Monday, Sep. 08, 1952
THE FREE AMERICAN CITIZEN, 1952
TIME often has to report bad news, but it likes good news better and when such windfalls drop into its lap, it is happy to share them with its readers. The tree this particular windfall dropped from is Commentary, a monthly magazine financed by the American Jewish Committee, and edited by Elliott E. Cohen, who wrote for its current issue the article excerpted below. He states the proposition that the U.S. has an exportable commodity more precious than guns and butter. TIME hopes its readers will find his prospectus of what the world might get from "the free American citizen" good and heartening news indeed.
A European View of the U.S.
EUROPE'S hostile disrespect [is] due to no unfamiliarity with things American. There is a reasonably abundant flow of facts and goods and people across the Atlantic; if we are strange, it is not because we are strangers. Rather, it is as if there hung between us, more formidable than any Iron Curtain, an invisible distorting lens that has skewed the American social landscape and its inhabitants into fantastic shapes . .
There was a myth about America . . . and what a myth!--one rubbed one's eyes at the crude stereotypes that stood for the characters, and the vulgar comic-book drama that passed for the plot. . .
This myth was no monopoly of the uneducated masses, or of those under the sway of Communist propaganda or commitment. The highest luminaries of arts and letters were responsible for some of the silliest absurdities. Jean-Paul Sartre's fabulously successful play about our South, The Respectful Prostitute, presents only more nakedly the whole creaky paraphernalia of America as seen and believed, in one degree or another, by the European intelligentsia from Kafka to Kingsley Martin.
The hand of the Machine . . . a sullen population of robots chained to the belt line, ridden by fear, bullied by threats and propaganda, and cozened by the vulgar mass arts and mechanical gadgets . . . a police state, ruled by Finance Capital through venal, illiterate political bosses, the FBI, and the generals, under the form of a sham democracy in which the population, given a meaningless paper franchise and deprived of all rights and liberties, finds itself helpless either to stay its own increasing victimization --see the charred black corpse swinging at every crossroad!--or to brake the suicidal careering of its production-and-profit-mad economy toward the imperialistic enslavement of all peoples, total war, and an apocalyptic holocaust and collapse . . . It is, in essence, the myth of the Frankenstein monster, the machine built to be man's slave, and which enslaved him . . .
The Answer That Is Not Made
Why don't we speak up about what we have to offer in the realm of politics?
How may a people be governed so that it can produce and share among its members the goods sufficient to their needs, while enjoying those freedoms and human dignities as vital as bread and shelter, and maintaining the strength and unity to protect itself from its enemies, "foreign and domestic? This is the prime question to which the suffering peoples of the world today seek an answer--challenging us to offer an alternative to the Kremlin's confidently asserted formula.
Yet few proposals would evoke more bewildered shudders from enlightened Americans than the suggestion that in the everyday realities of the American political system, we have our own answer to this question . .
Most sophisticated Americans--however anti-Communist-- pretty well shared the overseas Dim View of our politics . . . The melodramatic mise en scene [was] made familiar to us by the creative imaginations of our most highly regarded social dramatists, novelists, forward-looking historians, social scientists, editors and journalists of the '20s on, both before and after the Popular Front dispensation . . .
The educated . . . were voicing their own defeatist skepticism about America; and listening to them in the months after the Korean intervention, one realized with dismay how little confidence there was among the forward-looking of our worthiness or our capacity to defend the freedom which we claimed as our heritage; and to rouse others to defend their freedom, if they had it, or to win it, if they lacked it, side by side with us . . .
A Wise Man's Testimony
One remembers the testimony of a certain wise man who had come to live among us after the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the venerable and heroic scholar Leo S. Baeck, onetime Chief Rabbi of Berlin. A score or so of American intellectuals--novelists, historians, poets, political writers--had gathered to listen to him; and after some talk of Goethe and Nietzsche and Mann, one voiced the question in all minds: "Can what happened in Germany happen here?"
The answer was in essence not religious or moral, but political. "No, I am sure that it cannot happen here, or in England, or anywhere else where there lives what we have never had in Germany --the free citizen, the man who at a certain point will stand up in the face of the state and say: so far and no further. And this man is born of a certain living experience which we in Germany never had, of having once in history faced up to the state, having known it for what it is, something not divine but made up of human hands, and so capable of being taken apart in the hands of ordinary human beings and put together again, something to serve, not as man's history-ordained master, but as his servant and instrument. When you have men in their millions who have the sense of this ingrained in them, you have that which will safeguard them--and will safeguard you--from the ultimate cataclysm and the final bestiality."
