It is important for us to recall that there was a time not long ago when the positions were almost exactly reversed. It was the time of our frontier, the time when for the European, America was an uncomfortable place, without the amenities of his civilization. And at that time a stock situation in our plays and novels and our folklore was the conflict between the elegant but effete European or Englishman being outwitted or mocked or in some other way overcome morally by the inelegant, poor, roughhewn Yankee the mark of whose superiority was his relative poverty, an inability to spell, and a rugged, even primitive jealousy of his own independence. I was reminded of this irony by the latest novel of the aforementioned Graham Greene called The Quiet American. This is the story of an American working in Asia for a cloak and dagger bureau in Washington, and his friendship and conflict with a British newspaperman. One is struck time and again by the Britisher’s resentment of the American’s precautions again disease or dirt—a veritable phobia of contamination—quite like the old literature in which the Englishman appears in tweeds and cap to shoot buffalo in the West, his sandwich hamper neat and ready, the napkin included. It is not merely the resentment which is important, but Greene’s evident conviction that the American’s relative wealth insulates him from any interest or insight into the realities around him, particularly the stubborn problem of the meanings of existence, meanings which transcend the victory over material want. And Greene reflects as well a kind of grudging admiration for the Asiatic Communists compared to the smooth-faced, naïve American, for the Communist, he says, knows how to talk to his fellow poor. In contrast, the Americans are prosperous and spiritually blank-eyed; they walk with the best of intentions in the impenetrable delusion that theirs is the only civilized way to live; in this book they walk in a closed circle outside of which the alien millions of the world, especially the poor, lead a life unknown and unknowable to them, and they are forced, the Americans are in this book, finally to rely upon devious policies of political opportunism and terroristic force. I will add that there is a pronounced quality of the caricature in this book, a caricature which quite astounded me coming from the pen of Graham Greene. It is easy to cast a stone at him and walk away, but there it is, a book which evidently appears quite accurate to the British and presumably to the European, whose reviewers took no note of the caricature in it; the work of a man who has not shown himself to be a fool in the past and is surely not against democracy.
It is time, I think, for us to step back and with open eyes, and a dignified humility, to look at where we are. How does it come to pass that so successful a system and so free should so steadily lose its hold upon the hearts of men over a single decade, when its competition is a tyranny whose people live in comparative poverty and under the rule of men instead of law? Is it truly possible that everything can be laid to the success of Communist propaganda? If that is true, then I think the jig is up, for then history is truly made of words, and words that lie. But it is demonstrably untrue, for there has never been a Communist revolution in a country with parliamentary government, except for Czechoslovakia, which was a revolution under Russian bayonets. Nevertheless, there is a sense in the world that somehow we are helpless, except for our armament, against a positive ideology which moves forward as we stand still or move backward. The conviction grows, it seems, that we have nothing really to say that we haven’t said, and nothing to do except to stand by our guns.
I would make certain simple and self-evident observations and leave the largest conclusions to you. There is a revolution going on every single day in this era. Sometimes it erupts only in North Africa, sometimes in Iran, sometimes in a less obvious way in Greece, sometimes in the heart of Africa itself. By and large the foreign policy of the United States has gone on the assumption that things ought to remain as they are. By and large we have adopted a posture of resistance to change and have linked our fate and our dignity and our idea of safety to those regimes and forces which are holding things down. It is as though the misery of most of the world would not exist had the Communists not given it a name. We have, in more ways than one, made them into magicians. We had a Point Four program. We were going to buy the friendship of peoples with a few hundred million dollars. But the basic conditions of misery, the basic setup under which this misery is perpetuated and will continue to be perpetuated—for this we have no official word. The deepest hope, and we must come to admit it, was that they would take our aid and stop shouting. As a consequence, even by our own admission, enormous amounts of our aid have made the rich richer, as in Greece, and the poor no better off. Nor is this entirely our fault in a technical sense. It is not our fault that thieves steal for themselves, but there is a possibility which lies in another direction, a possibility which costs money to realize, but in my view presents our one great hope. One, but only one element in it, involves our resolution as a people and as a government that abject poverty and human freedom cannot coexist in the world. It is the desperation born of poverty that makes freedom a luxury in men’s minds. Were this country to place as the first object in its foreign policy a resolution, a call, a new dedication to the war on poverty, a new wind would, I think, begin to blow through the stifled atmosphere of international relations.
I believe such a program set at the very forefront of our work in the world would have not economic consequences alone, but ultimately political and institutional changes would occur. There ought to be in training here technicians and experts for loan wherever they are needed, an army of them ready to move into any land asking for them. We ought to be building as many atomic power reactors as we can build, and we ought to be offering them to any nation asking for them. And above all, we ought to make clear that there are no strings attached.
