Protesting the First
World War
excerpted from the book
Voices of a People's History of
the United States
by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
Seven Stories Press, 2004, paper
p284
Helen Keller, "Strike Against War"
[WWI] (January 5, 1916)
To begin with, I have a word to say to
my good friends, the editors, and others who are moved to pity
me. Some people are grieved because they imagine I am in the hands
of unscrupulous persons who lead me astray and persuade me to
espouse unpopular causes and make me the mouthpiece of their propaganda.
Now, let it be understood once and for all that I do not want
their pity; I would not change places with one of them. I know
what I am talking about. My sources of information are as good
and reliable as anybody else's. I have papers and magazines from
England, France, Germany and Austria that I can read myself. Not
all the editors I have met can do that. Quite a number of them
have to take their French and German second hand. No, I will not
disparage the editors. They are an overworked, misunderstood class.
Let them remember, though, that if I cannot see the fire at the
end of their cigarettes, neither can they thread a needle in the
dark. All I ask, gentlemen, is a fair field and no favor. I have
entered the fight against [war] preparedness and against the economic
system under which we live. It is to be a fight to the finish,
and I ask no quarter.
The future of the world rests in the hands
of America. The future of America rests on the backs of 80,000,000
working men and women and their children. We are facing a grave
crisis in our national life. The few who profit from the labor
of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which
will protect the interests of the capitalists. You are urged to
add to the heavy burdens you already bear the burden of a larger
army and many additional warships. It is in your power to refuse
to carry the artillery and the dreadnoughts and to shake off some
of the burdens, too, such as limousines, steam yachts and country
estates. You do not need to make a great noise about it. With
the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system
of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need
to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten
up and fold your arms.
We are not preparing to defend our country.
Even if we were as helpless as Congressman [Augustus] Gardner
says we are, we have no enemies foolhardy enough to attempt to
invade the United States. The talk about attack from Germany and
Japan is absurd. Germany has its hands full and will be busy with
its own affairs for some generations after the European war is
over.
With full control of the Atlantic Ocean
and the Mediterranean Sea, the allies failed to land enough men
to defeat the Turks at Gallipoli; and then they failed again to
land an army at Salonica in time to check the Bulgarian invasion
of Serbia. The conquest of America by water is a nightmare confined
exclusively to ignorant persons and members of the Navy League.
Yet, everywhere, we hear fear advanced
as argument for armament. It reminds me of a fable I read. A certain
man found a horseshoe. His neighbor began to weep and wail because,
as he justly pointed out, the man who found the horse-shoe might
someday find a horse. Having found the shoe, he might shoe him.
The neighbor's child might some day go so near the horse's heels
as to be kicked, and die. Undoubtedly the two families would quarrel
and fight, and several valuable lives would be lost through the
finding of the horseshoe. You know the last war we had we quite
accidentally picked up some islands in the Pacific Ocean which
may some day be the cause of a quarrel between ourselves and Japan.
I'd rather drop those islands right now and forget about them
than go to war to keep them. Wouldn't you?
Congress is not preparing to defend the
people of the United States. It is planning to protect the capital
of American speculators and investors in Mexico, South America,
China, and the Philippine Islands. Incidentally this preparation
will benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines.
Until recently there were uses in the
United States for the money taken from the workers. But American
labor is exploited almost to the limit now, and our national resources
have all been appropriated. Still the profits keep piling up new
capital. Our flourishing industry in implements of murder is filling
the vaults of New York's banks with gold. And a dollar that is
not being used to make a slave of some human being is not fulfilling
its purpose in the capitalistic scheme. That dollar must be invested
in South America, Mexico, China, or the Philippines.
It was no accident that the Navy League
came into prominence at the same time that the National City Bank
of New York established a branch in Buenos Aires. It is not a
mere coincidence that six business associates of P Morgan are
officials of defense leagues. And chance did not dictate that
Mayor [John Mitchel should appoint to his Committee of Safety
a thousand men that represent a fifth of the wealth of the United
States. These men want their foreign investments protected.
Every modern war has had its root in exploitation.
The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of
the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West.
The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should
exploit Cuba and the Philippines. The South African War decided
that the British should exploit the diamond mines. The Russo-Japanese
War decided that Japan should exploit Korea. The present war is
to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Egypt,
India, China, Africa. And we are whetting our sword to scare the
victors into sharing the spoils with us. Now, the workers are
not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.
