In 1960, Arnold Palmer became the first professional golfer to win mote than $75,000 in a single season. More than halfway to this goal in June, the 30-year-old talked with the Post about how he planned to make his mark on the sport.
Ever since I was able to walk I have been swinging a golf club, and ever since I was big enough to dream I have wanted to be the best golfer who ever lived. At one time I was certain that someday I would duplicate Bob Jones’ “grand slam” of 1930 — that is, sweep the United States Amateur and Open Championships and the British Amateur and Opening a single year. Then I found out — to my disillusionment — that to devote the necessary time to golf, yet still remain an amateur, I would need either tremendous wealth or a high-paying job with no responsibility.
For me, such prospects were as far away as the moon. I concluded that if I were going to reach the top in golf, I would have to do it as a professional. It was then that I started thinking about a professional “grand slam.”
When I got off to such a fast start this year — winning five of my first thirteen tournaments, including my second Masters in three years — I determined to make my bid. Now my sights are fixed on winning the four biggest tournaments open to a pro — the Masters, the U. S. Open, the British Open, and PGA (Professional Golfers Association of America). Ben Hogan won the first three of these in his great year of 1953, but had to pass up the PGA. No golfer ever has taken all four in the same year. The odds against it must be at least 1,000 to 1. Yet I feel confident that, with a little luck, it can be done. I want to be the man to do it.
Many people felt that Hogan’s 1953 achievement was at least equal, and maybe even superior, to Jones’ 1930 sweep because of the keener competition Hogan met. I agree. I believe Bob Jones, a wonderful sportsman, also might agree. In his heyday Jones had to beat only a small handful of top-flight players. In a big tournament today, anywhere from 30 to 40 men are capable of winning. Jones always has acknowledged that in his time it was possible to win a tournament with three good rounds and one bad round, whereas now it generally takes four good rounds to come out ahead. I think one major victory today is worth two in the Jones era.
The next major test for me is the National Open at the Cherry Hills Country Club this week in Denver. From there I go directly to Dublin, Ireland, to team with Sam Snead in the Canada Cup matches at Portmarnock Golf Club next week. These matches should help me get adjusted to the new playing conditions I’ll face in the hundredth anniversary British Open at St. Andrews in Scotland beginning July 4. After that comes the PGA championship, which opens at Akron, Ohio, on July 21.
Frankly, I am very excited about the British Open, whether or not I still have any chance for my grand slam by the time I get there. The United States has had only two British Open winners in the last 26 years — Sam Snead in 1946 and Ben Hogan in 1953. Our top golfers seldom compete in this championship; they don’t like to leave the rich American tour for an event which offers a first prize of only about $3,500. I’ll miss tournaments worth about $100,000, but I don’t care. I got into this business primarily to win championships. Money is important to me, certainly, but mainly as a means to an end. The money helps make it possible for me to go after the big titles, and I won’t be happy until I win them all.
If I miss out on a slam this year, I intend to keep trying. I am 30 years old — five years younger than Hogan was when he won the first of his four National Opens — and fortunately I am healthy and strong. I believe I have at least 10 more good years of tournament golf ahead of me. Pap — my father, Milfred Palmer, who taught me almost everything I know about golf — insists I’ll be playing competitively until I’m 50.
“The main thing is to take care of yourself, boy,” he keeps telling me. “A man’s body is like a tractor. Keep it in shape, and it will be serviceable for years.”
I seem to play my best in the big tournaments. For one thing, my game is better adapted to the tougher courses. For another, I can get myself more keyed up when an important title is at stake. I like competition — the more rugged the better. When I get on a hard, exacting course, I feel as if I’m wrestling a bear.
Such a course is the Augusta National, where the Masters is played every year. It’s a course that will snap back at you — even swallow you — when you least expect it. I won there in 1958, then kicked away the 1959 tournament on the final round by taking a six on the par-three 12th hole and missing putts on the 7th and 18th. Art Wall Jr., who birdied five of the last six holes, beat me out by two strokes.
