The Opening Door

After United Nations troops have paraded into a prostrate Berlin, where do we go then? We go right on to make a post-war world of the kind we want--a world in which the U.S. goes out and takes a main hand in the management.

This is the substance of the answer given by a substantial majority of the public in the survey of public opinion published in FORTUNE for April.

The idea of "Union Now" with Britain or any other nation was rejected by the people. Rejected also was isolationism. The ideas of three-fifths of the people* fall "in the area of our taking part in organizing the world for peace."

The vote was:

Return to national isolation . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1%

Unify but isolate the hemisphere . . . . . . . . 6.9%

Try alone to organize world for peace. . . . . 26.2%

Form a new world peace league . . . . . . . . . 34.3%

Establish ties with British Empire . . . . . . . . 3.5%

Unite with all democracies (Union Now). . . 8.4%

Don't know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6%

Said FORTUNE: "With unbashful assertiveness the answers were 82.3% that the U.S. should be the chief designer of the peace and 59.7% that we will be. This . . . may spring from a deep realization that this is the American Century, in which our role is a world role in peace as well as in war."

The state of U.S. opinion as revealed by FORTUNE's findings may bring before war's end momentous changes in U.S. politics and U.S. policies. The findings do not indicate that the U.S. wants to launch on an era of old-fashioned imperialism. Nor is it clear that the U.S. would forgive another President who, like Woodrow Wilson, would traipse across the sea to try to sell a parcel of grasping foreign politicians a slice of U.S. idealism.

But FORTUNE's survey made it clear that henceforth U.S. foreign policy need no longer follow a namby-pamby course. The U.S. does not want to lose the next peace, as it lost the last, by default. The people are ready to consider and choose military and economic means to make the world in the next peace a place where the U.S. and other decent nations may live in security. It is time the U.S. knows it is a world power.

That looked like the opening of a new chapter in history.

*Significantly, the largest group in favor of taking an effective part in post-war readjustment was among the "well-informed." Largest percentage of those who still clung to isolationism was among the "uninformed." FORTUNE separated the informed sheep from the ignorant goats by first testing the plain factual knowledge of those polled, with such questions as Which three countries do you think now have the largest navies?

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