“Miss Kayoko Nobutoki, a student of girl’s high school, Hiroshima Jazabuin, and a daughter of my church member, was taking rest with her friends beside the heavy fence of the Buddhist Temple. At the moment the atomic bomb was dropped, the fence fell upon them. They could not move a bit under such a heavy fence and then smoke entered into even a crack and choked their breath. One of the girls begun to sing Kimi ga yo, national anthem, and others followed in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them found a crack and struggled hard to get out. When she was taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how her friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing in chorus our national anthem. They were just 13 years old.
“Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor’s sake.”
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like. Mrs. Nakamura’s conception of it—and awe of it—was typical. “The atom bomb,” she would say when asked about it, “is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it was six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.” As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would add, “Shikata ga nai,” a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word “nichevo”: “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: “Da ist nichts zu machen. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase. “I see,” Dr. Sasaki once said, “that they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now. I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all.”
Father Kleinsorge and the other German Jesuit priests, who, as foreigners, could be expected to take a relatively detached view, often discussed the ethics of using the bomb. One of them, Father Siemes, who was out at Nagatsuka at the time of the attack, wrote in a report to the Holy See in Rome, “Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population. Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”
It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”
A NOTE BY JILL LEPORE
One summer evening in 1943, Orson Welles performed a New Yorker piece by E. B. White on CBS Radio, reading with a double bass what White had written with a clarinet. White had been asked by the Writers’ War Board to explain the meaning of democracy. “Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he began. “Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.” Living on a farm in Maine, White had been mailing his pieces to The New Yorker, pitching in, more than he wanted to pitch in, because Harold Ross had lost much of his staff to the war and also because White believed that the magazine had sometimes failed to say “things that seem to need saying.” (Ross said he was glad to have him, even “if only by the thimble-full.”) What needed saying White usually knew how to say. “Democracy,” he closed, “is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
Every war cleaves time. Before the war, The New Yorker was one kind of magazine; after, it was another. In the late thirties and into the forties, Ross’s reluctance to take an editorial position about the relationship between the United States and the Allied Forces had made the magazine seem muffled and aloof. “Tilley’s hat and butterfly return to plague us all,” White wrote, bitterly. If, in the end, the war brought the world into The New Yorker and carried The New Yorker to the world, it also changed how the magazine reported on Americans at home. The clock in McSorley’s seems hardly to have ticked between 1854, when the saloon opened, and 1940, when The New Yorker published Joseph Mitchell’s profile of it, but in an article by Mitchell that appeared in 1949, Caughnawaga Mohawks living in Brooklyn build bridges and skyscrapers out of iron and steel; on weekends, they watch television. “MARRIAGE BLAMED AS DIVORCE CAUSE,” a headline from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, was one of only a handful of bottom-of-column notices posted in the Ho Hum Department in a decade. As Ross explained to White in the summer of 1946, “These are not Ho Hum times.”
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Most of the following essays about the American scene offer one answer or another to the question the War Board asked in 1943: What is democracy? The answers in these essays are darker than White’s, and for one reason: in peacetime, the wartime defense of American democracy yielded to criticism of its failures. Democracy might be the score at the top of the ninth, but one suspects the game’s been rigged.
In “Letter from a Campaign Train,” Richard Rovere reports on the contest between Thomas Dewey’s 1948 presidential campaign, with its “junior-executive briskness,” and the “general dowdiness and good-natured slovenliness” of Truman’s. The difference between the two campaigns, Rovere writes, “is the difference between horsehair and foam rubber, between the coal-stove griddle and the pop-up toaster. Dewey is the pop-up toaster.” Lopsidedness is also the theme of the story Lillian Ross tells in “Symbol of All We Possess,” in which Ross rides to Atlantic City in a 1948 Pontiac sedan with Wanda Nalepa, a twenty-two-year-old registered nurse from the Bronx. She is competing in the Miss America Pageant. Miss New York State doesn’t stand a chance. She’s too short, she’s too skinny, and she can’t dance. Ross writes about her with a searing affection:
The contestants would be judged on four counts: appearance in a bathing suit, appearance in an evening gown, personality, and talent. Miss Nalepa was wondering about her talent. Her act, as she planned it, was going to consist of getting up in her nurse’s uniform and making a little speech about her nursing experience.
“I don’t know what else I can do to show I’ve got talent,” she said. “All I know how to do is give a good back rub.”
Rebecca West’s “Opera in Greenville,” the story of a trial held in South Carolina in 1947, ran to over thirty pages in the magazine. It is a masterpiece of restraint. Thirty-one white men stood trial for lynching Willie Earle, a young black man accused of robbing
and stabbing to death a white man. In the courtroom, the judge allows the defendants to sit with their families; West writes, of one man with his children, “During the recess, he spread his legs wide apart, picked up one or the other of the little girls under her armpits, and swung her back and forth between his knees.” The city’s blacks sit in the balcony. West peers at them: “Every day there went into court a number of colored men and women who were conspicuously handsome and fashionably dressed, and had resentment and the proud intention not to express it written all over them.” West starts her piece with a stream, ends it with a fever, and issues a verdict of her own about what the court’s ruling has done to every living soul in Greenville County, South Carolina, population 137,000: “These wretched people have been utterly betrayed.”
The war changed The New Yorker by making it more accountable to world affairs, but also by making it differently accountable to what was happening in the United States, including in places like a singularly hideous courthouse in South Carolina. Ross edited “Opera in Greenville” himself, something he didn’t often do. In January 1948, he wrote to West that there had been not a single lynching reported in the South in the six months since her piece had appeared. “We made the best of that one,” he told her. Democracy is a reporter in a courtroom, eyeing the balcony. Democracy is a terrible, terrible fight.
