Morals and Politics

...Let us hope that the young and courageous, the new generation in whom hope always resides, will not mix their projects for the improvement of social life with a contempt for those elementary wisdoms which have made social life possible...

...We are told that his 6,000,000 volumes have covered the world in some thirty languages...

...The indictment can be abundantly documented...

...To him there were no aliens and no ancients...

...But he nursed a botteomless resentment against all who try to put bridle and blindera on the human spirit—against academicians, theologians, prohibitionists of all sorts...

...sesjg „.iiaai ha" rr ideal to realise, fiey hare only a* tat free the elements af the new society which the .pi bsu a»e*» eueiely carries In Its womb...

...It meant the chance-equal as may be—to live freely, fully, satisfactorily...

...He wore himself out fighting Hitlerism because that, at the moment is the sharpest and most immediate threat to all free ways of living...

...That it is revolting to the moral sense, not even its perpetrators would deny...

...And yet both the Nation and the New Republic, our sole national organs of liberal opinion, condoned the bloody procedure by which this cultural desolation was manufactured as though it were a regrettably violent triurqph of their own people andHhe very principles they stood for...

...Even his most monumental works, those containing the most of his dexterously concealed scholarship, were records of the bubbling talk of an inspired talker...

...it leads the other way...

...Van Loon rebelled bitterly against every sort of crippling compulsion...

...Trying to be democrateic was reactionary...

...The heart-breaking truth is that those American idealists I speak of did not gravitate toward this theoretical attitude, nor begin to invite its corruption into their minds, until after it had born this monstrous fruit...

...The lead in this matter was taken, however, by intellectuals who stood free of the confusion caused by adherence to a gospel...

...Hitler and Hirohito will go tlown, but not racism, nationalism, imperialism, meanness, littleness, bigotry...

...And in my opinion it ii the lowest depth to which the Churches of Christ is America have ever sunk...

...There will be no postponement of that...

...JN the above utterances no principles are adhered to, either relatively or absolutely...

...Karl Marx announced that a* smrbing Am...

...Romain Rolland, Henri BarbusM, George Bernard Shaw, Max Lerner, Freda Kirchwey, Robert Moras Lbvett, Robert S. Lynd, Hey wood Broiw, Lililan VVald, HaroW Lasti, Dorothy Parker...

...The old system, they said, is rotten through and through...

...For from the Communist point of view the real, the continuous war is that between classes, and it is prosecuted as a means to social welfare...

...In this they have the support—astounding as it may seem—of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America...

...Peter...

...They supported him in the systematic murder of their own Russian colleagues to the last man and woman...

...And all the more since I feel ttiat I have deceived myself "as well as been deceived...

...He has either to agree to a limited suspensioi of his principles, in which ca?e he seems a disloys Christian, or become a Conscientious Objector, in whicl case he seems a disloyal citizen...

...Thia does not prove that there la a special penetration in moral judgment If the whole causa] nexus could be known, the moral judgment would turn ont to be nothing more or better than scientific...

...in the light of the new day that was dawning all corners would shine...

...make the world good, and the rest will follow...

...and their behavior to the position in political enterprise that it holds, and always hat held, and always will hold, in practical and personal affair...

...We accepted covertly, if not . openly, the most dangerous and ultimately dis-- I astrous idea that can lodge within the human mind, namely, that the end justifies the means...

...They belong to a culture whose vanguard for a hundred years has assumed that Marxian theory points the way of progress...

...The Communist leaders have not become convinced of the failure of Socialism, and honestly renounced their efforts to achieve it...

...But it does remind us that in social aad political matter* there ex 1*1* no science, no detailed technical knowledge, capable of replacing the principles of common sense...

...Since facts have betrayed our hopes, let's have no more truck with facts...

...Here print carried living words straight from heart and mind of the writer to the inward ear of the reader...

...According to the theory, there it aa deed or moral quality associated with the names of Cain or Judas, Torquemada, the Borgias, Caligula or Geaghis Khan which is not good and sacred when regarded as essential to the triumph of the class that h) te build the new society...

...The group who call themselves "Neo-Thomists," has shown how easy this maneuver is...

...But always he radiated faith in decency...

...While awaiting Russia's recovery, the comrades, unidentified as Party-members, will sneak into posts of influence and centers of publicity, repeating their fabulous bedtime stories about Russian super-democracy, and their unscrupulous slanders against those who insist upon telling the truth...

...There will be no more tales, sketches, conversations, histories, diaries, essays, sermons, biographies, quips...

...Always he inspired his collaborators to see straight, not to bo fooled by words, oppose all sorts of skullduggery everywhere, to fight fair and—^especially—to avoid dullness as the plagua...

