MUNITION MAKERS' INTERNATIONAL SALES BALK ALL AMERICAN PEACE EFFORTS
NYE, SENATOR GERALD P.
MUNITION MAKERS' INTERNATIONAL SALES BALK ALL AMERICAN PEACE EFFORTS By SENATOR GERALD P. NYE ri America is going to stay oat of war, America had better learn. quickly to confine what she calls...
...Wilson did not always seem to us quite steady on hit critical pins...
...cared for Zola's dull and unreadable novels (has anyone ever re-read a novel by Zola...
...Books • • • and Writers By EUAS L TARTAK On Marx and Pushkin rf*HIS column must admit its partiality for Edmund Wii***, * whose recent book* the columnist has read with profit and wet rewarded attention...
...Vhfaw, of course, accomplishment of these things, all of which are undertaken inSegislation pending, is not going to afford th*e cure-all for war that many people insist on...
...Without the least hesitation, Mr...
...Herbert Morrison, Major Attlee, Emanuel Shinwell, Walter Citrine, and other leaders of the Labor Party and the Trades Union Congress urged that the demonstration this year be remembered as Spain Day and that efforts of the entire British people be directed towards saving the Spanish Republic, wards saving the Spanish Republic...
...N the other hand, Mr...
...The men got their wage increase...
...Which doesn't detract an inch of Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's originality...
...Earlier in the day Emil Vandervelde, in a biting radio speech over a wide hook-up, appealed for the abolition of the "non-intervention" policy which was destroying Loyalist Spain...
...The Public Prosecutor of Wayne County, Mich., has seen fit to take steps to suppress the sale of "To Have and Have Not" in the aforesaid county...
...Americans are forbidden to sail upon the vessels of nations engaged in war...
...His discussion of this poem, with its Peter I theme, with its problem of "the hero as a ruthless statesman," are in the best tradition of Russian criticism...
...And both, for most unlike reasons, have a tremendous bearing on today's Russia...
...Himmler, head of the Gestapo, end some of his best men haven't been able to stop factory collections for Loyalist Spain...
...But, by and large, "The Triple Thinkers" has its literary being under the sign of Marx and Pushkin...
...This year's demonstrations were marked by the absence of several popular Socialist leaders, all of whom were recuperating in various sections of France, after their strenuous efforts in the "stop-gap" cabinet...
...This further endeared Mr...
...Our author raises so many interesting problems in his "Marxism and Literature" that this column hopes in the near future to return to the subject of "proletarian" literature Mr...
...Wilson places Pushkin, as artist and poet, not only above Byron and Tennyson, which is only too obvious, but even above Keats and Browning, which is no less true, but less obvious...
...From those planes are going to drop bombs loaded with shrapnel...
...Despite the ban on all May Day demonstrations, because of the fear of widespread Nazi disorders, the Social Democrats in the Sudeten area held their meetings as scheduled...
...The young poet's death was a tragic fatality, strangely prophetic of Pushkin's own fate to come...
...Leon Blum is down south, resting...
...The columnist's acquaintance with Edmund Wilson's work gees back to "Axel's Castle...
...I wonder how many people are aware of the fact that, what is used as power in those Japanese planes that bombed the Panay and a few Standard Oil tankers along with it, was oil delivered to the Japanese from the United States, for the most part...
...Wilson handles it worthily...
...Why isn't that law invoked ? Seriously, 95% of the people of this country have been taught to answer, because if we invoke it we are going to hurt China and help Japan—and there hasn't been a greater falsehood in the American mind than that one...
...In Cologne, the government machinery failed to break up a two-hour sit-down strike which threatened to spread to other workers...
...Wilson's more recent critical essays...
...Hundreds of thousands poured into Hyde Park, in this city, in a mighty roaring demonstration of the strength of British Labor and its intention to fight fascist aggression...
...Who issued that statement ? What selfish shipbuilder, or gun powder manufacturer ? Daniel Roper, Secretary of Commerce in the President's cabinet, who was only reflecting the degree of pressure that was on the administration to refrain from doing anything that would interfere with foreign trade—the same force* that was at work in 1916 and ultimately marched us into war, since we were intent on making profits out of other people's wars...
...Now, of course, we have to have some more ships...
...How many more...
...HEMINGWAY SUPPRESSED...
