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Imprimis, On Line -- May 1992
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
360,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
institution known for its defense of free market principles
and Western culture and its nearly 150-year refusal to
accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes lectures by such
well-known figures as Ronald Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom
Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many more. Permission to reprint
is hereby granted, provided credit is given to Hillsdale
College. Copyright 1992. For more information on free print
subscriptions or back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-
439-1524, ext. 2319.
-------------------------
"World War II: The Great Liberal War"
by John Willson, Henry Salvatori Professor of
Traditional Values, Hillsdale College
-------------------------
Volume 21, Number 5
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
May 1992
--------
Preview: For today's generation, World War II is ancient
history, with little to teach us about how modern life
should be faced. Yet as Hillsdale professor John Willson
points out in this month's Imprimis, the lessons of World
War II are more important than ever. Readers should take
note that he is not arguing that the U.S. should have
remained isolationist at any price, or that our millions of
servicemen and women fought in vain. (Dr. Willson's father
served in every theater of the war, incidentally.) Rather,
his message is that we must recognize the unavoidable costs
of war, especially the cost to our own liberty. His remarks
were delivered during a November 1991 Center for
Constructive Alternatives seminar on the Hillsdale College
campus.
--------
The War That Saved the New Deal
My uncle will turn ninety in January. He retired from
the federal bench at eighty-eight, and until a year ago
played golf three times a week. Last November he fell at his
hunting camp in the Pennsylvania woods. He refused to see a
doctor and lived in terrible pain for two months. When they
finally found out he had a broken shoulder and compressed
twelfth lumbar vertebrae, the pain made sense to his wife
and daughter. But he had changed: he sat around and slept in
front of the television and lost interest even in the sports
he loved so well. Then the United States went to war in the
Persian Gulf. He revived. He started calling his friends
again. He argued with the newsmen on TV. He took his
physical therapy seriously. And one day my aunt said to
their daughter, "Debbie, this war has been a godsend to your
father!"
World War II was a godsend to American liberals. The New
Deal had been dead in the water since 1937, torpedoed by its
fundamental failure to effect an end to depression and its
increasingly annoying meddling with traditional patterns of
American life. Congressman Charles Halleck of Indiana
predicted in 1936 that the "social experimentation and
reckless extravagance of the New Deal are on the way out
because the common sense of the American people is
reasserting itself." Whatever the merits of Charlie
Halleck's analysis, a "conservative coalition" of
Republicans and southern Democrats blocked almost all of
President Roosevelt's initiatives at least until the foreign
policy crisis of 1939-1941, brought about by the wars in
Europe and the Far East.
That crisis renewed the President's vigor and allowed
FDR gradually to maneuver the United States into a position
where it would have been astonishing had we not made those
wars into World War II by our entrance. He was aided
immeasurably by the recklessness of the Japanese in
attacking Pearl Harbor and the arrogance of Hitler in
declaring war against the United States four days later.
Nothing unites people like a common enemy. And since foreign
policy always reflects domestic policy (that goes for
military policy, too), it should have surprised nobody that
New Dealers geared up for war in New Deal ways. What
happened between 1941 and 1945 was an expansion of the
national state so vast as to be virtually irreversible.
We should take the time to notice that conservative
Americans were pretty sure this would happen. Senator Robert
A. Taft of Ohio, son of President William Howard Taft, a
patrician educated for leadership, a traditional American
from the heartland, is a case in point. "The basic foreign
policy of the United States," he said in 1939, should be
strength, independence, and "to preserve peace with other
nations, and enter into no treaties which may obligate us to
go to war." His reasons were reduced to two: we have little
business trying to affect the outcomes of wars that are not
ours (and we have certainly shown that we have no ability to
make peace); and war would "almost certainly destroy
democracy in the United States."
Senator Taft was especially suspicious of the notion
that we should "undertake to defend the ideals of democracy
in foreign countries." He added that "no one has ever
suggested before that a single nation should range over the
world, like a knight-errant, protect democracy and ideals of
good faith, and tilt, like Don Quixote, against the
windmills of fascism." The national interest of the United
States, he believed, was to protect liberty at home, not to
extend it abroad. "We have moved far toward totalitarian
government already," he said in 1939. "The additional powers
[already] sought by the President in case of war, the
nationalization of all industry and all capital and all
labor...would create a socialist dictatorship which it would
be impossible to dissolve once the war is over." To the
argument that totalitarian ideas presented a universal
menace to peace and freedom, Taft replied: "There is a good
deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas
from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever
be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund."
