MISSIONARY, SAVE THYSELF!
Missionary, Save Thyself! UNLIKE Time and Life, its bumptious brothers in Henry Luce's stable of magazines, Fortune has a habit of turning up now and then with a thoughtful survey of social forces...
...We find ourselves, on occasion, more than a little impatient with Americans whose love of self-flagellation leaves them constantly and carpingly sour on anything and everything American...
...the Russians—or the Americans.' We were greatly impressed with Fortune's analysis of the nature of the "myth" about America and the need for something more basic than a louder Voice of America program to combat the world's impression of the United States...
...See Lyle Tatum's letter...
...Now of course we're not so bad as the catalogue of our sins in any one month might make us seem...
...Again, in pounding home the extent to which the Marshall Plan, for all its virtues, has strengthened monopoly-minded "unregenerate European capitalism," while providing few benefits for the workers, this magazine of business urges: "It is high time the American businessman realized that it is not European socialism but European capitalism that is the chief block to free enterprise...
...Fortune recognizes that slicker gimmicks, gaudier pamphlets, and an extra jolt of juice for the Voice of America provide only a frivolous answer to a deeply serious problem...
...we must extend it...
...Profits today are reaching fabulous peaks undreamed of even in the hey-day of the Coolidge-Hoover era when money was more avowedly king...
...Meanwhile, a once progressive-minded Administration has become so persuaded of the need for harnessing money-mindedness rather than morals to its mobilization program that it has proposed a tax program which torpedoes the progressive principle of ability-to-pay it once embraced...
...Fortune answers the question with a qualified affirmative—"Yes...
...Still another development in the news at just about the time Fortune was reaching its subscribers may throw additional light on the "myth" about America...
...The People's Forum...
...It produced such a study in its February issue under the title, "Have We Any Friends...
...The lack of moral appeal to American foreign policy is a logical consequence of the lack of moral stature at home...
...All sincere attempts to recapture excess rearmament profits for the public have been beaten back by the power of entrenched greed and selfishness...
...M.H.R...
...Make no mistake," Fortune warns us, "if we do not destroy the myth, it will destroy us...
...that we are the new Carthage—all money and no spirit...
...Or, as the United Press reported the President's press conference reaction, he felt that "the present emergency program is one that will keep the nation prosperous, and this prosperity affects all groups, including labor, business, agriculture, and white-collar workers...
...a boy with a Quaker conscience gets ten years in prison—and we are surprised that the world wonders if we're the new Carthage, "a country without a soul...
...UNLIKE Time and Life, its bumptious brothers in Henry Luce's stable of magazines, Fortune has a habit of turning up now and then with a thoughtful survey of social forces and moral trends in American life...
...The recommended tax to finance part of the rearmament program will exact the identical percentage increase—four per cent across the board—on the income of a $5,000-a-year family as it will the $50,000 and $500,000-a-year family...
...The problem of Europe,' as one observer puts it, -'comes down to who is to liquidate the capitalists of Europe...
...The emphasis, at a time like this, on everybody-gets-rich-on-rearma-ment, rather than on equality of sacrifice, seems to The Progressive precisely the kind of reaction the world wonders about as it weaves its "myth" about America...
...Business concerns have been amassing record inventories for the record pay-off— a fact which led The Wall Street Journal to worry out loud lest "a peace scare might knock a lot of profit" out of the goods being held for higher prices...
...The low estate to which American morality has sunk is on daily display on our front pages...
...The same pattern prevails through much of industry, as even a fleeting glance at the market pages quickly makes clear...
...Page 30...
...But we found ourselves colliding with one fundamental aspect of Fortune's thesis: the underlying inference that the world's impression of America is almost wholly a myth...
...Until we look cour-ageously into our own hearts to search of the sources of our weak' ness, no less than the sources of our strength, the awesome achieve-ment of saving the world, to which our phrasemakers have dedicated us, will continue to elude us...
...III Our lack of concern for the lawlessness in our national life is matched by our shocking indifference to the fate of dissident minorities in this era of total conformity...
...But even more terrible has been the effect on us...
...The painful building over the years of a program of labor participation in great decisions is abandoned overnight in a frenzied effort to cajole big business into going along with the mobilization program...
...Unlike so many of our surface-scratching Congressmen and publicists...
