An Editor Balances the Account
I
IT is certainly curious,’ Bernard Shaw wrote to me on the Nations sixtieth birthday, ‘that so outspoken a journal as the Nation should have survived sixty years in a country where Truth is tarred and feathered, lynched, imprisoned, clubbed, and expatriated as undesirable three times a week or so. The only encouragement I can offer you is that sixty has a better chance of reaching seventy than fifty of reaching sixty. I have been through both myself and I know.' Shaw was right, and it is even more curious that the editor of the Nation from the years 1918 to 1933 not only survived but came through this period so little scathed.
It is the more remarkable because styles in publications in the United States change without notice, and the Nation, since Shaw wrote that letter, has passed its seventieth anniversary and is rapidly nearing its seventy-fifth birthday, with a new, but highly experienced, captain at the helm. When the Nation was founded, the Independent, the Observer, and the out-and-out religious weeklies exercised a tremendous influence in the country, and the once extremely powerful weekly editions of the New York dailies, notably that of the Tribune, were still alive when I entered journalism. Soon they disappeared, and doubtless the Nation and the New Republic, had it not been for the large means behind them, would have gone the way of the Independent, the Observer, the Freeman, the New Freeman, the Outlook, the Review (founded to combat our heresies and to offer a place of refuge for the seceding readers of the Nation), the Literary Digest, and numerous others.
As for the dailies themselves, they too have shown an alarming mortality. In New York City alone I have witnessed the disappearance of no less than nine dailies — some of which, like the Herald, the World, and Dana’s Sun, seemed as permanent as the City Hall itself. Although the survivors to-day print vastly more news from all over the world than did those dailies of 1897, nevertheless there has been decadence in numerous respects. They have been caught, remorselessly, in the drift toward consolidation and monopoly. Every economic influence which affects Big Business affects them, and it is almost impossible to find more than a few which do not reflect the point of view of the great business men and the wealthy and privileged classes. To-day the founding of a new daily in a great city is practically impossible — a far cry from that golden age when any young Garrison or Greeley, however poor, who had something in his soul to say to his fellow citizens, could found his weekly and perhaps watch it grow into an influential daily. This commercialization of the press, together with the creation of chains of dailies usually controlled from New York, with little real interest in the cities in which they appear, have made the few remaining independent dailies and the outspoken weeklies more precious than ever. That any survive is a cause for gratitude.
The Nation and the New Republic have, however, been preserved not merely because ownership wealth or friendly aid met their deficits. They have survived also because they are interesting, constantly print facts not to be found in the dailies, and are vital and alive. They have held deep and earnest opinions; they are sincere and enthusiastic in their championship of their causes. The journals of conformity, for all their sedative and supine acquiescence in everything said and done by authority, for all their defense of the status quo, have died one after the other because of dullness and lack of fire and leadership. In their places have appeared far more successful and more widely circulated types of weeklies, such as the digests and the weekly recorders of news events, which will in time yield to still others.
Lord Morley once wrote, in the exquisite introduction to his Recollections: ‘The oracle of to-day drops from his tripod on the morrow. In common lines of human thought and act, as in the business of the elements, winds shift, tides ebb and flow, the boat swings, only let the anchor hold.’ To no other form of activity than to our press do these words apply better. I am old-fashioned enough still to believe, and with all my heart, that to survive, with or without large means, a journal must be anchored by ability, character, leadership, and genuine skill in the presentation of facts and opinions.
Long ago it was said: ‘One who moulds the people’s beliefs ought to have the wisdom of a sage and the inspiration of a prophet and the selflessness of a martyr.’ Still more is asked of the editor of to-day. In addition to the economic pressure upon him, his lot is made extraordinarily difficult because never in the history of the press has such allembracing knowledge, such rapidity of judgment, such surety of vision, been demanded of leader writers. From every corner of the world comes news, often of extreme significance in its bearing upon events fifteen thousand miles away. There is little or no time for careful consideration. When I joined the Evening Post we often found ourselves hard put to it in summer to discover subjects enough to fill the daily editorial page. To-day, politics having become economics and economics politics, and the world standing on its head, a journal needs a large staff of specialists and expert legal advice to be had for the telephonic asking.
