The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
The Home Front By WILLIAM E. BOHN Military Trolaiag aad Democracy OUR great debate on military training is still to coma. The New leader has had one aymftotium on the topic, and all that...
...In its discussion, it mixed up the role of PACCIO, aa official body of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and National Citizens PAC, a body of liberals formed for campaign purposes after PAC-CIO shut down activities to conform with the SmithConnelly Act We were also balled up about negotiations with the UDA...
...The UAW has been organizing radio shops in the metropolitan area which the UE has been unsjjle to crack, and now the UE is beginning to squawk...
...The New leader has had one aymftotium on the topic, and all that it ahowed waa that ear contributors are all over the lot What we need new is some attempt to lay the foundations of fruitful discussion...
...J An article in the union journal on postwar conscription linked Thomas's socialism with Hitler's national socialism...
...fight brewing between the United Auto Workers and the United Electricsl and Radio Workers...
...S) seme kept their ideads...
...Of the 82 promotional campaigns now running, only seven sre expected to end v-e day...
...The charge was denied here, but the current issue of Butinett Week, telling American businessmen how to get to France, says, "the best trick is to become accredited to some agency in Washington capable of sending you over on 'business.'" . . . The Dies Committee goes out of existence January 1, 1945, when its legal life expires...
...Foxy Groadpo SfoiJn In the current Saturday Evening Pott, Henry Cassidy has an article which explains that Stalin is growing conservative because he is 66 and at an age where he does not want to start anything new...
...Stalin nods yes...
...The Army, from the point of view of its effect on the individual soldier, is like the curate's egg, good in spots...
...So he should know something about this business of the effect which the Army has on the individual...
...PM Porty-LJne PM which is often discriminating on its domestic news, usually goes haywire on its foreign coverage...
...Vorishilov scribbles a few words on a piece of paper and paasea it along to Stalin...
...Cassidy closes his article with a story that Is revealing for its implications...
...They may be simple—subjects connected with eating, sleeping, getting married—all the processes of life...
...The problems involved in these actions are not less intellectual than those involved in a problem of pure mathematics...
...4) Some have tried to change their low-brow friends either by lecturing them or getting into discussions and always pointing out problems or aspects of activity which called for comment and might provoke thought...
...Whatever wo want for America, we do not want that...
...It is our business to inquire into the practices of the Army precisely aa a parent asks about a school...
...Projects on which the OWI expects to continue after the war "translating them in terms of information for the American people" are universal military training...
...discipline...
...vER the past months efforts have been made by the Communists and their fellow-travelers to eliminate the International Federation of Trade Unions from the world labor scene and replace it with some organisation that would admit Communist unions and allow Lombardo Toledano to play a leading role...
...They do not bother others...
...Answers to this leading question I am eagerly pigeonholing...
...Sounds wonderful...
...6) Some just go through the Army aa spectators enjoying the scans and having a lot of fun watching the ethers...
...They do not want to be bothered...
...My master picture of what an army is and what an army does to its constituent individuals it derived from Germany...
...At night, off duty, they would separate, go off to reed, listen to good music, go for s walk, maybe have a talk with some fellow of similar ilk...
...In one episode, Stalin and Vorishilov are interviewing an airplane designer...
...The esthetes who get such pleasure out of pure thought and emotion that they live in a world of rarified ravings about a life of reason ? The college type who keeps his mind entombed in the cobwebs of rules and regulations of formal logic ? "Or do you mean the plain man who lives st times as a thinking being ? Who is able to think, to distinguish between different aspects of his environment, make decisions on the basis of the facts ? The curious guy who Just does not let the world hit him in the face but insists on asking embarrassing questions ? This intellectual need not be lofty...
...These are many sorts ef armies snd, tee, msny variations of tamper aad practice within any given army...
...readjustment ef populations from war-created ghost towns...
...1) Seme triad to become one of the hoys...
...This process gives us the surest way of building a fair basis for discussion...
...The intellectual cows who wish to chew the cud of culture instead of gum ? The...
...They became rowdies, drank, ran after women, gambled, cussed, became boisterous...
...Then Vorishilov announces: "You have been awarded the Order of Lenin, a prise of 100,000 rubles and a Zee automobile...
...Aad the effects of service are as various aa the kinds of men who pet en the uniform...
...Training for what...
...He writes i "1 asked an intelligent and articulate, but for obviout reasons an anonymout Russian for his estimate of ths man...
...I know what Prussian military training did to reduce the German people to the messy amalgam that mads Hitler possible...
...So my oft-rspested question to returning soldiers hss been: Does the Army tend to reduce your minds to a common mean...
...There hsvs, in fact, been important changes since Pearl Harbor...
...Tha articles laud the Supreme Junta of National Union, a Communist front which embraces Catholic reactionaries, but not one word is said about the Socialist groups in Spain...
...This man advises American officials to avoid the older labor officials and deal with Communist trade-unionists...
...Recently the ILO hired one David Efron as a member of its union relations staff...
...Adjustment in the Army...
...The guard house and 'neuro' clinics cases do not come from higher 'intellectual' brackets but from the lower ones...
...It is the artificial, mechanised, cold, impersonal, arbitrary nature of the system It ia tie Vests system, the undemocratic aspects, the orders, the way the orders are given, the swuagaid for tha individual, the callousness of some ef the officers and men that causes the tough spots for oar maladjusted fellows...
...It ia too arbitrary, undemocratic, callous...
...You see what this adda up to...
...Norman Thomas has filed a $500,000 libel suit against Dsn JTobin and the editors of the International Teamster...
...My observstion of problem cases leada me to conclude that the intellectuals are the best adjusted fellows...
...This one is from a psychologist serving in the personnel corps in the "land of the Arab, the Terek, the Berber, the Moor, the French, the Spanish and the GI's...
