Arithmetic of Promise

In Britain there was a wave of elation. In the Axis countries there was a stunned silence--and then an uneasy denial that the program (its staggering figures were not revealed to the people) could be carried out. In the U.S. that same program brought good tidings of hope ("Let no man say it cannot be done. It must be done. . . .").

Thus last week the world reacted to President Roosevelt's message to Congress on the state of the nation at war. Long after his firm voice had died away, the figures of the program he had set for the U.S. went on ringing, in conversation, in arguments, in the memories of listeners, in the plans of executives; they reached abroad to sound a new note in a warring world:

To increase our production rate of tanks so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 45,000 tanks; and . . . next year, 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks. . . .

So that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 20,000 [antiaircraft guns] . . . and so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 35,000. . . .

The war had taken its great turn. Thinking about the war had undergone its greatest change ("We shall carry the attack against the enemy--we shall hit him and hit him again. . . .").

The U.S. was awakening to the full measure of its task. It was awakening to the strain that task would place on machines, on communities, on corporations, on men & women, on the fabric of ideas and ideals that held the U.S. together.

The program brought on a crisis in OPM (see below); it raised problems for industry bigger than depression's (see p. 65); it meant a budget and taxes that would affect every American life (see p. 15).

But its most astonishing effect was the quick, inspired acceptance with which the U.S. responded to those figures of arithmetic, of fire and ice. In the squabbles and drudgery of production, that effect might die away, but for a period the U.S. had known the experience of figures making poetry, had known, too, that in no other nation on earth could such a mighty arithmetic of promise sing together like the morning stars of war.

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