THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves The Last Column IT WAS A significant dispatch that an Associated Press war correspondent filed from Allied Headquarters in Algiers last week—only to have it buried or...
...America can best cooperate with other countries in uprooting these maladjustments if it has first dealt with its own, and can thus stand before the world as a model of successful (not perfect) democracy—economic as well as political...
...The one great hope of getting them to turn their minds toward a constructive program for world peace is for us to put our own house in order and to come to grips with the basic economic problems whose solution would not only strengthen and revitalize our own democracy against the onslaughts of fascism, foreign and domestic, but would provide a healthy climate for the growth and flowering of a new concept of international cooperation—a concept which would find its inspiration in the success of economic as well as political democracy in America...
...putting our own house in order...
...What is discouraging, though, is to be called a starry-eyed idealist while engaged in presenting a thoroughly realistic and attainable objective...
...American boys in North Africa who have faced the enemy under fire aren't really indifferent to the shape of the post-war world...
...President Roosevelt, for instance, found it expedient to torpedo the London Economic Conference in 1933 because there was too much to be done at home...
...So he interviewed the soldiers and here is what he found: "The American soldier . . . was too busy trying to win the war and get back home to pay much attention to the results of the Moscow conference...
...Reading the bulletins from Moscow on the Molotov-Hull-Eden conference, the AP war reporter knew that back home the politicians, the officers of the League of Women Voters and the Junior League, and the gossip columnists at the Stork Club would burst into print with their own reactions...
...A post-war depression, with banks and factories closing, farmers evicted from the land, and business men going bankrupt, will leave the nation in no mood to embark on a global reform program...
...The One Great Hope This soldier indifference to world politics will be magnified a hundred-fold and, in fact, may sour into a bitter and perverted form of nationalism if the returning troops find a scarcity of jobs and opportunities when the war is over...
...What the phrase does mean is this: 1. Wars are largely caused by social and economic maladjustments, rather than by the mere presence of "bad men" in "aggressor nations...
...The columnists and commentators who resent this "isolationist" attitude on the part of American soldiers are trying to repeal the first law of human nature—as it applies to others...
...If they could be sure of a chance to have these—sure, at least, of a fighting chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit pf happiness, they'd be a great deal more interested in plans for policing the world...
...Why not, he mused, get the reaction of the boys who are fighting the war and who will have to swing the club in that world police force the statesmen are talking about...
...It was odd to be called reactionary by Wasielewski, who has a thoroughly reactionary record in Congress, has been denounced by organized labor, was exposed in the New Republic-Union for Democratic Action roll-call in 1942 as having voted with the Tories four out of five times on domestic issues, was recently revealed by the National Farmers Union to have been "wrong" five out of six times, and who is the docile mouthpiece for the Milwaukee Journal, Wisconsin's most hide-bound Tory daily...
...Thad Wasielewski, a Wisconsin Democrat from Milwaukee, tried it in Congress the other day when he denounced the article, "Progressives And The Peace," which I wrote a month ago...
...What they're thinking about, as they watch the best years of their lives run by, is their own future—a job, a home, a family...
...Now this viewpoint has been denounced on the one hand as reactionary and nationalistic, and on the other as Utopian idealism impossible to attain...
...It isn't often that anyone tries to hang the label "reactionary" on The Progressive, the La Follettes, or myself, but Rep...
...We know we're on firm ground and headed in the right direction when a reactionary like Wasielewski calls us reactionary...
...What They're Interested In "Putting our own house in order first" doesn't mean that we must completely solve every one of our problems and arrive at a state of perfection before we contemplate cooperating with the other nations of the world...
...2. The surest way to wreck the prospect of American participation in any plan for world cooperation is to fail to give priority to the job of...
...M.H.R...
...The Editor Reserves The Last Column IT WAS A significant dispatch that an Associated Press war correspondent filed from Allied Headquarters in Algiers last week—only to have it buried or suppressed entirely by most papers...
...The American soldier's one great concern is getting the war won and going back home and their one big worry is that after the war they may be kept in Europe as occupation troops...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 46
