Читать книгу Post War America 1945-1971 - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 11
ОглавлениеJAPAN SURRENDERS, END OF WAR!
EMPEROR ACCEPTS ALLIED RULE;
M’ARTHUR SUPREME COMMANDER;
OUR MANPOWER CURBS VOIDED
The New York Times, Wednesday, August 15, 1945. In the second paragraph of the lead story under these eight-column headlines, Arthur Krock wrote that “the bloody dream of the Japanese military caste vanished in the text of a note to the Four Powers accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945. …”
Two million people gathered in Times Square after the announcement of Japan’s surrender was flashed on the electric sign of the Times Building at 7:03 p.m., August 14. Wrote a reporter in another page-one story: “The victory roar that greeted the announcement beat upon the eardrums until it numbed the senses. For twenty minutes wave after wave of that joyous roar surged forth.” “The metropolis,” he wrote, “exploded its emotions … with atomic force.”
With one exception, his was the only conspicuous reference in that day’s New York Times to atomic power. It was eight days after the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, five days after the second one had been dropped on Nagasaki. The exception appeared on page three. Emperor Hirohito, in his radio speech to the Japanese people announcing surrender, explained:
… the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
On this last day of war, according to another story on page one, Japanese aircraft approaching the Pacific Fleet off Tokyo were still being shot down. Admiral William Halsey was quoted: “It looks like the war is over, but if any enemy planes appear, shoot them down in friendly fashion.” It seemed hard to shake off the martial spirit; just before the surrender announcement, the Times reported, the Japanese had sunk the American heavy cruiser Indianapolis, killing all 1,196 men aboard.
President Harry S. Truman, in declaring a two-day victory holiday, said: “This is a great day. … This is the day when fascism and police government cease in the world.” His mother told newspapermen: “I’m glad Harry decided to end the war. He’s no slow person. He gets where he’s going in short order.”
The Vatican announced that it was glad the war, in which fifty million people had died, was over. In Buenos Aires, in crowds assembled before the United States embassy to celebrate the end of the war, shouts of “Death to Franco” were heard. Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea, declared his gratitude to the United States government and to Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, and said Korea was entering the world of free nations in the name of peace, justice, and democracy.
On this last day of the war, France sent notes to the United States, Britain, and the U.S.S.R. suggesting early agreement on France’s administrative take-over of Indochina.
Joy was reported among thirty-three Americans of Japanese descent living together in a relocation hostel in New York, after having been released from relocation centers in the West.
In Moscow, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said the United States and Russia should be the best of friends, and hoped Russia would understand that in his country, “under the principles governing our affairs, there is no censorship of the press. … I, like every other soldier of America, will die for the freedom of the press. …” Alongside the general’s observations appeared the announcement that the Office of War Information, which had handed out official propaganda stories to newspapers throughout the war, was about to disband. Elmer Davis, the OWI director, spoke of the “psychological warfare” that had taken place during the struggle; he now voiced hope for “an era of free exchange of information and ideas among all peoples of the world.” Another story announced the closing of the United States Office of Censorship.
Hanson W. Baldwin, the Times’s military editor, wrote on page 10: “War, to the United States, has been conducted as a big business—not a game of chess. …”
A man was electrocuted at a Barnum & Bailey circus. One of the fighting Murphys, seven brothers from Great Falls, Montana, was missing in action. The public was warned about a polio epidemic, and advised that it could now look forward to luxuries and certain essentials it was deprived of during the war. Books published on this day included Freedom’s People: How We Qualify for a Democratic Society by Bonare W. Overstreet.
A playground was being built in Lancashire in memory of thirty-eight schoolchildren who had died when an American bomber crashed into their school. British children, in New Zealand for the war, were on their way home.
Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel said he was still loyal to the Führer, and that he knew nothing about atrocities until the end of the war. The Führer gave all the commands, the story reported him saying, and he “merely saw to it that they were carried out by the Wehrmacht.”
A list of “latest war casualties” was given on page 13.
Rehearsals began for “Girl from Nantucket.” She was to join, among others, “Bloomer Girl,” “Up in Central Park,” “Follow the Girls,” “Oklahoma!” and “Hats off to Ice.” Motion pictures: “Military Secret,” “Anchors Aweigh,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Junior Miss.” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia conducted the Philharmonic in a group of marches.
On the sports page, Arthur Daley looked back sadly on the decline of sports during the war, but eagerly anticipated a new era with the return of healthy young men from the war zones. In the business section, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was reported off to Europe and the Middle East to check on business possibilities for Americans.
That day in August, 1945, the United States was powerful and confident. It had built up a colossal industrial apparatus, it had entered a war proclaiming the right of all sovereign nations to be free of foreign domination, and it had defeated the war machines of Germany and Japan. The people of the United States had never been more fully employed, more prosperous, more united in a single cause. Then what happened? What happened within the span of one generation? Peter Berger, a social philosopher, wrote in 1968:
… in 1945, almost everywhere in the world, an American uniform represented the armed might of justice, liberating men from one of history’s darkest tyrannies. … Around 1960 American society still seemed a massive and massively stable structure. Today one has the feeling that the whole structure may come tumbling down at any moment; that even our most basic values are tottering.
The war itself, if Americans had stopped to think, could have told so much about that structure. But the United States was overcome with the grandeur of its mission. It was, all Americans acknowledged—omitting the handful of Nazi sympathizers, and the few pacifist fanatics who went to jail—the most just of wars. Only a master inventor of horror tales could have concocted an enemy as grotesquely evil as Adolf Hitler and the sieg-heiling, goose-stepping Nazi myrmidons. Who could have trumped up, even with the most fiendish imagination, the blitzkrieg conquest of Europe; the figures of Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler; the frozen Russian corpses in the snow as the German armies rolled eastward; the Stuka dive bombers screaming down on London and Warsaw and Rotterdam; the gas chambers, the ghastly operating rooms at Dachau and Auschwitz? Or the Japanese slaughter of Chinese in Nanking and Shanghai, the stunning attack on Pearl Harbor? The total evil of the Axis side certified, without question or condition, the total righteousness of the Allies.
World War II was a perfect example of that one-dimensional moral judgment so characteristic of human history: all evil on one side, all virtue on the other. Without a second thought, the dagger must be plunged not only into the foe but into everybody and everything remotely associated with him.
But what is the cost of a psychology of vengeance, in a war presumably waged for humanity? And what are the real interests of the victors, behind their speeches? World War II was fought, we all assumed, to preserve life, to end tyranny, to foster equality. Did it? And what values, what states of mind were strengthened by the war? Were they the values of peace and friendship?
Complicating factors are forgotten in the glow of a crusade. Thus, the Revolutionary War emerges from our history books without the viewpoint of the black slave, whose condition grew worse after that glorious victory for freedom. And what was the real point of the Civil War, in which more than six hundred thousand died? To slightly simplify and exaggerate: it was fought so that a single economic market could develop the most rapacious capitalism in world history, and so that a single political power from one ocean to another could become the most domineering nation in the world. The black person, presumed beneficiary of that crusade but really the pawn in a game in which competing interests vied with one another, was removed from one state of subjugation to another—one that was less crass, more flexible, more firmly anchored to the social structure.