Because of that 1959 disappointment, I went to the Masters this year more determined than for any other tournament I can remember. I passed up the Azalea Open at Wilmington, North Carolina, in order to arrive at Augusta a week in advance. I think I startled Mrs. Helen Harris at the registration desk when I checked in.
“Well, this is my 13th tournament of the year,” I told her. “Why don’t you enroll me as number 13?”
Mrs. Harris did — a bit reluctantly. So, my caddie, Nathaniel Avery, better known as Iron Man, had to wear a big 13 on his back all week. He didn’t like it, but he stuck it out; he has been my caddie there for six years.
I found myself installed as the six-to-one betting favorite for the tournament. Masters tradition has it that the advance favorite seldom wins. Newspapermen kept asking me how it felt to be put on the spot as the man to beat.
“It doesn’t bother me,” I told them. “What the bookies and sports writers say doesn’t affect the way the ball bounces. I never think of such things.”
It looked for a while as if my defiance of superstition might backfire. On the Sunday before the tournament I caught a flu bug and was miserable. I didn’t practice at all on Monday. I got a shot in my hip and stayed in bed the entire day. On Tuesday I played 14 holes. On Wednesday, the day before the opening round, I played only four.
However, when I went to the first tee on Thursday, I felt fresh and eager. I shot a five-under-par 67, with an 18-foot putt on the final hole, and led by two strokes. I putted poorly the next day for a 73, but stayed ahead by a stroke. In the third round, I shot a 72. That sent me into the last round with a one-stroke edge over five tough professionals — Ben Hogan, Ken Venturi, Dow Finsterwald, Bill Casper, and Julius Boros. I now had a chance to equal the 1941 feat of Craig Wood — the only man in the previous 23 Masters tournaments to lead every round.
The final round quickly developed into a three-way battle among Venturi, Finsterwald, and myself. Venturi andFinsterwald, playing four holes ahead, both had two strokes on me at one stage. I was on the 14th hole when Venturi finished with a fine 70 for a score of 283. Finsterwald missed a tricky eight-foot putt and wound up at 284.
In our business they say it’s best to be in the clubhouse with a good score — as Venturi was — and make the guys on the course come and get you. I needed to play those last four holes in one under par to tie, and two under par to win.
The best I could do at the long 15th hole and the short 16th was to stay even with par. As I moved on to No. 17, Winnie, my wife, came out and put her arm around my shoulders. “You’re doing fine, honey,” she said consolingly. Pap, who had come down Saturday from our home in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, gave me a wink and a sign as if to say, “Go get ’em, son.” Iron Man, my caddie, was almost in a state of shock. He fumbled nervously with the clubs, and every time he tried to say something, the words clogged up in his throat.
As for me, I wasn’t nervous. I was keyed up, of course, but the juices in my system were flowing normally. I read later that Venturi said he played the final round without once looking at the scoreboard or checking on what I was doing. With me it was just the opposite. I got reports at every hole. I knew exactly what I had to do. I was confident I could get at least one birdie on the final two holes to tie him — somehow, I always feel I can get a birdie when I need it.
The 17th is a par-four hole of 400 yards. I hit a good drive, but my eight-iron approach sat down too quickly and left me well below the cup — about 30 feet away from it, I would say. I remembered that the year before, on this same hole in the final round, I had missed an easy three-foot putt because I failed to read a slight break to the left. This putt, although much longer, was on virtually the same line. So I struck it boldly, intending that if the ball stayed up, it should break a little left at the hole. It did. It plopped into the cup for a birdie, and half my job was done.
There was high tension and wild excitement all around me at the 18th tee. The only sensation I felt was that my mouth was awfully dry. I would have given 10 bucks for a sip of water. But my main interest was in getting my drive on the fairway so I could be reasonably sure of my par. Par on the 18th is four. The hole is 420 yards and uphill, and we were playing into the wind.
My drive was a good one, a bit to the right. Then I punched a six-iron to the green about six feet to the left of the pin. Again I remembered the last day in 1959. I had had a ball in almost this exact spot. I had become disconcerted by the whirring of newsreel cameras and missed. This time I intended to take no chances. I studied the putt very carefully. I asked the newsreel men to stop their cameras. I gave the ball a solid whack. It dropped. That was the tournament.