...He was interested in our military successes, found what comfort he could in the certainty that we shall win battles of sea and air and earth...

...That orgy of immoralism was integral to the rise of a new ruling class in Russia—the replacement of the promised super-democracy by an industrial feudalism in which both ptaaaats and workers are turfs...

...In his case, we decree forcible restraint, but withhold moral condemnation...

...And the spread of sensitivity to the best that life affords was as the breath of his nostrils...

...Machiavellianism is not a suitable name for this, because the word implies serious reflection...

...There is a real danger that they, or other obscurantists like them, the sly-brained boys who lead us to darkness with specks of brilliant light, may crowd the center of the stage in the years to come...

...The ra ****** senea which revolted against It Mi moral grounds waa politically right...

...The earth, in short, is still 25,000 miles around, history millions of years long, and a man's brain a very small thing...

...What chiefly enabled these eminent idealists to reset in so immoral a way to the Russian purges was, I think, a false sense of sophistication...

...AoeoiiOshy tasaa* /slip ia what it should be called...

...We ran imagine Hendrik Willem Van Loon ¦ sitting down on some distant star »*»¦ a.««w with, let us say, Plato, R. v. Erasmus and, perhaps, a good cook or two, assorted musicians and a couple of not over-reputable wits...

...Just drop everything- snd get together and lift the sun up over the horiton.' That, appreahnately, was our state ef mind...

...Civilization itself ia little but a set of learned attitudes and social habit...

...There is no system— that was part of the dream...

...The Christian moralist is alwayi in a delemma when confronted by the emergency ol war...

...We are beating enemy armies, but not enemy ideas...

...It ia the real world we are going to live in, and the problems of the real world are not one, but many...

...If we HberalR were right on certain single .-• aspects of the Russian Revolution, we were wrong, disgracefully wrong, on the question as a whole?---• • • We consented to violations of principle that we p knew to be fatal to the moral integrity of man* kind...

...Van Loon's shoulder, of following his thought as he wrote to his son in the Army, of scanning the items of his diary as he set them down during these last crowded and troubled "-celts...

...T>*areticaur they did...

...W« UMd to think we bad the whole earth and man* history on it pretty well under control...

...It is the more important for us who still believe in facts to find a new poise, a new forward-going equilibrium, in this smaller and harder world of our disillusionment...

...W. E. B...

...Political education" will consist very largely of explaining that to the inside gang...

...I propose, thetv aa oae plank in ths new platform of the** aa cruelly brought to earth by the totalitarian debacle of Marxism, a frank aad humble abandonment of this falsa pose of superiority to standards of eon-duct I do not mean that we should become mystical about "conscience," or imagine that being good differs at bottom from being intelligent...

...Wherever there was understanding, refinement, culture—there went his interest and his fealty...

...i PARL BROWDER'S shameful speech of January 11, calling off Socialism and espousing the anti-strike program of the reactionary capitalists, -would have been unthinkable, had not the way been prepared for such acts of deliberated duplicity by a general surrender of moral standards on the left...

...For his writing was special and personal...

...Stalin's betrayals, slanders, purges, deportations, prison-camps and state-planned famines—his famous dictum "We must sacrifice a whole generation''—are therefore well within the radius of its eenserralion...

...Harry F. Ward...

...Not only is our health "at stake, but the health of human culture—of American culture especially, for a hard-grained humorous reverence toward fact is the core of what is unique in that culture...

...Readers of The New Leader have suffered a greater loss than others...

...The present struggle against fascism, Nazism, dictatorship engaged his every energy since the days —long, before this war—when he saw the sinister shape of things/ taking form in Europe...

...The trouble was that it was based on fantasy...

...And the attitude of respect toward those who refuse to suspend their principles at all, is twisted into a further argument for this same relaxing of standards...

...We have had the privilege of looking over Mr...

...JT is customary to describe this new immoralism aa Machiavellian, but that is a whitewash...

...Devoted as he was to this sort of spiritual democracy, Mr...

...That is tbe Beverend John Haynes Holmes of New York's Com-¦mnity Church: "I am sick over this business," he declared, "as though I saw my father drunk and my daughter on the street...

...Up to the middle of the last century, everybody who wanted to make society more just and rational assumed that j,,*--*- of joties and rationality would have som«-mjmhv ta da with tho Jab...

...We have no mature science of history...

...We were, in our own up-to-date way, monomaniacs of the millennium...

...At the same time, the best of them have shown a humbli respect for those who adhered to their principles absolutely, the Conscientious Objectors...

