Plans and the People
For twelve years this spinning earth has carried a burden of war. In most of these years it has carried the burden of depression as well. Millions upon millions of young people have grown up in a world where two great words were depression and war.
Some time in these bitter years--some time in the past few months--the world changed. It is becoming a world anticipating and planning for peace. A generation haunted by depression and war has begun to plan for a future where both will be impossible. In every country the masses of plain people have their own plans for what they want to do after the victory is won. Some of them are reading books and articles. Most of them are talking about the postwar world in their own language. They are the world's two billion people, and in the broad sweep of history, as they struggle to gain what they want, their hopes and their works outweigh the promises of leaders and all the plans of the planners.
Old & Ordinary. The world that has been carrying its burden of war around the sun has carried also the daily routines of the old and ordinary life of these plain people. Before the furnace heat of the Indian spring, in this pre-monsoon season, the 110,000,000 Indian farmers wait in their countless villages for the southwest wind to bring the rains of June. One-sixth of the earth's people, with their 225 languages, their 2,300 castes and 39 provinces, are living through their ancient order of life, not touching the 44,000,000 untouchables, not harming the sacred humpback cattle, not marrying outside their caste, not permitting the shadow of a European or an outcaste to fall upon their persons or their food.
In China, in the rich Red Basin of the Yangtze, the old wooden water gates and the interlocking channels of the 2,200-year-old irrigation system, installed a few years after Alexander invaded India, are still working this month. In Argentina on these hot midsummer days the crowds from Buenos Aires are swarming to the playground of Mar del Plata, to gamble in the biggest casino in the world. The earth that has been carrying war around the sun has carried as well the work and the relaxations, the moviegoing, horse racing, kiteflying, card-playing, visiting, talking, worshiping life of man.
Depression touched everyone, and conquest rolled over 600,000,000 people, but the old continuing rhythms pulsed on, the cycles of the seasons, the plowing and planting, the teaching and learning, the hopes, the dreams, the thoughts, the desires and achievements, the poetry, the loves, the prayers, the ceremonies, the grand visions and the humble faiths of the people God made, so many of.
New & Hopeful. There is no date to mark the moment when plans for the future rose against the tragic present. The mind's anniversaries are personal. Historians can set a date for Newton's discoveries, but not for the epoch that began when millions acknowledged their truth. Children who were ten when the Japanese shelled the barracks at Mukden are 22 now. Against a darker background than their parents ever knew, their first loves and their first jobs began; their play ended and their work and their fighting started.
In every great crisis of history there is a common impulse that moves among great masses of people at the same moment and guides their actions with a finality that is beyond the ordering of governments. There was such a time when millions of Europeans of all faiths and nationalities moved to the New World in a great tidal wave of humanity. There was such a time when the West was settled and thousands of emigrants swept over the Oregon Trail.
There was such a movement of mankind --greater than either of these--that began in August 1937, when 30,000,000 Chinese left Canton, Hangkow, Tientsin, the cities along the coast and the villages near the invader. They moved from the fertile country of the northeast--10,000,000 of them--and from the southern and central coastal provinces--20,000,000 more. They walked 800 miles and more across the canyoned plateaus and jagged mountains and the plains, or poled sampans up the rivers when the tugs broke down, moved 77 colleges and universities inland and the machinery for 472 factories, to build a new China in the heart of Asia that had mothered Oriental civilization in its beginning 5,000 years ago.
Now, akin to these great migrations, there is a movement of the mind of man. The plans for the postwar world are beginning to take shape. The current of thought is beginning to move--slowly, heavily, quakingly--as ice breaks up in the northern rivers under the first warm winds of spring. The news of the postwar world was once news of planners, politicians, theoreticians. It is becoming news of the hopes of plain people all over the globe.
In All Countries. To many of the world's plain people, hope has been buried as deeply as their dead. War has meant plagues, riots in the darkness of conquered countries, firing squads, assassins, brutality, murder, the seeping away of moral integrity, the surrender to sensations, the canceling of standards that had been fixed in social conduct and exemplified in human lives.