All wars of the United States were not splendid crusades, perhaps; Americans admit doubts about the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and even World War I. But not about World War II; it was the third of America’s unquestionably virtuous wars.
Even Hiroshima did not succeed in breaking the spell of righteousness. Indeed, in a strange way, it made the spell more durable. For those who were appalled that Americans had aimed a terrifyingly destructive new weapon at the entire population of a city, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was explained as something that was quite different from all the other bombs dropped by the good Allies. The event itself was treated as brand new, as an abrupt departure from ordinary devastations—as if it were not a technical extension of the fire-bombings of Tokyo, in which 80,000 were killed, and Dresden, in which 125,000 were killed; as if it were not a logical extension of the cruelty of the whole war.
Hiroshima was, despite all the earnest self-searching after the fact, the final affirmation of the ability of the best of civilizations—that of liberal, rational, enlightened Judeo-Christian society—to commit the worst of war’s acts. After Hiroshima, every atrocity short of nuclear death could be accepted as ordinary. And nuclear war itself could be envisioned for extraordinary situations. On August 6, 1970, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hiroshima, American planes, after dropping three million tons of bombs on Vietnam—more than had been dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II—were still flying over Vietnamese rice fields and destroying peasant villages. Israelis and Egyptians were still dropping bombs on each other. Russians and Americans were still increasing their stockpiles of atomic weapons, which now equaled about fifty tons of TNT for each inhabitant of the earth.
What Hiroshima showed was that, even if Hitler was at that moment ashes, even if the corpse of Benito Mussolini had dangled upside down in front of a Milan gas station, even if plans were being made to execute Japanese generals and admirals one by one, the only possible result that could justify the death of fifty million people had not been achieved: a change in the minds of men or in the institutions that set those minds. The basic premises of a world that had given birth to fascism—the notion of “superior” beings having the right of life and death over “inferior” beings, the idea that the victory of one nation over another in war is important enough to justify any unspeakable act—were affirmed in the Hiroshima bombing.
The debate itself over the bombing proved a point. Could any truly civilized nation debate gas chambers for Jews or slavery for blacks? Would it matter who won the debate? The concession that these were debatable was enough. And after Hiroshima, the use of atomic bombs was debatable, the extermination of villages and cities debatable, modern wars of annihilation debatable.
In this sense, Hitler won the Second World War in the same way the South won the Civil War: the signs and symbols were surrendered—the swastika in the one case, slavery in the other—but the evils they represented remained. The most extreme positions were yielded to enable a retreat to secondary positions, where the fundamental malevolence—nationalism and war for Hitler; racism for the Confederacy—could be kept alive in more acceptable form. Or, to put it another way, despite important differences in style, in rhetoric, in the degree of cruelty—the extermination of Jews in death camps versus the incineration of Japanese and German civilians—neither side represented a clear break from the idea that war itself is an acceptable means of solving disputes over political power.
The defensive arguments for the atomic bombings of Japan are therefore more important than mere historical facts; they anticipate the whole postwar rationale for preparing for nuclear war, and the justification for the most devastating non-nuclear wars. (In Korea, more than two million were killed in a “conventional” war.) The arguments illustrate a larger question: the extent to which the behavior and thinking of the United States, as one of the victors in World War II, epitomized certain qualities that were to bring about a national crisis in postwar America.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima turned into powder and ashes the bones and flesh of 100,000 to 150,000 (no one is yet sure) Japanese men, women, and children—in a few minutes. It left tens of thousands blinded, maimed, and poisoned by radiation, either to die soon after the explosion or to live on as its relics. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later killed between 35,000 and 75,000 (here, too, no one knows exactly).
Harry Truman took office in April, 1945—four months before Hiroshima—following the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was then told, by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, about the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. In his Memoirs Truman justified the dropping of the bomb, and one of his points was that an advisory committee appointed by him had carefully considered the question and approved the dropping of the bombs on populated cities. This was the Interim Committee headed by Stimson; it included Secretary of State James Byrnes, three scientists, and three other civilian officials. “It was their recommendation,” Truman said, “that the bomb be used against the enemy as soon as it could be done. They recommended further that it should be used without specific warning and against a target that would clearly show its devastating strength. I had realized of course that an atomic bomb explosion would inflict damage and casualties beyond imagination. On the other hand, the scientific advisers of the committee reported: ‘… we see no acceptable alternative.’ ” Truman said that “the top military advisers to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill, he unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war.”
The decision apparatus on the dropping of the atomic bomb was a perfect example of that dispersed responsibility so characteristic of modern bureaucracy, where an infinite chain of policy-makers, committees, advisers, and administrators make it impossible to determine who is accountable. By comparison, the sly double action of the Inquisition—the church holding the trial, the state carrying out the execution—was primitive. Truman created the impression that expert advisers gave him no choice; the experts—Stimson’s Interim Committee—claimed in turn that they depended on the advice of even greater experts, the four scientists on the Scientific Panel: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence.
The four scientists, it turned out later, did not know certain important facts: that the Japanese were negotiating for surrender through the Russians; that the invasion of Japan, which had been projected before the appearance of the bomb, was not scheduled until November; and that the Japanese were militarily close to total defeat. Oppenheimer, testifying after the war before the Atomic Energy Commission, said: “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in back of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Yet, the Scientific Panel told the Interim Committee: “We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”
Early in July Leo Szilard, who had helped persuade Roosevelt to start the atomic-bomb project, circulated a petition among his fellow atomic scientists, which sixty-seven signed, including Ralph Lapp, asking Truman to withhold dropping the bomb while other steps were taken to induce the Japanese to surrender. According to Compton, the Scientific Panel, at the request of Brigadier General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project, then took a secret poll among scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, which had helped make the bomb. Compton, in an article published three years later, wrote of the poll: “There were a few who preferred not to use the bomb at all, but 87 per cent voted for its military use, at least if after other means were tried this was found necessary to bring surrender.” But it was precisely these “other means” that were not brought forth as alternatives by the Scientific Panel. The exact figures on the poll given in Compton’s article show that only 15 per cent of the 150 scientists surveyed were for full use of the bomb as dictated by military strategy. Forty-six per cent were for demonstrating the bomb in Japan in such a way as to give the Japanese a chance to surrender “before full use of the weapons,” and 26 per cent were for a demonstration in the United States, with Japanese representatives present.