Fortunate indeed were the Abolitionists and other early reformers, for their causes were simple and understandable of all men. Slavery presented a plain issue and yet that was threefold: it was an economic problem, a vital political problem, and, most important of all, a burning human problem. It has often seemed to me that one of the foremost reasons for the failure of nations to progress faster, and of the intelligent peaceloving minorities in all countries to make themselves potent, is that the multiplicity of reforms, of issues, and of news events the world over, bewilders the multitudes, just as it often dries up the sympathies and paralyzes the enthusiasms of the reading public. The human mind cannot react simultaneously to horrors in Ethiopia, slaughtering in Spain, and indescribable massacres in China. The wellsprings of human emotion are inevitably sucked dry.
II
Although the demands upon the editor are beyond any one man’s powers to-day, the rewards of a free journalist remain of the greatest. We now know well what happens when the editors of a country all lose their freedom under government control. Of all the prostitutes in the world such editors are the most contemptible, because they deliberately and knowingly lend themselves to misleading and poisoning the identical people their newspapers were meant to enlighten and inform. Under freedom, the education of the unchained editor never stops. He acquires knowledge every day, whether he wishes to do so or not. The very studying with expert eye of the day’s dispatches adds to his store of facts, gives him a deeper background, and — if he has within him the possibility of growth — a wider and wiser perspective. That is one of the chief attractions and one of the great rewards of the profession — the joy of intense intellectual absorption in stimulating and exciting tasks which put the editor behind the scenes of politics and in touch with the men who work the governmental machinery.
I have repeatedly asserted that one who has had the joy of saying in print just what he thinks and feels, of breaking a lance on behalf of any cause in which his heart is enlisted, never relinquishes this privilege happily but always with deep regret. That privilege has been the great boon which inherited means bestowed upon me. They gave me the opportunity to be my own master; they enabled me to write as I pleased without ever having to wait upon another to get his orders. The ability to roam the world in order to see for oneself the kinship of all peoples; the power to aid in some slight degree the suffering, the oppressed, the victims of prejudice, of injustice, and of cruelty everywhere; above all, the freedom to say one’s soul is one’s own: these are the sole justifications of wealth that I have been able to discover. In darkest days friends have asked me how I could still be optimistic — undaunted. I have replied: ‘Being one of the most fortunate of men, I have no right to be other than one of the happiest.'
Still it has been far from easy to retain one’s courage when bitterness, hatred, and mediæval cruelty have entered into men’s hearts and brute force, at this writing, rules the world. Much of the great promise of my youth has been dispelled. All that hope and belief that we, in a country of unlimited riches and inexhaustible lands, were destined to be a tranquil, happy, uniquely prosperous people safe from all the quarrels and embroilments of the Old World have vanished. Our social problems have become those of the old countries — by our own folly and shortsightedness. We have wasted our natural resources, deliberately and needlessly invited class strife engendered by special privilege, by unequal economic conditions, by unfair governmental favoritism. We actually face real danger to the Republic that, until 1917, no one believed could again be put in jeopardy. We confront the pressing danger that economic stupidity, fostered by crass nationalism, the armament race, and war, will not only end the creation of the American Revolution, but will destroy all democracy, and civilization itself — a condition none the easier to bear because it has been due primarily to the lack of fidelity and vision, the obtuseness and selfishness, of those who have conducted governments.
How can one keep one’s faith? How present a cheerful mien to those coming after? For one thing, the causes which the Nation has championed since 1865 can never be wholly defeated unless humanity is to destroy itself. The ideals which we have professed will never perish even if we face another dark age. They have been the goals which for centuries have beckoned men onward — the desire for justice, for equality, for complete freedom, for the happiness which comes from social security and peace — and they will never perish. No dictator, for all his boasted efficiency and masterfulness, has anything similar to offer. We have not lost those ideals, nor have we individually been defeated. I refuse to admit discouragement save for the immediate future. That is, I think, not just a matter of inborn temperament. It is merely due to the rightful consciousness that the angels have fought with us — and that we ask of no one what we are not willing to concede ourselves. We have much with which to reproach ourselves in the frequent failure of our leadership, our own weaknesses, but not as to our aims. Victory always — that is impossible. As Robert E. Lee said at Gettysburg to his retreating soldiers, after admitting his personal responsibility for the disaster of Pickett’s charge: ‘We cannot win all the time.’ The independent, liberal, internationally-minded journalist is content if he can win part of the time.