The objection will be that we have already tried this and what have we got in return? I say that we have not tried it unpolitically. In India, in Italy, in Greece and other places, we have given aid on conditions of political fealty, and there is no blinking that fact. We have said, in effect, your misery does not move our hearts if you do not believe as we do. I say that it is the peoples of the world more than their governments who must be reached and raised up, and if that is the aim, if the love of the American people and their sympathy is permitted to surround this aid, instead of the fear of the American people turning all help into a species of bribery, we shall have reason for hope. Nehru is not suspicious of America because we have given India help in the past but because we have withheld it at times and threatened to at others when he says something we don’t like. We ought to make it absolutely clear to the world that we are precisely what has never been before, a nation devoting itself now to the international onslaught on poverty, a nation eager for change, not in fear of it. Certainly we shall be greeted with cynicism, but if we adopt cynicism we are falling into the trap set for us, as we so often have over the past ten years.
But along with economic and technical aid on a scale far beyond that of the past, our entire attitude toward cultural matters must be revolutionized. There ought to be an army of teachers in training here for foreign service, people who can teach languages, mathematics, science, and literature. We ought to appear in the world as the source and pool from which the nations may draw for the new age that is to come. Our own gates must be thrown open to the musicians, the players, the writers, the literature of these countries, and our own artists must be invited to perform wherever there is an audience for them. And what do we get in return? Nothing. Nothing but the slow, but I believe inevitable, understanding of the peoples of the world, nothing but the gradual awakening to the fact that we are not a fearful country, nor a country that knows all the answers, but a country with an understanding for the poor, a country which has such an abundance of materials and talents that it wishes to reach out its hand to others less favored.
But whatever the technical aspects of this approach, however difficult they may be to put into force, they are simple compared to the change in spirit required of us. I thi
nk the single most important alteration that has occurred among us since the Second World War is an insidious infusion of cynicism. No more were we going to be naïve, not again taken in by large visions and giveaways and the whole social-worker, Rooseveltian panorama of idealism. We were dealing now with sharks, and we must know how.
Yet, when was it that we held our undisputed moral leadership in the world? When did we start to lose it? It is simply no good laying the blame on communist propaganda because it was no more wily after the war than before. We have lost sight of the context in which we are living. We have come to imagine that because there are two major powers there can only be one of two ways the social and economic organization of the world can materialize. But already there are three. There is Tito’s Yugoslavia, striving to remain independent, trying to establish a kind of socialism and at the same time to put forth at least a root from which may grow a tradition of civil liberty. And there are four. There is India, insistent upon social planning and a high degree of government supervision of economic life, yet tolerant of private property and private business, but rejecting the American system of unrestricted private enterprise. And there are five, with Israel mixing completely socialized villages and farms with a private economy developing in the cities. And there will probably be six, seven, eight, or a dozen different combinations of social and economic forces in as many areas before the next decade is finished. Only one rule can guide us if we are to be wise, and it is, again, that misery does not breed freedom but tyranny.
We have long since departed from any attempt to befriend only democratic nations and not others. The police states included by us in what we call the Free World are too numerous to mention. The Middle East and certain states in South America are not noteworthy for their respect for civil rights, nor is Franco Spain or the Union of South Africa. All these states promise only one thing in common—an allegiance to the West. But if we are not to be taken in by our own propaganda we shall have to see that they have other less amiable traits in common. They are economically backward and their regimes have vested interests in backwardness. Why then do we include them in the Free World? Because they claim in common a hatred of socialism and a willingness to fight with our side in case of war. But what if there is not to be war in our generation? Then we have only collected deserts that might have been watered but were not.
This brings me to my final point and it is the most vital and the most debatable of all. I believe that the world has now arrived, not at a moment of decision, but two minutes later. When Russia exploded her atom bomb the decision of history was made, and it was that diplomacy based either on the fear or the confidence that the final decision would be made by war, is no longer feasible. I believe the arms stalemate is with us for an indefinite time to come, and that to base a foreign policy upon an ingathering of states willing to side with us in war is to defeat ourselves in the other contest, the main contest, the crucial contest. I believe that the recent shift of Russian emphasis to economic, social, and cultural penetration rather than revolutionary tactics issuing in ultimate war, is based on this new situation. I believe that literally the hands, or more precisely, the fists, of the nations are tied if they only knew it, and that it is their hearts and minds which are left with the struggle. I believe that in its own devious way history has placed the nations squarely in a moral arena from which there is no escape.
But the implications go even further. The whole concept of Russian-type socialism and American capitalism competing for the allegiance of mankind is going to fall apart. There will be no pure issue from this struggle. There will be so many mutations and permutations of both systems, that it will be impossible to untangle them and call them one or the other.
The danger, I believe, is that the Communist idea will, in fact, be able to accommodate itself to the new complexity, but that we shall not, because we shall have refused to see that great social changes can be anything but threats to us. The danger is that without our participation in the reorganization of the backward sections of the world, our central value, the dignity of the human being based upon a rule of law and civil liberty, will never become part of the movement of peoples striving to live better at any cost.