The key to Compton’s interpretation of the polls is in what he said several years after his 1948 article:
One of the young men who had been with us at Chicago and had transferred to Los Alamos came into my Chicago office in a state of emotional stress. He said he had heard of an effort to prevent the use of the bomb. Two years earlier I had pursuaded this young man, as he was graduating with a major in physics, to cast his lot with our project. The chances are, I had told him, that you will be able to contribute more toward winning the war in this position than if you should accept the call to the Navy that you are considering. He had heeded my advice. Now he was sorely troubled. “I have buddies who have fought through the battle of Iwo Jima. Some of them have been killed, others wounded. We’ve got to give these men the best weapons we can produce.” Tears came to his eyes. “If one of these men should be killed because we didn’t let them use the bombs, I would have failed them. I just could not make myself feel that I had done my part.” Others, though less emotional, felt just as deeply.
Behind the polls, behind the panels, behind the committees, behind the advisers and the interpretations of advice, behind the decisionmakers, a persistent basic belief seemed to quash all doubt about using the bomb. This view is summed up by Compton’s young friend: “If one of these men should be killed,” the failure to drop the bomb would be damnable. Tears at the thought of even one American death. But what of the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of Japanese victims of the bomb?
The dispersion of responsibility for evil, Hiroshima proved, is as insidious in a liberal, capitalist state as in a socialist state or a Fascist state. The proliferation of advisers, committees, and polls on the use of the atomic bomb allowed for enough participants so that the entire procedure might deserve the honor of being termed “democratic.” But not all the participants were equals; as the Scientific Panel’s ignorance of military matters demonstrates, not all had equal access to information, which is fundamental to real democracy. Further, the liberal state in modern times, like the socialist or Fascist state, is limited in its thinking by national borders; its “democracy” excludes, without a thought, those outside its boundaries. There was no sounding of Japanese opinion on the question of the bomb; indeed, the question sounds absurd in the self-oriented atmosphere created by the nation-state. It seems absurd not just because America and Japan were at war—it would seem just as absurd to suggest that the Greeks should be polled before making a policy decision on whether or not to recognize the Papadopoulos military junta—but because the national limits of democracy are ingrained in our thinking.
Hiroshima showed us that the broad spread of participation in decisions, which presumably marks a “democratic” country like the United States, is also deceptive. Not only did some of the participants have access to information that others did not, some people in the configuration had immeasurably more power than others. Scientists who opposed the dropping of the bomb, like Szilard, who with Fermi had supervised the first controlled atomic chain reaction at the University of Chicago, did not have as powerful a voice as Groves, an army engineer who built the Pentagon and was in charge of building the bomb. The Szilard petition to the president never reached Truman; it was kept for two weeks by Groves. That Szilard’s statement and those of others against the immediate use of the bomb were held up by Groves and his staff did not become known until 1963, when the files of the Manhattan Project were opened.
The petition was a forecast of the postwar atomic race:
The development of atomic power will provide the nation with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for the purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.
If after this war, a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation. Its prevention is at present the solemn responsibility of the United States—singled out by virtue of her lead in the field of atomic power. …
Hiroshima pulled all the elements of America’s decision-making process—including notions of right and wrong, nationalism, polling, secrecy, and absence of information—toward indiscriminate violence for national goals, without any conscious conspiracy or evil intent by individual leaders. As Groves said, after the war, it was not a matter of Truman’s making the decision to drop the bomb, but rather of his not altering a decision already made, of keeping a commitment hardened by the expenditure of money and men over years. Groves, who pictured Truman as “a little boy on a toboggan,” said of the president’s action: “As far as I was concerned, his decision was one of non-interference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans. … As time went on, and as we poured more and more money and effort into the project, the government became increasingly committed to the ultimate use of the bomb. …”
It was not that Americans at this point in their history lacked humanitarian feelings. They did not. That is why they needed explanations that showed lives were saved by dropping the bomb. But because the humanitarianism was vague, while the urge to national power was sharp, the explanations needed only to be made by national leaders in order to be accepted without question or scrutiny. Thus Truman could talk in his Memoirs of General George C. Marshall telling him “it might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy’s surrender on his home grounds.” (Marshall’s opposition to using the bomb without warning was not known until the Manhattan Project papers were unlocked; they disclosed that at a meeting in Stimson’s office May 29, 1945, Marshall had urged that the Japanese be advised about the bomb’s targets so people could be removed and only military installations obliterated.) Similarly, Byrnes could say that he had passed on to Truman the estimate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “our invasion would cost us a million casualties.” The president, Byrnes said, then “expressed the opinion that, regrettable as it might be, so far as he could see, the only reasonable conclusion was to use the bomb.”
That this was not “the only reasonable conclusion” is evident on the basis of only one additional fact, which Truman knew at the time he made the decision on the bomb. He knew that the first invasion of Japan would be on the island of Kyushu, that American casualties there were expected to be about 31,000, and that the Kyushu assault was not scheduled until November—allowing three months for the wobbling nation to surrender. Japan was already beginning to press for peace through her emissary in Moscow, as Truman and the American high command also knew through the interception of Japanese cables. There was, therefore, no immediate need to use the bomb to save lives. Hanson Baldwin summarized the situation as follows:
The atomic bomb was dropped in August. Long before that month started our forces were securely based in Okinawa, the Marianas and Iwo Jima; Germany had been defeated; our fleet had been cruising off the Japanese coast with impunity bombarding Japan; even inter-island ferries had been attacked and sunk. Bombing, which started slowly in June, 1944, from China bases and from the Marianas in November, 1944, had been increased materially in 1945, and by August, 1945, more than 16,000 tons of bombs had ravaged Japanese cities. Food was short; mines and submarines and surface vessels and planes clamped an iron blockade around the main islands; raw materials were scarce. Blockade, bombing, and unsuccessful attempts at dispersion had reduced Japanese production capacity from 20 to 60 per cent. The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26.
Such, then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.
Confirmation of the argument against the Truman-Byrnes “only reasonable conclusion” thesis was supplied by an official government committee, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, established by Stimson in 1944 to study the results of the aerial attacks on Germany. After Japan surrendered, the survey committee interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders on many matters, including the effects of the atomic bombing. Its report concludes:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Truman’s and Byrnes’s talk of saving lives in the future by destroying lives in the present has been the supreme defense of mass killing in modern war. As “humanitarian” rationale, it has been the most persuasive justification for the American depredations not only in World War II but in Korea and Vietnam. It is a rationale epitomized best by that quintessential liberal Woodrow Wilson when he described World War I, which cost ten million lives on the battle-field, as a war to “bring peace and safety to all nations.” In the 1950s the destruction of Korea and its people was justified by vague speculation about preventing some possible conflagration in the future. In the 1960s the continued American bombing of Indochina, with a million casualties, and millions more driven from their hamlets, was justified by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as necessary to prevent a larger war.
Truman’s other reason for dropping the bomb—that Hiroshima was a military base—is even more untenable than his talk of saving “half a million” American lives or Byrnes’s talk of preventing “a million casualties.” On August 9, the day on which the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and the Japanese were warned to surrender or be destroyed, Truman declared: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” In the face of the enormous toll of civilian life in the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman’s statement might seem to be one of the most mendacious uttered by any political leader in modern times. Not only were tens of thousands of civilians killed in this “military” bombing, but the official report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey said that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population.”