That we of the Nation have done — we have won from time to time as everyone must who fights long against cowardice, hypocrisy, greed, and human stupidity. More than that, if we wished to offset the demnition total of our errors of judgment, it would be easy to show case after case, year in, year out, in which we have warned the masters and rulers of America what the inevitable results of given policies would be and then, when those results appeared, have been able to say: ‘ We told you so.’ There is where we have drawn unending confidence and courage — the demonstration, in defeat, that our principles were right, our deductions correct. We have seen Time again and again catch up with some of the Lord’s anointed in a way to amaze and to hearten us no end. In the face of Hitler and the triumph of militarism at home and abroad, we recall Mr. Wilson’s statement to the American Federation of Labor on March 12, 1917: ‘What I am opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them. I want peace, but I know how to get it and they do not.’ When in all history was there an idler boast? Never has the falsity of solemnly spoken words been more clearly demonstrated and in so short a time — and the utter fallibility of the man who voiced them.
It was he too who, amid the plaudits of a victorious people, declared on the first Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, to the assembled Congress in Washington: ‘Armed imperialism such as the men conceived who were but yesterday the masters of Germany is at an end, its illicit ambitions engulfed in black disaster. Who will now seek to revive it?’ Yet at the very moment that he uttered these words there was an obscure lance corporal, still in his tattered field gray, who in the incredibly short space of time of less than twenty years was to give a complete reply to Mr. Wilson’s rhetorical questions and to win the World War without the firing of a shot. Discouraged by the Munich disaster, the hideous, unforgivable cruelties to the Jews of Germany, the subjugation of a great people to the will of a conscienceless, murdering fanatic? Yes, indeed; it makes facing the day-by-day world almost a trial as by fire.
But a vital sustaining fact is that the world is witnessing the greatest, the most overwhelming, proof of the futility of force in the settlement of national and international problems, and that fact millions are admitting. Never did it occur to me in 1917 that within twenty years the bulk of our countrymen would agree with us who declared that we could not win the war and that our entry into it was the greatest blunder in American history. But there the fact is; poll after poll tells the tale. Never could there be under heaven a more complete demonstration that you cannot shoot virtue or democracy into human beings, or kill sufficient to make the survivors forswear militarism and mass destruction. It is not because we can say with undeniable truth in 1939, ‘We told you in 1914-1918 what would be the exact outcome of the World War,’ that our spirits remain steadfast, but because of the proof that the principles of human conduct, the ethics, derived from Christ himself, which we championed, for which some of us were martyred in prison, have been completely justified.
We see that the prophecy that they who take up the sword shall perish by it may yet come true of the nations which sought in 1914-1918 to establish peace on earth by unparalleled human destruction. We are of the opinion that the present armament race, if it does not result in war, will do almost as much injury to the economies of the nations taking part in it as war itself; that the devoting of such large portions of a nation’s revenues to the making of munitions opens a direct way to the regimented, totalitarian state. We believe that if the democracies seek to maintain themselves by war they will inevitably emerge from it as Fascist states. But we think in ail sincerity that sooner or later the madness of the present hour will pass and the nations realize that armaments offer no security whatever, but the reverse; that the road they are now following leads not to safety, nor glory, but to despair.
III
The list of our successful causes we are prone to forget because the unsuccessful press us on every side — yet it is there. We have seen kings and kaisers, who seemed beyond question enthroned, fall overnight. We have witnessed the disappearance of one prejudice after another, the breaking of social chain after chain, the removal of injustice after injustice. We have seen caste lose its hold even under the dictators. We have beheld the complete change in the status of women; a Hitler has tried in vain to restrict them to Kinder and Küche, though not to the church.