The preparedness propagandists [WWI] have
still another object, and a very important one. They want to give
the people something to think about besides their own unhappy
condition. They know the cost of living is high, wages are low,
employment is uncertain and will be much more so when the European
call for munitions stops. No matter how hard and incessantly the
people work, they often cannot afford the comforts of life; many
cannot obtain the necessities.
Every few days we are given a new war
scare to lend realism to their propaganda. They have had us on
the verge of war over the Lusitania, the Gulflight, the Ancona,
and now they want the workingmen to become excited over the sinking
of the Persia. The workingman has no interest in any of these
ships. The Germans might sink every vessel on the Atlantic Ocean
and the Mediterranean Sea, and Hi Americans with every one-the
American workingman would still have no reason to go to war.
All the machinery of the system has been
set in motion. Above the complaint and din of the protest from
the workers is heard the voice of authority.
"Friends," it says, "fellow
workmen, patriots; your country is in danger! There are foes on
all sides of us. There is nothing between us and our enemies except
the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Look at what has happened
to Belgium. Consider the fate of Serbia. Will you murmur about
low wages when your country, your very liberties, are in jeopardy?
What are the miseries you endure compared to the humiliation of
having a victorious German army sail up the East River? Quit your
whining, get busy and prepare to defend your firesides and your
flag. Get an army, get a navy; be ready to meet the invaders like
the loyal-hearted freemen you are."
Will the workers walk into this trap?
Will they be fooled again? I am afraid so. The people have always
been amenable to oratory of this sort. The workers know they have
no enemies except their masters. They know that their citizenship
papers are no warrant for the safety of themselves or their wives
and children. They know that honest sweat, persistent toil and
years of struggle bring them nothing worth holding on to, worth
fighting for. Yet, deep down in their foolish hearts they believe
they have a country. Oh blind vanity of slaves!
The clever ones, up in the high places
know how childish and silly the workers are. They know that if
the government dresses them up in khaki and gives , them a rifle
and starts them off with a brass band and waving banners, they
will go forth to fight valiantly for their own enemies. They are
taught that brave men die for their country's honor. What a price
to pay for an abstraction-the lives of millions of young men;
other millions crippled and blinded for life; existence made hideous
for still more millions of human beings; the achievement and inheritance
of generations swept away in a moment-and nobody better off for
all the misery! This terrible sacrifice would be comprehensible
if the thing you die for and call country fed, clothed, housed
and warmed you, educated and cherished your children. I think
the workers are the most unselfish of the children of men; they
toil and live and die for other people's country, other people's
sentiments, other people's liberties and other people's happiness!
The workers have no liberties of their own; they are not free
when they are compelled to work twelve or ten or eight hours a
day. They are not free when they are ill paid for their exhausting
toil. They are not free when their children must labor in mines,
mills and factories or starve, and when their women may be driven
by poverty to lives of shame. They are not free when they are
clubbed and imprisoned because they go on strike for a raise of
wages and for the elemental justice that is their right as human
beings.
We are not free unless the men who frame
and execute the laws represent the interests of the lives of the
people and no other interest. The ballot does not make a free
man out of a wage slave. There has never existed a truly free
and democratic nation in the world. From time immemorial men have
followed with blind loyalty the strong men who had the power of
money and of armies. Even while battlefields were piled high with
their own dead they have tilled the lands of the rulers and have
been robbed of the fruits of their labor. They have built palaces
and pyramids, temples and cathedrals that held no real shrine
of liberty.
As civilization has grown more complex
the workers have become more and more enslaved, until today they
are little more than parts of the machines they operate. Daily
they face the dangers of railroad, bridge, skyscraper, freight
train, stokehold, stockyard, lumber raft and mine. Panting and
training at the docks, on the railroads and underground and on
the seas, they move the traffic and pass from land to land the
precious commodities that make it possible for us to live. And
what is their reward? A scanty wage, often poverty, rents, taxes,
tributes and war indemnities.
The kind of preparedness the workers want
is reorganization and reconstruction of their whole life, such
as has never been attempted by statesmen or governments. The Germans
found out years ago that they could not raise good soldiers in
the slums so they abolished the slums. They saw to it that all
the people had at least a few of the essentials of civilization-decent
lodging, clean streets, wholesome if scanty food, proper medical
care and proper safeguards for the workers in their occupations.