Truman’s statement, however, had to be made because of an important political fact: the American population needed such reassurance, and it depended for its information on the president and other government leaders. It is one of the ironies of modern “democracy” that the public, which is supposed to weigh the claims of its leaders, depends on its leaders for its information. In the Vietnam War, American political leaders continued to speak to the public, with considerable success, about bombing only military targets, as if American bombers pinpointed their loads on these targets with only occasional, accidental failures resulting in civilian casualties. Among themselves, military men spoke more frankly, as one naval officer did in a Naval Review article in 1969:
One naturally wonders why so many bombing sorties are required in order to destroy a bridge or other pinpoint target. … However, with even the most sophisticated computer system, bombing by any mode remains an inherently inaccurate process, as is evident from our results to date in Vietnam. Aiming errors, boresight errors, system computational errors and bomb dispersion errors all act to degrade the accuracy of the system. Unknown winds at altitudes below the release point and the “combat degradation” factor add more errors to the process. In short, it is impossible to hit a small target with bombs except by sheer luck. Bombing has proved most efficient for area targets such as supply dumps, build-up areas, and cities. (My emphasis.)
Hiroshima was not an unfortunate error in an otherwise glorious war. It revealed, in concentrated form, characteristics that the United States had in common with the other belligerents—whatever their political nomenclature. The first of these is the commission and easy justification of indiscriminate violence when it serves political aims. The second is the translation of the system’s basic power motives into whatever catchall ideology can mobilize the population—“socialism” for socialist states, “democracy” for capitalist states, “the master race” for Fascist states. The common denominator for all has been the survival of the system in power—whether socialist, Fascist, or capitalist. What dominated the motives for war among all the belligerents were political ends—power, privilege, expansion—rather than human ends—life, liberty, the pursuit of individual and social happiness.
This is not to deny that political ends—power, the survival and growth of particular social systems—have human consequences, and that the survival of certain social systems may be highly desirable in human terms. But the overlapping of political and human ends has been, so far, a matter of chance. And the reason why it has been a matter of chance is because no society in the world, including the American, has as yet reached the point where its political leaders are subject to the informed power of the people whose interests they claim to represent. As a result, the decisions of the leadership are motivated primarily by the aggrandizement of its own power and wealth, with token payments made in behalf of human rights when necessary to maintain control, and violations committed against such rights when they conflict with national political power.
The motivation behind dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, despite the death and suffering of the Japanese, and despite the consequences for the world of that atomic terror forecast by the Szilard petition, was political; the “humanitarian” aspect of the decision to drop the bomb is dubious. That political motive was to keep the Russians out of the Pacific war so that the United States would play the primary role in the peace settlement in Asia. The circumstantial evidence for this conclusion, Truman and Byrnes notwithstanding, is that the strictly military need to end the war did not require such instant use of the bomb. Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff; General Henry Arnold, commanding general of the air force; General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Strategic Air Force; as well as General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Pacific theater; and General Eisenhower, did not think use of the bomb was necessary.
The political motive was first pointed out by the British scientist P. M. S. Blackett in his book Fear, War, and the Bomb. Blackett wondered about the rush to drop the bombs, and concluded that it was to beat the Russian entrance into the war against Japan, which was scheduled for August 8. The Russians had promised at Yalta and Potsdam to attack Japan three months after victory in Europe, which was May 8. Blackett says: “One can imagine the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.” Blackett points to an article by Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter, in the Saturday Review of Literature, June 15, 1946, in which they ask why the United States did not first warn the Japanese by a demonstration of the atomic bomb. According to Cousins and Finletter, a demonstration would have taken some preparation, and there was no time for making such arrangements before the Russian invasion:
No; any test would have been impossible if the purpose was to knock Japan out before Russia came in. …
It may be argued that this decision was justified; that it was a legitimate exercise of power politics in a rough-and-tumble world, that we thereby avoided a struggle for authority in Japan similar to what we have experienced in Germany and Italy, that unless we came out of the war with a decisive balance of power over Russia, we would be in no position to checkmate Russian expansion.
Blackett adds:
The hurried dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a brilliant success, in that all the political objectives were fully achieved. American control of Japan is complete, and there is no struggle for authority there with Russia. … So we may conclude that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.
Blackett’s conclusion is supported by Gar Alperovitz’s meticulous research of the Stimson papers and related documents. Alperovitz points out that at Potsdam Winston Churchill told his secretary of state for foreign affairs, Anthony Eden, that “it is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, in his diary entry for July 28, 1945, said Secretary of State Byrnes “was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Byrnes’s own memoir, Speaking Frankly, is full of frankness: “As for myself, I must frankly admit that in view of what we knew of Soviet actions in eastern Germany and the violations of the Yalta agreement in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, I would have been satisfied had the Russians determined not to enter the war.” He then adds a much franker statement: that at the January, 1945, Yalta Conference the United States agreed on Russian entrance into the war because then “the military situation had been entirely different”; now with Japan near defeat and with the United States in possession of a brand-new deadly weapon, there was no reason to give Russia the added psychological and physical power in Asia that a major share in defeating Japan would afford.
What Hiroshima suggests is not that a liberal, humane society can make a mistake and commit mass murder for political ends, but that it is characteristic for modern societies to do so. The evidence for this harsh conclusion is in the explanations for the atomic bombings, advanced by the government and generally accepted by the American public, and it is reinforced by the behavior of the United States prior to and after Hiroshima. Granted that Hitlerism was a monstrous evil, were the attitudes toward human life demonstrated by the Allies during the war, and perpetuated after the war, such as to make the difference between theirs and Hitler’s worth fifty million corpses?
In World War II the two nations credited with being the most enlightened, liberal, democratic, and humane—the United States and England—agreed on the efficacy of saturation bombing of the German civilian population. As early as 1942 the British Bomber Command staff, according to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s official report, “had a strong faith in the morale effects of bombing and thought that Germany’s will to fight could be destroyed by the destruction of German cities. … The first thousand-bomber raids on Cologne and Essen marked the real beginning of this campaign.” At the Casablanca Conference in January, 1943, this faith was affirmed as Allied strategy; larger-scale air attacks would be carried out to achieve “the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”
It was the same strategy Mussolini had used in dropping bombs on civilians in the Ethiopian campaign and the Spanish Civil War, and it was the same strategy used in bombing civilian populations from Kiev to Coventry—all to the horrified outcries of the liberal, democratic, capitalist nations of the West. The only difference in the two strategies was that the English and American attacks on German, French, Czechoslovakian, and other cities made the Fascist bombing of civilians seem puny.
