NO DEMOCRATS NEED APPLY'
Coleman, Mcalister
'No Democrats Need Apply' By MCALISTER COLEMAN FOR MOST of the Merry Yuletide season I have been, in a manner of speaking, holding the cold and clammy hand of a war liberal. I have been saying to...
...There in the White House is the Gibraltar of Liberalism against which the angry waters of reaction may lash in vain...
...While Capt...
...It is said that in order to get things set for the 1944 "I Will Win the War" campaign, even the most "parfait knight" of them all, the perennial House Guest, Harry Hopkins, is to be kicked upstairs into overseas obscurity...
...Home is where we were all going to be so exalted by the tonic of war that liberalism would have an upsurge which Would make us overnight a cooperative commonwealth oozing sweetness and glowing with light...
...And there he broke down again...
...All is confusion worse confounded...
...Old Dr...
...Even when one of the beasts had been to all intents and purposes properly slain, the folks the beast had been terrorizing are not a bit grateful to their liberators...
...They had a perfectly wonderful time going round the country telling us all what dolts and sissies we were because we couldn't get hot and bothered about immediately declaring war...
...No wonder my poor friend is distrait, to put it mildly...
...Of course it was no soap for Gen...
...Whenever anything goes particularly stinko in the democratic marketplace, Sam gets on an angry look and proceeds to write a piece excoriating Sen...
...The General may be a good man in the War College but it is to be doubted if he can put himself in the place of a coal miner's wife who has to feed the old man and seven growing kids on a take-home pay envelope of forty bucks a week...
...But my friend says plaintively that he can't get any kick any more out of scolding "isolationists...
...It was his act to bring in the wavering liberals on the ground that a global war wasn't a bit like the ladies and misses' size wars we had hitherto enjoyed, but by its very size, if nothing else, would uplift and glorify Democratic Man for centuries to come...
...Burton Wheeler of Montana or Ellis O. Jones of California...
...I knew, however, what he had thought, because he so often proclaimed it on various platforms when he was speaking for the Rush America Into War Committee before Pearl Harbor...
...Or so it seems, judging from a recent dispatch from liberated Italy which says the wayfaring Italian goes wayfaring in an apathetic coma, snapping out of it only long enough to sell some sort of souvenir of the global war (you can't tell your liberators without a score-card) to some of the sojers...
...I have advised him to follow the example of Sam Grafton, the mouthpiece for the totalitarian liberals on the New York Post...
...New Deal Is Gone Yet hold...
...He must be left, I fear, to wander on that "darkling plain" where "ignorant armies clash by night...
...That Committee, you will recall, had one of the most distinguished letterheads of any of them...
...Never will the Infallible One forget the forgotten man of the mines, the rails, the steel mills...
...Just why he should have come to me with his great disillusion is not plain...
...Then take a look at home...
...Once he said through his sobs: "I didn't believe you when you told me that war would be like this...
...New Deal having administered the war purgative as his final act, has now packed up his bag and gone to parts unknown...
...And there's Poland...
...That done, Sam feels better for the whole day, and can get on with the war again...
...I have been saying to him, "there, there" and "come, come" and otherwise been comforting him...
...Marshall to sound off for a unilateral offensive against labor...
...Marshall so anonymously but so articulately said—i...
...In a time of bewildering drift there is unyielding mastery...
...The President has been thinking all along just what Gen...
...He shot the works at them in 1939-'40 and '41 and now, he sobs, the people he can't take are the very people who are at the top in this war effort...
...asks my disillusioned one...
...Offensive Against Labor But what are these miners and steel-workers and railroad men whom the war liberals were to lead after the guns ceased firing, into the pink sunrise of industrial Utopia, what are these no-good bums doing...
...Look At Poland There was nothing picayune about the picture my friend held up of this D. M. astride a cooperative world, gripping his flaming sword of righteousness...
...Professors of ethics, dithrambics, and applied altruism were on the list of sponsors, together with the run-of-mine riflemen of God, renegade socialists, ex-pacifists and neo-technocrats...
...Going around, muttering about strikes...
...It was going to be the quest of the grail, streamlined in 1940 tanks, and out of it would emerge not only one nation but one world, indivisible, etc...
...In his place have moved the money-changers and the captains and the kings of Kush...
...I thought...
...Into the outer darkness are streaming the hosts of sweetness and of light...
...In that "equality of sacrifice" which the imperatives of the crusade dictate, man will forever forego selfish ends (well, perhaps not forever, but at any rate for the duration) and gladly give his all for freedom's holy cause...
...I don't know what the Polish Colonels in Exile Committee is going to do if the cossacks answer that they are liberators with a pinch of conquest on the side, but I do know that the whole situation is most upsetting to my liberal friend and that Secretary Hull ought to do something about it quick, before they get the new partitions up...
...Now look at the damned thing, says my friend...
...Eddie Rickenbaeker, who, it is true, may not be entirely conversa'nt with conditions of living in, let us say, Aliquippa, Penna., may have nominated the General for the Presidency in 1944, as is the hero's right, the whole thing has a slight odor of illiberality about it in my friend's supersensitive nostrils...
...The Polish Colonels in Exile Committee in London want to send out a questionnaire to the Russians now arriving over the border as to whether the cossacks are liberators or conquerors...
...There is a sign, be it ever so invisible, hanging on the White House gate and at the front door of every Washington agency, "Men Working to Win the War for Democracy...
...But what incredible words are these, coming from the sanctum sanctorum, the innermost recesses of the Rock itself...
...No democrats need apply-" Confusion Worse Confounded I really don't know what to do to console my inconsolable one...
...Look at Poland...
...Seems they have been reading about those cost-plus contracts, negotiated and otherwise and, in their coarse, materialistic manner, want to get theirs, while there's still something to be got...
...My tear-stained friend was on the Committee's idealistic front...
...e. labor unions are no good if they try to function as labor unions in war times...
...Nothing has turned out right...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 3
