PEACETIME MILITARISM: GOODBY DEMOCRACY

...Let us look at them for a moment in contrast with the attitudes and abilities upon which the furtherance of democracy must rely...

...A good soldier is disciplined to function as part of a machine, with no sense of responsibility for the use to which the machine is put...

...All the agencies of instruction should be designed to further it...

...A dictatorship cannot prosper without it...

...How shall we move toward social justice for those of darker skin who have become clearly conscious of their dignity as human beings...

...We do it in grateful support of the millions who, along the outposts of worldwide strife, are giving or stand ready to give all they are and had hoped to be...

...more of it and of better quality...

...What is their bearing on the vitality of democratic citizenship...

...A good soldier is habituated to deal with conflicts in just one way—by an appeal to arms...

...A good soldier obeys orders without knowing or asking why...

...Sometimes it seems as if the best that thinking can do is to hobble along after acting, always a good distance in the rear...

...When the purposes of individuals, groups, nations come into opposition, as in the nature of things they are bound to do, the democratic principle demands the best possible outcome for all the interests at stake...

...We are inspired to work for its enlarged and deepened meaning...

...Here again we lack the right kind of education...

...they do not ask whether the training required to make a good soldier will also make a good citizen of a democracy...

...Progress in the one is retrogression in the other...

...It is a program requiring specific educational preparation...

...A good soldier is passively uncritical of the underlying life-pattern to which he is committed...

...We are aroused to oppose the projects that would interfere with its advance...

...This goes to show that if democracy is to function in and through inescapable occasions of controversy, big and little, this problem must be added to an already considerable educational job...

...And it should be clear also that training received under military auspices will only make the needed education and training harder to get...

...We are advised that there is not time to weigh the political and social effects of this radical departure from a principle of government we have adhered to since our nation was founded...

...What better forward step could be taken in our public schools than to prepare the young for proficiency in this great art...

...We must be made much better acquainted than we are with the obligations of democracy, and become much better skilled than we are in its procedures...

...Today, economic and political trends and the general climate of opinion are not united in active support of the democratic enterprise...

...And the influence of society on the individual is so strong that few will advocate changes which are likely to be frowned upon...

...So far, however, as I have read what has been written on this side by civilians, Army officers, and privates, they discuss the relation of military training to physical health, the educational value of seeing the world, the need for national defense, and other such matters...

...Yet we are being hurried into this venture...

...They are regarded as essential in the character of a good soldier...

...We are being urged to act at once...

...Hence most of us are not prepared to offer criticisms of constructive value...

...A Positive Rejection Finally, a component quality of the good citizen, and not of the good soldier, is a critical temper of mind as regards the institutions and customs of his country...

...But actions have their natural consequences whether they are anticipated and allowed for or not, and those consequences may be such as not only to wipe out all that is gained by the acting, but to pile up a balance of loss that is ruinous...

...It, too, is basic to good citizenship, whatever the form of government or society...

...It would prepare the coming generations for an age that we must hope is gone...

...No thoughtful person wants it encouraged...

...How, at the end of the war, shall we manage to build structures of peace, instead of entering upon an intensified warfare of class against class...

...But blind obedience as a general obligation is something very different...

...Discipline of this sort, adjusted to the social ends for which it is required, was never at a higher premium than in these days of vast disintegration...

...Discipline by all means...

...But none of them is immortal, least of all the reality...

...So the present argument is only indirectly an argument against peacetime military training...

...The need of education and training for citizenship is therefore clear enough...

...Training them according to the military manner, which not only ignores this art, but develops habits of behaving and feeling that make its mastery increasingly formidable, would be a retrogressive step of the most serious nature...

...These 4 military virtues do not of course present a complete picture of what is envisaged in peacetime military training, to say nothing of what is exemplified by the good soldier under conditions of war...

...But training which is all one with conditioning the future citizen to obey without regard to the relation of his obedience to democratic progress, must sooner or later prove fatal to democracy...

...They contend that democracy will suffer no harm, on the contrary will greatly benefit, if the young men of the nation are subjected to a year's rigorous military training...

...They are, however, central virtues for which the proposed military training assumes responsibility, and these virtues, with others of the same class, imperative as they may be for successful warfare, run directly counter to the interests of democratic society...

...We believe that the one unchallengeable goal of social effort is a commonwealth in which every man, woman, and child may find real opportunity to work out a satisfying and worthy life...

...Desires drive boldly on, often heedless of whether thinking keeps up or not...

...But like everything else, discipline is what discipline does...

...But is it true...

...Irresponsible fault finding is obviously all too common...

...The right of the citizen to criticize and the duty to exercise that right must be insisted upon for the safety of democracy...

...Never Greater Reason To Speak Luckily the issue is not yet closed...

...But informed criticism, which looks to improvements in prevailing institutional machinery and practices, is, on the contrary, sadly lacking and needs positive encouragement...

...We need more, not less, willingness to obey orders...

...At such a time of miraculous expansion in man's outlook, when the best which can be done in educating ourselves for the new world must fall short of adequately lighting up the conditions that have to be mastered, peacetime military training should be seen as an anachronism...

...Each of the values at issue is to have its day in the court of appreciative understanding, and the verdict reached is to give each of the values, recreated in the light of the conflicting claims, the right to proceed on its way...

...on his business and politics, his education and morality, his religion and philosophy...

...Democracy seeks to draw people together into coordinated endeavors to make life as liveable as possible all around...

...The same principle holds of discipline...

...We still have a chance to consider the advisability of taking the step...

...Those of us who are convinced that it would be a misstep, a colossal and tragic misstep, resulting in a disastrous setback not only in the progressive development of the best qualities of American civilization, but to the whole human undertaking, have never had greater reason to speak our minds...