World War II did not end, but rather sustained, the Fascist notions that war is a proper mode of solving international political problems, and that, once a nation is at war, any means whatsoever justify victory. The saturation bombing of Vietnamese villages by American bombers dropping napalm and cluster bombs, which are deliberately intended for people, not bridges or factories, and leave particularly cruel wounds, has been in accord with the thinking of the Allies in World War II—that “the morale” of the enemy could thereby be destroyed. In 1968 Daniel Ellsberg, at the time an official in the Department of Defense, publicly described this psychological objective in the strategic bombing of Vietnam. But Vietnam is only another example of the post-World War II acceptance of mass slaughter. When British historian A. J. P. Taylor was asked how he could place Hitler in the same broad context of evil shared by other nations, in view of the killing of six million Jews, he responded that those nations that had defeated Hitler were now stockpiling weapons capable of killing far more. American strategist and governmental adviser Herman Kahn suggested in his book On Thermonuclear War that atomic warfare did not necessarily mean the end of the human species; it might result in only thirty million American deaths.
Would thirty million American deaths be too high a price to pay for megadeaths among enemy civilians? By the end of the 1950s, the idea of nuclear war was becoming acceptable in the United States. All that people required was a reasonable provocation. In one nationwide poll conducted in 1961 among twelve hundred students, 72 per cent agreed that the United States “must be willing to run any risk of war which may be necessary to prevent the spread of Communism.” During the Berlin crisis in the summer of 1961, polls taken in various American cities, including Denver and Atlanta, indicated that most people were willing to risk atomic war with the Russians over the status of West Berlin.
All societies justify the most cruel acts of war by pointing to their superior culture. Thucydides, without making the accusation himself, shows Athens guilty of such arrogance. But whatever differences there are in the qualities of nations—and one can say there were differences between Sparta and Athens, as one can say there were differences between Nazi Germany and the United States—the act of total war reduces and sometimes obliterates these differences. Even if a society waging war possesses admirable features—the welfare system of the Soviet Union, the Bill of Rights in the United States—it is a fallacy to think that war is a valid means of spreading the good features to other nations in the process of “liberating” them from the enemy. Socialism did advance after World War II, but most effectively in those countries (China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam) where the local population fought its own guerrilla warfare and was not dependent on the massive strength of the Red Army. The Soviet Union supported socialist revolutions in certain places (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria), but was reluctant to support them in others (Greece, Italy, France, China) because its main concern was its own national power, not changes in social systems. The historian Gabriel Kolko writes in The Politics of War: “The Russians had not created the left and they ultimately could not stop it, though they might try. … The two genuinely popular communist parties to take power—in Yugoslavia and in China—did so over Soviet objections and advice. …”
Similarly, the United States supported democratic institutions in Japan and undemocratic institutions elsewhere—Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Africa. Its main priority was not the social welfare or the human rights of the local populations, but whether the existing government would support and augment the power of the United States in the world. The strange combination of regimes supported by the Soviet Union and the United States is proof enough that their major postwar aims have been to buttress their own national power. It is easy for Americans to accept this realpolitik as Soviet policy—they know Communist states are ruthless. It is harder to accept the same truth about themselves.
The romantic aura surrounding sociopolitical theories—the enthusiasm for “socialism,” “fascism,” “democracy,” “liberalism”—has obscured the fact that all ideologies in modern times have been morally limited by national boundaries. This has enabled political leaders to pass off external conflicts over national power as conflicts between ideologies, that is, between good and evil. Nationalist feelings are played upon too, of course; in the Soviet Union it was a war for the motherland as well as for socialism, and in the United States it was a war for national identity as well as for democracy. But nationalism came into the modern world as an ambiguity—it meant the safety and unity of people formerly divided or formerly controlled, as well as the rule by national leaders over their own people, and over others.
It was not the actions of Japan, Germany, and Italy against other people that prompted the United States to go to war. The United States had maintained neutrality while the Fascist powers destroyed a moderately left-wing parliamentary democracy in Spain; it did not protest against the deliverance by France and England of part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler; it continued to send scrap iron to Japan even after the Japanese slaughter of Chinese in Nanking and Shanghai. True, the United States did begin to give material aid to the Allies after the fall of France in June, 1940. But it did not fully enter the conflict against the Axis until the American naval base at Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese.
It was this challenge to the national power of the United States, which meant the power and the prestige of those who held office and wealth in America, that was the main reason America entered World War II. The welfare of the American people—or of any people, as American inaction in rescuing Jewish refugees in Germany attests—was not the chief concern of America’s wartime leaders. The rhetoric might deal with fighting for freedom, but the reality was expressed by Henry Luce, the multimillionaire publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune; in a Life editorial in 1941, entitled “The American Century,” Luce said it was time “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
This bald assertion of power as the justification for American involvement in World War II was avoided in the language of Roosevelt and other national leaders. Nonetheless, the behavior of the United States during the war was clearly in line with Luce’s ideas about “the American Century,” and after the war the phrase “world responsibility” became the prime euphemism for what the British had called “empire.”
The economic base for America’s postwar “world responsibility”—that is, for the American Empire—was laid during the war. The nation’s objective was simply to move into the vacuum that would be left by the collapse of British imperial power, and to become the undisputed economic leader of the nonsocialist world. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared early in the war:
Through international investment, capital must be made available for the sound development of latent natural resources and productive capacity in relatively undeveloped areas. … Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.
“No other problem, without exception, received as much space in the Department of State Bulletins during 1944 and 1945 as postwar foreign economic policy,” Kolko notes. Vice President Henry Wallace, who became secretary of commerce in 1945, said after a world tour in July, 1944—one month after the Allies had invaded western Europe and victory did not appear too far off: “The new frontier extends from Minneapolis … all the way to Central Asia.” (Was Kennedy, in making “The New Frontier” the slogan for his administration in the sixties, aware of this earlier use of the phrase? His administration was also conscious of the international reach of American business.)
The war did in fact prove to be an opportunity for the United States to take control of the huge Middle East oil resources from England. Great unexploited oil reserves existed, for instance, in Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt met with its king, Ibn-Saud, after the Yalta Conference, and later recalled telling him, as a State Department summary put it, “that essentially he, the President, was a businessman. … and that as a businessman he would be very much interested in Arabia.” Forrestal, then secretary of the navy, wrote in his diary that he had told Byrnes about the importance of spending money in Saudi Arabia to promote American over British interests. “I told him that, roughly speaking, Saudi Arabia, according to oil people in whom I had confidence, is one of the three great puddles left in the world. …” A Department of State Bulletin put the issue succinctly:
The desirability of control by American nationals over petroleum properties abroad is based on two considerations: (a) that the talent of the American oil industry for discovery and development is historically demonstrated so that results are likely to be better according to the extent to which American private interests participate, and (b) that other things being equal, oil controlled by United States nationals is likely to be a little more accessible to the United States for commercial uses in times of peace and for strategic purposes in times of war.