“How did you do it?” one friend asked me later. “I would have swallowed my Adam’s apple.” Another said, “With that putt on the 18th, I don’t think I could have brought my putter’s blade back.”
Well, I don’t think I have any stronger nerves than the next man. I suspect it’s just the patience I got from my mother and the ornery bullheadedness I inherited from Pap. My mother and father are of stolid German-Irish stock. Both their families settled in the hilly section east of Pittsburgh in the early 1800s and have been there ever since. Originally they were farmers and landowners. Later some of them, such as my dad, drifted into the steel mills and other lines of work.
Pap never had it easy. When he was just a tyke, shortly after he had learned to walk, he came down with polio and was in bed for months. Then he had to be taught to walk again. Today his left leg is about one-fourth as big around as his right, and he walks with a distinct limp. But he developed into a par golfer. He can chin himself with either arm, and 30 times with both. He swims like a fish.
Pap has served at the Latrobe Country Club in various capacities for 39 years. He first worked there as an ordinary laborer when this nine-hole course was carved out of a mountainside. He helped put the roof on the clubhouse. Later he became greenskeeper and took some courses at Penn State to learn more about grass. Then in 1933, in the midst of the depression, he was made combination greenskeeper and pro at the club at a very modest salary. To keep his growing family in groceries, he had to work in the steel mills during the winter.
Latrobe is an industrial community of about 15,000. It is about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh, off U.S. Highway 30. Three independent steel mills provide most of the employment. There also are some thriving construction businesses. The golf course is now in the process of expanding from nine holes to eighteen.
My family has always lived within a brassie shot of the course. I am the oldest child, born September 10, 1929. I have a married sister, Mrs. Ronald Tilley, 28, living in Washington, D.C.; a brother, Milfred Jr., better known as “Jerry,” 15, and a kid sister, Sandy, 12. None of them is very interested in golf.
I couldn’t have been more than three when I got my first golf club. It was an old iron with a sawed-off shaft. The first thing Pap showed me was the proper grip — the Vardon overlapping grip. I vividly remember swinging the club hours at a time as Pap and his men worked nearby. I’d be swinging at some remote spot on the course, and my dad would walk by and tell me what I was doing wrong. I would correct myself and start swinging some more.
Pap says that’s the reason I have such big hands. “They’re the hands of a blacksmith or a timber cutter,” he says. “You can only get hands like that by swinging an ax or a golf club.”
My father always impressed on me the importance of keeping a firm hold on the club and not letting my swing get too loose. Even as a kid I kept my swing compact. I tried to hit the ball so hard I often would lose my balance.
“Deke is ruining that boy,” some of the club members would say. “He should make the kid swing easy.” Pap, who doesn’t know where he got his nickname of “Deacon,” or “Deke,” never let this criticism bother him. “It’ll work out all right as you get older,” he told me. He was correct.
Although my dad was the club pro, I didn’t have free run of the course. On the contrary, the club maintained the old British aloofness toward professionals and other employees. I wasn’t permitted on the course except on Mondays, when it was closed to members.
I recall I used to draw mother’s wash water on Monday mornings and then rush off to the course to play golf with the caddies. I also played some with my mother, who was quite good for a woman and a real stickler for keeping a correct scorecard. Other times I had to sneak in my practice when nobody was looking. At eight years, I could shoot 55 for nine holes. Then I got down to 50. One day when I was nine, I shot even fives for a 45. I couldn’t wait to run home and tell mother.
“Did you count them all?” she asked skeptically. She and Pap never let me get the big head.
As I grew older I took on more responsibility around the course. I worked the tractors and mowers. I helped in the golf shop. But always I was anxious to get out and hit practice balls. Sometimes I would go out to cut a fairway and, with the job half done, I would park the tractor and start hitting balls. Pap would find me and chew me out.
I guess I was even worse around the shop. “Arnie is the worst caddie master I ever had,” Pap always said.
