Beyond Victory

by ARTHUR KUDNER

1

THE old cowhand sat there squatting on his heels. We had been in lazy discussion about the state of the nation. It was late afternoon and to the east the piñons threw long indigo shadows up the hills. At last he buttoned up the talk. “Anyhow,”he said, “ it’ll sure be hell when all this is over.”

He rode off down the canyon then as he always had, ready, competent, contained. I thought of all the years he had been chambermaiding cattle up these draws and across the mesas, parched or shivering as the seasons willed. Flush years, lean years, confident years, fearful years for the nation and the world. He had survived them all. During even the best of them, the most he had got out of it was fifty a month and a tender behind. Yet he was now worrying, and not about the war but about the future of America. It struck me it must have taken a very thorough spreading of defeatism throughout our country to have accomplished that.

How is it with us, I wondered as I watched him go. What he says I hear other men saying also. Have we as a people really lost faith in ourselves and in the limitless promise of this most favored land? Is it indeed true of us now, as Walt Whitman mourned in 1870, that “never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us”? How was it, say, a hundred years ago? At the beginning of the most astonishing and fruitful century the world has known, and which singled out America as its special beneficiary, did men sense and were they uplifted by what might be in store?

Suppose we look back a moment. Suppose we mingle in a typical political gathering of those days somewhere in the hinterland of the United States and listen to a local politician report on national affairs.

“President Harrison is dead, cut off at the threshold of his term,” he is saying, “and in his place we have Tyler, so hard-mouthed and mule-headed that his cabinet resigns en masse during his first year. He loses the confidence of Congress almost before he starts and has nearly gotten himself impeached. And what treason there is in high places when we see the son of a Secretary of War hanged at the yardarm for conspiracy.

“We are dragging bottom in a frightful depression, yet the legislative and executive arm alike are helpless to make any constructive moves. Business is paralyzed; specie payments have been discontinued by all banks for more than a year; like a string of firecrackers, more and more banks burst while Congress wrangles year in, year out.

“We are a most minor country, my friends,” the gloomy speaker warns. “Hideous and awful war with England looms over the Oregon boundary. Food and clothing are hard to come by; the heritage of our children is poverty and exploitation. Doctors are diamond-scarce as grippe ravages the nation. Small wonder that Asiatic cholera has appeared among us. Yet, on top of all this, Congress, crowning folly with extravagance, has seen fit to squander $30,000 on the Morse system, a crackpot invention for telegraphic communication. ”

A dire prospect, certainly. Yet out of it flowered that wondrous century which brings us up to now — and my cowhand friend’s conclusion that it’ll sure be hell when all this is over. Out of it flowered, also, the men we needed in the times and places which needed them, from Lincoln and Grant to the explorers and boomers and inventors and enterprisers and empire-builders and industrialists and boosters and debunkers for which our development called.

Perhaps there is something deep in the American marrow — far deeper than the cadgy and sterile pessimisms we speak from off the top of our minds — that made these things possible. Perhaps it is something tike that which moved Old Man Lester, another venerable Southwestern cowman of my acquaintance, to reply, when asked if he were not worried sick about a seemingly endless drought, “Nope. I’ve always noticed that in this country it rains just about thirty seconds before it’s altogether too late.”

2

What was happening when the date line joined the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

The Wrights were conquering the air with consequences that revolutionized the ways of peace and the concepts of war, and forever changed the geographical security of empires; the first radio messages were stuttering their faltering way across the Atlantic; speed in all things was accelerating to the point where space lost its sense of meaningless dimension. Electric power was sparking a gap in men’s minds and plans; taking form were vast superpower projects to harness the waters that irrigate where they do not engulf immense regions of the country. The telephone developed so enormously in a generation that in 1922 the annual expenditures of the Bell System were two thirds those of the United States government before the First World War.

Iron and steel production and coal mining were quadrupled between 1890 and 1920.

After the First World War we were producing twice as much steel as England, France, and Germany combined. In 1920 we were mining nearly half of the world’s coal.

In the social field, the motorcar was destined to transform American life, to break urban constriction and rural isolation alike, to redraw the mercantile map of the country and gather vastly greater territory into new trading areas. It was to haul in its train a whole era of suburban development, and to effect such an industrial upset that the population of Detroit quintupled in the span of a generation. For good or ill, photographic film and its offspring, the movies, were influencing the manners, dress, morals, and outlook of youth, while woman’s place outside the home was being enlarged and staked down by the development of the typewriter.

In agriculture, those were the pre-plowunder days, and the two decades before the turn of the century saw under cultivation new farm lands that equaled the combined areas of England, Wales, Germany, and France. And epitomizing the astounding sweep of progress and prosperity, here arose the skyscraper city— huge, utilitarian, frantic in aspect and application, but often beautiful, aspiring, and altogether American.