The postwar outlook for foreign trade and foreign investment of American private capital was extremely important to leaders of the government. Lloyd Gardner in his detailed study of economic foreign policy in these years, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, says of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s chief adviser: “No conservative outdid Hopkins in championing foreign investment, and its protection.” Gardner quotes Hopkins as saying in 1944:
Whoever borrows must see to it that expropriation will be impossible. The people of this country have a right to expect that kind of protection from their Government. It must be further agreed that money lent by the Government to other nations must be spent for purchases in this country. … And it is highly important that business and government have an early meeting of minds as to general policy governing private investments abroad.
In that same year, however, poet Archibald MacLeish, then assistant secretary of state, spoke critically of what he saw shaping up in the aftermath of a war filled with grand pronouncements about the common man:
As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief, of factual situations, a peace without moral purpose or human interest, a peace of dicker and trade, about the facts of commerce, the facts of banking, the facts of transportation, which will lead us where the treaties made by dicker and trade have always led.
Throughout the war, England and the United States dickered and bickered about the shape of international trade in the postwar world, with the United States anxious to acquire equal access to the raw materials in the British-dominated nations. The rapidly expanding manufacturing apparatus of the United States would desperately require more raw materials than were to be found within its continental limits. America’s “open door” policy was similar to that under William McKinley at the turn of the century, a policy of pretending to want nothing but fairness for all while being intensely concerned with American economic access to regions formerly controlled by older empires. At the Bretton Woods Conference of July, 1944, England and the United States set up the International Monetary Fund to regulate international exchanges of currency; voting in the fund, however, was to be roughly proportional to capital contributed, thereby assuring American dominance. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was presumably established to help reconstruct war-destroyed areas; but in its own words one of its first objectives was to “promote private foreign investment” all over the world. Herbert Feis, a State Department analyst, wrote: “The United States could not passively sanction the employment of capital raised within the United States for ends contrary to our major policies or interests. … Capital is a form of power.”
Kolko’s judgment of the Roosevelt-Hull doctrine of concern for private profit seems caustic. Yet it is supported by events:
Nothing in this doctrine suggested a serious preoccupation with the problems of post-war reconstruction outside the context of a renovated world capitalist economy, and Washington’s planning focused on its trade goals rather than emergency aid to a starving Europe that was fighting the war with far greater sacrifices than those of American businessmen, farmers, and exporters anxious over their future profit margins.
One fact supporting Kolko’s view is that the United States tried to keep down the reparations taken by the Allies from the Axis powers in order that the vanquished would be more dependent on American aid and trade. In November, 1944, the State Department told the Kremlin that “reparations payments should be scheduled in such a way as to interfere as little as possible with normal trading relations.”
In the public mind, the foreign-aid program that started during and continued after the war was a humanitarian venture. In the minds of the public’s leaders, there were other objectives: the welfare of the business community and the political influence of the American government in postwar Europe. As Averell Harriman, then United States ambassador to Russia, said in early 1944: “Economic assistance is one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to influence European political events in the direction we desire and to avoid the development of a sphere of influence of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe and the Balkans.”
Similar concern with power lay behind the founding of the United Nations—in spite of the sentimental hopes of those who believed, as its charter declared, that it might save the world “from the scourge of war.” At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt had proposed a postwar organization at the top of which would be the “Four Policemen”—England, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. The policemen were to enforce law and order in the world, by military intervention if necessary. Ultimately, something approximating this plan was adopted, with France as the fifth policeman dominating the Security Council, and with each able to veto any important action by the council. It was the United States that first proposed the veto power; the Soviet Union, watching the UN take shape as an American-dominated group, later embraced the idea eagerly. Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg, top-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, and former isolationist, who had much to do with creating Republican-Democratic unity on major issues of foreign policy, wrote about the United Nations Charter in his diary:
The striking thing about it is that it is so conservative from a nationalist standpoint. It is based virtually on a four-power alliance. … This is anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world State. … I am deeply impressed (and surprised) to find Hull so carefully guarding our American veto in his scheme of things.
In other ways, too, the UN organization reflected the nationalist interests of the big powers rather than the dreams of freedom that many thought the war would make real. The trusteeship system—by which former Japanese and German territories were to be supervised by the big policemen—was a way of delaying independence for those territories. As for the colonies held by the West European Allies, they were to move only gradually, if at all, toward independence. Hull wrote in his Memoirs: “At no time did we press Britain, France, or the Netherlands for an immediate grant of self-government to their colonies. Our thought was that it would come after an adequate period of years, short or long. …” From the American point of view, as Kolko points out, the “concept of trusteeship blended well with United States desires to acquire bases in the Japanese Pacific islands and elsewhere. …”
World War II fell upon a world dominated by a few imperial nations. In liberating people from the special brutality of the Axis, they were concerned with their own influence over these people, and with the perpetuation of the traditional prerogatives of empire. So it was with the English in India, Burma, Malaysia, Egypt, Palestine, East Africa; the French in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa; the United States in the Philippines and Latin America; the Dutch in Indonesia; the Belgians in the Congo. As for the Russians, they created a new “socialist” empire of their own, embracing Finland, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. The Western powers and the Soviet Union cooperated in maintaining hegemony in their respective spheres.
Furthermore, the so-called advanced liberal nations not only extended their control over other peoples, they maintained economic systems at home that labor strife and years of economic crisis after 1929 had proved both inefficient and unjust. They carried “democracy” only to the point of elections and parliamentary governments, but without the real day-to-day participation of popular bodies in decisions. If the war were to justify the deaths of tens of millions of people, it would seem reasonable to expect that its end would bring the liberation of subordinate peoples everywhere as well as critical changes in the societies of those nations that had waged the war. Instead, the victors continued to be much more concerned with maintaining the status quo.
For the United States, this meant that its national political leaders, during the war, never evinced any great interest in moving away from prewar conceptions. American society as a whole stuck to its traditional values. What were some of these traditional values? The idea of Manifest Destiny—the rightness of America’s growing power over other countries; white superiority in a population that was 10 per cent black; the inviolability of capitalism, the profit system, and corporate power and privilege.
Racism, ostensibly, was one reason the war was fought—to wipe out the race doctrines of Hitler. But in the United States, the idea of white supremacy in the North and South proved greater than the libertarian enthusiasm generated by the war. The most striking and bitter irony was that black soldiers fought in the war in segregated units, in separate and unequal situations. When soldiers were jammed onto the Queen Mary for transport to the European combat zone, the black soldiers not only ate and slept apart, they were consigned to the lower depths of the ship, near the engine room. On the home front, similar ironies occurred. Donations of blood to the armed forces were separated by race in the Red Cross blood banks, with government approval. (A black physician, Charles Drew, had been largely responsible for the blood-bank system; he died years later for want of blood after being denied admittance to a “white” hospital.) Blacks seeking employment in defense industries encountered the hostility of trade unions, the prejudice of fellow workers accustomed to seeing blacks as domestics and laborers, the discriminatory policies of business firms, and the complacency of the government. One West Coast aviation factory spokesman said: “The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities. … Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them.” Roosevelt did not issue Executive Order 8802 setting up a Fair Employment Practices Committee until black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in 1941 threatened a mass demonstration in Washington. The FEPC, as it turned out, was not powerful enough to enforce its own orders.