Throughout the world 7,000,000 refugees wandered blindly. In Poland in the first months of German conquest the conquered were killed at the rate of 10,000 a month, 300 a day, 14 an hour. In Leningrad alone hundreds of thousands have died of starvation and disease. In Athens a hundred thousand more--one in every seven --have starved to death.
In Australia the people are agreed on the main thing they want after the war: a home of their own. They want a "fair and square go" for the workingman, liberty, jobs, and freedom of movement. Looking backwards on life in the dripping jungle of Buna, on days in the yellow kunai grass and slimy swamps, on Japs crouching in jungle-covered nests, on death in the rivers, in the trees, in the air, in Jap bunkers, a soldier could say, "That's all I want out of this --a home and a wife and kids and all the rest of it."
In Argentina long trains of grey stock cars are chuffing into the terminals, loaded with beef and mutton from the brown seared grasslands of the pampas, stocking up meat faster than the British ships along the wharves can take it away. Eight million tons of wheat and 3,000,000 tons of linseed cram the new elevators of Buenos Aires, Puerto Nuevo, Rosario. The warehouses are filled with hides and wool. There they say what they want after the war: something better for the plain people of the world. Better education, more books, social justice, freedom to come and go, more shipping, the growth of home industries, lower prices, more confidence, better behaved capitalists, domestic peace, freedom from hatred, more tourists, freedom to study and travel, cheaper stockings, easier land ownership, greater spiritual tranquility, the nationalization of public services, Christian socialism, less Russian influence, the breaking up of big estates, no more compulsory military training, more security, more cultural independence, the universal equality of man.
In China the idea of universal brotherhood is not new; it is innate, says Chiang
Kaishek, in the catholic nature of Chinese thought. It is in the heritage of a people "ardent with desire to rebuild their country," a desire with the force of "a tidal wave which will absorb the energies of our people for a century. . . ." It is as clear and tangible as the potential power of the Yangtze, the Great River, that roars through the gorges below the city, falling 16,000 feet from the Kunlun Ranges, while the millions who live beside it work through their brief years in ignorance of the power and light it might bring them.
The peasant children know what they would do if they had the money: "Mai niu jou!--buy beef!" In a land where 320,000,000 have never heard a radio, read a newspaper, or seen a movie, the plans of the plain people remain what they were: to own land or to own a business. The Chinese officials are working on a master plan of reconstruction in which individual careers will interlock with a nourishing, trading, building, postwar career for the nation. They are talking of the roads that must be built, of the 100,000 miles of railroads New China will need. They know what they want after the war. To go home. Back to the coastal cities, back to good coastal meat and fruit with their rice, to good schools for their children, to business, low prices, trade.
Officials and plain people alike, they are talking about how hard it is to make a living working for wages during inflation--and about trading possibilities after the war. They are talking about the money that can be made in watches, in printing supplies, chickens, clothing, handcarts, in smuggling medicine through the Japanese lines--and about the money that can be made in the future that will mean for the little people a chance to get ahead.
In Britain they want an end to the ruddy blackout. They want to turn on all the lights, raise the curtains, open the windows, get out the old car. They have the perennial British skepticism about all big plans: the Beveridge plan, the Keynes plan, the work of the planning boards, the schemes for creating a good life merely by bringing about a higher standard of living. Yet they have a strong and groping hope that peace will somehow not be cast in the broken mold of the past. The English, pent up in their island for three years, tied down by war jobs, by wartime travel restrictions, want to travel. They want to go to Paris. They want Paris hats, a cottage in the country, children, lower salaries for big executives, more security, better chances for young men, better housing, a federal union in Europe to make travel easier, less blowing of their own trumpets by Americans, holidays, contentment, a month's sleep. They know what they want in government--sanity. Principled politics. "I want a government that will say: you have been running your business for 30 years and obviously you know more about it than we do, so carry on."
