Proclaim Liberty! Part 16

No. No despotism ever shrank from its "destiny" to destroy the freedom of other nations.

But the history of America will still create our destiny--and our destiny is _not_ to rule the world.

_Our destiny is to remain independent and the only way we can remain independent is by cooperation with all the other nations of the earth.

That is the only way for us to escape exclusive alliances, the pull of grandiose imperial schemes, the danger of alliances against us, and a tragic drift into the European war system which can destroy us._ There is an area of action in which nationality plays no part: like labor statistics--and this area is steadily growing; there is another area jealously guarded, the area of honor and tariffs and taxes. We have to mark out the parts of our lives which we can offer up to international supervision and the parts we cannot. It will surprise us to see that we can become more independent if we collaborate more.

"_Far as Human Eye Can See_"

I have no capacity to describe the world order after the war. If, as I have said, the war is fought by us in accordance with our national character, we will create a democratic relationship between the nations of the world; and our experience added to that of Britain and the USSR will tend toward a Federation of Commonwealths; the three great powers have arrived, by three separate experiences, at the idea of Federation; two of them are working out the problems of sovereign independent states within a union; the third, ourselves, worked the problem out long ago by expunging States Rights in theory and allowing a great deal in practise. As a result of our experience, we dogmatically a.s.sert that no Federation can be created without the ultimate extinction of independence; we may be right. But the thought persists that independence was wanted for the sake of liberty; that independence without security was the downfall of Czecho-Slovakia and France; and that we have cherished independence because the rest of the world did not cherish liberty as we did. Profoundly as I believe independence to be the key to American action, I can imagine the translation of the word into other terms; we are allied to Britain and the Netherlands and the Soviets today, we have accepted alien command of our troops and ships; we are supplying arms to the Soviets and building a naval base in Ecuador and have accepted an agreement by which Great Britain will have a word in the creation of the most cherished of our independent creations, the tariff. Independence, so absolute in origin, is like all absolutes, non-existent in fact; we know this in private life, for the man of "independent means" may depend on ten thousand people to pay him dividends; and only the mad are totally independent of human needs and duties.

We will not willingly give up our right to elect a President; we may allow the President to appoint an American member to an international commission to allocate East Indies rubber; in return for which we will allocate our wheat or cotton or motors--on the advice of other nations, but without bowing our neck to their rule. We have always accepted specific international interference in our affairs--the Alabama claims and the Oregon boundary and the successive troubles in Venezuela prove that our "sovereign right" to do what we please was never exercised without some respect for the opinion of mankind--and the strength of the British navy. Indeed recent events indicate that for generations our independence of action, the reality of independence, rested on our faith in the British fleet.

The moment we become realistic about our independence we will be able to collaborate effectively with other nations. We got a few lessons in realistic dealings in 1941--lend-lease and the trade for the naval bases were blunt, statesmanlike but most undiplomatic--moves to strengthen the British fleet, to extend our own area of safety, and to give us time against the threat of j.a.pan. They protected our independence, but they also compromised it; the British by any concession to j.a.pan might have weakened us; we took the risk, and our action was in effect an act of defensive war against Germany. Like Jefferson, buying Louisiana to protect us against any foreign power across the Mississippi, President Roosevelt acted under dire necessity and as Jefferson (not Roosevelt) put it, was not too deeply concerned with Const.i.tutionality. The situation in 1941 required not only the bases but the continued functioning of the British fleet in the Atlantic; and we got what we needed.

The economic agreement of 1942 is probably a greater invasion of our simon-pure independence of action; although it empowers a post-war President to decide how much of lend-lease was returned by valor in the field, it specifically binds us to alter our tariff if Britain can induce its Commonwealth of Nations to give up the system of "imperial preference". All our tariffs are horsetrades and the most-favored nation is a sweet device; but heretofore we have not bartered our tariffs in advance. Certainly a post-war economic union is in the wind; certainly we will accept it if it comes to us piecemeal, by agreements and joint-commissions and international resolutions which are not binding, but are accepted and become as routine as the law of copyright which once invaded our sacred national right to steal or the international postal union which gave us the right to send a letter to any country for five cents.

When we think of the future our minds are clouded by memory of the League; we are psychologically getting ready to accept or reject the League all over again. We are worried over the form--will it be Geneva again or will headquarters be in Washington; will Germany have a vote; will we have to go to war if the Supreme Council tells us to. These are important if we are actually going to reconst.i.tute the League; but if we are not, the only question is what we want the new world organization to do. In keeping with our political tradition we will pretend that we want it to do as little as possible and put upon it all the work we are too lazy to do ourselves; but even the minimum will be enough.

_Our Standing Offer_

Everything points to an economic council representing the free nations of the world; the lease-lend principles in time of peace may be invoked, as Harold Laski has suggested, to provide food and raw materials for less favored nations; and the need for "economic sanctions" will not be lost on the nation which supplied j.a.pan with sc.r.a.p-iron and oil for five years of aggression against China and then was repaid at Pearl Harbor.