Will it be “hell,” then, when this war is over? Not in my book. Nor, I think, does the old cowhand believe it either, or he would be moving heaven and earth to get the herd he tends sold while beef prices are in the stratosphere and the selling is good.

Is there good ground for the conviction he disclaims? Look about you. The unlocking of the world imagination is under way. All the fruits of science are just beginning to ripen. In terms of factories, machines, transportation, almost anything material you can name, we have means and opportunities in such measure and variety as the past could scarcely have dared imagine. Under the pressures of the war there are developing in this country the makings of an era of prosperity and expansion so widespread and dazzling as to make anything in our earlier experience seem puny potatoes indeed. When the war is won — and it is only too plain now it will take a lot of winning — will the people be energized by the vision of the phenomenal possibilities before them, as once they were energized by “the American dream”?

3

Let us examine a very few of the things that foreshadow what may be. The normal monthly output of new locomotive horsepower in peacetime in this country is about 40,000. In another year we should be producing in air horsepower per month something like 20,000,000. After the war, this immense bank of engine power will have to be dispersed. Progress in manufacture will force it. The dispersal will be made at absurdly low cost. At the close of the last war I saw OX-5 engines costing thousands of dollars to build sell at $90.

The dispersal of this vast amount of air horsepower will work a revolution in business, transportation, and communication. Spell out its implications for yourself as you prefer, whether in terms of tree-ripened oranges picked tonight in California, which will be on the New York market at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, or of transcontinental shipping generally, or more important, transcontinental thinking, accelerating from, so to speak, eight days from coast to coast, to eight hours. The whole velocity of trade, travel, living, will speed up proportionately, and marketwise this can be made to mean at least the equivalent of doubling the population. The railroads and airlines alike know all this well, and already are studying their potentials.

The new industries that are incubating now are almost uncountable and unimaginable in their eventual effect. I think it entirely possible that in five years a rubber tree will be as foolish economically as a wild strawberry. When you can determine at the outset the characteristics in a raw material that will exactly fit it to its ultimate function, why should you putter around with the milk of a rubber tree? A tire tread needs a different material from a garden hose, an oil pipe from a shoe sole, an airplane connection to serve at 30 below zero from a kitchen floor covering. Why handicap yourself by starting with the same material for all these different applications and services? Progress on synthetic rubbers will in the next few years answer that one with what is known in the popular idiom as the bird — especially when the accidental discoveries bound to come out of present activity have made their contribution. Even Charles Goodyear had to thank an accident for the vulcanization of rubber, and we haven’t begun yet to be able to audit our accidents on the asset side in the matter of synthetics.

Even so, we are much farther ahead on artificial rubbers than most people think, except in point of physical capacity. Any one of perhaps a dozen synthetics today will beat the result we got out of natural rubber in tires thirty years ago at a comparable stage of the art, and in 1938 Goodyear built synthetic tires with longer tread wear than could be had then from the best of natural rubber.

A few weeks ago I talked of this with the erstwhile manager of one of the leading rubber plantations of the Far East. Somewhat to my surprise he agreed. “I have been doing some figuring,” he said, “and on the basis of what we know even now I can produce more rubber with 350 men in a factory than I can produce with 10,000 men on a plantation. Or, to put it another way, I can get more rubber from 40 acres of factory space than I can get from 50,000 acres of plantation. ”

4

On the new industries side, we are just about to enter the plastics and light metals age. Our capacity in aluminum is on the way up from 300 million pounds a year to somewhere near a scheduled 3 billion pounds a year, and in its raw state aluminum is twice as plentiful as iron. Our magnesium output increase is also up by 1000 per cent or more. What this can mean as a contributor to a new economy of plenty can be visualized from the fact that magnesium is available by oceanfuls; it is many times more abundant than such old and useful stand-bys as zinc, lead, copper, and nickel combined.

It is not visionary to say that before we are through, this shift to light metals may be as consequential as the shift from the bronze age to the iron age. Think back to a time much later than that, and recall how steel ushered in an era of unprecedented progress and wealth that changed the face of the earth and refashioned the social and political ideologies of mankind. And already steel’s day is passing the meridian. Around the corner is coming a new and fabulous time in the potential of light metals and plastics. The papermakers are exploding the fibers of wood pulp and recompressing them into gears and gadgets which they say will outwear steel. The coffee planters in Brazil are casting their excess into plastics in an amazing variety of shapes and forms. The chemists and chemurgists and capitalizers of plenitude and waste everywhere are at their epoch’s great chance like a bear at a bee tree, so that in the lifetime of most of us the average American family will enjoy ampler and more satisfying living standards — in terms of cheaper and better housing, more conveniences and leisure, better education and health — than ever before.