...Both have made a great stir, both were great founders and, each in his own way, great destroyers...
...Lurking in back of millions of American minds is a theory that prosperity is to be found in war, a prosperity that 48 greater than that to be had in peace...
...In addition to taking the profit out of war, we ought to- find ways of taking the profit out of those mad games of preparing for war...
...Byron and Tennyson are bright adolescents when compared to Pushkin...
...If we spent enough time at it, perhaps we could...
...Many a contemporary leftist lawgiver would have died stillborn...
...During the past six months the Gestapo has been busy everywhere arresting the leaders of these factory groups...
...About that time he discovered Pushkin (he studied the Russian language, no mesa feat) and became a confirmed and enthusiastic Pushkinian...
...and he points to a powerful, churning thing...
...Experience says that repetition of our experience in other people's wars isn't worth the price that is demanded, the lives, that are sacrificed and ruined, and the dollars that are spent...
...The gasoline that propels those planes will be taken from those storage bases which the Standard Oil Company of the United States is under contract to keep at certain levels for Japan all the time...
...The American people today are to have nothing to do with other people's wars...
...WfHEN the American gunboat Panay was sinking, M- every hand there was whispering that that would wake up the United States...
...Wilson's prose translation of "Tht, Bronze Horseman" is excellent...
...Why don't you look to the figures of exportation and importation between the United States and China, and find out how much greater is the volume of trade between the United States and Japan than between this country and China and then you will know who will* be hurt the most by invoking these laws: Japan, many more times than China...
...the United States casts off all responsibility for American ships that choose to go into the war zones, and, in those field of commerce not defined as munitions, when nations at war want to buy from us, Vet them come here with cash and pay for what they purchase, and load it into their own ships and take their own chances in getting through dangerous war zones with their supplies...
...Many a reader, justly frightened by the existing verse translations, would welcome a translation in our author's lucid prose...
...For all of which this column just adores Engels, since this columnist has never (but never...
...Wilson translate "Evgeni Oniegin" as well...
...We don't care much about the cost of the war, it is the principle of the thing that we Americans are interested in—it was...
...The Gestapo arrested twenty men, but released them a few hours later when the entire staff, some three hundred strong, threatened to strike...
...May • Day marchers in Belgium struck the keynote sounded in other democratic nations: Arms for Spain, down with fascist aggression, and war on anti-semitism...
...This columnist has always had Hemingway in high esteemWe praised "To Have and Have Not" in The New Leader...
...In France, with Paris subdued by a heavy downpour and the Sunday-May Day standstill of virtually all activity, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the suburbs of the larger cities...
...The two larger and, in our opinion, the more important essays in the book are devoted to Pushkin and Marx, respectively...
...We are better fortified in any endeavor to stay out of war than we ever were ^efbre...
...Little wonder that the soldiers have agreed, and the fathers of today warn against the repetition of that experience* The present law of neutrality states that after a state of war exists the President shall have the power to at once forbid loans to be made to nations at war, short-time credit to be extended to them...
...In that earlier book this reviewer admired the wide range of Mr...
...Wilson did not then think much of that eminent Frenchman, Paul Valery...
...Well, this reviewer thinks the world of Paul Valery, uneven and difficult as he may be at times...
...11TE need two constitutional amendments, one that " accomplishes this: if at any time our country goes to war, and the government drafts the lives needed in winning that war, then it should have the same right to conscript the dollars needed to conduct that war...
...There are essays on Flaubert, on Bernard Shaw, on A. E. Housman...
...11/E are just as near engaging in another foreign ™ war 20 years after April, 1917—the same influences are guiding us, the same voice, the same hand...
...We are given several reasons—the first one was that Japan had forgotten to withdraw its ambassador from China, and China had forgotten to withdraw its ambassador from Japan, and so there had been no diplomatic break in the relationships, and technically and strictly speaking there was -not a state of war existing, it was just a little Fourth of July demonstration...
...In Karlsbad, Herr Wenzel Jaksch, newly elected leader of the German-Czech Social Democrats, spoke to some 30,000 to 35,000 Germans who dared the terror of the Nazis and possible future reprisals by demonstrating in public against Hitler and the dictators...
...A vast number of armament races are fostered largely by people who make a large profit out of them...
...We seem to remember that "Madame Bovary" aad "The Kreutzer Sonata" landed their authors in similar trouble And on the same charges...