He opposed every Roosevelt war initiative, the draft and
Lend-Lease particularly (although he supported a strong
defense, especially an air force). He even refused a deal
which may have given him the 1940 Republican presidential
nomination, if he would turn just a little more
internationalist. Once the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor,
however, Taft knew which side he was on; "with a heavy
heart" he voted for war. Four months later he was still
saying, "We need not have become involved in the present
war." Earlier, he had written to his wife Martha: "I am very
pessimistic about the future of the country--we are
certainly being dragged towards war and bankruptcy and
socialism all at once. Let's hope I'm wrong."
One of the many jokes the war played on the American
people was that by late 1943 many devoted New Deal liberals
thought he was wrong. In December of 1943 the President told
the press that "Dr. New Deal," who was a specialist in
internal medicine, had given way to "Dr. Win-the-War," an
orthopedic surgeon. Soon after, speaking to a group of
reformers, the New Deal poet laureate Archibald MacLeish
lamented: "Liberals meet in Washington these days, if they
meet at all, to discuss the tragic outlook for all liberal
programs, the collapse of all liberal leadership and the
defeat of all liberal aims."
What prompted his lament as well as FDR's change of
physicians was a Congress which kept cutting back on New
Deal programs. Wartime Congresses were made up of men with
formidably conservative leanings, and while they usually
authorized money, agencies, programs, regulations, and taxes
to fight the war, they also looked upon some of the sillier,
outdated, unworkable, and visionary New Deal programs with
budget-chopping eyes. During 1942 and 1943 the Civilian
Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the
National Youth Administration, and the National Resources
Planning Board--visible agencies all, from early on in the
New Deal--got the axe. "It is well that Congress has denied
funds to the NRPB," said the Wall Street Journal. "It might
be rewriting the Ten Commandments next. Of course, it has
already repealed the law of supply and demand." The Farm
Security and Rural Electrification Administrations were cut
back. Expansion of Social Security was put on hold. Federal
aid to education, national health insurance, and regional
TVAs got nowhere.
To this day, most historians who write about wartime
liberalism call those chapters "The Waning of the New Deal,"
"The New Deal at Bay," "The Conservative Coalition." But
liberals didn't look hard enough, then or now. The cuts were
off the tail of the New Deal; it bled a little, but no major
arteries were touched.
MacLeish and his liberal friends were undoubtedly in
near despair because they knew the stakes the war allowed
them to play for. "We who win this war will win the right
and power to impose upon the opening age the free man's
image of the earth we live in. We who win this war will win
the future." Robert Taft and his fellow conservatives
understood this too, at least in part. And Taft also knew
that "there is only one way to beat the New Deal, and that
is head on. You can't outdeal them." He led all the fights
to repeal the New Deal, and seemed to win some of them.
Three examples, however, should show how temporary and
incomplete his victories were.
First, the conservatives were patriotic Americans, and
they wanted to win the war. Congress is only secondarily
responsible for waging war. It falls to the President as
Commander-in-Chief to take war-winning initiatives, and FDR
ran a New Deal war. That is, his initiatives included crisis
regulation the scope of which no American could have dreamed
of even as late as 1939. They included four main elements:
price control (Office of Price Administration), rationing,
command over production (War Production Board), and control
of labor (National War Labor Board). Taken together they
represented a bewildering interlocking complex of agencies,
and they resulted in a command economy that differed only in
tone and details from totalitarianism.
By 1943 government boards and agencies could (and did)
tell Americans how much they could drive, what they could
manufacture and how much, whether they could change jobs,
raise rents, eat beef, or stay on the streets at night.
Government built housing and tore it down, reorganized the
entire automobile industry, created aluminum companies, and
withheld new tires from trucks carrying objectionable items
like booze, cigarettes and Orange Crush. In Oklahoma, which
was still a Prohibition state, the OPA demanded that all
speakeasies post ceiling prices for bootleg whiskey. My
uncle once illegally traded rationing stamps so he could get
champagne and caviar for my aunt on their wedding
anniversary. He was fined and threatened with arrest. My
wife, as a little girl, almost cost her farm family their
driving privileges for a month by pasting their gasoline
stamps on the front windshield. Gourmet magazine reprinted a
popular ditty:
"Although it isn't Our usual habit, This year we're
eating The Easter Rabbit."
