THE WAR CAN STILL BE WON
Mayer, Milton
The War Can Still Be Won By MILTON MAYER THREE YEARS AGO and four—it seems like yesterday—we warmongers were doing our damnedest to keep America out of war. Remember us? We were the warmongers...
...find ourselves winning a wingless victory...
...Our war isn't lost yet...
...And that war is our war...
...Niebuhr, Mr...
...After all, we're only human...
...Three years ago and four we tried to keep America out of war, we warmongers, because we believed that we could not win our war and Hitler's war too...
...Grafton, Mr...
...We never fell off the locomotive of doctrinaires' politics Dorothy Thompson lamented the fact that we are compelling our boys to "fight in the dark" because we have no clear-cut policies...
...Re-enlist with us, you disillusioned servitors of Churchill and Stalin, and your desertion three years ago and four will be forgiven...
...Roosevelt was engaging in political oratory when he promised the voters that they had only to re-elect him to keep their sons from fighting on foreign soil...
...We were the warmongers who for years had been calling for all-out war against greed and poverty, against injustice and inequality, against monopoly, imperialism, and racism, and, above all, against the devastating complacency on which these enemies of freedom were battening here at home...
...Now that the scales Even Walter Lippmann was upset last week...
...we're fighting it now that these fellow-fighters are discovering that Hitler's war is not what they hoped it would be...
...We refused to do business with the Hitlers here at home...
...We were called defeatists and appeasers...
...It isn't too late, you innocents who would rather be President than right...
...The nervous New Republic admitted that "the people are feeling more and more doubt about the fruits of the necessary victor," and then added, "Mr...
...Remember how we protested against all the deals and compromises and concordats and alliances that enabled the Mussolinis and Hitlers to come to power and stay in power and extend their power...
...Those men have now dispensed with the bait and have taken over the American Government...
...It has got to be won...
...It requires volunteers, not conscripts...
...We rejected all compromise with the Hitlers here at home...
...We were fighting it before Hitler's war lured some of our fellow-fighters away from us...
...We were against the war abroad and for the war at home...
...We were never at peace with the Hitlers here at home...
...And we aren't swaggering around and saying, "We told you so...
...We were right, too, when we said that we and our Allies were all morally unprepared for a moral war, and that, morally unprepared as we were, we would Lamented Marshall Field's rabidly pro-Roosevelt Chicago Sun this week: "The President's strongest supporters are deeply disturbed...
...and we'll be in there fighting it at the end...
...We were fighting all the time on every front...
...We said—three years ago and four—that the people of America did not want to go to Hitler's war...
...Remember us and our war...
...So what...
...All right, then...
...Roosevelt appears to have been trying to strengthen the Administration politically, not by concerning himself with the deepest fears and aspirations of the people, but by yielding to the lobbyists of special interests...
...It can still be won...
...or economics because we drove our own locomotive...
...Field...
...We never said quits...
...We were the warmongers who called for real war all during the '30's, real war against the forces of fascism wherever they showed their heads, and not just half-hearted feints and stabs from the orators in or out of the White House...
...We were the warmongers, and our names were Thomas, La Follette, Debs, Addams, Villard, Barnes, Reinhold Niebuhr, who used to sigh rapturously about the crusading character of the war, groaned in the Nation: "There is little connection between the ideals of liberal internationalists and the sorry realities of the contemporary international scene...
...We were the warmongers who called for war all during the '20's...
...We never gave quarter...
...The Hearsts and McCormicks tried to take us to their bosom, but we spurned them...
...We haven't time...
...We were toHiag...
...We said that those who feared the revolution of the •property-less proletariat should oppose the war because modern war over the whole world would convert whole continents into property-less proletariats...
...We were fighting for total victory and unconditional surrender against the injustice and oligarchy that threatened democracy in our own back yard...
...We were the warmongers wh™ refused to negotiate a peace with reaction any time, anywhere, and under any conditions...
...Willkie was engaging-in political oratory when he said that the voters had only to elect him to be saved from wo-ah...
...Roosevelt we see we were right on that one, too...
...We said that Lend-Lease in 1940 meant war just as the Morgan loans in 1915 meant war, and we were right...
...We wish we'd been wrong...
...So we warmongers from 'way back have got to fight our war harder than ever...
