THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column ACOUPLE OF MONTHS ago I reported that a charming lady in New York had asked her lawyers to get the FBI to throw me in jail as a subversive and treasonable...
...Conversely, the liberal, anti-militaristic Social Democratic Party rose from three to 35 per cent...
...M.H.R...
...This kind of evidence outweighs a multitude of quotations from what somebody wrote in a book or said in a speech...
...The German people responded to this first display of warmth by voting more enthusiastically for the liberal, democratic parties and by slashing in half the vote they had previously accorded the young National Socialist Party...
...I don't know whether her lawyers talked her out of it, or whether the FBI talked the lawyers out of it...
...Looking back over the 60 years, one can agree with the Christian Century that the figures "reveal, with some approximation to mathematical exactness, the attitudes of the German people—not the entrenched Junker aristocracy or the Prussian military caste, but the people—toward the antithetical ideals of militaristic nationalism and liberal socialized democracy...
...Subsequently, the depression which brought poli- tical upheaval all over the world, ushered in a new and tragic reversal in Germany and Adolf Hitler and his Nazi gangsters took over...
...So far as it goes, it disapproves the theory that the German people are congenitally and unalterably devoted to autocracy, militarism, and nationalistic aggression...
...The Churchill-Roosevelt adherence to the Casablanca demand for unconditional surrender has lengthened the war, deprived us of a powerful moral weapon, and contributed greatly to the gloom otherwise intelligent Americans, noting that we have gone to war against Germany twice in a single generation, have fallen for the easy but treacherous theory that the German people are essentially a warlike, bloodthirsty people bent on destroying democracy and conquering the world...
...In other words," notes the Christian Century, "while Germany's government was moving toward aggressive militarism, her people were moving in the other direction...
...The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column ACOUPLE OF MONTHS ago I reported that a charming lady in New York had asked her lawyers to get the FBI to throw me in jail as a subversive and treasonable character...
...The article was described by the Christian Century as a "calmly scientific analysis of the statistics of Reichstag elections from the formation of the empire in 1870 to Hitler's accession to power in 1933 . . ." What Dr...
...the fact is that I am still at large and emboldened to write again that it is criminal folly for the United Nations to refuse to distinguish between the two elements within Germany and to refuse to offer the decent and much larger group a program of hope-inspiring and hand-strengthening peace terms...
...The forceful writers [those traditionally cited as examples of German thinking] were addressing their messages of war and ruthlessness to the German people, and the reply of the German people through the silent voice of the ballot was a crescendo "No...
...And here is what he found: There was an unmistakable movement away from militaristic parties and "toward the liberal and democratic parties from the first election under the empire to the last before the outbreak of World War I." During those four decades, the aggregate vote of the conservative, military-supporting parties dropped from 53 per cent of the vote to 26 per cent...
...Powerful support for our contention that the great majority of Germans are essentially liberal, democratic, and anti-militaristic is provided in a careful study of German political thought and behavior by S. L. W. Mellen in the August issue of the American Political Science Review...
...How To Shorten The War The trend was even more marked after World War I. In the first Reichstag election under the Weimar Republic ±he so-called militaristic, reactionary parties polled less than 15 per cent of the vote...
...Inevitably, however, this group gained in power in Germany, as it would in any country, under the intolerable excesses of the Versailles Treaty, the tragic inflation, the occupation of the Ruhr, and the harsh indemnities...
...Mellen did in searching for the answer to German political thinking was to go right to the election returns and chart the Course of voting over six decades...
...I was guilty, she alleged with unchallenged accuracy, of distinguishing between the great bulk of German people and the clique of Prussian and Bavarian gangsters who have terrorized and ruled Germany for the past decade or more...
...A Scientific Analysis Certainly, all the evidence tends in the other direction...
...The figures in the American Political Science Review confirm still another theory of ours—that the people of Germany (like the people of any other country) react affirmatively and constructively when other Cations are decent and fair to them, and negatively nd explosively when they are pushed around...
...During the next four years, however, conditions within Germany improved greatly and the Allied powers showed a spark of understanding by admitting Germany to the League of Nations and scaling down reparations...
...The militaristic-nationalistic-reactionary group increased its vote from 15 to 40 per cent in the May, 1924, election...
Vol. 7 • October 1943 • No. 43