...Democracy was more than voting, more than equal rights or equal power...

...Machiavelli addressed hia peculiar counsel only to The Prince...

...We ahall have to focus one star, however, with special brightness...

...With all our hard-headed sctantiftenese, our sound faith in fast and aehle scorn for superstition, we were a little exalted...

...Here learning was not frozen into stiff volumes...

...Hitch your wagon to a constellation...

...There was not a thinking liberal left in Russia after Stalin's great purge who had dared open his mouth in the previous period outside of his own closet...

...Franz Boas, Thomas Mann, Stephen S. Wise, Albert Einstein...

...Because his fight has been for democracy in this fine, deep sense, Hendrik Willem Van Loon'* last days were sorely troubled...

...It is a coldly plotted treachery to .all concerned—to Roosevelt, to the capitalists, to Tabor, to the American people, whose minds it proposes to manipulate...

...America has become s sanctuary now for all that is left, of the scientific spirit...

...They prefer to take their mental exercise in a medieval system of celestial ideas, a concoction of the precocious infancy of the mind...

...Thaoratically, they regarded tho koibjaaj of ftoeialism aa the paramount task of hu-noaity "the true ead af man," ta recall a theological „iri«—'T- that ia appropriate, and all question* of per-gass) eharactor aad conduct a* subordinate to that...

...And when the international conjuncture changes, and Moscow gives the word of command, they will be in key positions to renew the ruthless offensive...

...This laughing philosopher will lie mourned by millions...

...In that case, they would have liquidated the Communist Party, not transformed it in an "association [still Communist | for political education...

...But from an ethical ppint of view, which requires an understanding of the inwardness of auch behavior, we need to look more closely into the relation of means and ends...

...No single star or hope...

...AN easy accommodation, of course, for blind animal tissue, would be to institute a general reaction...

...They consider themselves immune to moral condemnation, because they are committing these hypocritical and depraved acts on principle and us a means to a supposed universal social welfare in the future...

...They did not actually adopt the Marxian system of philosophy, these representative Americans...

...I thought, when I first heard of them, that they were fans of Norman Thomas...

...To this man this cord, now so much banded about, meant far more than politics or economics or any form of society...

...The inheritors of the tradition of Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison supported a foreign tyrant in a war of extermination not only against millions of sincere and innocent person*, hut against freedom, truth, equality, justice and the rights of man in every form...

...Except in a few cases, they did not even, take the pains to understand it They were merely buffaloed by it They wera •wept along by its pretense to an engineering detach-ment They were shamed by it out of their instinctive feeling, the feeling of all sane men, that civilized conduct is always of basic importance...

...The failure of the Russian Revolution to produce a super-democracy is the big determining fact for us all...

...The test is finished, the failure is complete...

...George Soule, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells, Vida D. Scudder, Alice Stone Blackwell, John A. Kingsbury...

...1st .they state able to take this extreme theoretical >(tj>^" only becauae the basic reaction* of civilised mm ta cheating and »tealing and slander and simony gas) asps and blackmail and treachery and murder and tarter* and maataere were Axed in their natures beyond *to intiih of theory...

...Why mind its fifes snd drums...

...Where it was thoroughgoing, there was something almost heroic in this resolute kicking over of all natural ideals and principles, this hardening of the mind, encrusting the breast, converting the soft brain into a machine-tool for making history...

...One American liberal, when aroused out of this voluntary moral coma by the Stalin-Hitler pact, made a courageous confession for them all...

...To me, those wholesale murders, and the abject confession of the show-victims, brutal and shameful as they were, presented a less dread menace to the march of civilization than the abdication of moral intelligence by those in other countries who were per-fectiy free, and whose natural duty it was to judge and condemn them...

...Since we withheld condemnation from those who stand by their morel principles even in wartime, we should withhold it from thoss who renounce the principles of morality site-gether...

...It is a mistake to infer from this that there is no difference between Stalin's standards and those of the old Bolsheviks exterminated by him, but the fact remains that in his deeds the theoretical attitude of the old Bolsheviks, and of Marx and Lenin their masters, bore a logical, and to some degree a natural fruit...

...We have a mature science of history now...

...Taa* xjllafallif statement, if you draw all the eon-jujir- freaa it, lead* to a reriUW* religion of fm-ttM(al*av Marx did not draw ail the conelusioa* from jt_an» and Lenin aaa) bis follower*, the old Bolahsviks...

...I quote from its "Information Bulletin" of December 18, 1943, on "Russia' snd the Western Democracies": "The democratic objection...

...Theh, once we were in the battle, every impulse of all his days went into support of our war effcrt But his part in this crucial, tragic contest was but the crowning effort of a life devoted to democracy in its deepest sense...