This was done in the name of emergency, of course, and
there wasn't any Gestapo to enforce it. Most Americans who
today remember wartime controls remember them with a certain
amount of patriotic pride and nostalgia. But the size of the
black market by 1944 (especially in cigarettes and silk
stockings) shows that it wasn't fun at the time. It also
shows that Americans didn't take the controls very
seriously--except those Americans who took jobs writing and
enforcing and lobbying for controls and exceptions to them.
They would want to stay in Washington after the war,
illustrating again the oldest law of government: once you've
got it, it's hard to get rid of it. An observant Englishman
said after the war: "Millions of Americans in 1939 had
little or nothing to do with the government of the United
States. Millions of Americans in 1944 looked forward to a
near and victorious future in which they would have nothing
to do with that government. They [would be] disillusioned."
A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
Second, the war rid New Deal liberalism of its most
obvious enemy. A large chunk of big business was by 1945
married to big government.
Take Henry J. Kaiser. This paunchy, jowly, duckwaddling,
table-pounding, oath-swearing package of pure energy took a
sand and gravel business and made it into "an organization
that combined the merits of a Chinese tong, a Highland clan
and a Renaissance commercial syndicate with all the
flexibility and legal safeguards of the modern corporation."
In the thirties Kaiser built dams (Boulder, Grand Coulee
and others), and during the war he built ships--Liberty
ships, small aircraft carriers, tankers, troop ships,
destroyer escorts, landing craft--all on a cost-plus basis.
In 1943 he garnered 30 percent of the national production
total, over $3 billion in contracts. His secret was not
efficiency and quality, but who he knew and who they knew.
He enlisted Thomas G. Corcoran ("Tommy the Cork"), a New
Deal wonder boy turned lobbyist without peer, who got him
into the War Production Board, the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation ("the largest aggregate of lending agencies ever
put together in the history of the world"), and the White
House Map Room. He leased suites at the Shoreham Hotel in
Washington and the Waldorf in New York, and settled in with
a long-distance phone bill of $250,000 a year.
Roosevelt wanted fast production, and Kaiser gave him
speed; once he built a Liberty ship in fourteen days! His
ships didn't last very long, and they didn't work very well,
but he could produce so many that the war machine couldn't
grind them up as fast as he could spit them out. When the
big steel companies fell short of delivering the materials
he demanded, he borrowed $106 million from the RFC and made
the Fontana steel plant, at no risk to himself. "Cheap at
twice the loan," he would later say. And he knew also
through his lobbyist friends that he would get the
government facilities that made up so important a part of
his empire at ten cents on the dollar after the war was
over.
Kaiser saw himself, as he said to Fortune, as "at least
a joint savior of the free-enterprise system." But he was
very nearly the definition of what Professor Burt Folsom
calls the "political entrepreneur." Government supplied his
capital, furnished his market, and guaranteed his solvency
on the cost-plus formula. He was not required to make
quality goods at low prices; just lots of goods, fast, at
whatever prices he chose. Kaiser's empire was a huge public
works agency, funded by taxpayer dollars. And this is the
point: unlike earlier trial marriages, this one didn't break
up! Divorce rates may have gone up all over the country
after World War II, but business and government lived
happily ever after.
Third, the war occasioned a tax structure that
threatened to abolish profits and that provided the
indispensable base for future liberal social
experimentation. As much as Roosevelt played the class game
during the Depression, as much as he tried to "soak the
rich," he never got a revenue bill that matched his appetite
through Congress until 1942. Even then Congress for the most
part insisted on acting responsibly and taxing the citizens
directly, rather than resorting to the administration's
funny money schemes of unlimited borrowing and confiscating
business revenues. But there was an "excess profits" tax,
and payroll deductions became mandatory, and the rate for
personal incomes over $150,000 was 90 percent. This
situation makes the wartime career of J.R. Simplot into
either a parable or a new chapter of Alice in Wonderland.
