Costly Ignorance

On the last day of the old year a "highly responsible source" talked to Washington correspondents. He banged his white-knuckled fist on the desk and although not a blasphemous man, he swore bitterly. For he was brimming over with indignation that Americans in their ignorance should do anything so tragic.

He was talking about the threatened railroad and steel strikes. He said that those events might cost the nation hundreds of thousands of lives. And he meant it, literally, in military terms.

Outlining the situation in Europe, he laid out a chain of cause & effect:

One of the main requirements for collapsing Germany quickly and with small loss of life is to cause the defection of her satellites. Her satellites will abandon her only when their expectation of Germany's early defeat exceeds their fear of German retaliation. The moves of the Allied forces as well as the efforts of Allied propagandists have been designed to speed that expectation--to produce it at an early date.

The news that the U.S. Government has had to seize the U.S. railroads may have put off that date indefinitely. So the cost of invading France when Germany still has her satellites under control may well be several hundred thousand lives higher.

In November 1775 an angry American General, George Washington, wrote of a large section of the American people: "Such a dearth of public spirit, and want of virtue, such stockjobbing, and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another ... I never saw before and pray God I may never be witness to again. . . . Such a dirty mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be surprised at any disaster that may happen."

Last week the "responsible source" drew no such ugly indictment. He was bitter because of the cold military logic of the situation. His indictment was of the American people's ignorance of what they did, and of the consequences.

But Labor, feeling that it had been unfairly singled out, reared back defensively. The St. Petersburg, Fla. Times kicked over the traces and announced that the speaker was no less a person than General George Marshall, a statement which was broadcast by the United Press and by radio.

White House Secretary Steve Early announced that the "responsible source" and President Roosevelt "seemed to have been thinking along the same lines." But Labor's mild Bill Green, stung, flung a peremptory challenge to "General Marshall or anyone else" to prove that U.S. Labor's record gave the enemy an effective propaganda weapon.

In a column called "A Double Standard of Morality" Pundit Walter Lippmann wrote last week: "The underlying cause of the trouble in this country is that we are applying one standard of morals, of values, of duty, and of rights to the men and women of the armed forces and a different standard to the civilians. . . .

"No one has ever worked out a just system of economic payments for the Marines at Tarawa. No one has been foolish enough to try. . . .

"Let no one think that the war can be so divorced from domestic issues that we can ask men to face death in battle and on the home front can have politics-as-usual, special-interests-as-usual, or any of our ordinary materialistic, acquisitive, ambitious habits-as-usual. That is not good enough, and the leaders of groups, blocs, factions, lobbies and parties here at home had better recognize that now before they open up an unbridgeable chasm between those who have served and sacrificed on the one hand, and those who have looked out for themselves on the other."

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