by Philip Wylie
Mollie sighed. "I know what you mean, Willie. Sometimes I get resigned. Like Anne Lindbergh. I just think this Nazi horror is the future--ugly and inescapable. "
"What about that?" someone else said.
Mr. Corinth smiled. "The wave of future? It's medieval! Barbaric! Every Nazi concept is one that has already been found wanting--and discarded. For instance, the ancient Hebrews tried conquest, city-smashing, salt-sowing, race snobbery, and race purity. The rest of the world never forgave them for it. The Nazis ape the old Jews in many ways. And the Germans will probably pay the same price for their egomania.
"Waves of the past keep rolling back, to threaten the precarious progress of mankind; the belief that such waves represent an inescapable future is the purest form of superstition. Superstition's strong stuff. But it does not understand progress, and so, will not accept it. Naziism isn't the wave of the future, Mollie. It's that old black superstitious curse rolled up again. It may, indeed, roll over you and me. If it does, then men will have to emerge again from it and start all over. As they have had to do before. You see, we're all superstitious."
" I'm not," Mollie said. "Not a bit."
"Oh, yes, you are. You're not superstitious about cats and ladders, maybe. You know that water is hydrogen and oxygen, and whatnot. But you're superstitious about--
well, say, sex and love. Being a spinster. Mr. Wilson is superstitious about the New Deal.
Jimmie, here, a very enlightened guy, is superstitious about his personal, private behavior. You see, our ideals, as we call them, are apt to be prejudices, or mere notions."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Mollie said.
"Well, take an ideal. Take decency--since I've been haranguing Jimmie about it recently. We all want to be decent. Try to be. Well, for one thing, decency changes. What was decent in Elizabeth's court is indecent now. What we print in advertisements would have been shameful in that court. Decency is a human notion that isn't even stable. And truth pays no attention to it--ever. If you think a particular truth is indecent, and examine it, you will find either that your own attitude is inconsistent with fact, or else that a human fault was at the bottom of the indecent truth. So, you can change your attitude--if that was the error--or go to work on the fault--if that's your inclination. But in the latter case you have to know it was a fault--which is a big order. Because what's right for one person is wrong for another, and what's decent in one situation is indecent in another.
" Every fact, every truth, depends upon some broader truth beneath it; and you can chase back the whole concept of decency to the point where you see that its existence in our heads is a matter of expediency, entirely. Every ideal is an expedient, at bottom. The man with the noblest expedients has the noblest life. Even mathematics is an expedient system. Beneath each system is a truer math. Under the geometry of Euclid lies that of Einstein. Under that, still another, broader, truer system, which Einstein himself is trying to discover. The life of the human animal is a conflict. The life of the human soul is a search. For truth. That's all evolution is--figures growing more aware, fighting forever toward still further awareness, with every means at their disposal. Are you really so surprised that the fight breaks out on the low levels of war, when so many people these days are so distracted from their fundamental purposes?"
Mr. Wilson said scornfully, "You preach a good sermon, Corinth."
"And you're a heretic," the old man laughed. "I believe in people."
"So do I. And if men like you would quit perplexing and inflaming them, we could get somewhere with America."
The old man's lips twitched a little. "Mmmm. You're getting us well along toward the slave status of a second-rate nation governed by the Nazi supermen. They really intend to do it, you know. That--or ruin us. I just happen to prefer ruin. You can rebuild where the plant is wrecked. Getting the people out of chains is harder. After all, only those who have no self-respect are afraid to die."
Mr. Wilson scowled. "Haven't you got it backwards! Isn't it easier to be an alarmist when there's no grave danger than it is to keep your feet on the ground?"
"That's an error all you plantigrade chaps make! It's a hell of a lot easier to keep your feet on the ground and do nothing risky, Wilson, than it is to pull 'em out of the mud and start doing a job that involves--or may involve--blood and toil and tears and a God-awful sea of sweat."
"You sound like Willkie," Mr. Wilson said bitterly.