...Why isn't that law invoked ? We are told that when Congress wrote that law it wasn't thinking, of China and Japan...
...Zola was, of course, an admirable character, but as a novelist he was a public disaster: Ein guter Mensch, aber ein echlechter Mueikant...
...Edmund Wilson has no difficulty in showing how little Marx and Engels cared for "proletarian" literature...
...EARNEST HEMINGWAY has been greatly honored...
...What a pity the book was never written...
...As is usually the case, after the dispute was "settled" a Gestapo labor spy was taken on to unearth the leader of the "union...
...These stoppages are increasing throughout Germany as wages go down and food prices, tents and "donations" to the Winter Aid Fund go up...
...It is just first rate...
...I wonder how many fathers will wonder if by chance any piece of that shrapnel is going to bear an identifying mark, showing that it once was a piece of the old ax, or the old shovel, or the old \>low, or the old binder, or the old something that in 1934 and 1935 and 1936 was out in the scrap heap in the back yard...
...The free Trade Unions still live and continue to work...
...a principle that took us into the World War, to go to the defense of poor and helpless people in Belgium, win freedom of the seas, destroy militarism, set the people of Germany down in their place, and sit down on them so they constitute less of a threat to the people and ueace of the world...
...China and Japan not being able to buy from us will buy from others, and when the war is over they will be so appreciative of what these others have done for them,, they will continue buying from someone else, and we will lose all our trade...
...The statement came that if we are going to invoke our neutrality laws we are going to lose a lot of trade with China and Japan...
...JAnother thing that America should do if it bas a real determination to stay out of wars, is to cease this game which finds some Americans arming all the world with the same instruments of warfare that may some •day be used against the sons of those who make the sales today...
...The great poet died at the age of 37, mortally wounded in a duel...
...Several fist fights broke out near the House of Parliament when sections of the Labor parade crossed the line of the Mosley fascists...
...We are upheld to the hilt...
...Wilson's literary interests, though at the time Mr...
...There isn't the remotest possibility of the Japanese ever getting within 200 miles of any part of our shore line, in this modern system of preparation, just as there isn't any possibility of the United States getting within any appreciable distance of the Japanese shore line...
...HE shrapnel, incidentally, that brought death to many, terribly painful injury to others in 1936 and 1937, was nothing more than good old scrap iron out in our own back yards exported to these nations at war...
...A worthy subject, and Mr...
...of Marx's contemporaries, Heine and Balzac...
...The next day the whole place was strewn with throwaways reading: "Look out for the Nazis...
...War with Japan—it just doesn't seem believable that it could come to pass, because it is pretty well established that we couldn't win that kind of a war...
...War with Japan ? * » • '¦•HERE I can see my son, and you, by chance, stand* ing at the rail of this transport vessel...
...WORKERS ABROAD By DICK REYNARD I ONDON.—Wherever working people were free from *¦* the terror and surveillance of the G.P.U., the Gestapo, the Ovra, and other secret police agencies of the world's dictators, there were well organized, colorful, enthusiastic May Day demonstrations denouncing international fascism, demanding that the democratic nations arm Loyalist Spain, that aggression end, that the League of Nations be rebuilt, and that all people in all nations unite in their fight for._democratic Socialism...
...It is with these two that Edmund Wilson struggles throughout the book, excited himself and frequently exciting the reader...
...IN his Pushkin essays, Edmund Wilson deals primarily with the * poet's famous "Evgeni Oniegin" ("Eugene Oniegin"), a novel in verse, the first great novel in Russian literature...
...Many of you are going to last and see more interesting things than that, such as the approach of the enemy aircraft...
...With all eyes on Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten district, tension ran high in the last Central European democracy...
...Hordes of people went to the theatre- and watched the well organized newsreel pictures and about the sum total of their reactions was, "What the devil was the Panay doing over there with the Standard Oil tanks, and what were the Standard Oil tanks doing over there...
...Marx Read Shakespeare IN his "Marxism and Literature," our author is endeavoring to * allay the cloud of dust raised by so many leftist critics as to the Marxian approach to art and literature...
...Then, too, when the question comes up as to whether the United States shall participate in a foreign war when it is not actually under attack, the question shall be submitted in a popular referendum to all duly qualified voters in the united States...
