THE FEAR OF PEACE
Chase, Stuart
The Fear Of Peace By STUART CHASE MOST Americans, standing where they are and looking steadily into the future, find their back hair beginning to rise. Yet most Americans are more prosperous...
...Not too well," I replied...
...That is just what many pressure groups are doing...
...Business.men are working on the problem, but at the best they can only do it piecemeal, and for their own particular business...
...One thing is pretty certain...
...Whoever's in charge, better get down to brass tacks," he said...
...If he says he is doing something for the public interest he is probably a crook...
...There will be a superb, up-to-the-minute plant, untouched by bombs or artillery, ready to provide for the physical wants of all Americans, and for a substantial number of non-Americans too...
...The war has given us many new resources, like synthetic rubber...
...It's getting late...
...How can a guy get married and raise a family on tdx receipts...
...American armies are conquering the world...
...There will be plenty of jobs from the physical point of view...
...How can we bear the burden of the national debt...
...If the Government is ordering $100 billion of goods and services a year, what is going to take the place of these orders when the war ends...
...Financial techniques are available, if we want to use them, to maintain a continuously high level of national income, to check inflation, to keep the national debt under control, to finance employment and social security for everyone...
...When I finish my 50 minutes—in what may not always be termed a hurr ricane of applause—the chairman asks for questions from the floor...
...That is what plain folks everywhere, soldier and civilian alike, are waiting for...
...The above is a curious foundation on which to base a host of fears...
...The fear comes out in all the polls of public opinion...
...A lot of us are already being discharged...
...Nobody has a better right to run the country—but how, by what methods, to what ends...
...A thousand conspiracies against the public interest are now being hatched in wartime...
...Look at black markets...
...After the standard addresses by the town single-taxer, the town Liberty Leaguer, and the town socialist have been heard, the honest perplexities of middle-bracket Americans come out in the open...
...Me first" has been the instinctive reaction...
...Where can we find leaders we can trust ? Behind each question lurks a fear, and their sum total is the fear of peace...
...It is like the man who was pronounced fit by his doctor worrying about the pneumonia he may catch next year...
...Perhaps as good a place as any to hear it registered is the question period of a public forum...
...What will inflation do to our savings...
...Observe the distrust coming out in a "GI Bull Session" I attended in an Eastern Army camp...
...How can we avoid totalitarianism...
...If the Administration and Congress, supported by organized business, organized labor, and organized farmers, could give the people a reasonably simple plan for full employment, it would hit the fear of peace a stunning wallop...
...One can lie awake at night and hear it grow...
...And then again maybe we can...
...All necessary raw materials are available—though some, like petroleum, are in need of long-term planning...
...he said...
...They'll give the boys- our jobs when\hey come back and we'll be on the street...
...What are we going to do with all these efficient new plants when we could not keep the old plants busy be fare th e war ? What will happen to this town when the shipyards shut down...
...Technical skill is available...
...and the forces making for unemployment—like the inevitable shrinkage of the aircraft industry...
...How can a man stay in business...
...How can one promise that the peace we enter will not be just as stagnant as the peace we left—the depression years which only a war-boom could end ? Curious Foundation For Fear I try to reply to the worried man in the third row, along this line: There are no physical reasons, I tell him, why we need be afraid...
...What is the matter with Americans that they should quake at the prospect of such fabulous well-being ? Have we lost our grip ? Have we grown so old and tired as a people that we cannot take the gifts held out to us ?. Fundamentally we are afraid because we do not trust each other...
...If they did, they would be the government...
...He will admit that the community has raised 300 billion dollars for war, but he does not know how it was done, and besides he thinks of it as a special case...
...Do you see how their minds were working ? Do you see the distrust coming out ? Some other outfit was going to beat them to it—4-Fs, women, union members, politicians...
...Fear is a subjective thing and seldom easy to answer...
...No plans have been approved...
...Inevitably the soldier and the civilian come to live in two entirely different worlds of discourse...
...Distrust Among The GI's We cast a balance sheet of the forces making for more employment—like the huge pot of savings in the hands of the public...
...To some of these questions there is no answer as yet...
...Yet most Americans are more prosperous financially than ever before...
...Just try and get them out...
...The fear of peace is part of the failure of the American republic to fuse its discordant pressure groups, its inability to think in Continental terms...
...The politicians will spend us into bankruptcy...
...Surely Mr...
...Enough useful work lies before us to keep everybody busy for another 20 or 30 years on a 40-hour week...
...It comes out when you talk to war workers, Government workers, almost any workers...
