by Gwen Bristow
Letting his cane drop between his knees, Kessler rested his elbow on the table and regarded Dick thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke.
“No, Dick, I don’t think you’re silly not to know. We who are older than you ought to be wiser, but sometimes we feel we don’t know any more than you do. I’ll try to tell you how it looks to me. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Go ahead,” said Dick. He added with an embarrassed grin, “I guess I’ve been talking a lot. But now I’m listening.”
Kessler turned his cane under his hand and looked at it, then raised his eyes again.
“Dick, the sweep of history doesn’t take much account of individuals. That’s hard for us to realize, because we are individuals and we can’t think except in terms of ourselves. But suppose you could stand aside and look at the current of six thousand years.”
“Holy smoke,” said Dick.
“It is difficult. Just at the moment you aren’t seeing anything but today. You’re seeing the persecutions in Germany, and the Japs using their prisoners for bayonet practice, and you are revolted, you want to kill them thoroughly and fast.”
“You’re damn right I do.”
“But suppose you were watching all of recorded history at once. If you were, you would notice that there was a time when nobody was revolted by such conduct. It was taken for granted in the ordinary course of things.”
“Wait a minute. Is that right?”
“Certainly. You’ve studied ancient history, only like most schoolboys you memorized the dates and forgot them, and didn’t think much about its actually having happened to human beings no different from you. But you know, for instance, that the Babylonian kings flayed their enemies alive. Flay—that means peel the skin off, in strips. They did it for no reason but the pleasure of doing it. Nobody was shocked. In fact, they were proud of it—the reason we know about it is that they left drawings on their monuments boasting of it. And you know it was the accepted practice to sell the people of conquered countries into slavery. Nobody questioned its being right or wrong.”
Dick nodded. “Sure, now that you say that, I do remember.”
“And when the ancients weren’t busy with a war, they were no better. You know how the pyramids were built, by millions of slaves who were quite literally worked to death, in order to feed the vanity of some preposterous nincompoop who happened to have been born in a palace. Nobody questioned that either. It never occurred to them that the slaves who built the pyramids were human beings just like the kings and queens whose bodies were going to be in them.”
“I guess it didn’t,” Dick acknowledged. “But Mr. Kessler, what’s that got to do with us?”
“A great deal, Dick. Have you ever thought about how very recently it did occur to anybody that human beings were human beings, no matter where you found them? It’s hard to make a man like you understand what a strange new idea that is. We’re all likely to assume that what we take for granted, everybody else takes for granted too. You see, you know a laborer living in a cabin is not necessarily inferior to an aristocrat living in a mansion, because you grew up with the story of Lincoln.” Kessler leaned forward speaking slowly. “It’s hard for you to understand that as recently as a hundred years ago men were still writing in the English language that So-and-so came to a bad end because he bought a book and concerned himself ‘with subjects too complex for the mind of a peasant.’ Or that such a statement provoked no comment, because it was generally accepted as true.”
“That peasants didn’t have minds?” Dick asked with a puzzled frown.
“They generally took it for granted,” Kessler answered, “that the minds of peasants were fundamentally different from those of aristocrats—that the difference between ignorant laborers and cultured ladies and gentlemen was not the result of education, but an inherent difference in the way they were made. One of the favorite subjects of old stories is the duke’s child who was lost in infancy and adopted by a shepherd, but who grew up finer than his supposed brothers and sisters because he had noble blood in his veins.”
Dick began to chuckle. “Gee, Mr. Kessler, I don’t know why you limit that tripe to olden times. Some people believe it this very minute.”
“Do you believe it, Dick?”
“Of course not,” Dick said scornfully. “Lincoln isn’t the only poor boy who made good in this country. But you know—or maybe you don’t know, being a foreigner—that there are still a lot of legends going around about Lincoln’s father having been some Virginia planter, because such a great man must have had ‘good blood’ in him.”
Without saying whether or not he had ever heard this explanation of Lincoln’s excellence, Kessler reminded him, his mouth quivering with amusement, “Even Shakespeare hasn’t escaped the suggestion that if the courtier Bacon didn’t write the plays, some other courtier must have wandered into Stratford nine months before Shakespeare was born. We have a great talent for finding reasons to believe what we want to believe, Dick. The rich and powerful want to believe in their right to be rich and powerful, so they justify it by saying they are inherently superior to the poor and lowly. So when somebody born poor and lowly proves himself to be as good as they are, they explain it by some accidental infusion of blood or influence from their own ranks. Then everybody’s happy except the rest of the poor and lowly, who can’t talk back anyway. What do you think about it, Dick?”
Dick considered. “Well, some people are stupider than others, that’s a fact. Aren’t they?” he exclaimed, and waited for confirmation.
“Certainly. But go on. I want to know what you think.”