One day when I was left in charge of the caddie shop, things got a little dull, and I sneaked down to the 8th hole to try out a new club. One of the club officers, an executive at one of the steel mills, picked this time to go by the shop for his clubs. He was hopping mad when he found the door locked.
Although he saw me hitting balls, he didn’t come down and say anything to me about it. Instead he hunted up Pap. He told Pap he would like to get his clubs.
“The caddie master will get them for you,” Pap said.
“Your caddie master is out there hitting balls,” the steel executive told my father coldly.
Pap tried to apologize, but it was little use. The other man said, “Let me have that boy in the steel mill for a while, and I will take some of that starch out of him.”
“I’d rather send him up on the ridges to chop trees,” Pap replied. Although my dad gave me a good dressing down when we were alone, he didn’t like the idea of anyone else pushing me around. I was a headstrong kid, but Pap kept a good bridle on me. He would hammer away at the things I was doing wrong in golf. I would get furious. We would wind up wrangling like a pair of alley cats.
Sometimes I would tell him he was old-fashioned and didn’t know what he was talking about. Pap would get peeved and give me the “freeze treatment.” I would ask him to help me correct some flaw, and he would pout, “I’m an old fogy — I don’t know anything. Besides I’m busy.” Then I would apologize. Pap would give in and work with me. I’ve found out one thing — he’s almost always right.
I played No. 1 on the golf team at Latrobe High School for four years. I lost only one match, to a Greensburg senior when I was a freshman. I won the Western Pennsylvania Junior three times and the Western Pennsylvania Amateur five times.
At the Hearst national junior tournament in Los Angeles around the time I finished high school, Bud Worsham, brother of former National Open champion Lew Worsham, suggested that he could help me get a golf scholarship at Wake Forest College in North Carolina. I leaped at the idea. Pap, with a houseful of hungry mouths to feed, had a tough enough time trying to keep me in golfballs, much less financing a college education for me.
With golf mainly on my mind, but majoring in business administration, I entered Wake Forest in September 1947 and became Bud Worsham’s roommate. Soon I found myself playing against fellows I later was to face on the pro tour. Art Wall and Mike Souchak were at Duke. Harvie Ward was at North Carolina. I won the conference title two times and the Southern Intercollegiate once. I was twice medalist in the National Intercollegiate, although I didn’t win it.
After I had been in college about three and a half years, I lost my roommate when Bud Worsham was killed in an automobile accident. I became restless and quit school to join the Coast Guard. I served three years — a few months in New Jersey and Connecticut, the rest in Cleveland. I had an opportunity to play a lot of golf.
In January 1954, I re-entered Wake Forest, but stayed only a semester. I was still short some credits, and I never got my degree. All this time I was the captive of my strong obsession with golf and my conviction that I could become a better amateur player than Bob Jones was.
I returned to Cleveland and got a job with W. C. Wehnes and Company, manufacturers’ agents. On this job I could work in the morning and play golf in the afternoon. But there was no way I could get off for extensive periods to play in tournaments.
Then came what looked like my big break. A friend of Bill Wehnes offered me a job marketing a revolutionary trailer with a hydraulic lift. He guaranteed me $50,000 a year for two years and promised that I would make enough money thereafter in renewals to enable me to devote myself almost completely to golf. I was in the man’s office to sign a contract when word came that he had been killed in an automobile accident in Florida.
At this time I still wanted to play as an amateur, although I felt a growing urge to get into big-time golf. My restlessness continued when I won the 1954 U.S. Amateur title at the Country Club of Detroit in August, beating Robert Sweeny one-up in the final match.
Three weeks later I was playing in Fred Waring’s tournament at Shawnee on Delaware, Pennsylvania. On the first day of the tournament — a Tuesday — I noticed a pretty, dark-haired girl in my gallery. After I finished I learned she was Winnie Walzer of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a friend of Fred Waring’s daughter Dixie. We were introduced. By Friday night I had proposed. We became engaged and talked about taking a honeymoon the next spring when I went to England with the United States Walker Cup team.