...Lister Hill, Alabama Democrat, disclosed that 46% of the young men of America from 19 through 25 called for military duty since the postwar reenact-ment of the draft, have been rejected for physical and mental disabilities...
...Truman had nothing to say about the need for universal sacrifice and moral dedication in a period in which we are ostensibly rearming to preserve the free world against Communist aggression...
...If we wish our proposition to survive, we must now not only describe the revolution we began...
...a country without a soul"—that's the "myth" Fortune reports...
...We have only to examine the file of any reasonably conscientious metropolitan daily for the month the Fortune editorial appeared to find abundant confirmation of the truth of at least some of the ingredients that make up the "myth" about America...
...Grafting politicians and crooked gamblers get vacations in Florida...
...Even allowing for the factor of higher standards, the growth in the rate of rejection for health and educational reasons is a depressing commentary on the values of this richest nation on earth...
...This complete departure from the principle that taxes must be graduated according to ability-to-pay means that a two-children family with a $3,000 to $5,000 income will pay an increased tax of 38%, a $50,000 family will pay only 21 % more for rearmament, and the $500,000 family will pay less than 15% more in "this hour of national crisis...
...But we're not nearly so good as we would like to think we are...
...It is too late for mere information," the magazine concludes...
...McCarthy—all these mirror the decline in American morals and morale...
...the much-too-cozy conviction that life at home, morally, socially, and economically, is pretty much all right...
...During World War II the rate of rejection in the 18-25 age group was 26...
...For when we hear it played back to us, we grow petulant and dismayed, and in our anger many of us can think of nothing but to pull down the pillars on a world that does not understand...
...The myth, we are told, is the growing world conviction that "for all our bathtubs and our cars and our skyscrapers we are without moral purpose...
...We found intriguing, too, the magazine's conviction that we could do much to puncture the "myth" and at the same time help our neighbors enrich at least their material lives by sharing with them our advanced techniques of mass production, quick turn-over of goods, and certain gains in labor-management relationships...
...and, as Fortune emphasized so well, we grow petulant and dismayed, and want to pull down the pillars, when we hear the record played back to us, But it is not, as Fortune argues, the myth of a soulless, money-mind' ed America that will destroy us, but the facr of a spiritually impoverished nation...
...Prices are "frozen" at the highest level in history in a wistful effort to prevent a rash of cheating on the black market...
...President Truman was faced with a revolt by organized labor against the Administration's mobilization policies...
...Nor is there much concern in Congress or the country over the revelations of outrageous discrimination against Negro troops in Korea...
...Already it has sapped the will of our allies . . . and each month it grows more in virulence, ready to attack at each crisis...
...The other day a 19-year-old Quaker son of Quaker missionary parents, who had already served one sentence for the same offense, was sentenced anew to serve ten years in federal prison because his conscience would not permit him to respond to the draft...
...More coarsely stated, the mobilization grab-bag is big enough to give every group in society its cut, so why doesn't labor wise up to the fact that there's enough armament prosperity to keep it happy and silent too...
...but they are estranged by a myth...
...Still, we can't understand how any intelligent, informed American can face up to the challenge of destroying the "myth" about his country without accepting the elementary fact that the job must begin here at home...
...and hence, the total emphasis on external acts to destroy the myth...
...The President said he couldn't understand what the shouting was all about...
...a myth partly of our own making"— a myth that "can destroy us...
...The basketball fix on the collegiate level, the scandals in the RFC, the Kefauver Committee's disclosures of the crooked alliance between gangsters and politicians, the racetrack shenanigans of Sen...
...All money and no spirit...
...that we are, in short, a country without a soul...
...General Motors has just reported ner profits, after taxes, of $834,000,-000 for 1950, higher than that of any corporation in history and 27% higher than its own record-breaking year of 1949...
...Conscripted to fight on a faraway battlefield for the liberation of Korea, they find their own freedom hemmed in by Jim Crow treatment which makes them victims of a double standard of military justice...
...After all, he blurted out, in effect, there was enough money in rearmament for everybody...
...At just about the time the February Fortune was available...
...II The President's failure to recognize labor's legitimate grievances— frozen wages accompanied by phony price controls, and the refusal to let labor share in the councils of mobilization leadership—reflects the temper of our times...
Vol. 15 • April 1951 • No. 4