...Sidney Hook was awarded one of the Townsend Harris medals by City College of New York for "notable postgraduate attainments...
...2) Some hurriedly shed the restraints of their past Uvea and tried to tee what it feels like to live in tha raw...
...All right...
...With German Junkers at its head...
...In its last Sunday issue, more than three pages are devoted to the Spanish situation in articles written by fellow-travelers Richard Yaffee and Allan Chase...
...If its traditional routine fails to produce the bast results, there csn be changes...
...I do not believe it is the adjustment of men to men thst rsuses Section VIII's, ths COD'S, the guardhouse rases...
...Our psychologist haa been observing on the spot It is his opinion that more reason, understanding, sympathy would give as e better fighting force...
...Efron was one of the organizers of the Stalinoid Council for PanAmerican Democracy which is now headed by Nets Mattel editor Fredrick Vanderbilt Field...
...The trouble 1ms not in the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of boys taking almost identical training...
...Pacta about armies are aa contradictory aa farts about other great institutions...
...I had in mind the sensitive, imaginative, literate type of young man...
...The Intellect sol and the Regimen...
...It is because of their bearing en this arguanent for and against military training that I am eager to add to the scrapbook of my mind every bit of soldier testimony that I csn gather in...
...If you will accept my definition, this second one, I am willing to discuss tha adjustment of the intellectual...
...guys who strike poses-as thinkers, philosophers, poets, writers, editors, seers...
...Neither does it stem from the throwing together of boys of every sort It rises from the inherited tradition of the training...
...In the meantime, probably the most useful thing we csn do is to gather and evaluate evidence of the sort of training given by our present military setup...
...The recent convention of the Spanish Socialist Party in Toulouse, which united the old Caballero snd Prieto, left snd right wings of the party, is ignored completely...
...His business is to straighten out kinks in the soldier's mind...
...We are told that it will be wise to have practically universal training for boys...
...Tha aame processes are involved but tha materials are different...
...He said: 'The war has made Stalin a success...
...Before we shall be in a position to take our stand we must have before us a definite proposal, a lav/ which outlines objectives and methods of trsining...
...Now he will be known forever as Stalin the Great'" If he had died before the war he would have been known at...
...Chitchat TlIE London Daily Mail complained recently "that American businessmen were getting into Paris with the Army and thus jumping the gun on trade...
...Where reason, understanding, sympathy, respect for one another's rights exist—there we have gg#a morale and well-adjusted soldiers...
...with no union experience, is now in a key 11,0 division currying on relations with world labor bodies...
...Let me tell yon about the intellectuals whom I have met in the service...
...If he bad died before the war he would have gone down in history as Stalin the Terrible...
...10, according to Parker, Major General Martin Lattmaa, committee member of the Officers Bund, wrote: "The Free Germany Committee is s united front, s pattern for a great German people's front to come...
...The company with the higrHsu morale is net necessarily the one with the most Ire...
...Hope Springs Eternal The OWI is making plans now to continue as a peacetime agency, if Congress be willing...
...This is well proved by the records in the Army...
...CIO Mlx-ap ThIS column got all balled up last week on its PAC story...
...The progress of society depends upon the possibility of individual and group variations...
...6) Most of them just get down to the level of the average fellow and keep their ideas to themselves...
...Members of the Committee who were defeated for re-election included Dies, Staines, Costello and Busbey...
...Efforts are also being made to infiltrate the ILO labor division...
...I wondered what happens to him when he is thrown, twenty-four hours a day, with lusty average guys and has to spend his time in strenuous boot training which takes no account of his high thoughts and fine feelings...
...Those who have adjusted in the past, who got along with people in civilian life, get along ia the Army...
...The key figure in these intrigues is an official of the Foreign Economic Administration, now stationed in London...
...The future ef National Citizens PAC is still in doubt, and its existence will depend on the attitude taken by the UDA, whose leadership, Niebuhr, Kirchwey, Loeb, etc., were on the Citizens PAC national board...
...The boobus intellects who lives with his long hair waving in the wind "as he walks through the Village...
...By MURRAY EVERETT Inside and Out I at or mat tonal Labor laf rigee...
...There ran be more...
...They are so engrossed in what is happening about them that they have no time to worry about what they are doing—so they get along successfully...
...My question to him was: What does the service do to the intellectual...
...During the day, at work, they would mingle with the men at their level...
...These are tha quiet, reserved boys who mind their own business...
...The question we must answer, then, is: Would compulsory training in this country necessarily product tht regimented robots who furnish easy game for a dictator t So when ready talkers begin to discuss compulsory trsining my natural question is: What sort of training...
...Two stories are worth retelling...
...He merely realises that he haa problems aad tries to face up to them...
...But my use of the term intellectual got my correspondent off to s bad start: "What do you mean, intellectual...
...But apart from this debatable thesis, the article is interesting for a few slants on the personality of Stalin...
...Efron...
...WhICH leads, inevitsbly, to a soldier letter...
...fa toe Labor World ThERE is a jurisdictions...
...Another article hy Ralph Parker in Moscow lands the Free Germaay Committee headed by the Junker General von Seydlits snd its msgasiae Fmrs DoatsthlamL Parker writes: "Freies Deutochlomd offers hope evea to the repentant Nasi" In this issue of Freies Demtsthland of Sept...
...Any conclusions which ws draw from experiences ef boys in the training camps or on the fighting fronts are sure to rest on foundations ef only partial fact...
...Anything which irons out differences tends to make life stupid and static...
...role of public works, etc...
...The dullard, the unthinking being who, when faced with a problem, escapee into drink and relaxation with women, ia the fellow who is worst adjusted...
Vol. 27 • December 1944 • No. 48