"What's the matter with Willkie?"
"What was the matter with Benedict Arnold?"
"He was a traitor to his country," Mr. Corinth said amiably.
"In my opinion, Willkie betrayed his party, his country, himself, and the dignity of being a man!"
"Because he was loyal to the truth?"
"Because he sold himself out to Roosevelt."
Mr. Corinth scratched his head. "I don't get it. I do remember, though, Wilson, the last election. I recall you out haranguing the state with your customary cold eloquence. I remember you in the parade--and I remember when Willkie stopped here. You were damned near as hoarse as he was, at the time! I must confess, I didn't think much then of the frog-voiced prophet of your party. I believed he was going to undo the things that Roosevelt did for his countrymen because they had to be done. The expedient things.
There's nothing wrong with expediency, as I was saying, as long as the underlying motive for it is okay. I thought Willkie lacked it. Anyway, Wilson, he wasn't deceiving you about foreign policy at that time, was he? He said he was for aiding England, didn't he? He told you he was against Hitler, didn't he? And he hasn't changed, has he? He went over there and saw for himself, in spite of the bombings, didn't he? Have you been in England lately? Do you pretend to talk with authority about England? Well, Willkie does pretend to--and he has the right. He still disagrees with the New Deal, and says so with brilliance and violence, doesn't he? Just what the devil has he betrayed?"
"He was supposed," said Mr. Wilson acidly, "to be a Republican. The Republican party is the opposition party. Willkie's thrown in with everything the Democrats are doing--every main thing."
"The main thing they're trying to do is beat Hitler. You think he should be against it?"
"I am sure of it."
"F or Hitler?"
"Certainly not!"
"For what, then?"
"For America! A well-defended, independent, standing-alone America."
"There you go!" Mr. Corinth shook his head. "Wendell Willkie decided--and Roosevelt decided, and about two thirds of the people of America have decided--that there's no such thing. That there will be no such thing, until the last Nazi has been written off. We aren't to blame for the Nazis, you say. I say we are, indirectly--but even that doesn't matter. We aren't to blame for microbes, but we fight 'em with the lives of our doctors and laboratory technicians. We aren't to blame for hurricanes, but we get ready for 'em. We aren't to blame for fires started by lightning, but we spend a lot on fire departments. If a gorilla was disemboweling the man next door and had his eye on me, I'd worry. I'd call the cops and get a hatchet, anyhow. I'd even set fire to my garage, if I thought it would drive the gorilla off. I think that Mr. Willkie is worried about the gorilla next door. As a matter of fact, from being very dubious about Mr. Willkie--due to some of the gentlemen in your political party, and not wishing to start here an argument about the gentlemen in my own--I have become a great admirer of Mr. Willkie. I like him. He warms me. I trust him. I believe he is bright. I doubt if Franklin Roosevelt runs for a fourth term, in spite of your little jokes, and I would like the opportunity to elect this Willkie fellow."
"Politically," said Mr. Wilson, "he has committed suicide."
"Politically," Mr. Corinth answered sharply, " you have. You--and the professional ironheads you've carried around. The Republican party in these United Sates is a chain-jangling ghost, a crusty anachronism, a mold-worshiping luster after the grave. Willkie may find a new body for it. Me, I'm sick of inexpert management of business. I
have as big a business as you have and I know what I'm talking about. I'm sick of loud-mouthed amateurs trying to regulate affairs they don't understand. I don't like the administration attitude toward labor. I don't think the laboring men like it themselves. I don't like John Lewis and I never did think Greene was worth the powder it would take to blow him away. I don't believe great undemocratic organizations should be allowed to flourish within democratic countries. I think labor unions ought to have to turn in the same reports corporations do. I think churches should, too, for that matter. I think that the leaders of labor are mostly self-appointed, because the laws governing unions aren't like the laws governing the rest of the affairs of the nation. I don't like self-appointed leaders anywhere. As a matter of fact, I don't even like men with too-bushy eyebrows. But I do like Willkie."