Jack Simplot was an Idaho potato farmer whose
entrepreneurial genius had made him a modest fortune during
the hard years of the thirties, with no government
contracts.* "I ain't no economist," he told a friend, "but I
got eyes to see." By 1941 he had worked out an efficient
process for drying onions and potatoes, and so was in a
position literally to feed the nearly 16 million men and
women of the armed forces. Here was the problem: in order to
meet the incredible demand, he had to create on average a
new business every month--a hog-lot to get rid of the
millions of tons of potato skins and eyes and sprouts,
phosphate plants to provide soil enrichment for his depleted
fields, box factories for shipping his goods, lumber mills
for materials to make the boxes. Each step involved enormous
efforts of enterprise; each bottleneck threatened the entire
enterprise.
Enter the IRS. A governing philosophy of New Deal
liberalism was that profits were a form of theft. Because of
his rapidly expanding income, and given the excess profits
levies, price controls and confiscatory tax rates, Jack
Simplot became a target for government commando attacks. Now
think of it: this was a man who was literally feeding the
U.S.army! He needed profits to invest, to meet the
challenges of his dizzyingly expanding enterprises. He
couldn't predict what the next challenge would be; real
entrepreneurs rarely can. He had neither the time nor the
temperament to explain to bureaucrats the necessities of box
manufacture, fertilizer production, potato farming, or hog-
feeding.
So, faced with confiscation, caught somewhere beyond the
looking glass (between "the law and the profits," George
Gilder says), he turned to lawyers. They created such a maze
of interlocking corporations, using every member of
Simplot's family and practically everybody he had ever given
a "howdy" as directors and partners. The IRS had to spend so
much time finding his money, that by the time they did it
was gone to another use!
So Jack Simplot, who fed the troops and worked hours
that most people didn't know existed and lived in less
luxury than almost any Congressman, acquired a reputation as
a tax-evader and war profiteer.
One could argue that these things turned out all right.
The United States won the war, the ships got built, the
soldiers got fed, everybody made a lot of money, and the
Depression was over once and for all by 1945. This is true,
but Bob Taft was also right, and he didn't want to be right.
Despite the fact that the war frightened the liberals into
thinking that the New Deal was over, it had really (1)
expanded the regulatory state beyond their wildest dreams,
(2) rid them of their most potent short-run enemy, the big
corporations, and (3) provided them with the tax foundation
on which they could build their postwar social agenda. The
war had saved the New Deal.
The War That Politicized America
World War II was also the war that politicized America.
Robert Nisbet has noted that the word is infelicitous (I
would call it ugly), but indispensable for understanding the
present age. "Now it is the politics of the family, the
school, the Supreme Court and the environmental movement.
Power, not money, is the great commodity to be brokered and
traded."
Once again this was a matter of acceleration rather than
point of origin. The war did not create politicization:
basic Progressive-liberal ideas did. The New Deal nurtured
politicization, and then World War II brought it to
maturity. One of the war's most significant doctrines is
especially pertinent to this part of the discussion:
compulsory military service.
The Selective Service Act of 1940 was the nation's first
peacetime draft. It was passed after the fall of France and
after a terrific political struggle in the United States
Congress, which was in many ways the last political gasp of
the isolationists. According to one biographer, James T.
Patterson, Taft summed up his vigorous opposition: the draft
is like roulette. It cruelly cuts into a young man's career,
deprives him of his freedom of choice, leaves him behind in
the competitive struggle with his fellows, and turns society
into a garrison state. Of the nearly 16 million who would
serve in the armed forces during the war, over 10 million
were conscripts. The doctrine made the lives of all
America's men through the age of thirty-five the property of
the state.
Even at the time, many Americans realized its unlimited
implications for the politicization of society. The
influential economist Wesley C. Mitchell pointed out in 1943
that when the country agrees to pull its finest young men
from their homes and occupations, causing them to accept low
pay, physical discomfort, and "risk their lives in the
horrible job of killing others," then there is nothing
beyond the scope of the state. "After common consent has
been given to that act," he said, "civilians are morally
bound to accept the lesser sacrifices war imposes upon
them." This is in fact one of the definitions of total war.
When lives themselves are means to the end of military
victory, then so is everything else. The political decision
to draft our young men was the engine that drove all other
elements of politicization.
