The Political Preface

The two issues look towards the common end we as a nation have faced—as green shoots face the sun—since the dawn of our history: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Both issues imply the same means—self-disciplined loyalty to our free, still developing institutions.

It has taken the tragedies of the wars abroad, the fate of other democracies, once hopeful and upstanding like our own, cut down before our eyes, to simplify and clarify in this way the political issues of 1940. The danger in slackness, greed, and internal strife has been made so plain that no American can have failed to see it. Where labor demands more than a country’s economy will bear, where business men [sic] put private trade balances above public security, where factional feuds sap the national strength, where plain citizens evade plain responsibility, we now know what can happen. We have read these things in letters of blood on the changing map of Europe.

We are all, therefore, conscious in a new sense of the necessity, as the world stands to-day, of narrowing by intelligence and fairness our gaps between class and class, section and section. We are learning a new lesson about the worth of achieving and maintaining a table basis of good will. As we study the record on preparedness of the radical group in France and of the conservative group in Britain, we are reminded that wisdom does not reside in any one party. Nor does justice. Nor patriotism. Republicans or Democrats, we cannot trust our parties to be wiser or better than we make them.

We are reminded once more of the importance of debate. Upon the many unsolved problems we have on our hands—still on our hands after generations of effort—in our social and political life, we are far from agreed. Happily, we are voters in a country where disagreements can be aired and difficult matters searched by argument. We should be foolish not to make the most of this opportunity. Nothing can be healthier for the body politic than periodic popular debate on the questions that concern us all equally—so long as the issues presented are real not specious, and so long as the debaters are honest, thoughtful, and fair-minded, with the general welfare rather than the exclusive welfare or party, or a clan, or a section as their aim.

Four years ago, we should have said there was no such word as Blitzkrieg. We did not dream that a modern belligerent would be no respecter of even the strictest neutrals. We expected no great shift in relations between dictatorships that had always represented themselves as diametrically opposed to each other. We had not yet heard of the Fifth Column. We had never seriously considered wars across the oceans which would necessitate in their midst a Pan-American conference with regard to European possessions lying close to our borders. We were still unaware of the changing relations between sea power and air power. All these things we have seen now, and we know that they mean for us, as for others, new tasks in a new world.

Naturally, the war with its disclosure of novel techniques, novel potentialities of strategy in time and space, has perplexed and shaken us. Shocked by its events, we have been divided as to what to do about it—how to formulate or apply our policy. But we have come to an unusual state of unity on one point. We are generally agreed that we must build, man, and watch our own ramparts.

We are generally agreed that we must make the most of our resources and of our respite from external trouble to put ourselves into the best possible condition for defense against any possible hostile force. Here there are difficult problems of production to solve—problems which will entail difficult co-operation between labor and industry, and (what may be even harder for both groups) an unaccustomed amount of government direction for both. There are also, of course, complicated technological problems, which will tax the skill of craftsmen, scientists, and administrators. There are upsetting problems of personnel. I have myself been in favor of selective conscription and of a registration of all active citizens as the best means of preparing against the possibility of a defensive struggle of the type we now know modern warfare to be—a business which requires vast equipment and vast numbers of workers of all sorts behind the lines, if soldiers are to have a fighting chance when a need to fight comes.

Here, we realize, there is room for debate, and often enough there is educational profit in debate, for audiences as well as speakers. In view of the speed of events in the present world, it should hardly be necessary to add a caution against prolonging talk beyond reasonable limits.

We realize, also, that the defense measures already enacted will be hard on our purses. But we are not disposed to be niggardly. Our common concern is that the money shall be well spent; and that, too, must mean plenty of straightforward discussion by experts of different parties.

We know that in the years, particularly the months, just ahead our agriculture must be kept on a sound productive basis. Man does not live by bread alone but he cannot live without bread. And it may be necessary for us to share our own stocks, eventually, with nations less well supplied. In the new total war, food is a powerful military weapon, like every other essential in the national economy. In the new totalitarian régimes, in peace time, food is a powerful political weapon—its production and distribution tightly controlled by the government. With these facts before us, and with the impoverished condition of a large part of the earth to consider, it is not going to be easy to pursue a policy in this regard which will be at the same time to our own best interests and to those of the world at large. Again, we shall have to discuss the agricultural issues freely and from all sides.

There is one danger this year against which we should especially warn ourselves as citizens preparing to cast our ballots. That is the neglect of political issues in our neighborhoods. In the coming election, we shall have to vote for local and state officials as well as for men who are to represent us in Washington. Their records and words, like Mr. Roosevelt’s and Mr. Wilkie’s, should be studied and weighed. It is a natural tendency in these days of spectacular events in Europe or Asia to be entirely absorbed in discussions of world news and national policy as the news bears upon it. If we were to become so absorbed, we should play directly into the hands of our worst ward bosses. Vigilance in local affairs is fundamental in American democracy. They deserve as much attention as the grand strategy of the nation. Rural or urban, our communities will be no wiser and no better than we make them.

Wisdom, like the charity and the discipline indispensable to all human living, begins at home—though its lines go out to the ends of the earth. Wisdom and charity and self-discipline, the utmost that each citizen can give, were never so sorely needed as they are to-day, in our country and our world.