You know what is happening in fuels and in the utilization of them. The compact and efficient Diesels of the type that power the streamliners are, in smaller editions, driving tanks, submarines, tugboats, auxiliaries, trucks, and buses in such quantities to meet war needs that production this coming year will reach a rate more than twenty-five times that originally projected in peacetime for two years hence; and with the absorption of engineering and tooling costs involved in such production you can guess how much more widely available this low-cost, power will be, when peace comes, than was originally contemplated.

Again, the 100-octane gasoline capacity we are getting means, with the lighter metals, a world of smaller motorcar engines of higher power and lower costs — and the gasoline technicians already say they have in their laboratories fuels three, or four times as powerful as our present 100-octane gas.

This is mere highlighting, a meager sample of what will be. Consider, in addition, the possibilities of centrifugal casting, powdered metallurgy, heat-toughened and flexible glass, the new and astonishing developments in black light, electronics, radio and television, the interesting advances being made in demountable and prefabricated dwellings, in dehydrated foods, in the whole science of nutrition — a foretaste of which is had in the striking contrast between the Army’s field ration in this war and in the last one. In medicine, the advance is reflected in an able Surgeon’s remark that “in the light of our present knowledge every wound we treated in the last war was mistreated.” Add to these the long list yet unrevealed of original and exciting ideas and inventions and devices being worked upon in a thousand places and ten thousand minds. Pile on top the banked-up needs that will require to be filled after the war, ranging all the way from civilian housing and conversion facilities and mercantile stocks to elastic girdles and canned beer. Now you begin to see the prospect, but you do not see it adequately until you have added at least a glimpse of the possibilities outside our own country. By lifting the living standards of the backward peoples everywhere even a little, we should be able, in collaborative progress, to run our factories on the backward peoples’ raw materials perhaps for longer than any of us shall live.

After the last war there was no such thing in America as a factory parking lot or a broadcasting station. That is not so long ago. Nor was there a foot of concrete pavement in a state like Indiana. Nor was there such a thing as a highway truck as late as 1919. In that year, a leading rubber company wanted to make a dent in the truck tire business. A competitor held the market in tight grip on solid-rubber truck tires. So the ambitious challenger brought out a pneumatic truck tire. Everyone scoffed at it. The truck makers refused to redesign trucks on which pneumatics could be mounted. Finally, as a demonstration, the challenger built its own trucks and started a highway transport line from Akron to Boston. The roads were so bad, the venture such roughand-ready pioneering, it took ten days to make the trip, and the trucks could not carry anything else but the extra tires needed on the way. But hardship and blowouts and bad roads and tough going be damned, the trucks got through and the foundations were laid for our huge highway transport industry.

By the close of this war we shall have as many aviation-trained people in America as were familiar with automobiles at the time of the last war. You can spin out and embroider the possibilities in that to suit your most buoyant mood, remembering that when you have designed a plane to land at twenty miles an hour you will have made landing it in bad weather or emergency virtually as easy as bringing a motorcar to the curb.

5

To speed and to ensure the coming of these things, we are recruiting, developing, and maturing under the forced draft of war necessity the greatest source of new wealth which any country can have — our stock of young managerial and executive talent. It is always this group which spurs and quickens progress and which, to have sweep, must penetrate up through and beyond entrenched conservatism or fearful and reactionary management.

For a dozen years this group has been cramped, frustrate, unproductive, under the paralysis of the depression. Now it has suddenly sprung to action, its faculties challenged, its energies released and expanded. The process is something like this, to be specific: Normally 15,000 men work at Buick, say, on one type of product. Today the men who directed and managed that personnel are being swiftly spread thin over a personnel calculated to reach 40,000, making a whole variety of new and unfamiliar things. And those new things are unprecedentedly and inexorably fine in design, quality, precision, materials. No barriers of cost or competition stand between them and perfection. New plant layouts, new machines, new alloys, new tolerances, new techniques, new products, new training requirements — all these are crowding the heads and aspirations of these managers. They are in an educative hothouse, and they are burgeoning like nobody’s business. I have talked with dozens of them. They are explosive with new ideas, new standards, new ambitions. Fifty years of peacetime would not offset the training for bigger things they are getting now.

By the same token, the rank and file in industry is experiencing a similar regeneration.

I suppose, before our enemies are beaten down, ten million or more men and women, above and beyond the normal industrial personnel, will have learned a trade, most of them a machine trade. They will never be the same. From the dread and uncertain state of being a person lacking method and capacity, frightened and adrift because he has no internal reliances or assets, each becomes sustained and aspiring by pride of craft, dignified by the consciousness of being a producer, and will never again be content until he has found an outlet for his skill.

