip hand over all the sonsabitching senators and representatives, maybe we’d get something done. If they didn’t do a good job, they’d just get their asses booted out of there…”

“And we get some guys just as bad in their places,” I say.

“And how would you know when they’re doing a good job?” Fisher asks.

“Well, you’ve got something there,” Stan admits. “Look, fellows, I’ll tell you what. Don’t you just think that a Constitution that was written over a hundred and fifty years ago for a little colony of thirteen states might be a little obsolete today?”

“You’re absolutely right!” Buck agrees. “Now if we could just make the right changes…”

“Listen,” T. J. Pearson breaks in with a weary voice, “there’s a bunch of guys in this tent you have to shake their asses to get them out of bed at seven in the morning for breakfast, and that starts talking politics at eleven-thirty at night. That’s the one thing that’s wrong with the American way of life.”

 

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Business-Government Imbalance Poses Potentially Fatal Risks

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

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

September 10, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Education for All, Balanced Budget or Not

[This lengthy entry — pared down from a much longer original — followed an evening of caroling by my father and his two siblings while home for the Christmas holiday. After meeting a young farmer among the carolers, my father went on to discuss his belief that all people should have access to the highest educational opportunities of which they’re capable. In this sentiment I see a foreshadowing of his eventual work in university administration and development. My father argues that, if our country is able to pay whatever the cost necessary to wage war, it can also pay the cost of offering the best educational opportunities to all its citizens, regardless of their economic circumstances.

As in the previous posting, my father states his opinion based on lessons learned during the Great Depression — i.e. the need for government spending to address pressing societal and economic needs, regardless of “such bogies of finance as the ‘balanced budget.'” Our country today faces many of the same challenges and, unfortunately, it seems that the no-taxes/cut-spending crowd is prevailing over those (most economists included) who warn that cutting back on stimulus spending too soon could stall, and possibly reverse, the halting economic growth we’ve begun to achieve. My father’s youthful idealism that America’s values were shifting to emphasize “social success” rather than “money success” has since been shown, repeatedly, to be wishful thinking.]

December 23, 1942 (Underhill, Vermont)

…At nine o’clock Kent and his wife arrived, and we proceeded to the main business of the evening. Most of the people who appeared to acknowledge our singing were old folks. They seemed genuinely pleased.

Kent is a young farmer, 23 years old. The local board had deferred him because he’s running one of the largest farms in the vicinity. There’s nothing deceptive in his nature. His face is pleasant, broad featured, Yankee; his body is big and strong, his hands massive. I suppose you’d call him raw-boned, a typical farm type. Bashfulness is a quality completely foreign to him. He was well-acquainted with me from the moment of shaking hands. Before I left him at midnight he had given me a frank appraisal of his fortunes and hopes…

I don’t envy Kent. He reminds me of Thoreau’s farmer who went through life carrying his farm on his back, a slave to his occupation. Kent isn’t degraded yet to this unhappy state, but the time may come. I just can’t see how he has much chance. His wife is a good kid, willing to work hard… he seems quite proud of her, partly because she’s an “out-of-state” girl, partly because she’s had an education…

…There is certainly a formidable barrier between the well-educated and the uneducated which can’t be melted down by simple appeals to humanitarianism. This doesn’t offer an excuse for snobbishness on the part of the well-educated. It does mean that the channels for communication between the two levels are considerably circumscribed. What a democratic state needs is an educational system which offers an opportunity for the maximum development of native talent (mental ability) in whatever economic level it appears. We should not be much concerned for the existence of these economic levels, so long as those at the bottom can earn enough to live without suffering. What we must avoid is the freezing of these levels. We know that exceptional minds appear at the bottom as well as at the top of the economic heap. The economic factors, however, have thus far been given far too much weight in determining what minds shall come to fruitful expression in the world. When genius is allowed to starve to death behind economic barriers, this is one of the most disastrous expenses that any society can shoulder. If the expenditure of money can build an educational system that will make such starvation or malformation of genius highly improbable, no sum will be too large to spend.

This was the point which was emphasized in that supplement to Fortune which I read in Burlington yesterday at the library. The National Economy, it was called. We have come traditionally to exalt money to a position where it becomes our master, instead of keeping it where it should be, in subjection as a slave to help us achieve social profits. We have too long been tyrannized into poverty and national weakness and unhappiness by such bogies of finance as the “balanced budget.” It’s taking a terrible war to break the delusion. We are finding out that we can spend just as much money as we need to preserve our national existence under the hammer blows of enemies who learned the same lesson several years before we did. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions our national debt runs into on the books, as long as we keep our national destiny in our own hands, – it doesn’t matter, if we apply the knowledge that we already have for the control of our financial system. This, of course, is the basic idea in the compensatory government spending theory of Keynes, Hansen, and their associates.

It is indeed, not only a new theory, but a new philosophy of economics, and marks the overall change from the last century’s focus on “money” success to this century’s focus on social success. It can’t be repeated too often that money is properly a tool, and not a tyrant, for men.