The chief irony of the doctrine is contained in this
sentence from the law itself: "In a free society the
obligations and privileges of military training and service
should be shared generally in accordance with a fair and
just system of selective compulsory military training and
service." If free is compulsory, then life is property. In
1943 a logical extension of the doctrine led to proposals
for "national service." For labor, this amounted to "work or
fight." FDR, "consistently ambivalent" toward the "Citizens'
Committee for a National War Service Act," decided in 1944
to support it. He insisted that "there can be no
discrimination between the men and women who are assigned by
the Government to its defense at the battle front and [those
who] produce the vital materials essential to successful
military operations."
A rare convergence of interests between labor and
business, neither of which wanted a government-assigned
labor force, allowed the Senate to tear a House-passed bill
apart in 1944, and with victory over Germany in sight after
D-Day the issue temporarily disappeared.* Furthermore, a
series of veterans' buyouts collectively known as the "G.I.
Bill of Rights" largely removed the issue from postwar
politics. The G.I. Bill was to transform American higher
education; it also cemented the state's control over its
youth in place. The classroom replaced the foxhole.
Government could take opportunity away, and government could
also restore it; since the sequence went in that direction,
compulsory service didn't surface as an issue again until
the Vietnam quagmire recalled it.
Meanwhile the universities which would benefit from the
G.I. Bill had become militarized in the war. Professor Merle
Curti wrote, "The federal capital became the intellectual
center of the nation." Government promoted research,
enlisted scholars, and proved that both "were as necessary
to war as to peace." Militarization of the intellect
promoted politicization of the universities, perhaps the
single most important social consequence of the entire war.
This is an enormous story, and deserves a far better
telling than we can give it here. In fact, it has not been
told satisfactorily at all. On one level it is a simple
story: total war demanded gigantic and focused scientific
research. The government had the money, and the universities
had the scientists. Through the National Defense Research
Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and
Development the government sponsored thousands of (mostly
short-term) projects in hundreds of universities and
colleges. The most celebrated was the Manhattan Project
which produced the atomic bomb, but it was only the tip of
the iceberg. Vannevar Bush, head of the OSRD, offered the
proposal that made the government-science relationship
permanent in his 1945 report to the President, Science--The
Endless Frontier.
Less visible were the thousands of academic
intellectuals who flocked to the war effort--to OPA, OSS,
OWI, and scores of other agencies. And less visible were the
thousands of "social scientists"--economists, sociologists,
political scientists, psychologists, anthropologists --whose
war-related research brought them into the government orbit.
By 1945 four-fifths of the nation's psychologists were
involved in one way or another with the federal government.
Anthropologists studied the "cultural constellations" that
helped explain Japanese and German and Jewish behavior.
Economists set prices and determined markets and generally
congratulated themselves for helping to end the Depression.
One economist revealed more than he knew when he said, "You
can learn quite a lot about...an economy--by trying to run
one." There was no doubt that the war experience seemed to
make plausible the bright dream of a "science of society,"
funded by the national state.
But there is a more significant side to the story. Until
World War II it was an unwritten law of the universities
that academic freedom in part depended on the ability to
steer clear of the national state and its nosy bureaucrats.
Robert Nisbet says, "That changed dramatically in World War
II when, by early 1942, the militarization of the university
was well in progress. Courses were hastily adapted to
'national defense' curricula, young soldiers were marched
from class to class, whole colleges were occasionally taken
over for war training, and research was almost totally
military in character in the sciences and remarkably so even
in the humanities." Add these four background factors, and
the stage was set by 1945 for the conversion of the
university into virtually an arm of the national state and
its liberal agenda: (1) The war generation remained in
control of postwar universities, and impressed future
generations with their new-found importance. (2) The G.I.
Bill provided a new source of almost endless funding for
postwar academic expansion. (3) The Progressive-liberal
agenda had always included the dream of nearly universal
education funded by the public. (4) Most academic people
shared the liberal-progressive outlook.
One casualty was the emphasis on teaching. Prior to
World War II the function of the American college and
university had been to pass on our common memory through
teaching. This did not mean that faculty members did no
research; it meant that they knew that their first
responsibility was to their students, and that their
research was strictly subordinated to their teaching. The
war allowed the liberal emphasis on process to emerge at the
heart of the university function. Problem-solving research,
the university as agent of and guide to change, students as
method-learning creatures, rather quickly took the place of
the old emphasis on substance, reflection, culture, and
memory.