Something of the same sort of growth will be found in most of the young men who enter the Army. The six or eight millions of them who come back will not be the inept young gaffers who went away. They will have learned some truths serviceable and grave — how to handle themselves, how to handle other people, how to handle the specialties they dealt with in the service — and they’ll be on the prod, wanting to get set and get ahead in the glittering new world that’s looming. Most important, they will have seen the world and judged for themselves, and they will know, as traveled Americans all know, that there is no other people and no other country like their own homeland, and they will bring to its preservation and advancement a firmness of conviction and a certainty of purpose which will not be turned aside. They will have had a bellyful of regimentation, too. They will have resolved, if they feel as most of us did after the last war, that there’ll be no more “standing in line" for anyone.

6

Now the big thing in making the rich promise which lies at the war’s end come true is at bottom a psychological thing. The people — all the people — have to believe in it. They have to see the vision, for it is as true in economics or in industrial potential or in national development as in the Bible, that “where there is no vision, the people perish.”

We had that vision once. Before we had it, in the 150 years from Plymouth Rock to the War of Independence, we coasted along as a snarl of colonies and did not amount to much. Trading rank tobacco and ranker rum for English furniture constituted most of our activity in trade. We made little more use of the continent’s vast resources than did the Indians whose knuckles we rapped.

But out of the War for Independence sprang an idea. The people were caught up with its force and magic. Impoverished, on their own for the first time, their trade, credit, markets gone, they themselves farscattered along a narrow strip of coast between the wilderness and the sea, they yet saw in this new free land a wondrous and beckoning horizon. All men were created free and equal; any man’s son could be President; under a government which Jefferson called “the world’s best hope,”a man could rise as high as his abilities could carry him; there were beaver in the streams and gold in the hills of this “chosen country,”to continue Jefferson’s phrase, “with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation" — and so believing America went to town. We ranged the seas, the turnpikes and tollroads, the wilderness trails, traded everywhere, suffered every hardship and capitalized the outcome, because we believed in what lay ahead. In the next century and a half, we produced as much wealth as all the remainder of the world had produced in a hundred centuries. And the bulk of the wealth we have has been created in the lifetime of people now living.

We lost our national nerve for the first time during the recent depression. We lost the horizon as well as “the true aspect of things past.” And then we began to worship Security instead of Opportunity. We know now, if we have not always known it, that when a man or a nation sets up Security to worship, the temper is out of the mainspring. The dynamics are gone. You think about dividing wealth instead of multiplying it. You lean on government instead of needling it. Your preoccupation is with the difficulty instead of its solution. You nibble at the seed corn instead of manfully preparing the field for its increase.

But you cannot successfully argue Opportunity to the man in whose brain doom is ringing and who is worrying about his next meal. The vision of Opportunity has to clear his head before he can hear you. Then and only then will his understanding take in the truth that the greatest security to be found on earth is in the grave. And that the next greatest security is to be found in the penitentiary. Neither invites him at this clear stage; he is on his way to sunnier and more fertile fields.

Beyond Victory, be it near or distant, — perhaps, before we are through, as a vital constituent of it, — we must spread and illuminate the vision of what is possible after the war. When that is done and its magic is working, the impediments and hurdles, fancied or real, the disheartening accumulation of limiting legislation and restrictions that constrain initiative, hamper the venturesome, and intimidate the bold can be stripped away, because the first ones who fall in line when the people march purposefully in a given direction are the bureaucrats and politicians. They have learned to do that or be trodden down.

I know that many men highly placed in business and finance take another view. They want the process reversed. They speak sincerely of the need for a “favorable environment for risk-taking” and for “restoration of incentive” and for “assurances of reasonable rewards” as indispensable preliminaries to productive action. They are very logical; they may even he right. But if seems to me they want to idle the motor and conduct a highway safety survey before refining the gasoline to put in the tank to make the automobile go. That may be the right of it; a good many economists also say it is. I confess these gentlemen abash me for the most part, sending the lay mind reeling with their swarming statistics and confident second-guessing. But I should like to point out that too often in their equations, it seems to me, they overlook a primary factor without which there would be no statistics to tabulate and no economy to rationalize.

The primary factor I mean is a dauntless man. Out of a passionate belief in his idea, out of stubborn will and an unshakable conviction at his heart, such a man refuses to be put off, dissuaded, or discouraged, but drives steadily on until he has founded a business, a fortune, and a legend. Most of our great businesses and industries of today were founded by such men. Most of their collateral was character, and most of their capital was faith; and so it will be of such men until the last trumpet.

Sharpen your pencils and thump your comptometers all you will, the vision comes first. And when the people sense what can be, when after the war they realize we stand, if we so will, on the threshold of a time more rich and productive and serviceable to all than the world has ever known, one spark in the right place at the right time will set off national comprehension and release their energies to apply and direct our vast facilities in such fashion as to make fulfillment possible. Then we shall all see what Walt Whitman saw, singing of America in a less liverish mood than he felt in 1876, as exultantly he hymned: —