...And now that our lack of foreign policy is apparent even to the liberals—and the mere mention of the lack of it is annoying to Mr...
...We were not popular...
...The disappearance of the Atlantic Charter—not to mention the failure ever to invoke any part of it—suggests that we were right...
...We stayed radical because there was radical work to be done to get democracy, and we were never turned from our work by the silence of the Old Deal or the eloquence of the New...
...Remember how we supported every New Deal measure that strengthened the democratic fabric and attacked every New Deal act, including the truckling with the Kellys, the Hagues, and the Cotton Ed Smiths, that weakened the democratic fabric...
...And we said that Mr...
...So we aren't glad...
...We were right again...
...We took neither orders nor ideals from Moscow— or from Wall Street...
...We are not...
...Remember how we made war on social and political ahd economic racism everywhere in America, so that no Hitler could ever confuse us by saying that we were racists too...
...The Messrs, Churehill and Stalin now confirm our assertion...
...Like the shepherd of old, we will be gladdened more by the return of the sheep that strayed than by those that were never lost...
...We said that the men here at home who were taking us down the road to war were not dedicated to democracy and were using ideological slogans as bait for the innocent idealists...
...The Willkies and the Roosevelts and the Blivens and the Knoxes and the Marshall Fields found us insufferable...
...It is never lost...
...The polls showed them that we were right, and the corny commercial techniques to build up morale show now that we were right...
...We said that our Allies and prospective Allies in Hitler's war were all imperialists who would not be fighting for democratic ideals but for power and pelf...
...We will go right on fighting Hitler everywhere and whipping him everywhere...
...And you there, in the pin-striped pants and the morning coat, you, too, can re-enlist, Franklin...
...We were at war, war to the death, with the enemies of democracy that flourished right in front of our noses...
...A principal cause of the dissatisfaction with the diplomatic conduct of the war," he pontificated in his syndicated column, "is that the administration of our foreign policy by the White House and the State Department is not sufficiently alert, lucid, consistent, or efficient...
...We knew for ourselves what democracy was and how to get it, and we charted our course by the lights of the common sense that God gives to common men...
...Remember how we fought for appropriations for jobs, slum-clearance, schools, hospitals, and social insurance, so that every American would know exactly what America was fighting for if America ever had to fight...
...The people as a whole . . . should be reassured not by quips from the White House, nor by more of Mr...
...The war you abandoned three years ago and four is still being fought all over America...
...We followed no party line...
...We were right...
...the bell, three years ago and four, for ourselves no less than for those who disagreed with us...
...We're still fighting it, the same old war for the emancipation of all men everywhere...
...We, mind you, the original warmongers—we were called defeatists because we protested that defeat at home would be the price of victory abroad...
...We said that Mr...
...So what...
...Beard, Coleman, Ameringer, Holmes, and a lot more, millions more, that nobody ever heard of...
...Chins up, Miss Kirchwey, Mr...
...We would just love to swagger around and say, "We told you so," but the words stick in our throats...
...We told you so...
...Hull's platitudes on the State Department's pious hopes, butt by concrete evidence of progressive action...
...We never said die...
...We're losing our war every day and with every victory in Hitler's...
...We declined every truce, every concordat, and every trade agreement with the Hitlers here at home...
...And we were right...
...We're stubborn and tough, and we're not convinced that either Hitler or Churchill, or both of them together, can lick us in our struggle for the emancipation of all men everywhere...
...We are not glad that we called the* turn three years ago and four, because being right about Hitler's war means that the war for human emancipation is worse off than ever...
...And so we will leave the sobbing to the Nation aad the New Republic 'and the rest of the innocents who are just discovering that we were right and they were wrong, and we will get on with the business of fighting our war and winning it...
...Are we glad...
...have dropped from your eyes, you must not let hard reality daunt you...
...And we were right...
...Remember how we warred, year in and year out, for the Four Freedoms for India, Burma, Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, and the rest of the three-quarters of the earth's population that was oppressed by those gallant democratic nations whose democracy at home rested on the sandy foundation of imperial tyranny...
...We were even right when we said that our moral unpreparedness deprived us of any sort of foreign policy beyond the cannibalistic doctrine of get what you can and hold on to what you've got...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 14