...If this is true, then the adoption of peacetime military conscription will effectively block the advance of democratic civilization, possibly do worse than block its advance, possibly eradicate it from the earth...

...This is a revolution to which only the few greatest revolutions of history are comparable...

...And so on...

...We do not always have the combination of good will, intelligence, and moral imagination required to translate it into practice...

...The mere survival of the democratic enterprise, I repeat, has become problematical...

...Out of those struggles of other days and our own day, we hear the call to stand by the democratic cause...

...Will those who partake of that training be improved in social intelligence and social vision...

...Many customary practices would be fundamentally transformed...

...Born in a fortunate hour of human history, democracy matured in a singularly favorable environment...

...It seemed destined to move on and on with resistless momentum...

...A democracy cannot prosper with it...

...An age less friendly to democracy has replaced it...

...It will exert the profoundest imaginable impact on man's practices and aspiration...

...We oppose peacetime military conscription in grateful memory of those who in times of peace have labored to give substance to democratic idealism, and of those who in wartime have offered up "the last full measure of devotion...

...Force Versus Cooperation The successful application of this principle is never easy and sometimes extremely difficult...

...It has to be cultivated...

...Peacetime military training, if adopted, would touch every aspect of American life...

...To some of us the answer is obvious...

...The democratic objective in these cases is always the same...

...Not life in general or in the abstract, since there is no such thing, but human beings urged on by needs and wants and ambitions...

...Orders have to be obeyed under any form of government or society, even at times when it is not clear, then and there, why the obedience is called for...

...We need much more training to do it well than we now receive...

...And on the larger social scale where organized groups are arrayed against each other and all the elements of difficulty are enormously increased, pressure technique still prevails so largely that many people view it as the sole realistic method of settling differences...

...The more successfully military habits and attitudes can be woven into the general educational fabric the less will the young be prepared, the less will any of us be prepared, for the hard work that has to be done if democratic principles and processes are to be influential in the postwar world...

...Will the proposed military training contribute to the performance of this difficult task...

...As to the third item in the foregoing list of military virtues—the coercive pushing aside of the other fellow in a conflict of aims—this is as antithetical to democratic procedure as anything could be...

...And the situation will be more complex, and therefore more crucial, when the armies disband and the millions return home, lay aside their uniforms, and reenter civilian life in search of civilian careers...

...Therefore looking before leaping is sometimes an unequivocal necessity...

...Consider the following virtues...

...In fact, its very survival has become problematical in the face of a world-wide revolutionary ferment and a world-drift toward centralized governmental authority...

...Training for military effectiveness is the exact antithesis of training for democratic effectiveness...

...How shall a consciously planned and ever widening social order be prevented from swallowing up human individuality...

...We feel called upon to keep so much of it as we inherited, and to hand it on enriched through our response to the outreaching ideals of our time...

...Overreaching all other problems, entering deeply into every one of them, is the fact that man has lifted himself from his native earth and is finding a new environment in the sky...

...Democracy is a big word, the idea is bigger still, and the reality to which the word and the idea refer is the biggest of the three...

...He may grumble and grouse, or, to use his own words, "gripe" a good deal, but his complaining is not directed at the military program itself...

...Even when 2 or only a few individuals are involved in controversy, so that the problem is relatively simple, we frequently lose patience and fall back on self-assertive pressure to put an end to the dispute...

...The economic landscape, the intellectual atmosphere, the political fecundity of the time, were all conducive to its vigorous development...

...He is the frank embodiment of the dogma that might makes right...

...and we believe that it is a commonwealth democratically inspired, democratically organized, and democratically informed, which provides this opportunity in the amplest and most practical form...

...We can still think about it with the intention of deciding, before it is too late, whether we deem it wise to move out in this direction or not...

...And it is hardly debatable that at the present time more rather than less discipline is desirable, more self-discipline and more community-induced discipline...

...We have problems to solve for which none but a politically and socially critical people can find even approximate solutions...

...And to win for it more than survival, to win for it conditions favorable to a vital and significantly expanding future, is an uphill task demanding the best intelligence and the clearest social vision of which collective man is capable...

...Such discipline is not a spontaneous growth of preoccupation with life...

...Observe what is going on as regards peacetime conscription of the nation's young men for military training...

...But it is equally unde-batable that this discipline should be of a certain character—not the mechanical, unquestioning kind that plays into the hands of autocratic or dictatorial leadership, but the kind that is motivated by intelligent acceptance of democracy as a distinctive art of life...

...It is primarily a defense of democracy's future...

...It surely remains to be shown that Americans should cooperate in disciplining democracy out of the world...

...It is the fruit of education and training...

...Increase the group to national size, multiply the difficulties accordingly, and the conclusion generally arrived at is that all serious conflicts between nations must be decided by military might...

...There are those who argue that it is not true...

...The need for immediate action is presumed to be so pressing that we cannot even hesitate long enough to consult the desires and convictions of millions of young Americans who are fighting on the battlefronts of the world, great numbers of them permanently ruining their careers, all of them risking their lives, and thousands upon thousands suffering and dying in defense of the institutions and ideals we are to ignore...

...And this happens to be of central importance...

...There are special reasons why the situation is more crucial today than at any time before...

...And this is what peacetime training in military discipline would tend to do...

...This is not a simple thing to do, although many of us act as if it were...

...This being our faith and our creed, we are forced to consider the probable effects of the proposed military conscription on what we thus regard as the greatest social venture in which man has engaged...

...That propitious age is gone...

...In a democracy readiness to obey orders has to be related to democratic means and ends, therefore has to be combined with the opportunity and the capacity to take part in choosing what orders are desirable...

...We were educated to stand by what we have, without knowing too well what that is...