Women can and do conquer as much of the industrial world as they desire and they have penetrated deeply into the professions in all enlightened countries. They have captured advanced positions in their assaults upon the archaic laws which have held them in bondage — with some redoubts still to be taken. Woman now knows that her body is, or should be, her own; that she has rights as to her children, and, in some countries at least, owns her own property free from the control of her husband. The establishment of her right to vote, and to participate in government in as many countries as have yielded it, ensures the inevitable spread of her political power when the present period of darkness has passed. Even in Turkey the veil, which had seemed perpetual, was abolished, with the fez, by one stroke of the dictator’s pen; Turkish women have literally overleaped centuries in twenty years, and now find themselves almost in the status of their sex in progressive countries of the giaour.
Best of all has been the marvelous alteration in the relations of men and women, their having been freed, even in Germany, from the incredibly degrading assumption that if a young man and woman found themselves together they could have but one thought and aim — a relic of the age-old theory that the woman existed solely for the gratification of the man. With this has come the growing recognition, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries where it was particularly needed, that in this field, as in relation to the liquor traffic, individuals cannot be made moral by law. We see on every hand the new understanding that the private lives of individuals, where they do not affect public order or exploit victims of our capitalistic system, are their own affair; that morals and personal standards do change, and change for the better; that individuals are not to be gravely punished and ostracized for life if they transgress what hoary tradition, selfish privilege, and hypocritical religionists declare to be the immovable mores of the hour.
To me this revolution means not license and debauchery but the emancipation of society from unbearably degrading chains of falsity, sanctimonious hypocrisy, stupid prudery, and deliberate disregard of truth and the realities of life — sins far worse than that which was to have been curbed not only by monogamy but by divorceless marriage. In the generations to come, I believe, nothing will seem more incredible to historians of our time than that women should have been for centuries chained by law to human brutes whose very aspect was loathsome to them, whom they could not divorce, who would not divorce them, who made their lives a daily hell, indescribable in the refinements of its cruelty; nothing will seem more tragic, perhaps, than that those martyred women could not leave their husbands to fend for themselves because there were almost no decent economic opportunities for them to earn a livelihood.
If there ever has been an advance, it lies in the discovery that even youth may freely discuss the problems of sex not only without injury but on the whole immensely to its own benefit. In other words, frankness, honesty, openness, intelligent knowledge of any problem, are vastly preferable to concealment, evasion, misrepresentation, deceit, humbug, hypocrisy, the refusal to look facts in the face, the intolerant persistence in pretending that the most important factor in life is not what it is. Because of this belief—shared by all my associates — the Nation under me fought just as staunchly against every form of censorship of art, books, and plays as it did for the other forms of human liberty.
During its long life its editors have witnessed the spread of knowledge the world over. It has not made men free nor saved whole countries from enslavement by the new and direful propaganda of governments made possible by some of the latest and greatest inventions. The system of free public education in this country has never equaled in efficiency that of pre-World War Germany, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars lavished on bricks and mortar. It was Montaigne who declared that he was ‘very fond of peasants — they are not educated enough to reason incorrectly.’ I have recorded my belief that I would rather trust the innate good sense and the judgments of five hundred Americans of the farms and villages than a similar number of more or less classconscious college graduates. This is no pose, but the absolute truth. It has been a result of my journalistic education that I have acquired faith in the plain people whom Lincoln trusted so completely, provided — and this is a large ‘if’ indeed — the facts can be laid before them; Lincoln himself might tremble in the face of a governmental control of all organs of opinion and all means of communication !
This faith does not permit me to believe that the votes of any very large number of Americans have been bought by the lavish expenditure of government moneys since 1932, nor to entertain any doubt that if the mass of the people were convinced that the New Deal has become something else than what they desire in concept and execution they would vote Franklin Roosevelt out of political life as emphatically as they did Herbert Hoover. The plain people have been deceived repeatedly by false leaders; but the public has risen to the three men who at one time or another have asserted that they sought to free the America of to-day. The slogans ‘Square Deal,’ ‘New Freedom,’ and ‘New Deal’ may have meant little or nothing in the Park Avenues and Wall Streets of our cities; they have meant much to those whom Woodrow Wilson had in mind when he said: ‘The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set above the forms of democracy.’