Academic entrepreneurs appeared: grant-getters, doing
result-oriented, short-term research projects that could be
published. Since their patronage came from outside
(government and foundation money), these entrepreneurs
gained leverage in their universities to define "contact
hours," "teaching loads" and other elements of piecework.
Rewards and standards shifted away from the ideal of
teaching, service and commitment to the academic community,
and especially away from loyalty to school. The new academic
nation was discipline-oriented, professional rather than
institutional, institute-making, arrogant enough in its
access to money that it created an academic star-system,
first in the sciences but ultimately in economics, business
schools and even humanities.
And it is crucial to understand that these changes put
the universities in the service of the liberal-left agenda:
social experimentation, economic planning, the growth of the
state, destruction of absolutes, hostility to traditional
religion--in general, an adversarial relationship with
traditional American values and culture. It was all based,
to a large extent, on unlimited access to taxpayers' money,
but operated without accountability to taxpayers' values.
Total war also politicized the Constitution, or rather
it completed the politicization that Roosevelt began when he
tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. The Congress and
the American people decisively rejected that attempt, so
vigorously that the episode threatened to stop the New Deal
in its tracks. But by use of his "emergency powers," FDR
later managed to politicize the Constitution and alter it
forever in the direction of national and executive power.
Clinton Rossiter once remarked, "Of all the time-honored
Anglo-Saxon liberties, the freedom of contract took the
worst beating in the war." Perhaps. But we should turn to a
remarkable little book published in 1947, a series of
lectures by the greatest American constitutional historian
of this century, Edwin S. Corwin. It is called Total War and
the Constitution. Professor Corwin argued that the enforced
segregation of Japanese-Americans by Presidential executive
order in 1942 was "the most drastic invasion of the rights
of citizens of the United States by their own government
that has thus far occurred in the history of our nation." It
established the principle of "constitutional relativity,"
which simply means that since there are no constitutional
absolutes, the fundamental law of the land is what the
national government, particularly the executive, says it is.
It would be no accident that the California governor who
carried out FDR's executive order concerning the Japanese
later became the Chief Justice who presided over two decades
of Progressive political meddling by the Supreme Court: Earl
Warren. Corwin had already predicted in 1947 that the war
had so accelerated prior trends toward "constitutional
relativity" that there would be no peacetime Constitution to
return to; that the wartime Constitution had resulted in
five major developments: (1) Congressional legislative power
of "indefinite scope," (2) Presidential authority to
stimulate the exercise of this indefinite power for
"enlarged social objectives," (3) the right of Congress to
delegate its powers to the President for the achievement of
those objectives (but not clearly have the right to reclaim
its authority!), (4) virtually unlimited Presidential
"emergency powers," and (5) "a progressively expanding
replacement of the judicial process by the administrative
process in the enforcement of the law." Potentially, every
part of American life was politicized.
The War That Restored the Redeemer Nation
In our foreign policy, World War II was the war that
restored the redeemer nation. Senator Taft had known back in
1939 that our wars have a messianic quality, and although
the hard-headed Congress of 1943-45 tried to minimize it,
unconditional victory turned out to be a heady thing. As the
United States geared up for more moral crusades in the Cold
War, the wonderfully acid-tongued Clare Booth Luce labeled
the new liberal internationalism "globaloney." It is an
important part of the story I have been trying here to tell,
but it is a part that will have to wait for another time.
Let me close with a few remarks about the wounds given
during the war to the traditional American institutions of
family, church and local community. These wounds were direct
results of total war, politicization and global crusading.
The "little platoons" necessarily suffer when great events
set society on the move, kill off its young men, and send
money, intellect and power to Washington. In some cases the
wounds were flesh wounds--one thinks of the soaring divorce
rate in 1945-46, which quickly leveled out for almost twenty
years. War strains marriage, and the English bishop may have
had something when he proposed a blanket indulgence for all
war-separated couples who would simply renew their marriage
vows in church.
Other wounds were more serious. Robert Taft favored
federally subsidized public housing by 1946, precisely for
reasons of family. Patterson reports that he felt that the
Depression and war had so dislocated Americans and so
disrupted their living patterns that modest, decent public
housing was needed to preserve the family by ensuring it a
decent environment.