If there is any wisdom--in the people or in their leaders--we will not have a formulated League to accept or reject; we will have a series of agreements (such as we have had for generations) covering more and more subjects, with more and more nations. We have drawn up treaties and agreements with twenty South American States, with forty-six nations united for liberty; we can draw up an agreement with Russia and Rumania and the Netherlands so that England and the Continent and China get oil; and another agreement may give us tungsten; we may have to take universal action to stop typhus--and no one will be an isolationist then. If the war ends by a series of uprisings we may be establishing temporary governments as part of our military strategy.

Slowly the form of international cooperation will be seen; by that time it will be familiar to us--and we will see that we have not lost our independence, but have gained our liberty.

We began the war with one weapon: liberty. If we fight the war well, we will begin the long peace with two: liberty and production. With them we will not need to rule the world; with them the world will be able to rule itself. All we have to do is to demonstrate the best use of the instruments--and to let others learn.

Before our part in the war began, it was often suggested that America would feed and clothe Europe, send medicine and machinery to China, and make itself generally the post-war stockpile of Democracy as it had been the a.r.s.enal and treasury during the war; and the monotonous uncrushing answer was about "the money". Realities of war have blown "the money" question into atoms; no sensible person pretends that there is a real equation between our production and money value; we can't in any sense "afford" bombers and battleships; if we stopped to ask where "the money" would come from, and if the question were actually relevant, we would have to stop the war.

Another actuality of war relieves us of the danger of being too generous--the actuality of rubber and tin and tungsten and all the other materials critical to production in peace time. Since we will have to rebuild our stocks of vital goods, our practical men will see to it that we get as well as give; we may send food to Greece and get rubber from Java, but on the books we will not be doing too badly.

Neither money nor the bogey of a balance of trade is going to decide our provisioning of Europe and Asia; the cold necessity of preventing revolution and typhus will force us to rebuild and re-energize; in the end, like all enlargements of the market, this will repay us. The rest of the world will know a great deal about ma.s.s production by the end of the war: Indians and Australians will be expert at interchangeable parts; but we will have the immeasurable advantage of our long experience on which the war has forced us to build a true productive system. We will jump years ahead of our schedule of increase and improvement because of the war; and we will be able to face any problem of production--if we want to, or have to. The choice between people's lives and the gold standard will have to be made again, as it was by many nations in the 1930's; only this time the choice is not without a threat. After wars, people are accustomed to bloodshed; they prefer it to starvation.

_Alternative to Prosperity_

The greatest invention of democracy is the wealth of the people. We discovered that wealth rested more firmly on prosperity than on poverty and the genius of our nation has gone into creating a well-to-do ma.s.s of citizens. Unfinished as the job is, we can start to demonstrate its principles to others. In return they may refrain from teaching us the principles of revolution.

Recovery and freedom are our concrete actual offer to the nations of Europe, counter to the offer of Hitler. Without this literal, concrete offer, we shall have to fight longer to defeat Hitler--and every added day costs us lives and money and strength inside ourselves which we need to create the new world; if we can defeat Hitler without the aim of liberty, our victory will be incomplete; we will not automatically emanc.i.p.ate France or Jugo-Slavia, or draw Rumania back into the orbit of free nations. Within each nation a powerful group profits by the n.a.z.i-system; within each a vast population, battered, disheartened, diseased, wants only the meanest security, one meal a day, shelter only from the bitter days, something more than a rag for clothing--and an end to the struggle; these are not heroes, they are old people, men and women struck down and beaten and starved so that they cannot rise, but can drag down those who attempt to rise. These we may save only by giving them food and forgetfulness. On the other side there are the young--carefully indoctrinated, worked over to believe that the offer of fascism is hard, but practical; it is an offer of slavery and security; whereas they are told the offer of the democratic countries is an hypocrisy and--worse still--cannot be made good. We have to face the disagreeable fact that the Balkan peasant in 1900 heard of universal suffrage and high wages in America, and his grandchildren know more about our sharecroppers and race riots and strike breakers than we do--because the Goebbels machine has played the dark side of our record a million times. The first year of the war was bound to show the "superiority" of the German production technique over ours, since Europe will not know that we are still at the beginning of actual production. The mind of Europe knows little good of us; we have not yet begun to undermine the fascist influence by words, and our acts are not yet planned. Even after Hitler is destroyed, we will have to act to overcome impotence in political action which years of n.a.z.i "conditioning" induces, and to compensate for the destruction of technical skill in the occupied areas. To us the end of the war is a wild moving picture of gay processions, swastikas demolished, prisons opened, and the governments-in-exile hailed at the frontiers; all of these things may happen, but the reality, after the parade, will be a grim business of re-making the flesh and the spirit of peoples. The children of Israel rejoiced and sang as they crossed the Red Sea; but they had been slaves. So Moses led them forty years in the wilderness, when he could have gone directly to the Promised Land in forty months, because he wanted a generation of slaves to die, and a generation of hardy freemen to be in full mature power.[A] The generation we will raise to power in the occupied countries will have great experience of tyranny, none of freedom; it will know all about our shortcomings and nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it will have seen the n.a.z.is at work and know nothing of new techniques of production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: I have not traveled the route; but General Sir Francis Younghusband who had, gave me the figures--and the motive.]