E. B. White
JULY 3, 1943
We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
Joseph Mitchell
APRIL 13, 1940 (ON MCSORLEY’S OLD ALE HOUSE)
McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in the city. In eighty-six years it has had four owners—an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter—and all of them have been opposed to change. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves—and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. The clientele is motley. It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck-drivers from Wanamaker’s, internes from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, clerks from the row of secondhand bookshops north of Astor Place, and men with tiny pensions who live in hotels on the Bowery but are above drinking in the bars on that street. The backbone of the clientele, however, is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling toward the place. Some of these veterans clearly remember John McSorley, the founder, who died in 1910 at the age of eighty-seven. They refer to him as Old John, and they like to sit in rickety armchairs around the big belly stove which heats the place, gnaw on the stems of their pipes, and talk about him.
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Old John was quirky. He was normally affable but was subject to spells of unaccountable surliness during which he would refuse to answer when spoken to. He went bald in early manhood and began wearing scraggly, patriarchal sideburns before he was forty. Many photographs of him are in existence, and it is obvious that he had a lot of unassumed dignity. He patterned his saloon after a public house he had known in Ireland and originally called it the Old House at Home; around 1908 the signboard blew down, and when he ordered a new one he changed the name to McSorley’s Old Ale House. That is still the official name; customers never have called it anything but McSorley’s. Old John believed it impossible for men to drink with tranquillity in the presence of women; there is a fine back room in the saloon, but for many years a sign was nailed on the street door, saying, “Notice. No Back Room in Here for Ladies.” In McSorley’s entire history, in fact, the only woman customer ever willingly admitted was an addled old peddler called Mother Fresh-Roasted, who claimed her husband died from the bite of a lizard in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and who went from saloon to saloon on the lower East Side for a couple of generations hawking peanuts, which she carried in her apron. On warm days, Old John would sell her an ale, and her esteem for him was such that she embroidered him a little American flag and gave it to him one Fourth of July; he had it framed and placed it on the wall above his brass-bound ale pump, and it is still there. When other women came in, Old John would hurry forward, make a bow, and say, “Madam, I’m sorry, but we don’t serve ladies.” This technique is still used.
In his time, Old John catered to the Irish and German workingmen—carpenters, tanners, bricklayers, slaughterhouse butchers, teamsters, and brewers—who populated the Seventh Street neighborhood, selling ale in pewter mugs at five cents a mug and putting out a free lunch inflexibly consisting of soda crackers, raw onions, and cheese; present-day customers are wont to complain that some of the cheese Old John laid out on opening night in 1854 is still there. Adjacent to the free lunch he kept a quart crock of tobacco and a rack of clay and corncob pipes—the purchase of an ale entitled a man to a smoke on the house; the rack still holds a few of the communal pipes. Old John was thrifty and was able to buy the tenement—it is five stories high and holds eight families—about ten years after he opened the saloon in it. He distrusted banks and always kept his money in a cast-iron safe; it still stands in the back room, but its doors are loose on their hinges and there is nothing in it but an accumulation of expired saloon licences and several McSorley heirlooms, including Old John’s straight razor. He lived with his family in a flat directly over the saloon and got up every morning at five; he walked to the Battery and back before breakfast, no matter what the weather. He unlocked the saloon at seven, swept it out himself, and spread sawdust on the floor. Until he became too feeble to manage a racing sulky, he always kept a horse and a nanny goat in a stable around the corner on St. Mark’s Place. He kept both animals in the same stall, believing, like many horse-lovers, that horses should have company at night. During the lull in the afternoon a stable-hand would lead the horse around to a hitching block in front of the saloon, and Old John, wearing his bar apron, would stand on the curb and groom the animal. A customer who wanted service would tap on the window and Old John would drop his currycomb, step inside, draw an ale, and return at once to the horse. On Sundays he entered sulky races on uptown highways.
From the time he was twenty until he was fifty-five, Old John drank steadily, but throughout the last thirty-two years of his life he did not take a drop, saying, “I’ve had my share.” Except for a few experimental months in 1905 or 1906, no spirits ever have been sold in McSorley’s; Old John maintained that the man never lived who needed a stronger drink than a mug of stock ale warmed on the hob of a stove. He was a big eater. Customarily, just before locking up for the night, he would grill himself a
three-pound T-bone, placing it on a coal shovel and holding it over a bed of oak coals in the back-room fireplace. He liked to fit a whole onion into the hollowed-out heel of a loaf of French bread and eat it as if it were an apple. He had an extraordinary appetite for onions, the stronger the better, and said that “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” was the motto of his saloon. About once a month during the winter he presided over an on-the-house beefsteak party in the back room, and late in life he was president of an organization of gluttons called the Honorable John McSorley Pickle, Baseball Nine, and Chowder Club, which held hot-rock clambakes in a picnic grove on North Brother Island in the East River. On the walls are a number of photographs taken at outings of the club, and in most of them the members are squatting around hogsheads of ale; except for the president, they all have drunken, slack-mouthed grins and their eyes look dazed. Old John had a bullfrog bass and enjoyed harmonizing with a choir of drunks. His favorite songs were “Muldoon, the Solid Man,” “Swim Out, You’re Over Your Head,” “Maggie Murphy’s Home,” and “Since the Soup House Moved Away.” These songs were by Harrigan and Hart, who were then called “the Gilbert and Sullivan of the U.S.A.” He had great respect for them and was pleased exceedingly when, in 1882, they made his saloon the scene of one of their slum comedies; it was called McSorley’s Inflation.
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