That is only a small part of what should be done, but what wonders
that one step toward the right sort of preparedness has wrought
for Germany! For eighteen months it has kept itself free from
invasion while carrying on an extended war of conquest, and its
armies are still pressing on with unabated vigor. It is your business
to force these reforms on the Administration. Let there be no
more talk about what a government can or cannot do. All these
things have been done by all the belligerent nations in the hurly-burly
of war. Every fundamental industry has been managed better by
the governments than by private corporations.
It is your duty to insist upon still more
radical measure. It is your business to see that no child is employed
in an industrial establishment or mine or store, and that no worker
in needlessly exposed to accident or disease. It is your business
to make them give you clean cities, free from smoke, dirt and
congestion. It is your business to make them pay you a living
wage. It is your business to see that this kind of preparedness
is carried into every department in the nation, until everyone
has a chance to be well born, well nourished, rightly educated,
intelligent and serviceable to the country at all times.
Strike against all ordinances and laws
and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the
butcheries of war. Strike against war, for without you no battles
can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs
and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that
means death and misery to ~ millions of human beings. Be not dumb,
obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army
of construction.
***
p288
[The radical journalist John Reed of Portland,
Oregon, is best remembered for his detailed reportage of the Russian
revolution in October 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World. But
before then in spring 1917, he wrote a series of articles describing
World War I as an imperialist venture: "War means an ugly
mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists,
side-tracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social
forces."]
John Reed, "Whose War?" (April
1917)
By the time this goes to press the United
States may be at war. The ay the German note arrived, Wall Street
flung the American flag to the breeze, the brokers on the floor
of the Stock Exchange sang "The Star Spangled Banner"
with tears rolling down their cheeks, and the stock market went
up. In the theaters they are singing "patriotic" ballads
of the George M. Cohan-Irving Berlin variety, playing the national
anthem, and flashing the flag and the portrait of long-suffering
Lincoln-while the tired suburbanite who has just been scalped
by a ticket-speculator goes into hysterics. Exclusive ladies whose
husbands own banks are rolling bandages for the wounded, just
like they do in Europe; a million-dollar fund for ice in field-hospitals
has been started; and the Boston Budget for Conveying Virgins
Inland has grown enormously. The directors of the British, French
and Belgian Permanent Blind Relief Fund have added "American"
to the name of the organization, in gruesome anticipation. Our
soldier boys, guarding the aqueducts and bridges, are shooting
each other by mistake for Teutonic spies. There is talk of "conscription,"
"war-brides," and "On to Berlin ......
I know what war means. I have been with
the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen
men die, and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell; but
there is a worse thing than that. War means an ugly mob-madness,
crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists, side-tracking
reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces. Already
in America those citizens who oppose the entrance of their country
into the European melee are called "traitors," and those
who protest against the curtailing of our meager rights of free
speech are spoken of as "dangerous lunatics." We have
had a forecast of the censorship-when the naval authorities in
charge of the Sayville wireless cut off American news from Germany,
and only the wildest fictions reached Berlin via London, creating
a perilous situation The press is howling for war. The church
is howling for war. Lawyers, politicians, stock-brokers, social
leaders are all howling for war. Roosevelt is again recruiting
his thrice-thwarted family regiment.
But whether it comes to actual hostilities
or not, some damage has been done. The militarists have proved
their point. I know of at least two valuable social movements
that have suspended functioning because no one cares. For many
years this country is going to be a worse place for free men to
live in; less tolerant, less hospitable. Maybe it is too late,
but I want to put down what I think about it all.
Whose war is this? Not mine. I know that
hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great
financial "patriots" are not paid a living wage. I have
seen poor men sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even
without any charge. Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children,
have been shot to death, burned to death, by private detectives
and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and the
cost of living higher, and the workers proportionally poorer.
These toilers don't want war-not even civil war. But the speculators,
the employers, the plutocracy-they want it, just as they did in
Germany and in England; and with lies and sophistries they will
whip up our blood until we are savage-and then we'll fight and
die for them.
I am one of a vast number of ordinary
people who read the daily papers, and occasionally The New Republic,
and want to be fair. We don't know much about international politics;
but we want our country to keep off the necks of little nations,
to refuse to back up American beasts of prey who invest abroad
and get their fingers burned, and to stay out of quarrels not
our own. We've got an idea that international law is the crystallized
common-sense of nations, distilled from their experiences with
each other, and that it holds good for all of them, and can be
understood by anybody.
