THE RISING TIDE OF BITTERNESS
Holmes, John Haynes
The Rising Tide Of Bitterness By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES STEADILY, as we win the war abroad, we are losing it at home—assuming that this war has as its objective a world united in the interest of peace...
...It shatters the structure of society, and therewith precipitates disaster...
...then, from this foul center of contagion, it spreads like a disease to...
...But right here where we stand, it can be done now...
...This religious prejudice has its springs of course in the Reformation, the contentions of which still rage among us...
...But it is with the domestic front that I am concerned at this moment, and here there is developing a bitterness and hatred which may well be preparing the way not for peace at all but for some kind of civil war...
...When War Is Over As long as war continues, hatred will grow apace...
...One may seriously question if the foreign diplomacy of the hour is not itself losing the war in the field of statesmanship as fast as the soldiers are winning it on the field of battle...
...Then must the nation set its house in order...
...Straight along the old familiar lines of racial and religious antagonism sweeps the tidal wave of passion...
...That prejudice is native to the soul of man is a ridiculous hypothesis...
...The Moslem world is unaware of antagonism between whites and blacks...
...Those who have always felt secure now wonder what may be going to happen to them, while the great masses of the peoples, who have never felt secure, live from day to day in'a state of apprehension which is none the less serious because repressed and unconfessed...
...Fear is upon them—and fear turns to madness, as in a panic of fire or flood...
...First, there is the growing hostility between whites and blacks, deep-set in the concept of racial inferiority from the standpoint of which the white man looks down upon the Negro...
...Indeed, it is in the so-called liberal and religious journals today that we find the best, or rather the worst, specimens of contemporary intolerance aimed feverishly and even ferociously against Roman as contrasted with Protestant Christianity...
...This racial antagonism of course extends itself to the yellow man and the brown man, and is acute at this moment in the case of our Japanese fellow-citizens...
...Meanwhile, there must continue, in war and in peace alike, that work of education in the interest of right ideas, and of friendly intercourse in the interest of brotherhood between all nationalities, races, and religions, which creates the atmosphere alone favorable to amity and concord...
...All of which means that men feel, perhaps for the first time, "the fell clutch of circumstance," and face, perhaps for the first time, the sheer struggle for survival...
...It must outlaw exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong...
...Anti-Catholicism, as I have said, had its origin in the Reformation, when the new Protestantism sought to justify itself by proving the Medieval Church to be the Scarlet Woman...
...The points of conflict are not difficult to identify...
...Education must vainly beat the air like the wings of a storm-ridden bird...
...the Latin American countries know nothing of race prejudice...
...Tidal Wave Of Passion The future becomes uncertain and in many ways frightening...
...War is a wild tempest that sweeps everything into confusion...
...The hearts of men are seized upon by grim forebodings...
...It is this madness which is expressing itself in the prejudice and hate now pouring through the land...
...And each single individual must in the spirit of his heart, and in the conduct of his daily life, so demean himself that always and everywhere he walks with his fellows of every race and creed as with friends and comrades...
...It overturns and demolishes all stability in human relationships...
...No child was ever born into the world with the taint of anti-Semitism or Negrophobia...
...What You And I Can Do It must guarantee to all persons security, and the full enjoyment of civil and social rights...
...At the very moment when great armies of men disciplined to unity are marching to the front, disunity as between class and creed and color rages behind the front, and rends the masses of the people into mutually hostile groups...
...Thus, it is deliberately taught against the enemy, as an expression of true patriotism...
...The worst quite as often as the best becomes the theme of inward speculation, and at last the veritable nightmare of expectation...
...Churches must welcome in Christian hospitality all the sorts and conditions of men in the community...
...With stability and justice established, to say nothing of the native compassion of human hearts released, there must come a relaxation of inward tension, an easing of outward contacts...
...This foul plague of anti-Semitism is ravaging Europe, and is now spreading to this country on a terrifying scale...
...The first few years immediately following a war are sometimes worse than the war itself...
...What begins with a German or a Japanese, in other words, is soon sweeping full blast against a Negro in Chicago, or a Jew in New York, or a Roman Catholic in Boston...
...The Rising Tide Of Bitterness By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES STEADILY, as we win the war abroad, we are losing it at home—assuming that this war has as its objective a world united in the interest of peace and comity...
...Persons who are open-minded and good-natured in all other human relationships and are horrified at all antagonism against Negroes and Jews, are themselves bigots of the first order in the case of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, its priests, and communicants...
...And little can be done about it until the war is ended...
...Thus, anti-Semitism in our western world goes back to the severance of early Christianity from Israel, and the superstition that the Jews rejected Christ and then killed him...
...Committees of inquiry and conciliation can only go through futile motions...
...Whole sections of humanity know nothing of the hostile passions that devour our land...
...The big job of reconciliation is going to take a long time...
...It is an amazing and terrifying spectacle...
...We have known in petty fashion what Gentile feeling against the Jew may be, but today, for the first time in the history of America, we are learning what it is in its more dreadful European forms...
...It demands sudden and complete adjustments to conditions as strange as they are dangerous...
...What war does to prejudice and hate is a thing dreadful to behold...
...Russia under the Soviets has freed itself of contempt for Jews...
...In our own little worlds at least—our homes, our churches, our business offices, our social centers, oui places of work and play, all those slight and yet important areas of human intercourse which already we control—in these we may straightway end the reign of hatred and hostility...
...Secondly, there is the age-old contempt for the Jew on the part of myriads of so-called Christians...
...Even after the return of peace, it will ride high and fierce for a time, as the ocean waves resurge for hours after a storm has blown itself out...
...all whom we dislike, or fear, or do not understand...
...War Fosters Hate It is historical accident and incident that begin this business...
...Prejudice Is Made, Not Born Lastly, there is the fierce tide of hatred beating upon Roman Catholicism from out the bleak shallows of Protestant arrogance and bigotry...
...Like all phases of intolerance, this anti-Catholic feeling possesses the hearts of great masses of ignorant people, but is unique in possessing as well the unsuspecting hearts of many liberals...
...Denunciations and appeals will do no good...
...As for our degradation of the Negro in this country, this is obviously rooted in the institution of slavery which branded the African as a serf and therefore an inferior being...
...It must see to it that each humblest citizen in the land has equal opportunity, and every group of men and women a useful, and honored, and equal place in the life of the community...
...And this will do more to dissipate hard feeling and foster general good will than any other one thing that can be imagined...
...Planted thus by historical circumstance within men's mind, alienation feeds upon itself, creates social distinctions which themselves create new prejudice, is fostered by decisive influences of education and tradition, and becomes at last hard set in the habits and mores of society And always there is the fact of insecurity to worry men and turn them in desperation against each other, with war breaking out at intervals to fan the flames that might otherwise be left to die away...
...But with the close of hostilities, the recession of hate sets in, and the restoration of sense and decency becomes at least possible...
...The result is that they become nervous, tense, afraid...
...Only as the war stops, and the madness of our fear subsides, will the bitterness of our hate subside as well...
...Schools and colleges must correct the errors and dissipate the superstitions upon which prejudice and hatred thrive...
...It must end the selfish competition between individuals and classes for power and place and profit...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 1