Not Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Roosevelt has unchained the people, but however faulty, incompetent, deliberately recreant, or heavily handicapped the leaders, the fight for a better America has gone on somewhere in our country all the time. It has had different names and has flown different banners, but, whether in Wisconsin or Minnesota or New Hampshire or California, there is ever a striving for popular control of the public’s affairs which neither treason, nor economic and social stupidity, nor the making of war, has been able to destroy. One need only cite as proof of this the extraordinary vote in the House of Representatives in the winter of 1938, when, despite tremendous Presidential pressure, that body came within twentyone votes of the first step to take the war-making power out of the President’s hands and to place it where it belongs, not in the hands of Congress, where it ostensibly inheres, but in those of the people who are asked to make the sacrifices and to give their sons.
IV
Forty-one years of responsible journalism have given me little respect for most of the men in high office in any country. Often I have said to myself, ‘Would that mine enemy could become President or Prime Minister.’ Nothing in my life has been more disheartening than the discovery of how the holding of high office eats into the characters and souls of human beings — again with rare exceptions. I speak here not of legislators, but of men in powerful executive positions controlling the destinies of great masses of their fellow human beings — the Wilsons, Roosevelts, Hoovers, Clemenceaus, MacDonalds, Lloyd Georges, not to speak of dictators, who seem to feel when they take office that they are, first, indispensable to their respective countries; second, no longer bound by the rules of ordinary morality, and so free to misrepresent and to lie, to grasp power, to break faith; and, third, blessed with absolute infallibility. So they change all their points of view by processes of selfdelusion and rationalization until they convince themselves that they are as consistent as they are righteous, as true to themselves and to their beliefs as they are just.
Most menacing to humanity is the ability of such men to order others to their deaths — by millions — without any real sense of responsibility or human feeling. So Lansing and McAdoo were ready to plunge this country into the World War without really caring what the cost would be in lives, merely because they felt that if the Allies were to lose the war our base blood-money prosperity would collapse overnight. So Wilson was ready to make war upon Mexico and Haiti and Nicaragua to have his way with those countries, with whose governments and fates he was never charged. Of the Prime Ministers few have hesitated at undertaking any kind of political chicanery to achieve their ends, not only in war but in peace. Sometimes I feel that the Hitlers and Mussolinis are just Wilsons and Lloyd Georges who have risen to power merely because they were more ruthless than these Anglo-Saxons, more ardent and brutal in fighting for their beliefs, besides being vastly abler executives and more dominating leaders.
I have no doubts about one thing: the business of governing, as I have observed it, is no unfathomable mystery, no impossibly difficult task even in these times, if only the men in highest offices would forswear their selfish politics, forget their parties and their own ambitions, and really accept their offices as a public trust. There is nothing stranger than that your practical politicians cannot see that the straightest course becomes the most direct and certain road to popular favor. Nothing concerning them is more offensive than their skulking one moment behind what they call public opinion, when they do not wish to do something, and then refusing to pay the slightest attention to the public will when they wish to go ahead and have their own way. Especially has this been true in the making of war.
Of all the Presidents I have known and studied, Grover Cleveland seems to me the best, the bravest, the most honest, and the truest. He was a politician, and he leaned toward conservatism. He did not always have the vision we need today; he was mistaken in his labor policies and perhaps in handling bond issues; he made one gross error in foreign policy. Yet he was free from inordinate ambition; he was not constantly thinking about his own advancement; he stood foursquare to the winds; he was unpurchasable; he was stubborn in holding to a principle to the verge of a dangerous obstinacy. Looking back, however, those seem halcyon years — when there was a man in the White House who was a very great administrator, who stood on Monday where you had left him on Saturday, and believed in principles in 1894 in which he had believed in 1884.
To my mind the high-water mark of personal virtue and patriotic service in the White House in my lifetime was that scene when, in 1888, Mr. Cleveland called in his chief political advisors and lieutenants to talk to them about the coming presidential campaign. He did not ask them what he should do so far as his own fortunes were concerned; he did not ask them what political issues he should espouse. When they had assembled he told them that he had determined to stand for reëlection, and on the issue of a tariff for revenue only. Promptly every man in the room protested and told him that if he asked for reëlection on that issue he would be defeated. ‘Well then, gentlemen,’ said Grover Cleveland, ‘I shall be defeated’ — and he was. It is strange that it is necessary to portray this simple, and normal, and conscientious stand as the greatest act of moral courage by a President in fifty years — but that it is. Not one of his successors would, in my judgment, have been capable of a similar greatness — certainly not his first Democratic successor, Woodrow Wilson.