...Grounds of complaint: indecency, of course...
...All was quiet on the Balkan front.' Yugoslavia banned demonstrations, while Hungary permitted the Socialists, under strict police "protection," to hold out-door meetings...
...This reviewer remembers how thrilled he was a good many years ago, when, in the midst of his own troubles with the problems of what was the "orthodox" thing in literature, he made the discovery that Marx's favorite writers had been Aeschjrles, Sophocles and Shakespeare, two reactionaries and one mild liberal...
...STRIKES INCREASE IN GERMANY PRAGUE.—Through the usual underground channels * word has come through that despite a lack of organization anti-Nazi factory groups throughout Germany are now able to agitate for higher wages and less hours by disguising their "strike" as spontaneous stoppages...
...Or are we too cautious...
...If we expect that we are going to be able to lay down programs that can be accepted as guarantees against war, we are going to find that there are still loopholes that are going to require constant attenton...
...We ought to confine the manufacture of munitions in this country, to our own needs and our own requirements, and quit this business of putting guns and powder into the hands of others that may some day be used against us...
...Marx intended to write a book on Balzac...
...There still would be many other causes, and they can be dug out and erased only as we come more largely to appreciate the contributions which lie in certain causes and then reach out and eliminate them...
...The acceptance of the poet's challenge was an act of moral cowardice on the part of Oniegin, but he fought fairly and not at all with cowardly trickery, as our critic seems to think...
...Wilson is in error in discussing the circumstances of the duel scene in "Evgeni Oniegin" where Evgeni kills his friend, the young poet Lenslri...
...So in August we asked why isn't the neutrality invoked...
...As soon as the secret police let up a little the men struck again...
...This threat, however, seldom produces any results and the political police are reduced to imprisoning men who have had nothing to do with the current situation...
...Today we have a leadership which seems to think that we must try'and get ready for a war that is fast approaching...
...The majesty of the Taw has been invoked by a group of Catholic laymen...
...America can avoid more war, but she is going to avoid it only as Americans learn some of the essential things that must be done: primarily, that we don't have an economic appetite that must be satisfied by other people's wars...
...The Triple Thinkers" is a collection of Mr...
...The cabinet was warned that any moves towards fascism would be fought by the Popular Front, which was cheered everywhere...
...This activity has brought the secret police down on many factories in Saxony...
...War between these two countries isn't going to get either of us anywhere...
...When the men, always suspicious, discovered why he was there, they again threatened to strike unless he was dismissed...
...As long as that theory exists, war is inevitable...
...Which will it be in the end: Marx or Pushkin...
...JT was to win all those things that we went into the * war—today it is clear that we lost every one of those things, without exception...
...Suddenly my son grips your arm, and asks, "What is that...
...You are going to say to my son, "That is a torpedo, shot oot of a submarine erected in the United States and made available to.the Japs...
...2.50...
...This time it was a Chinese brand of democracy that was involved—another challenge to us to destroy militarism, win freedom of the seas—and for a few hours Americans were enthusiastic...
...Then, we will need more aircraft carriers to augment those battleships, some more gunboats and cruisers to go along with them, if we are going to do this tiling right, and fill up the Pacific with all of these contraptions;—and maybe we will beat the Japanese, but we will go flat broke trying to get ready for that day, before we are ever ready for it...
...Secondly, came the explanation that both sides had forgotten to declare war...
...It is full of fairness and common sense...
...In the glass works in Oberlausitz, some workers quit because of a wage dispute...
...That isn't very clear yet, but four, five, or six new 50-millimeter slingshots would help considerably...
...Despite the Gestapo, the spy left...
...To think that Bukharin and Radek were for many years the exponents of the true Marxian ritualism in literature...
...One of our great leaders delivered an address in which it was clearly demonstrated that democracy was calling again...
...Every one of those planes, with the exception of four or five per cent of them, are powered and motored by devices manufacturedtin the United States, or manufactured in Japan by licenses sold to Japan by American corporations, who make a lot of money, and a lot of arms for Japan...
...Wilson's book is a valuable and thoroughly enjoyable contribution to American literary criticism...
...To kill that theory, write legislation in peace time that informs every American that if his country goes to war again it is going to be impossible for any American to make one penny of profit out of it, and don't let them, in the name of accomplishing that, sell you the Hill-Shephard Bill...
