THE DESTINY OF AMERICA
Morley, Felix
The Destiny Of America By FELIX MORLEY IN SEPTEMBER, 1930, I was living in Geneva—had, indeed, been living there two years and, in addition to writing a book on the League, was running the Geneva...
...there are scarcely any real professional men...
...It really is, if we will humbly help Him-to make it so...
...He will, if we prove worthy to be blessed...
...partly because of the growth of nationalism among the subjected peoples...
...You and I have no call or claim to make predictions on the immediate future of Europe—other than to note the obvious fact that semi-Asiatic and wholly totalitarian Russia will play a far larger role in its future than in its past...
...The depression had hit Germany and Hitler was cashing in...
...To meet that responsibility we shall unquestionably need to be armed and developed in material strength...
...What I learned on that trip convinced me, more than 15 years before Pearl Harbor, that the imperial rule of the white man in the Far East had become precarious...
...I spent the Winter and Spring of 1925-26 traveling through Japan, China, and the Philippines, talking with all sorts and conditions of men...
...I think we should assert more frequently that our country stands for something unique in history, and heaven knows there is nothing unique in fighting wars...
...corroborative respect for the rights of other men...
...What they failed to realize was that Goethe and Beethoven and Schiller were only accidentally Germans and were actually Europeans, living and working for all humanity...
...What shall it profit us to defeat the Axis and lose our own souls in the process...
...Americans abroad are facing facts unflinchingly, and I think that you, who are still at home, are as ready to expose your minds as they are to expose their bodies, to disagreeable reality...
...It could and did come to power, my friend and thousands like him to the contrary notwithstanding...
...jumped, as compared with the previous election of May, 1928, from 12 to 107...
...And Europe's people, as distinct from Europe's rulers, have always recognized the worth of what we have here established...
...The Nazi representation in the Reichsta...
...There is a kernel of truth within our boast that this is God's country...
...And it is not merely in distant countries that we have a tremendous part to play...
...Let me quote the words of a well-known Chinese author, Dr...
...Years afterward I heard that this scholarly, professorial editor had been shot by the Gestapo for having courageously but indiscreetly opposed their much more drastic type of socialization...
...The Destiny Of America By FELIX MORLEY IN SEPTEMBER, 1930, I was living in Geneva—had, indeed, been living there two years and, in addition to writing a book on the League, was running the Geneva office of the American League of Nations Association, which indicates how much of an "isolationist" I am...
...Men did not build the United States to be politically an Umpteenth Republic in a Soviet Union, nor fven to be just another autonomous British Dominion...
...Why look," he said, "there is not a savant in the Nazi movement...
...Importance Of Ideals Far beyond physical power, however, we shall need to emphasize our ideals—such matters as constant faith in the sanctity of the individual...
...No-Yong Park, who in 1937 wrote: "Even if the Asiatics fail to do anything against the Occidental nations, the white men will bring about their own retreat by waging their Christian wars...
...Those faiths did not spring newborn from American soil...
...This was not done just to design another flag, to build another nation, to develop cannon fodder with which some individual megalomaniac or selfish ruling class could play at power politics...
...But equally essential, and fundamentally far more important, is that we begin to think in terms of what we can collectively contribute rather than in terms of what we can individually secure...
...To overlook the importance of the ideals which alone justify our participation in this war would be a terrible mistake...
...What we are entitled to emphasize is the role which is cast for us as a result of the collapse of Western Civilization in its historic home...
...One iftore personal recollection...
...America will win this war—at a cost of which we have as yet paid only a tithe—but in the winning of it we may still lose—disastrously and irrevocably...
...I recall as though it were last month, the morning when the returns came in on the general election which had been held throughout Germany on Sept...
...The votes cast by the party rose with a similar leap from 810,000 to 6,400,000...
...How could such a movement come to power in this country of Goethe...
...the faith in human brotherhood which Christ insistently preached...
...14 of that year...
...One of the Garmans I interviewed was the editor of the Munchener Neueste NachricMen, the leading conservative paper in the city and one which was later charged with having unwittingly helped the Nazis by its unsparing criticism of the Socialist government of the German republic...
...If I know anything about the American people as a whole it is that they are fed up, almost bitterly fed up, with the mingled diet of pap and dope ladled out to them in buckets by the cohorts of our own Ministry of Public Enlightenment, in Washington...
...That will be the outcome unless we fight not to destroy, but to construct, not merely to add to the wreckage of Europe and to restore imperialism in Asia, but rather to resuscitate the best in that civilization which we alone now have the energy to restore...
...A Kernel Of Truth Two forces inspired the men who made America...
...there is not a poet...
...It is the destiny of America, I firmly believe, to raise our common heritage from the hand of prostrate Europe and to hold the torch aloft in such a manner that no repetition of the Dark Ages can throw its dark shadow for centuries across the lives of men...
...of Beethoven...
...A few days later I went to Munich, the headquarters of the Nazi movement...
...They were, as I have said, the very essence of Europe's civilization...
...There is a substance behind the insipid declamation of God Bless America...
...A few years before my stay in Geneva, the Baltimore Sun, for which 1 was then working, sent me to the Far East...
...I wanted to examine its strength, its appeal to the populace, for myself...
...Our greatest problem, it seems to me, is not the effort and suffering involved in winning eventual military victory over the Axis...
...15 Years Before Pearl Harbor We dined together^ I well remember, and this editor assured me, almost with tears in his eyes, that in spite of the sensational Nazi gains the movement would never secure political power in Germany...
...In a democracy, a depression period always favors the demagogue: the man who desires power for its own sake and who will promise anything, and assure everything to everybody, in order to achieve his petty end...
...revived sensitivity to those spiritual values we have allowed to atrophy amid the sybaritic life which had become an end in itself for many of us...
...there are few, if any, gentlemen...
...that the most fundamental issues like that proud assertion of Congressional integrity which blazed out in Washington last week, are secondary or meaningless...
...increased emphasis on the proper functioning of representative government...
...Because of their inability to set their own house in order and because of their utter helplessness in preventing incessant wars among themselves, the white men have forfeited not only their privilege to rule over other races, but their inherent right to rule over their own people...
...The faith in individual virtue which we trace back to Greek philosophy...
...We must, as many economists have pointed out, begin to think in terms of more equitable distribution as well as of more intensive production...
...partly because of increasing resentment of exploitation for foreign benefit...
...most of all because the power of the white race to rule the brown and yellow men depended altogether on that unity of the white nations which the last war shattered and which the period between the wars did not restore...
...Nature has saved some of the best of Europe, and Nature has also infused this emigrant sample with distinctive virtues from our own spacious land...
...But our forefathers feared that they were losing ground in Europe and must be reanimated here...
...Do you see, then, the biological as well as the political importance of America...
...How right they were the present condition of Europe shows...
...Here we have developed a cross section, for blending and reproductive purposes, of that great western civilization now sinking in chaos across the Atlantic...
...To listen to some radio commentators you might think that all that matters is the flow and surge of physical fighting...
...They were brought from Europe...
...The gangster minority led by Hitler, espousing the worst in nationalism and repudiating the best in civilization, was able to organize within the wreckage and disruption of the last war to bring on this one in which the ruin of 'Europe is being made complete...
...there is not an artist...
...The grim anticipation is, rather, that the attainment of this victory will find the peoples of Europe so impoverished, so shattered, so deprived of physical and intellectual nourishment that the chances of the recovery of civilization as wa have known it on that Continent will be problematical...
...of Schiller...
Vol. 8 • March 1944 • No. 10