It is hardly any wonder that the American people rose so remarkably, almost unitedly, to Franklin Roosevelt immediately after his taking office, when the country was in the midst of a dire economic catastrophe. For then it appeared as if he had ideas, determination, a program which he was prepared to carry through with unfailing courage and most heartening cheerfulness, conveyed to all his countrymen in beautiful English by a captivating voice. The promise of those years has not been wholly lost. Side by side with disheartening blunders, with administrative inefficiency as striking as was the extraordinary executive ability of Grover Cleveland, we have gained more for labor and more social security under his administrations than under those of all the other Presidents put together.
I hold no great brief for Mr. Roosevelt despite my lifelong friendship with him; despite the fact that in 1910, when he had just won his first office, a seat in the Senate of New York State, I introduced him to a City Club audience as the young man who, in my judgment, had the greatest political future before him of anyone of his generation; despite my writing in 1928, in the Nation, that, if his health should be completely restored, he would be nominated some day for a still higher office than that of Governor. I have cited him here not, of course, for these reasons, but because he, too, affords clear proof of my thesis that the American people want nothing so much as leadership of the type that they thought Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were giving to them and that Franklin Roosevelt certainly offered in those days in which everybody sang his praises, even the ‘economic royalists’ who now revile him from sunrise to sunset.
To pass complete judgment upon him is not possible at this time; we cannot yet tell how events on the other side of the world will affect our destiny, nor can we yet measure the extent and dangers of his obvious weakening, his blunders, his unstable leadership, his lack of sound economic beliefs, his insistence on playing the political game. We do know that he has led this country into a most dangerous militarism, which, because of inadequate forethought and lack of planning or definition of what we are to defend, repeats the worst blunders and follies of the statesmen of Europe and other countries. Under him we have joined in that deadly race for preparedness and more preparedness which even Mr. Roosevelt stated, in Buenos Aires on December 1, 1936, spells bankruptcy and the lowering of the standard of life for vast multitudes, and the destruction of a country’s economic system and war.
Here we have again proof of how little statesmen have learned; how they are bound by conventions; how they imitate one another in folly and wrongdoing; how they actually set their feet upon paths which they admit lead but to destruction. So, in the economic field, they pattern after one another. If one puts up a tariff the other raises it, too; if one seeks colonies, another demands them as his right, without the slightest consideration of what his having colonies before meant to his country, without inquiring whether a single dollar is to be gained by the subjugation of foreign peoples. Not one of the leaders is willing to try methods short of war although they know that it is no longer possible to win any victory when war comes — only to reap a harvest of wholesale murder, of immeasurable misery, of economic disaster.
Finally, in this hour of diabolical, unchristian, psychopathic, anti-Semitic barbarism, I must state the simple truth that if I had not had the support and encouragement of many Jews I could not have carried on in the measure that I did. Their idealism, their liberalism, their patriotism, their devotion to the cause of reform in the time-honored American way, heartened me in the hardest hours. I have been wholly unable to discover the slightest difference between their support and that of Gentiles, except that they responded more quickly, often more generously. I have never appealed to them for aid for the Negro, for the sick, the poor, the distressed, or for any philanthropy, and been rebuffed. And never once have the Jews who aided my causes and responded to my appeals for others sought to capitalize upon this, to ask favors, to presume that their responses entitled them to rewards at my hands.
My pen may have some skill, but I could not begin to measure the debt that this country owes to its Jews and to millions of its foreign-born citizens, first for a jealous guarding of American rights and liberties to which the native-born have too often been indifferent; secondly, for preserving at all times a great reservoir of idealism and liberalism; and, thirdly, for keeping alive a passionate desire for knowledge in every field, which has steadily quickened American life, notably in its colleges.
That this editor’s mistakes have been numberless during his editorial career, his failures egregious, must be perfectly plain to the observer. Perhaps, however, it can be said of him in retrospect that he did know how to fight and cared enough about the struggle to put into it all that he had to give during his fighting years — as his life’s contribution to the country which he has sought to serve and the democracy for which he will never cease to strive.