...If our memory serves us right (we have not "Axel's ' Castle" at hand), Mr...
...IT is curious to note that for all the keenness and carefulness of * his analysis of "Evgeni Oniegin," Mr...
...quickly to confine what she calls na- ' tional defense strictly to national defense...
...Wilson to the reviewer's heart...
...Hemingway is honored...
...But it was a pleasure to disagree with so urbane and wide-visionss a critic And, after all, we disagreed only in opinion, not in our love of the French literature...
...Edmund Wilson is right again in pointing out that the issue is further obscured by the naivete with which so many simpletons accept Moscow's latest zigzags for the Marxian "line", op literature...
...j| Mr...
...And Engels wrote that one monarchists and reactionary Balsac was worth a thousand of Zola, with all of Zola's semi-socialistic pretensions...
...THE TRIPLE THINKERS, by Edmund WUeon...
...This reviewer would suggest that Mr...
...As usual, it is the case of so many recent converts who are "more catholic than the pope himself...
...Brussels saw a Socialist demonstration of some thirty or forty thousand people...
...therefore, no state of war existed...
...The Paul Valery hurt was fully forgiven...
...Or a more harmonious fusion of the two...
...In Vincennes a huge rally, dedicated to the Popular Front program and aid to Republican Spain, heard Leon Jouhaux and other labor and Socialist leaders defend this program...
...It penetrates this vessel, sendind many of you to a watery grave...
...Wilson had the courage to sat and to say (in the year of our grace 1935) that Russians were singularly afraid of prison camps and were strangely incommunicative on political problems—apparently a cause and effect connection...
...U7HAT consolation there is going to be, in the " knowledge that the explosion that sent that shrapnel on its way was occasioned by powder manufactured under a formula, sold in 1932, for $800,000 to Japan, by the great DuPont Corporation of Wilmington, Delaware...
...If we didn't go broke before they did, perhaps we could...
...We, not able to beat the Japanese...
...But they well know what they owed to Pushkin, not as imitators, of course, nut as great disciples of an even greater master...
...Eareourt, Sruc» and Co, New York...
...I am only trying to say that America can, if it has the will to do so, avoid such things as I have mentioned...
...the second, one of the greatest thinkers of the same century...
...Why haven't these laws of neutrality which I have just described been invoked...
...Marx Dormoy is away, and Paul Faure, general secretary of the Socialist Party, has just returned from a short vacation trip...
...And the law is Wayne County is making a jackass of itself...
...the motors that propelled those planes were manufactured in this country, or manufactured in Japan upon licenses and patents sold to Japan by American corporations...
...Production in important steel and armament plants broke down for several days until the Gestapo smashed a strike in large electricity works in Eastern Germany...
...America's .program today in the name of national defense does not contemplate any war at home...
...Both are even more alive and vital today than 50 or 60 years ago...
...DUSHKIN AND MARX—the first, one of the greatest poets cf *^ the 19th Century...
...I ATER came an indication of further growth, "Travels in Two *"* Democracies," Edmund Wilson's unconventional impressions of American and Soviet Russia...
...Wilson is right when he says that most of the great Russian novel which was to appear later came frem the characters of "Evgeni Oniegin," from Evgeni and Tatiana: Tolstoy's Rosters' society, Turgeniev and others...
...Browning and Keats are his intellectual peers, but his artistry is greater and his range wider by far...
...Wilson's impressions of Russia and the Russians were fresh, vivid snd concrete, free of revivalist gush...
...Russia today may be called the spiritual child of Marx and Pushkin...
...i WHAT Congress was thinking about was keeping out of all people's wars wherever they arose...
...Needless to say, the discussion is quite opposite in connection with present-day Russia where Peter I is glorified both in movie aad novel, as the political ancestor of a certain dictator...
...Wherever these "strikes" occur the Gestapo publicly announces that unless the ringleaders reveal themselves the former officials of the pre-Nazi trade unions will be arrested...
...and with the no less famous "The Bronze Horseman," a narrative poem of historico-philosophical implications...
...it contemplates instead the possibility of transporting 3,000,000 American boys across thousands of miles of ocean'waters, to take up arms in defense of homes, [safe and secure thousands of miles away from where they are patting up their brave stand of national 'BeTense...
Vol. 21 • May 1938 • No. 19