The war created the conditions—blacks moving into northern cities and into new jobs—for exposing the magnitude of racism in America; it did not stimulate eagerness in either the government or the public for dealing with the causes of racism. Poverty and over-crowdedness in the cities, bigotry in the minds of the people continued to exist. Two race riots occurred during the war. One was in Detroit in June, 1943, where white-black conflicts led to looting and property damage by blacks, police action, and the deaths of twenty-five blacks and nine whites. In Harlem that same year, blacks rioted when a white policeman tried to arrest a black woman. During the looting and burning that followed, six people died and five hundred were injured.
The war against fascism not only did little to curtail the power of customary racism in the United States, it did little to change the traditionally subordinate status of American women. One of the distinguishing features of the Fascist societies was the avowedly inferior role played by German, Italian, and Japanese women; their status was based on the recognition of men as the primary workers, and although women might work as society required—certainly in the home, and sometimes out of it—neither their status nor their wages were the same as those of men. The anti-Fascist crusade of World War II paid little attention to the similar status of American women.
In 1940 an attempt to get labor leader Sidney Hillman, a member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, to appoint a woman to his staff was rejected. “It was apparent,” says a government report published in 1952 by the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, that the commission “did not favor the participation of women in the development of policy with respect to women’s expanding integration into the labor market.”
When the War Manpower Commission was set up in 1942 to coordinate the use of the home-front labor market, the effort of women to join the policy-making group was rebuffed—even though women were needed for the work force and were entering it in large numbers. Mary Anderson, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, asked the manpower commission’s Management-Labor Policy Committee to appoint one or two women as members; the proposal was turned down. Rather—on the request of the Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs—a women’s advisory committee was appointed to the War Manpower Commission. Despite a promise from the commission’s executive director that the chairman of this advisory committee would have voting membership on the Management-Labor Policy Committee, this voting right was not granted. Moreover, the chairman initially sat on the sidelines at policy meetings, and only after several sessions was she invited to join the others at the conference table.
The 1952 Women’s Bureau report, commenting on the subsequent work of the advisory committee, raises the question as to why the committee “did not concern itself to a greater extent with problems pertaining to wages and hours for women workers. …” The report conjectures that the “Committee may have felt that it was necessary to subjugate the interests of special groups to the needs arising from the national emergency.” Nevertheless, the bureau report expresses cautious criticism of this neglect of the equal-pay problem:
… it is believed by some reviewers in retrospect that a good opportunity was overlooked by the Committee to gather more data and develop important information on the subject of equal pay, since this was a period in which women were entering the labor market to an unprecedented degree and performing many jobs held before almost exclusively by men. There is evidence that discriminatory pay and work opportunity practices did exist; the issue of equal pay and its corollary, equal opportunity, may have helped to create obstacles to the fullest possible integration of womanpower at a time when the labor supply was most critical. Although the Committee embodied the equality principle in all of its basic policy and program releases, there was comparatively little emphasis on equal pay.
Here was shown the traditional view that women should be reticent and avoid vigorous protest. The bureau report says “women were wary of attracting unpopular attention to issues in their own behalf,” adding that “in the climate of war crisis,” it was easy for men of the national administration to dismiss the requests for action as unnecessarily feminist—thereby reacting in accordance with tradition. The report also notes the existence of “doubts and uneasiness” on the War Manpower Commission “concerning what was then regarded as a developing attitude of militancy or a crusading spirit on the part of women leaders. …”
The conservatism of the women’s advisory committee—in the face of the intransigence of the males on the War Manpower Commission—is indicated in the bureau report, which says the committee’s work “should set at rest the alarm of those who wince at the memory of objectives ascribed to the early feminists as seeking to usurp the traditional masculine role or seeking special privileges which have no justification.” The committee, rather, “demonstrated that it could hold to its purpose, that, in addition, it could quietly go about its business, without offending propriety or tradition, and, finally, that its purpose embraced larger objectives than special privilege.”
Once again, therefore, needed changes in America’s social structure—action toward achieving equal rights for women—were subordinated to the need to vanquish fascism. Once again, the forestalling of change meant that the evils Americans were presumably fighting to overcome would continue at home after the military campaign abroad was over.
The war brought full employment and decisively ended the Depression of the thirties, as Roosevelt’s New Deal measures had failed to do. Still, it left intact the same basic features of the American economic system, which had produced, throughout American history, poverty amidst abundance, profiteering by big business, and alliances between giant corporations and the government at the expense of the American public. In The Crucial Decade, Eric Goldman writes:
The America of V-J was prosperous, more prosperous than the country had been in all its three centuries of zest for good living. The boom rolled out in great fat waves, into every corner of the nation and up and down the social ladder. Factory hands, brushing the V-J confetti out of their hair, laid plans for a suburban cottage. Farmers’ children were driving to college classes in glossy convertibles. California border police, checking the baggage of Okies returning east, came across wads of hundred-dollar bills.
Goldman exaggerates the reality; there were also the decaying slums, the shortage of housing, the ghettos, the unsatisfying jobs held by most people. He is closer to the truth when he talks of the “tonic sense of new possibilities” that many people felt. Yet the trouble was that even though trade unions, representing only a fifth of the working population, had become stronger during the war, the power of large corporations had increased in much greater proportion. The war accentuated the traditional American economic scheme in which business profit and power were the first considerations.
The alliance between big business and government has been a keystone in the American system ever since Alexander Hamilton’s economic program was presented to Congress during the nation’s first, peacetime administration. In wartime, the alliance has always become tighter, and World War II was no exception. The mobilization of production was essential to waging and winning the war, and this required the cooperation of those who controlled production—the executives of industry. Roosevelt, in one of his boldest speeches, had denounced the “economic royalists” of America, although his administrations did little to dislodge them from power. As historian Bruce Catton saw it from his post in the War Production Board: “The economic royalists, denounced and derided through two terms of the administration, had a part to play now. …”
In his book The War Lords of Washington, Catton described the process by which industrial mobilization during the war was carried on in such a way as to leave the economic status quo untouched. The United States began a drastic increase in war production after France’s defeat, and according to an official report of the Office of Production Management, as early as 1941 three-fourths of the total dollar value of military supply contracts was concentrated in the hands of fifty-six corporations. A year after the fall of France, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the auto industry had received $4 billion in war contracts; it was, however, delaying the fulfillment of those contracts while it brought out the 1942 model cars, decorated with more chromium than had ever been used before—and chromium was one of the scarcest and most critically needed materials.