"When this war is over," Mr. Wilson answered, "you'll see! You'll see America turn once more against war and against Europe--"
"Damn it! There you are! Postulating the course of future events on the last World War! Can't you numbskulls ever realize that this isn't a repetition of the last war? It may be, in a sense, a continuation of that war. I think it is. But, as such, it's continuing simply because it never was finished the last time. Roosevelt isn't Wilson. You Republicans can't count on this war ending in an armistice and an economically nude Germany and a virtually untouched, unharmed American public that is anxious to forget trouble and have fun. It won't end that way. It can't. You won't be able to get up a national reaction that'll slap a Harding into the White House and put the pork and the spoils in the hands of you, or anybody else. After Roosevelt's third term there may be another war president. Willkie would be my reformed idea of a good one. After that president there might be still another war president. Might go on ten, fifteen years. Why don't you fellows think of what might happen for once--instead of what you 'wish would happen? Instead of forcing yourself to believe that what's coming will be a replica of events a quarter of a century ago? What's going on, Wilson, is a world-wide attempt to shift those old events. The Germans are trying to go on to the win they barely missed then. The English are trying to lick a menace that came back stronger, after being knocked down once. The Americans are about to get into the same fracas. And it's going to continue, this time, until somebody--us or them--gets whipped to zero. Zero. None of your business deal armistices. None of your negotiated truces. None of your international diplomatic maneuvers. You guys aren't in the saddle any more--and you don't know it. Wall Street isn't running things. Money isn't running things. The people are. Willkie's got a lot of people for him--millions on millions--and, my friend, any man who has the millions he has is still in politics!"
"Suppose," said Mr. Wilson, "you're wrong? Suppose the war does peter out.
Suppose it has to end in a deal? I think it will."
"No. As long as it was about money, living space, raw materials, empire-envy--
things, in other words--it could end in a deal. It's not, now. It's about something you can't make deals over. Something that's a lot more forceful than political boundaries or money."
"What?"
"It's about--hate. Just hate, Wilson. The hate of millions upon millions for the eighty million who have undertaken to betray, kill, and enslave them. Every Pole who lost his woman, every Czech with a tortured relative or friend, every Italian whose Mussolini has brought him to shame and hunger, every red Russian, every tormented Dutchman, every bleeding Belgian, every indignant citizen inside the sickly failure that is France--every one of these millions hates, night and day, with a hatred that we in America don't yet know anything about.
There are men by the million who have sworn on their lives that, when the time comes, they will take knives and firebrands and avenge the butchery they know with a butchery so appalling that the memory of it will instill centuries of dread for conquest in those who are left. These men mean this. They will not forget. They are living for this alone.
"The people of Germany can feel, burning all around them, the circle of fire which--if they lose--will close in upon them and scald even their children without mercy.
That is why they will carry on to inhuman length. Not to do so would be to face inhumanity. And the gravest part of this thing--this thing that had to come alive in men when the monster notion of force was expanded to its uttermost size--the most dire index of this cauterizing horror against horror is the hatred of the English.
"You can't make deals with that thing, Wilson. It has to run its course, like an incurable disease. It isn't good for mankind, but the thing that gave rise to it was worse, because it was wholly wanton. Hate is the natural reaction to wantonness, the ultimate distillation of the passions of responsible people for those who will be responsible for nothing. Now, lighting up in the world--in China for the mutilating laps, the yellow rapists, the sackers of Nanking, and elsewhere for the mud-faced Huns--like the yellow glow of a sun too hot to bear, is this hatred.
"The Germans under Hitler have done a frightful thing; they are Frankensteins and their monster grows against them, day by day. In ten years--or, if they succeed, in even a thousand--it will be big enough to consume all of them. You can't buy hatred, Wilson. When it exists, you can't buy it off, either. Real hatred--the elemental force these Nazis have created--is as sacred to the hater as love. It is the same thing as love, Wilson."
The banker said nothing.