For that and that alone ought to be our mission in this world. There are many mansions not only in heaven but on earth. We have or ought to have but one interest, if only for our safety’s sake, and it is to preserve the rights of man. That ought to be our star and none other. Our sole aim in the past ten years was the gathering in of states allied against the Soviet Union, preparing for an attack from that source. As from some fortress town of the Middle Ages, we have seen the world. But now as then history is making fortresses ridiculous, for the movement of man is outside and his fate is being made outside. It is being made on his farm, in his hut, in the streets of his cities, and in his factories.
In the period of her so-called naïveté, America held the allegiance of people precisely because she was not cynical, because her name implied love and faith in people, and because she was the common man’s country. In later years we have gone about forgetting our simplicity while a new ideology has risen to call for justice, however cynically, and imparting the idea that Russia stood for the working man. Meanwhile in a small voice we have spoken of justice and in a big voice of arms and armaments, wars and the rumors of wars. Now we must face ourselves and ask—what if there is to be no more war? What is in us that the world must know of? When we find this, the essence of America, we shall be able to forge a foreign policy capable of arousing the hopes and the love of the only force that matters any more, the force that is neither in governments nor armies nor banks nor institutions, the force that rests in the heart of man. When we come to address ourselves to this vessel of eternal unrest and eternal hope, we shall once again be on our way.
CONDITIONS IN AMERICA
Concerning Jews Who Write
1948
There is a great deal of talk going on about attempting to create a Jewish literary movement. In this time when Jews have become so highly aware of their identity as Jews, when a new national feeling has taken hold of so many of us, the argument is heard that the Jewish artists and writers have it as their duty to address themselves in their works to Jewish themes, Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life.
There are possibly several hundred Jewish writers in America of whom a handful write in Yiddish. Very few have written more than one work about Jews or Jewish problems. Why is this so?
In the first place, few of us have ever felt any binding tie to what could be called Jewish life. We have graduated out of it, so to speak, in the same way that second and third generation Americans of every nationality have tended to adopt the customs and habits and attitudes of the American nation as a whole. And of course, the Jewish writer is not alone in having broken his ethnic ties, for Jews who are businessmen, professionals of every kind, workers of every kind, have done the same thing. In other words, the cords which bind any people together to the degree that warrants their being called a homogeneous nation or people, have been so loosened and cut as to leave the Jewish writer with no other identity than his American identity.
This alienation is not in any way reprehensible, as some people seem to imply. Western culture, western art and literature are much more highly developed, much more varied, and much more at home in America than are Hebrew culture, art and literature, if only because the latter have been enchained for two thousand years and more. Further, it is not as though the Jewish writer were deserting a highly unified culture of his own to adopt a rival culture through which his fame could spread around the world, instead of being confined to a few million dispersed Jews. It was not a unified culture that we left behind. Indeed, in my own experience it could hardly have been called a culture at all. I know that during my first 15 years I was brought up in a religious home, my grandfather was the president of his synagogue, and I read enough Hebrew to understand about 20 per cent of what I read.
My parents hardly ever spoke Yiddish, and any concept of a Jewish culture, in the sense of a British or French culture, was until quite recently utterly unknown to me.
THE INNOCENT GENERATION
Unless I am quite mistaken, unless I am a remarkable exception, my experience tells me that my generation in America was Jewish only in a very peculiar and particular sense. We did not think in Yiddish or Hebrew, we thought in English. We did not yearn for some national home outside of America; we felt no ties with Europe that really had any operative effect upon our psychology; and we had no personal ambitions that could distinguish us from any other American family. Significantly, although I knew of course that I was Jewish, that I was forbidden to go to a Christian church both by my Christian friends and by my family, I did not feel myself in any way set apart, in any way a minority, in any way a traditional Jew, until I left high school and went to work. Without the slightest trepidation I sailed into a firm that had never hired a Jew, got a job, and then was slowly brought to realize by means of the usual methods, that I was not of the same strain as my idol Abraham Lincoln, that my grandfather, whom I had come to identify somehow with Herbert because he loved Hoover so well, was in reality somehow different from Herbert Hoover, and that, in sum, I was not being regarded by my fellow workers as an ordinary American but as a kind of second-hand American.
I can’t tell you how strange it felt not to be what I thought I was. I remember coming home after about a week on the job. I was a stock and shipping clerk in a large auto parts warehouse. We had about a hundred thousand different items in the place, from 1911 Packard manifolds to Chevrolet piston pins. I didn’t know the stock, naturally, so one night I stayed an hour after quitting time to go over some of the bins in order to familiarize myself with the locations of things. I was into the fan pulleys when the manager of the warehouse came down the aisle and stopped beside me. He was smiling, and said, “You’re going to own the place pretty soon, heh.” The point is that I thought it a compliment. I still didn’t know I was a “Jew” and that for a Jew to be conscientious was a conspiracy. As a matter of fact, when I related the incident to my parents, such was the friendliness they felt in America that they too saw nothing unfriendly in it. That was the year they all voted for Hoover.
Collected Essays Page 45