It is the fate of the intelligentsia who live by ideas often to be imprisoned by them. Yet, finally, can we resist the plain evidence of our senses? Might not we begin to be responsive to the possibility that in Dr. Baeck's free citizen, our fellow countryman (Homo Americanus), we have not merely a lesser evil but a substantial, palpable, perhaps victorious good? . . .
The Organized People
The individual [in the U.S.], in his struggle against the elephantiasis of modern institutions, is not alone, and is not powerless. Beyond and above . . . major ethnic and religious groupings, there is the host of cellular structures which Tocqueville noted so many years ago:--the bewildering proliferation of private citizens' groups, formed by free association, in which Americans almost instinctively seem to join to carry out the most diverse aims and purposes, from the highest to the most trivial: fraternal orders, educational, health, and social-welfare associations, neighborhood and regional organizations, associations for the slaughter of wild life and for the preservation of wild life, together with all varieties of associations for the protection of economic, financial, class, and occupational interests . . .
Indeed, the initiative these groups display, the sheer amount of work they voluntarily carry through, may well be the single most extraordinary phenomenon in the United States. Sometimes one feels these are not only a supporting, supplementary force, but the very social fabric itself.
Two benefits result: first, diverse loyalties are developed which modulate and whittle down the encroaching primal loyalty to the state, and it is thus that we have not merely a mixed economy but a mixed polity . . . Second, [the] individual may belong [to] so many groupings, some of which cut across racial, class and economic lines, [that] he tends to develop a sense of solidarity with all his fellow citizens, since in at least some of his associations he joins with men and women excluded in others. If the American white Christian does not meet the Jew or the Negro in his church or his club, he will meet him in his parent-teacher association or his union local.
There are still gaps and evils: there are large areas where, shamefully, racial exclusion and discrimination powerfully operate, but in the interplay of the little communities with the great community, aided and abetted by organized protest, education, legislation, and the needs and general give-and-take of production and commerce, we have a dynamic process at work whose progress forward is steady and accelerating. Most on our conscience is the Negro: but even here we need hardly grovel in guilt before the other nations. Which society that has had the same problem has had greater success in weaving widely different "ethnic" groups into a national community: South Africa, Russia, India herself? . . .
What Americans Never Forgot
Another challenge to the free citizen has been, of course, industrialization, and its concomitant, urbanization, at a pace so swift and a scale so vast in America as to presage a total inundation of the individual . . . That we must domesticate ["the industrial monster"] we have never forgotten: our people have never been subject to machine-glorification or terror; nor have they ever found alluring that greatest of all machine concepts, the Industrial State. For us machines remain machinery, our tools and servants, never the Monster, the Model, or the Master . . .
Most important of all. there has been, in all this, very little surrender on the part of the recalcitrant citizen of his jealously guarded right to his opinions and their free and open expression, and above all of his cherished right to opposition. The British have their "loyal opposition." In America every citizen would seem to consider himself a permanent member of his government's "loyal opposition." He is inveterately, as we say, "agin' the government." . . .
Compared with extraordinary [recent American] extensions and adaptations of the older tradition, there has been little corresponding development of ideas, philosophy, or any articulate expression of what has been achieved, or any appreciation of the deeper meaning underlying it. Perhaps the American's inveterate suspicion of ideologies restrains him. And, after all, what he has to contribute is not so much another and alternative competing ideology, but something more complex and subtle, a conspectus of a whole way of living, a web of practices, attitudes, insights, areas of compromise and of no compromise . . .
The Bridge That Is Not Built
Much of the American tradition about which I have spoken here, in a way that must have sometimes sounded idyllic or nationalistic, is but an extension and working out of ideas and insights of European thinkers--French, German, and especially English--and their Greek and Hebrew forebears . . . What a gross impertinence it would be if an American intellectual should actually ask Europeans to defend the democratic tradition without at the same time acknowledging that the free citizen is in large part no American gadget but Europe's greatest creation.
If in certain European lands the tradition has faltered or suffered crushing blows, we must believe that it still lives as the great --if submerged--tradition in the mind and heart of the peoples. The dream of a time when he can be free and a citizen is still the great dream of Western man, not as a substitute for bread and security, but as the only sure road for seeking and achieving such goods, and others no less precious. And why should we doubt that the dream that animates the aspiring Asiatic peoples or the road that they need to take for its achievement is different from our own? The political truths that our founding fathers held self-evident they never thought of as stopping at either ocean's edge.