...f"\NLY when handed on to a less subtle and more ^ naturally brutal character did its full meaning in action begin to unfold...

...When he sat down with the members of our staff—it was usually around a luncheon table—he would speak with deep seriousness about the difficulties of this tough old world...

...He listened to the radio and read his psper and saw with shudders our vision of "ice-boxes and cars and mink coats and...

...thi churches of Christ as a body have always chosen i limited suspension of principle, but they have hoped by reducing or eliminating wars, to narrow the splieri in which this suspension should be necessary...

...We must be prepared to answer the question, Wherein lies the difference between the use of espionage and treachery which prepared for the successful invasion of Africa— the territory of Vichy France, with which we were avowedly at peace—and the use of similar methods in the prosecution of the class war...

...Why obey its rules...

...Let's get rough...

...But he had a sense of approaching defeat in other battles which seemed to him infinitely more important...

...We hsve seen it proven in Russia, where a super-democracy is already arising—or will in Just a minute—out of the proletarian dictatorship...

...The nophlatteate* who consumed it as "political realism" ia taa halt mug af a fro* aeeieto wera ninaies aad dupes af tbair own desire...

...No new millenial panacea, whether here or in heaven...

...Democratic process, no doubt, requires agreement on both means and ends, and experience shows that Communist methods are disruptive of our democratic life—in political parties, in labor unions, and in other v organization...

...stand by for the super-democracy, th« proletarian state-planned society...

...And by many, very many, he will be missed in a very special, very personal way...

...Established power, a going concern, something to give them a refuge from hazards and from independent struggle, ia what they are supporting...

...The assumption is dead...

...That is the argument...

...He was impelled to write about the highest things in the arts and philosophies in the language of the common man...

...To accommodate ourselves to that fact, to get on our feet and get going again, is the principal job of humanity's thinking contingent for some years to come...

...Let us preserve that spirit Just because we called pur grandiose delusion scientific, let us not make the mistake of confusing sanity with snti-science...

...It needs, in order to fight well, a viaion of the future, a sense of growth toward better things...

...It need* s young snd courageous vanguard...

...What a report they can make on the human race— each one picking it up at the point of his own experience...

...Hewlett Johnson, the Rev...

...These serious, super-modern intellectuals have decided that they do not like scientific thinking and they do not like facts...

...It agved them from the total madness in it—ssved them, alai, from knowing how mad it is...

...At first he wrote and spoke to rouse.the American people, to wake them to their danger, to sting them into bearing their part in the approaching struggle...

...That, however, is a different theme...

...Trying to be good didn't matter much any longer...

...It is no accident that in proportion aa they have enlarged the sphere of their immoralism, the Communists have abandoned all real interest, both in that social welfare which was supposed to justify it, and in that class struggle which was supposed to bring it about [The Churches of Christ have just caught up to the class struggle idea, but the Communist party abandoned it long ago...

...No wonder-working magic formula...

...He could see the worst, stare straight at suffering and sordidness— and then laugh and square off for the fight...

...There is on the surface an indecisiveness in thess remarks, but what they really say, if you go down u it, is definite enough...

...The necessity of impending Christian principles in wartime, instead of being circumscribed and regretted, is advanced ss sn argument in defense of those who suspend all moral principles in all political life...

...to participation by Communists In the work of democratic institutions and agencies is based on the use by the Communists of methods that are characteristic of class war, not of democratic collaboration—in-trigue, misrepresentation and undercover tactics...

...We defended, or at least apologized for, * *Tlls in the case of Russia which horrified us • ,, Wherever elie they appeared, and by whomsoever ejse they were done...

...Proletarian dictatorship is not the road to a new freedom...

...woald do tho Job and it was not _lir----u» bother about juatleo and rationality at all...

...Why rise to it* climaxes...

...Van Loon chronicled for readers of this paper a couple of weeks ago he recorded his hurt at evidence of the crudrness sntl crassness of our picture of the world which we hope to win...

...In some degree, all restive minds became obsessed after ths Great Depression hit them by the idea of inaugurating s new epoch, of stream-lining society, swerving the course of history...

...To speak more simply: we shall have to revive one ancient, instinctive wisdom before our new efforts will have the dignity of honest hope...

...After Kirov was killed in l^ningrad in 1934, the American liberals as a body became accessories to a series of murders, massacres and solemnly promulgated lies and hypocrisies that have hardly their equal in the history of public crime...

...There is no old system to be rotten through and through...

...Vincent...

...All we lack is the guts to apply our science...