Treasury of Hope. In the twelfth year of war in China, the fourth year of war in Europe, one year after Pearl Harbor, a traveler from Mars or Japan could see that in this sprawling, devastated world each U.S. factory and laboratory counted for many times its prewar strength, that each U.S. workman, technician and scientist had grown in stature as a citizen of the world. For, to face the postwar world, the U.S. had:
ENOUGH FACTORIES. In the 1,299 days since Germany invaded Poland, the U.S. has added to its industrial plant a third of its original capacity--it had made additions in three and a half years comparable to the combined industrial capacity that all the rest of the world had built in the 180 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
ENOUGH FOODSTUFFS. The U.S. and Canadian wheat reserve, now nearing 1,500,000,000 bushels, is great enough to provide half a loaf of bread every day for a year, for every man, woman and child from Gibraltar to Leningrad, Norway to Greece, even if all other cereal supplies should totally fail.
ENOUGH SHIPS. U.S. yards can now launch, in three years, the equivalent of the world's merchant marine tonnage.
ENOUGH AIRPLANES. The aviation industry, now approaching a rate of 2,000 planes a week, can, when converted to peacetime production, turn out air transports, private planes, autos and even houses in unprecedented numbers.
ENOUGH MATERIALS. In synthetics, aluminum, magnesium, copper, nickel, production has grown far beyond prewar limits.
ENOUGH PROJECTS. Last September, at the session of the American Chemical Society, Du Font's Charles Stine stepped out on the platform of huge Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, after the orchestra had played Pomp and Circumstance, and announced: "Mankind has the habit of arising phoenix-like from its own ashes. .. . Progress is immortal. . . . Give us a victorious peace and the freedom of enterprise it should guarantee and our progress will be unprecedented. . . .
"The scientist is fighting . , . for five hundred, yes, for five thousand other freedoms. The freedom to work, to expand the intellect, to worry through with a theory until it is validated or disproved ... to improve, if he can, everything that exists under the sun, and beyond that to create things upon which the sun has never before shone . . . the freedom to better the lot of mankind, that each generation may rise to heights loftier than any won by its predecessor." Already science offered wool from silk and silk from coal, plywoods, plastics, rustless steels, fire-resistant wood, synthetic finishes, bendable glass, luminous paint, two-way private radio, furniture derived from air, water and coal, shoe soles of impregnated carpeting, fluorescent lighting, packaged houses, television, autogiros, decentralized cities, lightweight automobiles and locomotives, air express, new chemicals, new medical discoveries so revolutionary that they offered a saving of human life greater than the sum of human life lost in war.
ENOUGH FRONTIERS. In Australia, Canada and South America government commissions are laying plans for the immigration of millions of new settlers. Fifteen thousand workers have moved into the Amazon country. Engineers are exploring the water route from the Rio Negro to the Orinoco. Bulldozers have shoved a 1,671-mile road to Alaska, while the U.S. and Canada discuss joint development of the newly opened territory.
ENOUGH COLLABORATORS. Brazil is acquiring a steel industry. Latin America is industrializing. Britain's per capita war production is ahead of the U.S. German industry is still formidable despite bombing. Russian industry has achieved miracles despite the war. China has moved, rebuilt --even expanded--her industry. India has climbed to eighth place among industrial powers.
Mind and Body. Years ago Wisconsin's stubby, pragmatic bon vivant, Philosopher Max Otto, stood on the bank of the upper Mississippi one Sunday sunset to ask himself again what force it was that prevented the technology of the modern world from being used to the greater happiness of the plain man. Afternoon darkened into evening ; the shining silver of the river blurred in the darkness; lights began to appear in the village.
Modern man's strength is greater than his knowledge or his will, thought this aging Midwestern professor. "The vast economic material body of the world lacks a mind to match it, and is not animated by a commensurate moral spirit. This backwardness is the tragic inadequacy of our time. It is the basic problem which the agencies of aspiration and intelligence have to solve."