Yet . . . two years after Korea, how much of all this had we succeeded in voicing to bridge the gulf in sentiment between Europe and ourselves? Militarily, economically, and diplomatically, our practical politicians and soldiers had flung across the gulf a network of rope-bridges. But there is no comparable progress toward that meeting of minds on political aims and goals that is the true Grand Alliance.
Here, as they would be the first to agree, we have a right to look to our leading minds and spirits; but from that quarter there has come no clear lead or inspiration . . . We have seen every step of our program fearsomely scrutinized [by the intellectuals] for imperialistic aims or the intent to impose our will--or our way--on our allies or the oppressed peoples . . . With reluctance, we were permitted to rearm and arm our allies. Programs for material aid were approved, but they were searched for political contraband; heaven forbid, that we should slip copies of the Declaration of Independence, and political directions for duplicating it, into our CARE packages. Support of "reactionary" politicians was deplored, but neither were we to raise the slogans of political liberation, or democratic self-rule along American lines. That was political interference. Housing projects for the Ganges, yes, but otherwise hands off. Democracy, American model, was apparently too good for "backward" peoples--or maybe not good enough, as compared to the popular formula for "destroying feudalism."
The Alarmist Watchmen
Most favored of all was the soulful thought that the best way to meet the Soviet challenge was to reform ourselves at home--had we a right to point the finger at anybody else's broadest beam, so long as there was the slightest mote in our own eye?
Overwhelming all else was an alarmist screaming, a warning of one dire menace after another detected within our own sheepfold. The Black Tide of Reaction. Bourbonism. The Pentagon Mind. Red Hysteria. Neo-Fascism. Finally these nightmares were to materialize into twin super-menaces of such terrifying dimensions as to eclipse totally such trumped-up bogies as Stalin.
MacArthur! McCarthy! Can one recall anything like the wave of terror that swept through the ranks of the enlightened as MacArthur's plane approached these shores--it was Hitler entering the Chancellery all over again: nothing could save us now! And then the dark days of the dictatorship of Senator McCarthy, when printing presses stood mute, when freedom of expression went underground in the universities, and radio-TV stations and the lights of Broadway and Hollywood were extinguished; and when roving mobs of Legionnaires cast into the overflowing dungeons any government employee or plain citizen heard expressing "an unpopular opinion." So our most reliable watchmen --from Justice William O. Douglas up and down--believed and reported week after week in the news columns, special "surveys," and Sunday magazine section of the authoritative New York Times, and so their opposite numbers in Europe read and believed, and were not surprised. To hear that fascism was at our threshold, or already inside, only confirmed their cherished myth . . .
Perhaps the Future Is Here?
We are just now enjoying one of those national moments when even the sophisticated awake to a sense of the capacities of our democracy . . . Our two presidential conventions, perhaps the most scorned symbols of the whole vulgar, fraudulent, worthless farce of American politics, exhibited themselves on the most glaring public stage in history--and out of them emerged two excellently qualified candidates authentically reflecting the nation's needs and the people's choice. Come to think of it, even faced in the raw, the proceedings and the personalities involved had not seemed disreputable, irresponsible, or unintelligent . . .
We would not be happy if America's intelligentsia were suddenly to point as a man to the dome of our Capitol and declaim Lincoln Steffens' words [spoken in reference to Soviet Russia], "I have seen the Future, and it works." But perhaps we might begin to admit the possibility. Maybe here, right on our own doorstep, is the long yearned-for political alternative, after all.
We are proudly exporting our technological skills and our technical experts to our global cousins; what of this "know-how" of self-rule, possibly the best of all of the techniques and processes of our devising? Why not, as a beginning, share with the peoples of the world a true report of all this . . .
But any such possibility as this is still some way off, one fears. Prior to any such hope, we must achieve the coming home again of our own "forward-looking" intelligentsia. Before rapprochement can be made with Europe's and Asia's intellectual spokesmen, there must be some larger inclination of sympathy and identification between our own writers, thinkers, "experts," and professionals, and our own life . . .
Perhaps soon those who must do our talking to European opinion will find the kind of unabstract, living words that because they report of things seen rather than dreamed or feared, will bring belief, accord, and a new courage to our allies in the continuing great struggle for human freedom . . .
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