...Chief among them i* the demand men habitually make upon themselves aad their associates for mutual respect of dignity, for truthful, kind, sincere and loyal and honorable conduct Civilisation is on tho defensive now...

...His inmost thoughts he shared wjth us...

...their act had not that intellectual dignity...

...Its struggle is among all classes, and for total power.] It is no accident that Stalin's treachery to his life-long friends and colleagues accompanied hia Anal annulment of the idrsl element in the Bolshevik program...

...all the luxuries which are the birthright of everybody who believe* in the American way of life...

...The Faith of Van Loon LIE was writing a Report to St...

...and these brilliantly self-hardened intellectuals are not inaugurating a new epoch...

...In jottings from his diary which Mr...

...The transformation of the party, like the "dissolution" of the Comintern, is one more maneuver in - the long-time campaign to break down our democratic way of life, and replace it with totalitarian state ownership and tyranny...

...I need not argue how generally, in the past decade, this wisdom has been abandoned...

...It is lighting for it* life...

...Yet to lie wholly objective, we must recognize that the behavior of the conscientious objector is also disruptive in wartime—if there are enough of him to make resistance to war effective...

...Almost to a man, the liberals in other countries who support Stalin, and support among other things his cynical contempt for themselves, denounced Lenin and Trotsky, and the Bolshevik revolution in its idealist 10 and comparatively humane days as enemies of civilisation...

...It it one thing to advocate, for the preservation at* a society regulated by aristocratic tradition aad the mores of feudal caste, that the man on taa top should held himself immune from moral judgments...

...Why not kick the whole thing over...

...Let's abandon science itself for some crude but impressively cerebralized superstition...

...Perhaps our hardest task in achieving the new equilibrium will be to svoid replacing one monomania with another—a mistake not uncommon in convalescent wards for crackpots...

...Sheean, Waldo Frank, Langston Hughes, Paul Robe-soil, the Rev...

...That ia a sense of the political importance of moral character and moral principle...

...It was taken, as I have said, by the liberals at the time of the Great Purges in Russia...

...In this diU-nimk...

...Then suddenly the pen stopped...

...They were made ta think: it naive, unrealistic—worst of all, unscientific —to demand that people who had.set out to make the world in general just and humane should do justice and act humanely in specific instances...

...The pronouncement of that influential body in favor of withholding moral judgment against the organized dishdnesty of the Communists is the most extreme example, thus far, of the degeneration of which I speak...

...To take life «<th all the senses and hold it and mold it...

...Something of that is what we need in our new pro-"gram, some recognition of the madness to which in ex-"•ffgerated despair exaggerate hope has carried honest ¦ten...

...But those who cherish civilization, or wish to improve it will restore the Judgment of men...

...His optimism was not based on dishonesty or blindneis or fear of looking life squarely in the face...

...No—it is Thomas Aquinas they are bringing down the aisle...

...They imagined that i* was mature and educated and canny and expert—a part of the engineering job of social transformation—separate moral from political judgments...

...Brightening the corner where you are was old maid's puttering...

...We had an expert engineering technique, baaed on hard facts discovered by Karl Marx, for bridging at one jump the multiple gulf between the real and the ideal...

...The old have to face it, and the young, too...

...Even those who did not know they had hopes invested in Moscow, feel the loss of those hopes...

...Sufficient here it the tragic fact that American idealism- in its most advanced representatives threw overboard, during the panic of the 1930's, that wisely intense concern about • good character and action which, however twisted and exaggerated in its early years, was after all its best inheritance...

...To simple and normal minds, such conduct is perfidious...

...Thevlist is too long to recite, but 1 want to make it plain that I am talking about real people...

...For this man—hi'morist though he was—was not one to soft-peddle troubles...

...Their instinctive sagacity, too, that sense of the interpenetration of mean* and enda thai it native to all wise men, set some limit to tho ¦jrtitw* to which this theory could carry them...

...Men anywhere or in any time learning to live were feeders of an upward tending flame...

...He was a citizen of the world and of all the ages...

...It is this come-down, or coming to, that intellectual culture In the 1940's has to face...

...It ia utopian to imagine that such a body of knowledge will ever exist To those who strive only for power it doe* not matter...

...This was true not only of the outright Marxians...

...It ia a vary different thing, in endeavoring to pass from political democracy .to a atill snore free aad equal form of social union, to offer the same immunity to "the proletariat," and thus to all mankind...

...And hia last words were deeply moving ones commending a war for principles which can win for ua a victory worthy of "the magnificent courage of our soldiers and sailors and air-men...

...What he haa left to his friends and admirers is a tall to continuing battle...