“But they aren’t stupid because they’re poor, I’m sure of that. Take our class at school. We’ve got some first-class dopes from some mighty good families, and a couple of the brightest fellows—” he hesitated an instant—“are Negroes. Mr. Kessler, what do you think about Negroes?”
“What do you think?” asked Kessler.
“I think they’re all right!” Dick retorted, almost defiantly. “Aren’t they?”
“‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’” Kessler quoted smiling.
“That’s what I think!” Dick said in relief. “But you’d better not say that around some people.”
“Why not, Dick? If you don’t say it, and act on it, what are you fighting for?”
“Wait a minute,” exclaimed Dick. “I don’t get it. Maybe I’m slow. Let’s go back. We were talking about Babylon, and people being skinned alive and sold into slavery and nobody minding, and the pyramids and everybody’s thinking it was all right for a thousand slaves to be worked to death to please one king, and people just lately thinking aristocrats and peasants were born different like human beings and apes. And then about white people thinking they’re superior to Negroes. And now we’re back to the war. We’ve gone pretty deep, haven’t we? Do you mean we’re no better than the Babylonians?”
“No, Dick, I mean we’re a great deal better than the Babylonians. The very fact that you and I are sitting here talking like this proves we have come a long way.” He smiled at his listener. “For example—you’re a very fortunate young man, you know.”
“Am I?” Dick asked with artless astonishment.
“Why yes. You’ve had all the advantages your civilization can give you. Which means that in the United States you occupy a position like that of a prince in Babylon.”
“Holy cats,” said Dick.
“And no prince in Babylon ever sat down as a matter of course to say that the people born in the cabins of Babylon were quite as good as he was, and as entitled as himself to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Certainly if any of the princes did, he left us no record of it. All they ever thought worth writing about was how they made slaves of anybody they could lay hands on, and made them build monuments and temples to prove the superiority of their overlords. No, Dick, we’ve gone a long way. But we’ve taken
every step of it through blood and torture and hell, and we’re in this war because we haven’t gone as far as we’ll have to go before we get peace.”
“Go on. I’m listening. I don’t think I ever listened so hard in my life.”
“If you look at the sweep of history,” Kessler went on, “you’ll notice that there are certain currents that appear as almost invisible little ripples, and they grow, and move forward, and finally push away everything in their path. Some of these are minor alterations in social customs, others are tremendous new philosophies that overturn nations and change the lives of millions. Every one of them has the same course. It starts as a ludicrous notion that gets no attention but occasional jokes, it grows until it’s called an attack on law and order and revealed religion, and at last, sometimes after a revolution or a war, it becomes the normal way of thinking and everybody says, ‘I told you so, I knew it all the time.’”
“Like what, for instance?” asked Dick, still puzzled.
“Let’s take some small examples—they’re easier to see. What about the revolution in bathing suits?”
Dick started to laugh. “You do think of the damnedest things,” he commented.
“You’re not old enough,” continued Kessler, laughing too, “to remember when men’s swimming suits had shirts with sleeves to them, or when women went into the water wearing corsets and petticoats, but you must have seen pictures. Anybody who suggested anything different was a fool. Everybody knew a man would get sick if he exposed his body unprotected to the summer sun. And as for women, everybody knew their muscles were too weak for them to stand up without whalebones to support them.”
“Honestly?” Dick exclaimed. He laughed incredulously, and Kessler laughed too, thinking of Dick’s lean sunburnt body and the strong young figures of Cherry and her friends.
“Honestly,” Kessler assured him. “So naturally, only a lunatic would think of any change. At last when a few lunatics did begin to adopt scantier suits, the suits were called indecent, contrary to Scripture, an insult to womanhood and a threat to the home. The scantier the suits got the more the uproar increased.”
Dick found this very funny. “Of all things,” he commented.
Kessler continued, “However, if you’ve noticed, uproar against a new idea, and laws to prevent anybody’s accepting it, nearly always can be regarded as a signal that the new idea is just about to be taken for granted.”
“You mean that? Why?”
“Why, as long as nobody thinks of trying to do some particular thing, why go to a lot of trouble to prohibit their doing it? There’s no law to prevent the citizens of Beverly Hills from climbing up to hang their laundry on the telephone wires.”
Dick nodded slowly. “Say, wait a minute. You know, I believe your idea is true. Wait a minute, let me think.” He scowled, his mind fumbling among the scraps of his knowledge. “The anti-evolution laws were like that, weren’t they? I mean, they didn’t start making laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution until everybody was about to take it for granted.”
Kessler nodded. “They were like that. So were the old church dignitaries, threatening to put Galileo on the rack unless he’d stop saying the earth moved around the sun. It didn’t occur to them to insist that the earth was the center of the universe until just before everybody was about to stop believing that it was.”
“I’ve often wondered,” said Dick, “why the old dopes didn’t get some telescopes and go out and see what moved around what before they did anything about it.”