Each American had now to develop a spirit comparable to his achievements, to recreate the spirit that had made his achievements possible. To preserve and strengthen his precarious new position in the world, he had to understand what had brought him to that position, what were the spiritual springs that made him an American. Whether he knew it or not, or liked his new role, each dweller in the U.S. had become a leading citizen of the world and one on whose conduct the hopes of the world rested.
The world had changed in its feeling about the U.S. Once American technology was a storehouse of learning that Europe hired, as U.S. engineers built dams and railroads in Russia, automobiles and cracking plants in Germany, developed oil in England, piped the fields of Rumania. But through the years of war and prewar depression the rest of the world changed in its view of what it wanted from the U.S. It no longer wanted only the wealth that U.S. industry could produce. It no longer wanted American builders only to imitate on foreign soil the kind of machinery that was indigenous to the U.S. It wanted the essential secret of U.S. enterprise, the quality within it that brought forth on the continent a new nation, a new birth of liberty, and with them a new wealth beyond the richest visions of the old. Thus the 132,000,000 Americans, honest and dishonest, good, bad and humanly both, had become the only people of the earth's two billion who could save the hopes of the world in the simple struggle to save their own.
The U.S. was unchanged. Isolationists, interventionists, Democrats, New Dealers, Republicans, keeping the same beliefs, the same politics, the same internal squabbles, the same President, the same newspapers, the same columnists, radio commentators, movie stars, had unwittingly grown in stature as the earth grew smaller. The U.S. was still the land of plenty: it was the land of faith that government of the people, by the people and for the people should never perish from the earth. It was the land where millions sang without self-consciousness that their eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. It was the land where all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was the land where farmers exchanged notions on the best ways to cultivate crops and where manufacturers visited each other's plants to learn the latest production wrinkles. It was the land where its most bitterly hated politician had truly stated the creed of democratic government: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. . . ."
Search for Principle. Out of range of the headlines, like reconnaissance planes soaring high above anti-aircraft guns, the philosophers and religious teachers struggled with the task of organizing these underlying concepts so that the modern mind and modern morality might equal the modern world's physical strength.
>How could the U.S., based on a belief in equality, accept its power without aggressively forcing its faith on others?
"Treat human beings according to what they may become," said Cleveland-born Philosopher William Ernest Hocking, "with the best available aid, and our own."
>What religion could man worship to fill the aching heart that all the glory of the good material things of life had left empty? "There is no sure shield against the tyranny of this ruinous passion for possession," said Britain's gentle, eloquent, 77-year-old teacher W. Macniele Dixon, "save a transference of our affections from possession to admiration, from immoderate craving for wealth and power to an intense longing for beauty and excellence."
>How could man rediscover this religion? "Democracy must go down to the tomb and arise," said Kansas' William Allen White. "Men . . . slowly are giving up old ideas, old prejudices, slowly are coming to the realization that it is necessary in politics, in society, in economic organization, to preserve the dignity of man, the dignity of all men. . . . This belief in the dignity of man as an individual was a latent faith in men's hearts even while they basked in a civilization they did not intelligently appreciate or quite believe in--a faith that in due time should remake the world. . . .
"Regeneration is no theological formula. It is a function of spiritual progress--a part of the evolutionary spiritual growth of the race. That repentance is needed now for rebirth ... to lessen its load of sin. Sin is only unneighborly conduct. Democracy's rebirth will be hard, most ungodly hard. But enslavement would be harder. We have no other alternative. We must conquer by heroic self-denial or be conquered by ruthless force. World democracy, rich and proud and pharisaical, is the camel before the gate of the needle's eye. He must go through. He must bend low, even to the dust. He must slip off his load and his proud trappings of purse and power. To be saved for 'a new Heaven and a new Earth' the diverse people of democratic civilization must think in new terms --new terms as citizens, new terms as nations, new terms as a modern, remade world, in a new day and time."