We do have the knowledge and the mechanical means now to assure every inhabitant of our country, and ultimately the world, freedom from economic insecurity. While this cannot be considered as the highest aim of man’s activity, it is essential to any permanent progress of man in his spiritual sphere. It is very important that economic security always be recognized as a means to a better life, and not as an end in itself, or as a guarantee of that better life. For life can be “better” only in a moral sense, and science, including economics, which we are using as a means to that better life, is in itself amoral. The Nazis are demonstrating that it can very well be used as a means to a worse life.

We don’t debase ourselves or jeopardize our ideals by studying our science as avidly as do the Germans. In fact, we criminally betray ourselves to destruction if we do not seize upon science for all it can show us about the waging of war and the building of the new world order. The significant difference comes if we use science as a weapon on the side of Christian morality. Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr. makes this point clear in an interesting exposition of the science of geopolitics in the Dec. 21^st issue of Life. We don’t damn ourselves by using what knowledge we can discover to make ourselves powerful, if we use our power to give our ideals of Christian morality expression in the lower but nonetheless necessary, level of economic life. The name of [Halford J.] MacKinder’s book on geopolitics was Democratic Ideals and Reality. He brought it out in England in 1918. Our trouble was that we wrote out a peace in which democratic ideals continued to be abstracted from reality.

What excites me now is that today there are a lot of men who know that we must not repeat this disastrous experience. Keats it was who maintained that the ideal can’t be separated from the real. Democratic ideals are just so much hot air until they are expressed as relationships of men to men, and men to goods in the marketplace.

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Capitalism’s Failings and Socialism’s Promise

[This entry gives some insight into my father’s post-Great Depression hope for “collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism.” Using as a starting point a lecture by Harry M. Fife, a Middlebury professor of economics from 1925-1950, my father writes about the exposed shortcomings of private business and the emerging potential of “public business.” It’s impossible to read this entry and its phrases — “general fabric of irresponsibility,” “rapacious self-interest,” “great spree of speculation” — without drawing parallels to the financial-market and mortgage manipulations that sparked our recent deep recession. It seems that the “corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism” of the 20s, 30’s and 40’s had some staying power. So did the ability of politicians and ideologues to demonize terms and concepts such as “socialism” and “welfare.” How quaint that my father could write: “No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits.” And how sad that this sentiment is so at odds with the reality of our present-day world.]

December 11, 1942 (Middlebury College)

Fife gave a swell lecture this morning. He traced through the several phases of capitalism from the “putting-out” period down to the recent, and not yet extinct corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism. This last fits in as both cause and effect of the present woes of the world. But we are advancing into the period of collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism. Please keep your thinking constructive, he said. Corporate organization is indispensable in our society. What we need to find out is how to keep the advantages of the corporation and get rid of its disadvantages.

Old Fife embodies the true spirit of our times better than any other prof that I have, not excepting Doc Cook. I’m going to ride high on that spirit not because I believe in following the crowd, but because I have no other choice, no other urge, but this. It seems to me that the moral issue is more clearly defined these days than it has been for a long time. Up until the depression of the 30’s there must have been room for a great deal of doubt in a young man’s mind if he asked himself just what his position in society should be. On the one hand there was the dominant business interest in private hands, apparently serving the community as well as anything available. On the other hand was the growing volume of public business, barely articulate, and yet containing dim possibilities of great future good in society. But a man would have had to be morally keen to have seen these possibilities, and courageous to invest his life work in bringing them to fruition.

This problem no long[er] exists. No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits. This, indeed, must have always seemed narrow justification to some businessmen, even when it was thickly glossed over with the ideal theory of the self-regulatory, free competitive system, automatically assuring the greatest good to the greatest number. Many intelligent men who were hand and glove in the system must have sometimes wondered, nonetheless, if things were actually so fine as the theory suggested. A lot of people knew that things were actually very bad, but they were the people on the bottom, the working masses, and their voice didn’t count. In the land of “free enterprise” it was obviously their own fault that they stayed down; – they lacked the brains, or the ability, or something. It must have been possible for many men on the top to reason this way with perfect sincerity.

But this ground got shakier all the time, especially after the first World War. The moral compromise involved became more and more obvious to men in high positions, and [as] a result they began to lose faith in the system to which they were allied. They lost their integrity. Out of this general fabric of irresponsibility, the whole tendency of too rapacious self-interest which had been inherent in the system for a long time, though to a large degree rationalized out of sight, now came into its own. We embarked on the great spree of speculation, with all the bars down. It was an out-and-out case of dog eat dog, at least among the men of power and influence in our society who were to a large degree responsible for decent social order and justice. In that mad decade this class abdicated its position as the recognized leading class of the nation.

So the choice today is no problem. I am on the side that has stepped into the breach, – the New Deal side, the socialist side. And it’s a good side to be on, because it’s fresh and new, with an untainted, if short, history, and a tremendous future full of work. We’re not out for revenge, but as Fife says, our job is to build an economy for welfare, and not for money profits.

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