Mr. Corinth cleared his throat. "All over America, beginning many years ago, were the small, brave voices of alarm. We called them 'militarists' in the early days.
'Jingoes.' Get ready, they said. Stop the Japs in Manchuria. Stop Ethiopia. Don't let the Germans reoccupy the Rhineland. On and on the voices went, repeating the warning--to a nation that was dedicated to peace, prosperity, and an undefined asinine thing they called
'normalcy.' The voices rose as the crimes increased. Bigger navy, they said. Put the boondoggle money in rearmament. They were right. We were wrong.
"We filled our magazines with wishful advertisements for peace. War, we said, was murder. War, we told ourselves, was a money game. An economic matter. And, while we insisted all war could be prevented by negotiation, we also refused to sit at a table for any negotiation--thereby exhibiting the essential flaw in our own lulling argument. On went the voices. Nations fell. At Munich, America relaxed, as did Britain, with an eloquent sigh. Peace was assured. Hitler was a barrier against Communism--and no more. In the sigh was a note of humiliation--a decent people had been 'sold,' but the price was worth the gain. Anyway--it cost America nothing. The Paul Reveres kept riding, though. Poland next, they said. The Balkans. And then France."
Mr. Corinth looked around at the faces. A few conversations had started at the other end of the room. Jimmie was sitting with his eyes shut, frowning. Mr. Wilson lay back in his chair, staring scornfully down his nose. The others kept making little motions, as if they wished to interrupt the old man. But his voice plunged ahead of them before their arguments could crystallize; he spoke with such assurance that many of his listeners--even those who stopped a while and went away--were evidently persuaded of his point for the time they listened. They would go back, for the most part, to their convenient views, when the memory of what they had heard became dimmer. The old man paused as if he were trying to summon some sort of idea, some point or topic, which would rivet his attitude irrevocably onto their brains.
"When France fell--fell so fast--a lot of Americans were frightened. By a lot, I merely mean a relatively large number. Most Americans think France is a dirty, remote, semi-civilized country where a second-rate people converses mainly about sexual perversions in an incomprehensible language. Even the majority of veterans who have been there think that. So its fall didn't impress the national opinion much. The common people still thought one marine could lick a panzer division.
"But history, if future history is to be written in English, will talk about the Paul Reveres of this recent age. At the head of them will be Roosevelt--who saw and understood.
Next will come Willkie. And, after that, a few hundred men and women. A few hundred--if America survives the coming years-will be responsible! Maybe it's always a few hundred--who save things. They were all sorts of people, these few.
Reporters who had watched the sinister crusade set fire to the sullen Germans. A statesman here and there--a very few statesmen--who, like Churchill, had seen the misshapen things to come. Some scientists and refugees, a handful of college presidents, a few Jews, a few editors and publishers, by God's grace, and a number of writers. If you think I mean Walter Winchell among 'em--I mean Walter Winchell. His rabid memoranda may have a bigger place in history than you think. The realist often looks shabby to the reactionary--and always survives his social superior in the annals. William Allen White, and Pierre van Paassen, Van Loon, Sinclair Lewis, John Gunther, William Bullitt, Henry Luce, and so on. You could name 'em all, if you've read anything except the propaganda of your own crowd. Different sorts of people. Dorothy Thompson and Thomas Mann and his kids. Pearson and Allen and Clapper and Alsop and Kintner. They wrote. They published. They formed committees.
"Do you think that's all they did, Wilson? Do you know what has opened the eyes of your fellow Americans? These people. They met in New York and Washington and Chicago and Miami and every big city. They formed, not two or three, but thousands of groups. And they were not interested in trying to sell the American people a notion--as you are. They were interested, very simply, in trying to put before their fellow citizens the facts of what was happening. They talked till dawn. They lectured; they begged the microphones. They beat their typewriters when they could barely sit up straight enough.
They made their living somehow, ran up bills, raced across the nation at their own expense-and they did not preach, like you. They said to all the people that they could reach: Here's what's going on; make up your own mind.