That the conservative Taft had come to trust in a
federal solution illustrated the truth of Professor Corwin's
conclusion about the wartime effect on federalism, the
traditional American doctrine which more than any other
protected the integrity of neighborhoods and local
communities: "Federalism...has ceased to be capable of
obstructing the continued centralization of governmental
power in the hands of the national government." This can be
read as the epitaph for the traditional American way of
life.
"The Best Years of Our Lives" swept nine major Academy
Awards in 1946, which is a pretty good indication that it
tugged on the American heartstrings pretty hard. It's the
story of three servicemen who accidentally return together
to the same home town--"Boone City," an Everytown USA. One
is a Navy enlisted man who had lost both hands, returning
uneasily to (literally) the girl next door. Another is an
older man, a sergeant who had been a rapidly rising banker
before the war, coming home to a very charming and competent
wife and two by now grown children. The third man is a
glamorous officer, a much-decorated pilot who had been a
soda jerk in a corner drugstore before the war and who had
married a hot number who was in love with his uniform. All
of them want to settle down. They want simple, decent
things--jobs, security, family. All of them succeed. It is a
life-affirming, family affirming movie--pretty awful in some
ways, but guaranteed to evoke a tear or two from anyone who
hears the rhythms of heartland America.
Yet there is a disquieting undertone. The handless Navy
man, although he is very competent with his artificial limbs
and learns to play "chopsticks" on the piano in his uncle's
bar, is resigned to the fact that he will spend the rest of
his life dependent not only on his family, but on
his...government! The banker painfully, and somewhat
drunkenly, comes to realize that the bank's profits are less
important than its social responsibility to the community's
poor people and returning veterans. There is no job in the
system for the officer, whose wife leaves him when his money
runs out, and he is reduced to women's work--selling perfume
at the drug store, which has become part of a nasty, plastic
and unfeeling chain.
The Heartland has become the Heel-land; profits are
slimy, the home town has lost its soul; there isn't even a
place for a man who saved its standard of living. The
ugliest scene in the movie is at the lunch counter in the
spiritless drugstore: a thick-necked, twisted, shaggy
browed, ugly man in a dark hat growls against the war and
everybody who fought it. This troglodyte is obviously an old
isolationist, unrepentant and not exactly politically
correct. He is brought up to date with a right cross to the
jaw.
This is not the main message of "The Best Years of Our
Lives," but it has been Hollywood's main message more or
less ever since. This message combined in interesting ways
with very real social unravelling that the war also
accelerated. Millions of women were not so much liberated as
turned loose. Farmers and southern blacks didn't so much
move to the city as they were expelled to the city. As money
and intellect ran off to Washington, liberalism relied
increasingly on the White House and the federal agencies
staffed with ideologically sympathetic bureaucrats to corner
the compassion market. The wounds of the little platoons of
family, church and local community were left largely
untreated.
The Progressive-liberal agenda had always been democracy
and "Science," equality and relativism. Increasingly,
liberals recognized that this agenda required national
planning, national citizenship and national culture. The
American people, largely undaunted even by the New Deal,
continued for a long time to resist the agenda, in their
hearts and in their votes. To a degree that it is
uncomfortable to admit, the Great Liberal War overwhelmed
them. Perhaps it had to be fought; I don't know. But these
things must be said. Bishop Butler's words of two centuries
ago still apply: "Things and actions are what they are and
the consequences will be what they will be; why, then,
should we desire to be deceived?"
------------
Former chairman of the division of social sciences, John
Willson is currently the new Henry Salvatori Professor of
Traditional Values at Hillsdale College. As the Salvatori
chair, his plans include an upcoming video and pamphlet
series on American history that emphasizes founding
documents and the roles played by both famous and unknown
figures in the shaping of the American experience. A past
presidentially-appointed member of the Board of Foreign
Scholarships, a syndicated columnist and a professor at St.
Louis University, he has published articles in Modern Age,
Imprimis, and the University Bookman, and has contributed to
Reflections on the French Revolution (Regnery Gateway,
1990). Dr. Willson was elected "Professor of the Year" by
the Hillsdale College classes of 1982 and 1991 and was
chosen as one of the four best Michigan college/university
teachers by the Detroit Free Press in 1988.
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