We are simple folk. Prussian militarism
seemed to us insufferable; we thought the invasion of Belgium
a crime; German atrocities horrified us, and also the idea of
German submarines exploding ships full of peaceful people without
warning. But then we began to hear about England and France jailing,
fining, exiling and even shooting men who refused to go out and
kill; the Allied armies invaded and seized a part of neutral Greece,
and a French admiral forced upon her an ultimatum as shameful
as Austria's to Serbia; Russian atrocities were shown to be more
dreadful than German; and hidden mines sown by England in the
open sea exploded ships full of peaceful people without warning.
Other things disturbed us. For instance,
why was it a violation of international law for the Germans to
establish a "war-zone" around the British Isles, and
perfectly legal for England to close the North Sea? Why is it
we submitted to the British order forbidding the shipment of non-contraband
to Germany, and insisted upon our right to ship contraband to
the Allies? If our "national honor" was smirched by
Germany's refusal to allow war materials to be shipped to the
Allies, what happened to our national honor when England refused
to let us ship noncontraband food and even Red Cross hospital
supplies to Germany? Why is England allowed to attempt the avowed
starvation of German civilians, in violation of international
law, when the Germans cannot attempt the same thing without our
horrified protest? How is it that the British can arbitrarily
regulate our commerce with neutral nations, while we raise a howl
whenever the Germans "threaten to restrict our merchant ships
going about their business?" Why does our Government insist
that Americans should not be molested while traveling on Allied
ships armed against submarines?
We have shipped and are shipping vast
quantities of war materials to the Allies, we have floated the
Allied loans. We have been strictly neutral toward the Teutonic
powers only. Hence the inevitable desperation of the last German
note. Hence this war we are on the brink of.
Those of us who voted for Woodrow Wilson
did so because we felt his mind and his eyes were open, because
he had kept us out of the mad-dogfight of Europe, and because
the plutocracy opposed him. We had learned enough about the war
to lose some of our illusions, and we wanted to be neutral. We
grant that the President, considering the position he'd got himself
into, couldn't do anything else but answer the German note as
he did-but if we had been neutral, that note wouldn't have been
sent. The President didn't ask us; he won't ask us if we want
war or not. The fault is not ours. It is not our war.
***
p295
Anti-War Speech by Eugene Debs
"THE CANTON, OHIO, SPEECH" (JUNE 16, 1918)
Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism
is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had ...
[the] Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes,
for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the
exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism,
or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.
They would have you believe that the Socialist
Party consists in the main of disloyalists and traitors. It is
true in a sense not at all to their discredit. We frankly admit
that we are disloyalists and traitors to the real traitors of
this nation; to the gang that on the Pacific coast are trying
to hang Tom Mooney and Warren Billings in spite of their well-known
innocence and the protest of practically the whole civilized world
....
Every solitary one of these aristocratic
conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot;
every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make
the world safe for democracy. What humbug! 'What rot! What false
pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers
and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have
the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth,
and fight for their exploited victims-they are the disloyalists
and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by
side with the traitors in this fight ....
Max Eastman has been indicted and his
paper [The Masses] suppressed, just as the papers with which I
have been connected have all been suppressed. What a wonderful
compliment they pay us! They are afraid that we may mislead and
contaminate you. You are their wards; they are your guardians
and they know what is best for you to read and hear and know.
They are bound to see to it that our vicious doctrines do not
reach your ears. And so in our great democracy, under our free
institutions, they flatter our press by suppression; and they
ignorantly imagine that they have silenced revolutionary propaganda
in the United States. What an awful mistake they make for our
benefit! As a matter of justice to them we should respond with
resolutions of thanks and gratitude. Thousands of people who had
never before heard of our papers are now inquiring for and insisting
upon seeing them. They have succeeded only in arousing curiosity
in our literature and propaganda. And woe to him who reads Socialist
literature from curiosity! He is surely a goner. I have known
of a thousand experiments but never one that failed.
How stupid and shortsighted the ruling
class really is! Cupidity is stone blind. It has no vision. The
greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of
his nose. He can see a chance for an "opening"; he is
cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how
it can be secured, but vision he has none - not the slightest.