CHAPTER XIII

The Liberty Bell

Above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. We have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not forget--and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is only a word. We do not need to convert the world to a special form of political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us to help. We will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will underwrite. For in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man, freedom can destroy poverty.

We have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known before, not even to ourselves. For we have to create enough liberty to take up the shameful slack in our own country. We all know, indifferently, that people (somewhere--where was it?--wasn't there a movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. But we a.s.sume that Americans always have enough liberty. The Senate's committee report on the fascism of organized big-farming in California is a shock which Americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not understand that we have been weakened internally, as England was weakened by its distressed areas and its Malayan sn.o.bbery. We do not yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic system and calculated denials of liberty. We have denied liberty in hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have started the counter-infection of communism. Most of the shameful occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. Here are the facts in the California case, chosen because the doc.u.mentation comes from official sources:

"Unemployment, underemployment, disorganized and haphazard migrancy, lack of adequate wages or annual income, bad housing, insufficient education, little medical care, the great public burden of relief, the denial of civil liberties, riots, strife, corruption are all part and parcel of this autocratic system of labor relations that has for decades dominated California's agricultural industry."

The American people do not know that such things exist; no American orator has dared to say "except in three or four states, all men are equal in the eyes of the law"--or, "trial by jury is the right of every man except farm hands in California, who may be beaten at will."

When the Senate's report is repeated to us from j.a.panese short-wave we will call it propaganda--and it will be the terrible potent propaganda of truth. We will still call for "stern measures", if a laborer who has lost the rights of man on American soil does not go into battle with a pa.s.sion in his heart to die for liberty, and we will not understand that we have been at fault, because we have not created liberty. We have been living on borrowed liberty, not of our own making.

We have not seen that some of our "cherished liberties" are heirlooms, beautiful antiques, not usable in the shape they come to us. We have the right to publish--but we cannot afford to print a newspaper--so that we have to create a new freedom of the press. We have the right to keep a musket on the wall, but our enemies have ceased to prowl, the musket is an antique, and we need a new freedom to protect ourselves from officious bureaucrats. We have the right to a.s.semble, but men of one mind, men of one trade, live a thousand miles apart, so we need a new freedom to combine--and a new restriction on combination, too.

Freedom is always more dangerous than discipline, and the more complex our lives, the more dangerous is any freedom. This we know; we know that discipline and order are dangerous, too, because they cannot tolerate imperfection. A nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free, but it can exist 90% free, especially if the direction of life is toward freedom; that is what we have proved in 160 years. But a nation cannot exist 90% slave--or 90% regimented--because every degree of order multiplies the power of disorder. If a machine needs fifty meshed-in parts, for smooth operation, the failure of one part destroys forty-nine; if it needs five million, the failure of one part destroys five million.

That is the hope of success for our strategy against the strategy of "totality"; the n.a.z.is have surpa.s.sed the junkers by their disciplined initiative in the field, a genuine triumph; but we still do not know whether a whole people can be both disciplined and flexible; we have not yet seen the long-run effect of Hitler's long vituperation of Bolshevism, his treaty with Stalin, and his invasion of Russia--unless the weakening of n.a.z.i power, its failure to press success into victory at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad reflect a hesitation in the stupefied German mind, an incapacity to change direction.

Whether our dangers are greater than those of fascism may be proved in war; it remains for us to make the most of them, to transform danger into useful action. We have to increase freedom, because as freedom grows, it brings its own regulation and discipline; the dangers of liberty came to us only after we began to neglect it or suppress it; freedom itself is orderly, because it is a natural state of men, it is not chaos, it begins when the slave is set free and ends when the murderer destroys the freedom of others; between the tyrant and the anarchist lies the area of human freedom.

It is also the area of human cooperation, the condition of life in which man uses all of his capacities because he is not deprived of the right to work, by choice, with other men. In that area, freedom expands and is never destructive. The flowering of freedom in the past hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create liberty, they destroy only what is already dead.

I have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"--as if the freedom of man were a commodity; _and it is_. So long as we think of it as a great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we _make_ liberty it becomes a reality; the Declaration of Independence _made_ liberty, concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets.

Liberty, like love, has to be made; the pa.s.sion out of which love rises exists always, but people have to _make love_, or the pa.s.sion is betrayed; and the acts by which human beings make liberty are as fundamental as the act of s.e.xual intercourse by which love is made.

And as love recreates itself and has to be made, in order to live again, liberty has also to be re-created, or it dies out. Whatever lovers do affects the profound relation between them, for the pa.s.sion is complex; whatever we do affects our liberties, for freedom rises out of a thousand circ.u.mstances; and we have to be not only eternally vigilant, but eternally creative; we can no longer live on the liberty inherited from the great men who created liberty in the Declaration of Independence. All that quant.i.ty has been exhausted, stolen from us, misused; if we want to survive, we must begin to make liberty again and proclaim it throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof; and it shall be a jubilee unto them.