"WAR PROSPERITY?"
Mears, Helen
the Army. Them is a plea for violence, ap well as a coldly calculated essay in box-office strategy. I t is infantile, loath- ~ o m e and sadistic. I t almost justifies the assertion that our...
...On October 29, 1954 the N. Y. Times reported: In the recent election President Eisenhower presented the same line again, though in milder form: We have proved at last that Amerout ica can a terrifying go from war depression to peace with- . . . This Administration is working vigorously to bring about a lasting solution . . . Unemployment today stands much below the levels of 1950...
...I t is not even one-third of the 1940 level...
...Democrats did not even trouble to answer this charge, but instead based their major effort on the assertion that the Republicans by their military “economy” measures were jeopardizing both economic stability and national security...
...Billy Sunday, for all his absurdities, gave up a successful professional baseball career to become an evangelist ; today he would no doubt continue to play baseball, and lecture on the Y.M.C.A...
...and of the American renaissance of interest in Jung as opposed to Freud, apparently motivated chiefly by Jung’s bias in favor of religion...
...Science and Religion in America Ned Polrky AMERICA NOW HAS A LARGE intellectual industry devoted to showing that there is no conflict between science and religion, an industry that is but one aspect of the increasing general tendency to play down elements of conflict in American life...
...Oratory” is here used in the sense of a private chapel...
...During their concluding campaign efforts they developed a pleasing counterpoint of Prosperity Without War as slogan and Prosperity Through War Contracts as reality...
...We only on this one special area of science: think of the careers of people like Gregory Zilboorg...
...The Study of Sociology...
...On the level of social role-taking, the priest no longer conceives of himself as different from ordinary men, no longer acts the role of one set apart by virtue of a higher calling...
...Any connection with the have psychoanalysts who also profess election was denied although officials in to be devout Catholics, a spectacle which the Pentagon acknowledged they could should make Catholics shudder no less not remember a single past ocasion than the psychoanalysts...
...On October 30 President Eisenhower sounded the Peace theme and recapitulated the charge against the Democrats...
...Fearing, perhaps, that some of the nervous unemployed might take this seriously, the administration announced the same day, as the Times put it, that “PENTAGON REVEALS 5 BILLION CONTRACTS...
...This assumption and its party has discovered any satisfactory corollary-that military procurement is method of assuring the American standaid of living except through high-level war preparations...
...the This Republican charge-that Democrats achieved prosperity only by war production and jobs in the armed services-was dramatized by the “bird dog” episode of Secretary of Defense Wilson...
...In both those years millions of people had been without jobs for long periods...
...The “men of God,” for their part, are similarly eager to avoid a fight...
...EISENHOWER VOWS JOBS WITHOUT WAR,” reported the Times...
...circuit in the off-season...
...ARMY NAVY LIST BILLION IN ORDERS...
...he stumbles all over himself in his desire to conform to the Hollywood image (Bing Crosby) of the priest as “a regular guy” who is at heart “just one of the boys...
...Did Anyone Say “War Prosperif y 3“ Helen Mearr OUR ELEcrioNs A R ~ : NOTABLE for verboth major parties accept the idea that the government is responsible for economic prosperity...
...His slip-which was taken to mean that he looked upon workers as dogs-should not lead us to overlook his point, which was that a young man was the road to high-level production and prosperity-has by now permeated the whole country...
...The Republicans, like the Democrats before them, counted on “prosperity” for votes, and counted on war preparations for prosperity...
...He is grimly determined to be “modern.’’ Newspaper editors gleefully fall in line by printing pictures of priests playing baseball, nuns in the bowling alley, etc...
...James Joyce desmibes the process as follows: “Thus confronted, it was a trick of the pleader for orthodoxv to sucrest a posaihle reconciliation between neighbors and to suggest further that the Church would not be over hasty in condemning 89 Winter 1955 DISSENT...
...No wonder, no wonder many had come to believe that America could prosper only when American blood was flowing on the field of battle . . . I am quite sure that Americans don’t want to pay for any pseudo or false prosperity in the blood of their sons and brothers on the battlefields...
...The story from Washington explained that the Defense Department had announced that the Army and Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics was placing a billion do1l;irs in contracts in October, and that the Air Force was preparing a similar announcement for release the following day...
...And they didn’t get jobs until the nation went to war...
...When religion is threatened, its incorporative powers are tremendous...
...On the ideological level, we need mention merely that Darwinian evolutionary theory is now taught in Jesuit colleges...
...Them is a plea for violence, ap well as a coldly calculated essay in box-office strategy...
...All our scientists seem to be like the physicist whom Herbert Spencer castigated because “when he entered his oratory he shut the door of his laboratory...
...The a distant state, than being shot at in recent election made it clear that by now the army...
...September Orders for Goods Give Manufacturers Biggest Lift Since ’53 Downturn...
...And there is more than one way to look at Jane Russell...
...To elaborate when monthly defense contract totals had been announced before the end of the month...
...The Republicans claimed that they would bring both prosperity and peace...
...It is also clear that neither biage...
...The Republicans replied by accusing the Democrats of having achieved a “phony prosperity” based on war and war production...
...I t almost justifies the assertion that our civilization shows signs 01 decadence...
...To counter this charge the Republicans went In 1952, the Democrats campaigned on the “Republican Depression...
...This into the final week of the campaign deline proved so salable that it helped put termined to persuade the voters that the Republicans in office...
...With few exceptions the stability...
...Whether people vote for Democrats or Republicans, they can Confronted by the Republican charge be quite sure that they are voting for a that Democratic Prosperity was War permanent war economy as the under- Prosperity, the Democrats were remarkpinning of our economic and social ably composed...
...Pentagon Denies the Unusual Announcement for October is Linked to Elections...
...So it went...
...But now that the air has been cleared of campaign oratory, what emerges is that only one issue aroused wide-spread interest-prosperity, i.e., full better off looking for a job, even in production and full employment...
...The prize speaker in any church lecture series is a scientist (preferably atomic) who stands up for God...
...We all hate war, but war production-that has become the health of the state...
...He was replying to a critic who implicitly assumed that our military apparatus is the answer to unemployment...
...Never before in the history of America have scientist and theologian worked so well togther...
...Then workers 88 Winter 1955 DISSENT got jobs in uniform or in war plants...
...And on November 1. the voters were given a final reassurance: “MILITARY BUYING PRIMES INDUSTRY...
...On the contrary, he is frightened to death of this...
...their devotion to peace did not lead them to any idea so extreme as an objection to war production...
...I t is infantile, loath~ o m e and sadistic...
...Still, the Republicans didn’t forget that they were the Peace Party...
...As Andrew Dickson White remarked about the Church’s position on a scientific discovery which conflicts with dogma, “First they denounce it violently, then they admit it quietly, and finally they deny they were ever against it...
Vol. 2 • January 1955 • No. 1