He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out
in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation
of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites
pay for the violation of the laws of life. The Rockefellers are
blind. Every move they make in their game of greed but hastens
their own doom. Every blow they strike at the Socialist movement
reacts upon themselves. Every time they strike at us they hit
themselves. It never fails. Every time they strangle a Socialist
paper they add a thousand voices proclaiming the truth of the
principles of socialism and the ideals of the Socialist movement.
They help us in spite of themselves.
Wars throughout history have been waged
for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords
who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along
the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their
power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon
one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than
the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.
The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors
of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable
serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been
taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters
declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to
fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the
profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt.
And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared
the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The
master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the
subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose-especially
their lives.
They have always taught and trained you
to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have
yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history
of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring
war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation
in any age has ever been declared by the people.
And here let me emphasize the fact-and
it cannot be repeated too often-that the working class who fight
all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices,
the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the
corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or
making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both.
They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
Yours not to reason why; Yours but to
do and die.
That is their motto and we object on the
part of the awakening workers of this nation.
If war is right let it be declared by
the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above
all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war
or peace.
***
p298
Randolph Bourne, "The State"
(1918)
The moment war is declared... the mass
of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced
that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then,
with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves
to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of
their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction
toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme
of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation.
The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government,
identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military
memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august
presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes
the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and
hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual
bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.
Wartime brings the ideal of the State
out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies
that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags
in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially
the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within
its territory its power and influence should be universal. As
the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so
the
State is thought of as the medium for
his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing
to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in
war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity
for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization
of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another
herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for
defense, the closer will become the organization and the more
coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends
the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest
level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities
of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central
purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense,
and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled
to become-the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business
and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the crosscurrents
fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with
ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end,
toward the "peacefulness of being at war," of which
L. P. Jacks has so unforgettably spoken ....
War is the health of the State. It automatically
sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for
uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in
coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which
lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and
enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated
into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of
persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them.
Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is
never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work
of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their
agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their
resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual
opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime
attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating
at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly
be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty-or mystic
devotion to the State-becomes the major imagined human value.
Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty,
the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously
sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves
the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing
these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons
into sacrificing them.
War-or at least modern war waged by a
democratic republic against a powerful enemy-seems to achieve
for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist
could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government,
but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity.
We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective
community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue
of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself
with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification.
The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each
person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the cause of war.
The impeding distinction between society and the individual is
almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical
with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition
of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the
suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong;
he feels behind him all the power of the collective community.
The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost
his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American
nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such
sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such
as universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it
have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have
permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it,
such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of
a war of offensive self-defense, undertaken to support a difficult
cause to the slogan of "democracy," it would reach the
highest level ever known of collective effort.
The members of the working classes, that
portion at least which does not identify itself with the significant
classes and seek to imitate it and rise to it, are notoriously
less affected by the symbolism of the State, or, in other words,
are less patriotic than the significant classes. For theirs is
neither the power nor the glory. The State in wartime does not
offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never having acquired
social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been drilled
and regimented, as by the industrial regime of the last century,
they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but
they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without
that herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their
"betters." They live habitually in an industrial serfdom,
by which, though nominally free, they are in practice as a class
bound to a system of machine-production the implements of which
they do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they
have not the slightest voice, except what they can occasionally
exert by a veiled intimidation which draws slightly more of the
product in their direction. From such serfdom, military conscription
is not so great a change. But into the military enterprise they
go, not with those hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts
war so powerfully feeds, but with the same apathy with which they
enter and continue in the industrial enterprise ....
Thus arises conflict within the State.
War becomes almost a sport between the hunters and the hunted.
The pursuit of enemies within outweighs in psychic attractiveness
the assault on the enemy without. The whole terrific force of
the State is brought to bear against the heretics. The nation
boils with a slow insistent fever. A white terrorism is carried
on by the Government against pacifists, socialists, enemy aliens,
and a milder unofficial persecution against all persons or movements
that can be imagined as connected with the enemy. War, which should
be the health of the State, unifies all the bourgeois elements
and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The revolutionary
proletariat shows more resistance to this unification, is, as
we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard, as
the IWW is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that it
is a symptom, not a cause, and its persecution increases the disaffection
of labor and intensifies the friction instead of lessening it
....
It cannot be too firmly realized that
war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it
is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing.