Hitler might be on the rampage, but American businessmen were concerned mostly with business. Moreover, they went to Washington in large numbers as dollar-a-year men to direct industrial mobilization; they drew no salary but they maintained profitable corporate connections. The alliance between America’s governmental and business leaders, in effect, was not going to permit the war to cause any basic changes in the American capitalistic system. The government’s decision to employ dollar-a-year men, as Catton says,
grew logically out of the fundamental decision that while we were fighting an all-out war we were going to fight it for limited objectives—which is to say, for purely military objectives—and it was a decision of the most far-reaching importance. In effect, even if not by conscious intent, it was a decision to cling to the status quo.
For the decision to keep on using dollar-a-year men did nothing less than preserve the existing corporate control of American industry; not just because the dollar-a-year man did things on purpose to safeguard that control, but because the possible alternatives to the dollar-a-year man system were all so far-reaching.
“Far-reaching” alternatives might have included giving the rank-and-file workers in industry an important say in economic decisions, and reducing corporate profit in order to give the benefits to the nation’s low-income groups. If the war was to bring about any genuine extension of democracy at home as well as abroad, it would have to do something about industrial democracy—at the point of production, where trade unions had fought for a small voice in conditions of work. (Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, did suggest labor’s participation in production decisions, and ultimately labor-management committees were set up in about five thousand factories; but they came to function as devices for increasing production and cutting down absenteeism—that is, as disciplinary groups rather than as forums for democratic decision-making.)
A report submitted shortly after the end of the war to the Senate Small Business Committee, entitled “Economic Concentration and World War II,” noted that the government spent a billion dollars during the war years for scientific research in industry, aside from money spent on atomic research. The billion dollars went to two thousand corporations, with sixty-eight of them getting two-thirds of the total and the ten largest corporations in the United States getting 40 per cent of the total. Furthermore, in 90 per cent of the contracts, the patents for new developments were handed over to the contractor, who then controlled the commercial applications of the government-financed research.
Catton, recollecting his experiences in war mobilization, writes: “We had been put in the position of fighting for the preservation of the status quo; the status quo at home, where reaction had found its voice again, and, by logical extension, the status quo abroad as well. … The big operators who made the working decisions had decided that nothing very substantial was going to be changed.” One of the most important elements of the status quo was that, despite all the self-congratulatory talk in the United States about democracy, decisions would continue to be made at the top. Whether conservatives or liberals were in power in Washington, the decision-making process and the intent of the decisions would remain the same. As Catton describes it: “Hidebound businessmen had one approach and doctrinaire New Dealers had another. Different as they were, both groups shared one controlling emotion: a distrust of the naked processes of democracy.”
This distrust manifested itself in something which, much later in the postwar period, during the Vietnam War, was termed the “credibility gap”—a growing realization that the government was concealing facts, distorting truths, and just plain lying. The wartime government became obsessed with what was said and shown to the people, rather than what was actually done. It seemed easier to get the people to believe that something had been done than to do it; the most important consideration was what became known as “image.” In November, 1942, a dollar-a-year consultant on the staff of the War Production Board wrote a memo entitled “Public Relations.” It proposed the use of advertising men to promote public goodwill, and suggested: “The deficiencies of WPB are naturally seized upon by press and radio with more glee than its successful achievements. Methods must be found, therefore, to give true value to WPB’s really significant results.”
As suggested earlier, though the Allied powers won the war, antidemocratic, even totalitarian, ideas dominated the postwar world to a significant degree. One of these ideas was that dissenters from the government policy—especially in wartime—should be silenced by intimidation and, if they refused to remain silent, put in jail. On the eve of war, in 1940, Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed, the Alien Registration Act, known as the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence in speech or writing, or to “affiliate” with organizations urging such action. It was therefore made a crime to advocate what Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had advocated in the Declaration of Independence. In the midst of the war to end repression, the American government prosecuted and sent to prison a number of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) for violating the Smith Act by what they wrote and said. What the government was anxious about was not the imminence of revolution—the Socialist Workers Party was tiny and weak—but the fact that the party criticized the war, questioning its objectives and arguing that its real intent was to preserve capitalism at home and imperialism abroad.
The government not only punished speechmakers and writers during World War II, it put in detention camps (some called them concentration camps) tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, including those born in this country—not for doing anything, but simply for being of Japanese descent. The argument was that they were potential threats to the war effort. Both the Smith Act prosecutions and the removal of the Japanese families from their homes into camps were ultimately approved by the Supreme Court. In World War II, as in previous wars, civil liberties were put aside at a time when freedom of discussion about life-and-death issues was most urgently needed.
The reconsideration of World War II in this chapter does not mean to ignore the fact that the war destroyed one of the most cruel governments in history—that of the Nazis’, as well as the aggressive imperialisms of Italy and Japan. It does not mean to deny that the war had tumultuous effects on many parts of the world, leading to the overthrow of old, oppressive regimes and to the development of revolutionary movements for independence and change. Nor does this reassessment mean to deny that the war created an atmosphere of hope that may have been an instrumental factor in the struggles for freedom that have taken place in many parts of the postwar world, including the United States. The intention here has been to show that these undoubted results must be weighed against other facts: that while the war enlisted the energies and sacrifices of tens of millions of ordinary people, it was directed by power elites in a few major nations. The chief concern of these elites was the expansion of their own power, the perpetuation of their own systems at home, and the extension of their domination over other parts of the world—facts as true of the United States as of the Soviet Union.
The intention has also been to show that the war not only left intact the existing systems, not only concentrated world power even more tightly than before, but that it perpetuated the identical values the victors claimed to be fighting against. The stockpiling of weapons continued; so, too, did the system of military alliances. Indiscriminate war on civilian populations as an instrument of international politics did not cease, nor did governmental control of information, the political use of racial hatred, the monopolization of wealth by a few, and the destruction of civil liberties—facts as true of the “totalitarian” Soviet Union as of the “democratic” United States.
There is no point, now, in answering the question: Should Americans therefore have fought the Nazis? Historians need to be concerned more with the future than with the past, and no crisis appears in exactly the same form twice. But there are phenomena that, if not exactly alike, have the same general characteristics at different times and places in history, and to know this may help us make the specific decisions that any particular situation requires. One of the characteristics of war is that it always represents a multiplicity of interests within each fighting nation. Also, the dominant values in American society may be so close to those the United States claims the enemy represents as to call into question how much human sacrifice can be justified for the traditional objective of military victory. As Yossarian said in Catch-22, when it was suggested that his anti-military talk was “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”: “The enemy is whoever wants to get you killed, whichever side he’s on.” And in a play by Bertolt Brecht, there is a frightening line of dialogue for all people called to war: “Let’s go fishing, said the angler to the worm.”
The problems America sees now in the postwar period are not dramatic deviations from that time of idealism and victory that was World War II; they were visible in wartime America, if anyone had cared enough to look. In World War II, despite the rhetoric of a crusade, the United States retained its basic historical characteristics: its arrangements of power and privilege, its traditional ideas and values. After the war, these characteristics emerged so sharply as to bring, in the 1960s, a national crisis, with tumultuous conflict, agonizing disillusionment, and a movement for change beyond anything the nation had ever seen.