New Terms. Democracy is going down to the tomb. The need for world fellowship, bred in terror, is furnishing a binder to hold men together. The belief in the dignity of man, of all men, is in itself a primary protection against the perfidies of the war of nerves, a check against the regimentation of domestic life, a guarantee against life's waste in war. It is the bond between the drawings of the engineer and the unformed hope of the man in the street; it is the force that overcomes the bickerings of allies, the conflicts of national prestige; it is the measure of U.S. responsibility for shaping the future. It is inescapable. Says Russell Davenport: "Cain never received an answer to his outraged question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' But the answer is: 'You are.' "
The world that carried the hopes and the work of millions as it wheeled in its circle of the sun carried the burden of war and the misery that flowed from its worship of false gods. From Pearl Harbor to Warsaw the life of the times whispered the agony of that worship, If the new terms of the new world were not to be wild echoes of the past or the wild grasping for a new turbulence, they could begin with the truth. If democracy reborn is based on belief in the dignity of man, that dignity carries with it the positive affirmation that all men are brothers and that their death and their sinful unneighborliness is a part of the denial of their brotherhood. If the unharnessed power of the Yangtze flowing for thousands of years past the unseeing Chinese can light the lamps of China, the power of an equally familiar but unseen idea can provide the new terms of the remade world.
First Tasks. To have human value, to get down to the ordinary business of ordinary life, to fill the routines of plowing and planting and the humdrum tasks of every day with a spirit that will make them conscious efforts to create a better destiny, the ideas must result in programs, and the programs must be fulfilled by living, sweating, striving, imperfect and hopeful people. The ideas and ideals strong enough to rebuild the old world and remake the new cannot be the special province of planners and experts. They must be general enough to cross frontiers and local enough to give meaning to the village carpenter's place in the world. They must guide people exhausted and embittered by war to :
> Prepare for the orderly demobilization of 50,000,000 soldiers to peacetime life;
>Establish orderly governments over the 340,000,000 Europeans ruled by Hitler, the 335,000,000 Chinese, Filipinos, Javanese, Koreans, subjugated by the Japanese;
>Reconstruct the devastated cities of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, Stalingrad, Valetta, Berlin, Tokyo;
>Transform war industry to peacetime labor, meet the problems of war expenditures, averaging in the U.S. alone almost $100,000,000,000 a year, release drafted labor throughout the world, invite the functions of private enterprise, resolve the political fights over the course of the postwar world, create agencies which will make effective the commitments the United Nations have already agreed upon, establish some functioning international order which will break the way to release the promise of the future.
Principle to Practice. The world that carried war around the sun carried the millions of minds that must serve as the connective tissue between the thoughts of the philosophers, the vast practical programs and the toilers who alone could bring them about. Through good weather and bad, in sickness, defeat, in agony of spirit and against the dull weight of ignorance and fear, the soul of each man must be nourished to undertake of his own free will works which in their total are bigger than the slave-built wall of China and in their daily demands as warming as the building of a home. Coercion cannot order the materials; bombast cannot inspire the efforts; the fear of death cannot release the imagination's shortcuts or bring about the emotions' quick ability to generate for a time their superhuman strength.
If some stimulus is to be broadly effective, then the ideal of the coming human fraternity, "the truth that the world, like the human self, has its own unity in a living purpose," cannot reside only in the distant words of philosophers. Such truths and ideals must be the equipment of millions of humble leaders close to the task. Americans are too close to their destiny to rely only on a few far-away leaders. They must find near at hand those who can formulate the causes, interpret principle in definite acts, nourish their spirit by giving them tasks to work on in the direction of their hopes.
The strength of America, thus released, would fulfill the moral purpose of its founders, or the institutions they created would end. The new world after the war still needed its Founding Fathers: businessmen, teachers, engineers, soldiers, had become teachers and builders to the world. The responsibilities the new world had placed upon Americans could be tasks grudgingly assumed or an adventure cheerfully undertaken. In the crucial importance of that task they could say, "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair," certain again that the wise and honest were numbered in the millions throughout the spinning earth.
And in that adventure, for the first time in 100 years, Americans could repeat, in the words of their poet:
Passage to more than India! . . .
Away O soul! . . .
Sail forth--steer for the deep waters only.
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