It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity;
it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist
without a military establishment, and a military establishment
cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial
tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition
and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined.
We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against
the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that
this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take
measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is
not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished
in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary,
with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing
forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State's chief function
is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part
of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression.
It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can
of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a
vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If
the State's chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned
with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which
make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential
destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For
the very existence of a State in a system of States means that
the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the
calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling
of the productive and life enhancing processes of the national
life ....
All of which goes to show that the State
represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent
forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of everything
most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling
for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. War is the health
of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society
function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic
devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the
ideal of the State lover. With the ravages of democratic ideas,
however, the modern republic cannot go to war under the old conceptions
of autocracy and death dealing belligerency. If a successful animus
for war requires a renaissance of State ideals, they can only
come back under democratic forms, under this retrospective conviction
of democratic control of foreign policy, democratic desire for
war, and particularly of this identification of the democracy
with the State. How unregenerate the ancient State may be, however,
is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the Government's
unreformed attitude on foreign policy. One of the first demands
of the more farseeing democrats in the democracies of the Alliance
was that secret diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have been
made possible by a web of secret agreements between States, alliances
that were made by Governments without the shadow of popular support
or even popular knowledge, and vague, half-understood commitments
that scarcely reached the stage of a treaty or agreement, but
which proved binding in the event. Certainly, said these democratic
thinkers, war can scarcely be avoided unless this poisonous underground
system of secret diplomacy is destroyed, this system by which
a nation's power, wealth, and manhood may be signed away like
a blank check to an allied nation to be cashed in at some future
crisis. Agreements which are to affect the lives of whole peoples
must be made between peoples and not by Governments, or at glare
of publicity and criticism.
***
p306
Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1939) [excerpt]
Take me along country roads and stop by
every farmhouse and every field and ring a dinner gong so that
the farmers and their wives and their children and their hired
men and women can see me. Say to the farmers here is something
I'll bet you haven't seen before. Here is something you can't
plow under. Here is something that will never grow and flower.
The manure you plow into your fields is filthy enough but here
is something less than manure because it won't die and decay and
nourish even a weed. Here is something so terrible that if it
were born to a mare or a heifer or a sow or a ewe you would kill
it on the spot but you can't kill this because it is a human being.
It has a brain. It is thinking all the time. Believe it or not
this thing thinks and it is alive and it goes against every rule
of nature although nature didn't make it so. You know what made
it so. Look at it medals real medals probably of solid gold. Lift
up the top of the case and you'll know what made it so. It stinks
of glory.
Take me into the places where men work
and make things. Take me there and say boys here is a cheap way
to get by. Maybe times are bad and your salaries are low. Don't
worry boys because there is always a way to cure things like that.
Have a war and then prices go up and wages go up and everybody
makes a hell of a lot of money.
There'll be one along pretty soon boys
so don't get impatient. It'll come and then you'll have your chance.
Either way you win. If you don't have to fight why you stay at
home and make sixteen bucks a day working in the shipyards. And
if they draft you why you've got a good chance of coming back
without so many needs. Maybe you'll need only one shoe instead
of two that's saving money. Maybe you'll be blind and if you are
why then you never need worry about the expense of glasses. Maybe
you'll be lucky like me. Look at me close boys I don't need anything.
A little broth or something three times a day and that's all.
No shoes no socks no underwear no shirt no gloves no hat no necktie
no collar-buttons no vest no coat no movies no vaudeville no football
not even a shave. Look at me boys I have no expenses at all. You're
suckers boys. Get on the gravy train. I know what I'm talking
about. I used to need all the things that you need right now.
I used to be a consumer. I've consumed a lot in my time. I've
consumed more shrapnel and gunpowder than any living man. So don't
get blue boys because you'll have your chance there'll be another
war along pretty soon and then maybe you'll be lucky like me.
Take me into the schoolhouses all the
school-houses in the world. Suffer little children to come unto
me isn't that right? They may scream at first and have nightmares
at night but they'll get used to it because they've got to get
used to it and its best to start them young. Gather them around
my case and say here little girl here little boy come and take
a look at your daddy. Come and look at yourself. You'll be like
that when you grow up to be great big strong men and women. You'll
have a chance to die for your country. And you may not die you
may come back like this. Not everybody dies little kiddies.