“Why Dick,” said Kessler, laughing again, “you don’t notice Hitler asking for scientific tests to show that Nordic blonds are superior to Jews, or the Japanese trying to prove their descent from the sun-goddess, or the white-supremacy school of Americans favoring intelligence tests for themselves in competition with Negroes. Hell hath no fury like a fanatic asked to find a reason for what he’s doing. He simply wants to do it, and generally he wants to do it because he observes, often unconsciously, that something new is coming into existence and he doesn’t like it, and he’s going out with fire and sword to hold it back.”
“But it comes into existence anyway?” Dick asked eagerly.
“Yes, Dick, it does. When a new idea is about to be born, nothing under heaven can stop it. Sometimes the fire-and-sword opponents can put it off a generation or two. Jefferson did lose his fight to get slavery out of this country, you remember. It was one of his hardest defeats. But looking back on those days, we moderns can see that even in Jefferson’s time slavery was doomed and no power on earth could have kept it there much longer. Incidentally, you might remember that the proponents of slavery didn’t go to war to keep it until a time when machinery was making it not only morally wrong but economically impossible. It would have gone without a war, conquered by tractors and push-buttons. When a particular change is on the way, not even a war can do more than delay it; sometimes as in the case of American slavery the war speeds it up, because the side of the future destroys the side of the past.”
“And sometimes,” Dick suggested thoughtfully, “the side of the past destroys the side of the future?”
“Yes, as the Persians destroyed the Greeks at Thermopylae. But they never did succeed in establishing Oriental despotism in Greece, because while Greek democracy was a long way from what we call democracy now, it was still the side of the future. We’re up against something of the same sort today.”
Dick nodded, thought a moment, and asked, “What would you call this current that’s coming in now?”
“We call it by a lot of high-sounding names—the Four Freedoms, the dignity of the individual, postwar security. But essentially it’s the idea that nobody is born with a natural right to beat up anybody else and take over the products of his labor. It’s the idea that everybody—not merely the persons of your own family, or your own race, or your own nation, but everybody—should be allowed to develop whatever brains he was born with and do whatever sort of work he’s capable of doing. That’s the new idea, the one you and I believe in. Our opponents are fighting to re-establish the past.”
“Gee, don’t stop!” Dick exclaimed when Kessler paused. “Just how do you mean—re-establish the past?”
“Well, as the Nazis worked it out in Germany, and as the Japanese have set it up too, it’s the resurrection of feudalism. The Nazis’ purpose is a feudalism modernized by having the great industrial corporations take the ruling place that used to be held by the great landed estates. Those not born to power are to work as servants of the rich, regardless of what intelligence and energy they might be born with, just as in the Middle Ages the peasants served the lords, regardless of the fact that a peasant might be brighter, more honest and more excellent in every way than his lordship. Is that clear?”
“Holy smoke, Mr. Kessler—but that won’t work! It doesn’t make sense in these days—it won’t work.”
“It did work for a long time,” Kessler reminded him.
“But that was years ago,” Dick protested. “You can’t do that to people now. They’re too smart. They won’t take it.”
“No, they won’t take it. There’s your answer. And there’s the war.”
Leaning on the back of his chair, Dick studied the wall in front of him. “Do those bums really think they can get away with that?” he asked after a moment.
“Of course they do. If they didn’t think so they wouldn’t be fighting for it.” Kessler regarded him almost apologetically. “I know it sounds absurd to you, living in a country where every child is taught that his chance to rise in the world depends on what he can do, and not on his family’s social position.”
Shrugging, Dick gave Kessler a faintly cynical glance. “That’s the idea, Mr. Kessler, but don’t fool yourself that it always works. Being a foreigner, maybe you don’t know it, but it’s not true that all Americans have a chance. I know they’re supposed to, and they ought to, but they don’t.
”
“Why no, they don’t, Dick.” Kessler smiled at him earnestly. “I never said there weren’t any backward thinkers in this country, did I? Or that there weren’t any liberal-minded persons in the Axis countries. But the prevailing ideal of the United States is individual freedom, and that is not the prevailing ideal in Germany or Italy or Japan. Your ideals in this country are better than you are—what would be the use of them if they weren’t?”
Dick frowned, thought, and nodded. “I get it. You mean it’s like what the boss always told us kids—if a fellow tries to do the right thing he doesn’t always do it, but he does better than if he wasn’t trying. You mean it’s like that with countries.”
“Exactly. Don’t get too discouraged about your country, Dick. The United States has a standard it’s trying to live up to—of course you haven’t reached what you’re aiming at, but you’re closer than you used to be. Look back and you can see the idea coming—slowly, painfully, cruelly, but always on the march. The American Revolution was part of it and the French Revolution another part. They went as far as they could, but not as far as the idea was destined to go. The American Revolution was a war for liberty, but it didn’t finish the fight—haven’t you ever read about the howls that went up in this country, long after the Revolution, at the suggestion of free public schools for all children?”