...How can we hope for decent living standards no matter how productive our plant may be, if business monopolies ayid cartels restrict production and fix prices...
...What's the use...
...Twelve to fifteen million husky young men could make a pressure group without precedent in our history...
...We have not yet fused as an organic community...
...It is a psychological problem, not a physical one...
...Stamps of approval came from his fellows^ After a discussion of the place of government in postwar plans, some of the servicemen's real fears began to emerge...
...We got to fight this war and pay for it too...
...They are rapidly gaining orthodox approval...
...Never have so many of our people been so excellently trained in the arts of production...
...They came from, all over the country, and were shortly going overseas...
...Civilians Fear The GI's I found much the same reaction in civilian bull sessions, only here the fears are reversed...
...The i-Fs are getting all the good jobs while we are in the fvxholes...
...We think in individual, not community, terms...
...Look at the postwar guarantee of parity prices Congress gave them, and that's just a starter...
...A voice from the balcony: "Woman's place is in the home...
...They aren't afraid of physical violence...
...What with bonuses and pensions, they'll double the debt bef&re they get through...
...To some extent the fear is justified...
...What the 4-Fs haven't got, the women have grabbed...
...can't live up to thfl promise of our great continent and its resources...
...Because Mr...
...Congress closed up the National Resources Planning Board, and is apparently ready to close up anything else of a comprehensive nature proposed by the Administration...
...The labor unions are clamping down with the closed shop all over the place...
...Maybe the republic will take the road of all the great empires of the past...
...We're supposed to get our old jobs back—if we had one to start with—but they'll find a way around it...
...A big blonde top sergeant from Michigan got to his feet...
...There were about 300 soldiers, and a few WACs, in the Service Club lounge room...
...Black cannot personally raise all the money he wants to give employment to people, he does not see how the community can...
...question periods: "The unions wtM raise wages or strike or sit down, or take over the Government...
...We sit up nights figuring and scheming how to cripple one another...
...Britain, the Dominions, Europe, will use these techniques after the war...
...The Government is going to tax us to death...
...All this explains in part why our magnificent physical resources and abilities add up to nothing but a promise...
...Maybe we can't make the grade...
...The top sergeant looked mulish...
...When all the assets and liabilities were listed, the balance sheet tipped pretty heavily toward unemployment provided no comprehensive plans are adopted...
...How do we pry our way in there...
...THE civilians' fear of the returning soldiers is a special and ominous case...
...Must we give away our wealth abroad while people go hungry at home...
...Here are other civilian fears collected in my forum...
...There's no reasoning with them...
...What is going to happen to my job...
...They have no power to take over-all community action...
...The theme is almost universal...
...Look at the British Government's White Paper of May 1944, outlining a compensatory economy after the war...
...Think of the sixteen million new houses needed in the next decade, alone...
...Our fellow-citizens are organizing to do us in...
...The farmers will gang up and raise prices so high we will never be able to buy that gold standard of nutrition the speaker talks about...
...The assunjption is that nobody is up to any good who is not working for himself, "minding his own business...
...Some were reading the papers or writing letters, but most of them stopped when we began to talk about jobs after the war...
...I have spoken at some of these forums lately, discussing postwar problems...
...We don't intend to be asking people can they spare a dime...
...We are not afraid of famines, plagues, droughts, locusts, invaders, Germans, Japanese, we are afraid of Americans...
...Cheers from the floor, until a flushed WAC gets up and says: "Have you guys all been sleeping since you were born...
...While they were away fighting for their country, their coustrymen would double-cross them...
...Maybe we will never learn to trust each other...
...Chase surely has not...
...That stuff went out when they let women vote in 1920...
...If a working majority of us woke up tomorrow morning ready to trust our neighbors—on both sides of the tracks—the fear would evaporate like mists at dawn...
...Look at the PAC...
...Among the many tragedies of war," says John Chamberlain, "one of the most frightening is that it divides a nation into two nations: the men Who have seen battle, and the rest of the community...
...Chase has not answered all your doubts...
...How are the plans getting on...
...The stay-at-homes are alarmed at the GI's...
...They apparently had little faith in the justice of their community...
...For the fear we bear one another we cannot organize the resources for the benefit of the whole community...
...I have lived around here too long to believe that there is any cheap and easy answer to this one...
...To others there will be no cheerful answers if the pressure groups tear all constructive plans to pieces...
...After the war, as the soldiers and civilians fear, it could be much worse...
...American production is twice what it has ever been, and, in industrial goods, more than the rest of the world combined This is a strange business: shiv- ering in trepidation as we climb to the greatest height of power— military, industrial, and political— ever achieved by any people...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 47