Closer please. You over there against
the blackboard what's the matter with you? Quit crying you silly
little girl come over here and look at the nice man the nice man
who was a soldier boy. You remember him don't you? Don't you remember
little crybaby how you waved flags and saved tinfoil and put your
savings in thrift stamps? Of course you do you silly. Well here's
the soldier you did it for.
Come on youngsters take a nice look and
then we'll go into our nursery rhymes. New nursery rhymes for
new times. Hickory dickory dock my daddy's nuts from shellshock.
Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and burned
out his eyes. A diller a dollar a ten o'clock scholar blow off
his legs and then watch him holler. Rockabye baby in the treetop
don't stop a bomb or you'll probably flop. Now I lay me down to
sleep my bombproof cellar's good and deep but if I'm killed before
I wake remember god it's for your sake amen.
Take me into the colleges and universities
and academies and convents. Call the girls together all the healthy
beautiful young girls. Point down to me and say here girls is
your father. Here is that boy who was strong last night. Here
is your little son your baby son the fruit of your love the hope
of your future. Look down on him girls so you won't forget him.
See that red gash there with mucus hanging to it? That was his
face girls. Here girls touch it don't be afraid. Bend down and
kiss it. You'll have to wipe your lips afterward because they
will have a strange rotten stuff on them but that's all right
because a lover is a lover and here is your lover.
Call all the young men together and say
here is your brother here is your best friend here you are young
men. This is a very interesting case young men because we know
there is a mind buried down there. Technically this thing is living
meat like that tissue we kept alive all last summer in the lab.
But this is a different cut of meat because it also contains a
brain. Now listen to me closely young gentlemen. That brain is
thinking. Maybe it's thinking about music. Maybe it has a great
symphony all thought out or a mathematical formula that would
change the world or a book that would make people kinder or the
germ of an idea that would save a hundred million people from
cancer. This is a very interesting problem young gentlemen because
if this brain does hold such secrets how in the world are we ever
going to find out? In any event there you are young gentlemen
breathing and thinking and dead like a frog under chloroform with
its stomach laid open so that its heartbeat may be seen so quiet
so helpless but yet alive. There is your future and your sweet
wild dreams there is the thing your sweethearts loved and there
is the thing your leaders urged it to be. Think well young gentlemen.
Think sharply young gentlemen and then we will go back to our
studies of the barbarians who sacked Rome.
Take me wherever there are parliaments
and diets and congresses and chambers of statesmen. I want to
be there when they talk about honor and justice and making the
world safe for democracy and fourteen points and the self determination
of peoples. I want to be there to remind them I haven't got a
tongue to stick into the cheek I haven't got either. But the statesmen
have tongues. The statesmen have cheek. Put my glass case upon
the speaker's desk and every time the gavel descends let me feel
its vibration through my little jewel case. Then let them speak
of trade policies and embargoes and new colonies and old grudges.
Let them debate the menace of the yellow race and the white man's
burden and the course of empire and why should we take all this
crap off Germany or whoever the next Germany is. Let them talk
about the South American market and why so-and-so is beating us
out of it and why our merchant marine can't compete and oh what
the hell let's send a good stiff note. Let them talk more munitions
and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases why of course
we've got to have them we can't get along without them how in
the world could we protect the peace if we didn't have them? Let
them form blocs and alliances and mutual assistance pacts and
guarantees of neutrality. Let them draft notes and ultimatums
and protests and accusations.
But before they vote on them before they
give the order for all the little guys to start killing each other
let the main guy rap his gavel on my case and point down at me
and say here gentlemen is the only issue before this house and
that is are you for this thing here or are you against it. And
if they are against it why goddam them let them stand up like
men and vote. And if they are for it let them be hanged and drawn
and quartered and paraded through the streets in small chopped
up little bits and thrown out into the fields where no clean animal
will touch them and let their chunks rot there and may no green
thing ever grow where they rot.
Take me into your churches your great
towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years-because
they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles
where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation
have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from
a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky
enough to die. Set me high on your altars and call on god to look
down upon his murderous little children his dearly beloved little
children. Wave over me the incense I can't smell. Swill down the
sacramental wine I can't taste. Drone out the prayers I can't
hear. Go through the old old holy gestures for which I have no
legs and no arms. Chorus out the hallelujas I can't sing. Bring
them out loud and strong for me your hallelujas all of them for
me because I know the truth and you don't you fools. You fools
you fools you fools ...
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