However, now that I wanted to get married, it began to seem impractical to me to remain an amateur all that while. I turned professional on November 19, 1954, signing a contract with Wilson Sporting Goods Company. I talked it over with Pap first, and he didn’t mind. He had wanted to play on the tour himself, but never felt he was good enough or had enough money.
Shortly before Christmas I picked up Winnie at her home, and we drove to Washington to visit my sister. Winnie and I decided to get married right away. I called my folks at Latrobe. They gave their approval and decided to come to the wedding. Winnie’s parents weren’t keen on the idea, but that didn’t stop us.
We went to the courthouse to get our license, and the clerk asked Winnie how old she was.
“Twenty,” she said.
I kicked her on the shin.
“I mean, twenty-one,” she said.
“Are you sure?” the clerk asked.
“Yes, sir,” Winnie said bravely. Actually she was just short of 21. We were married in Falls Church, Virginia, on December 20 and then began the tournament circuit as a honeymoon. We started our new life on a shoestring in 1955. Under PGA rules I was ineligible to accept prize money from PGA-sponsored tournaments until I had served six months’ probation. But I picked up $750 in a special pro-amateur competition at Miami, then went to Panama and tied Roberto de Vicenzo for second in another non-P.G.A event, collecting $1,300.
This was our stake. Winnie and I picked up the winter tour on the Pacific Coast and bought a trailer to be hauled around by my secondhand 1952 car.
We pulled that trailer all the way across the United States on the tour. In St.Petersburg, Florida, we bought a bigger trailer and headed for home. Near the end of the journey I decided to take a shortcut over a mountain. On the steepest slope, we got near the top and couldn’t make it. I had to back the big trailer down and start again. Winnie got scared and walked to the top. When we finally got over, the very steep downgrade was almost too much for us. With brakes of both the car and trailer screeching and smoking, we somehow reached the bottom of the mountain safely. After we had made it the rest of the way to our backyard in Latrobe, I told mother, “Sell that thing. I never want to see it again.”
I won enough money in non-sanctioned tournaments to keep our heads above water until my six-month probation was up. Since then the tour has been good to me. My money winnings have ranged from about $10,000 that first part year to $42,607 in 1958, when I was the national leader. Last year I didn’t putt well and fell back to fifth with $32,462. This year, with almost $50,000 already won by late May, I have a good chance of reaching $100,000, which would be more than any man ever won in PGA tournaments. Ted Kroll holds the record — $72,835 in 1956.
Three years ago Winnie and I built a white ranch house overlooking the Latrobe Country Club. There is more than an acre of romping room for our two little girls — Peggy, 4, and Amy, almost 2. I’m strictly a home man, and I generally play my best golf when the family is with me. When they can’t be, I take breaks from the tour and go back to Latrobe. Usually I play six or seven tournaments and then skip two. I find these little breathing spells good for my game.
I have two main hobbies — bridge and flying. The Latrobe Airport is only about a mile from my home, and I have close to 100 hours of solo flying to my credit. I’m looking forward to the day I buy my own plane and can sky-hop between tournaments.
On the golf course, I’ll admit, I am a bold player, but the tour has taken away much of my early brashness. As a freshman pro, I felt I could beat anybody. I played like a pirate, going for the pin every time regardless of the consequences. I still do that most of the time — particularly when I feel I have at least a 50-50 chance of making the shot — but I don’t gamble when a miss can be very costly.
All in all, I think the biggest improvements in my game during the first months of this year were steadier putting and better concentration.
Now that I’ve won my second Masters, I notice that some people are comparing me with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. I’m not like either of them. I figure I am a power hitter like Snead, with a swing that has needed little or no overhauling. But Sam has the greatest natural talent I ever saw. His ability is such that he can win tournaments without concentration or extra effort. All he has to do is swing away.
Hogan, on the other hand, is self-made — the product of his own relentless determination. He is the coldest, sharpest calculator I have ever seen on a golf course. I get intent at times myself, but often I shrug it off and say, “What the heck — it’s just a game.”
Although Hogan and Snead are nearing 50, both are still threats in a tournament such as the National Open this week. However, I believe the main competition at Cherry Hills will come from younger men who have been active on the 1960 tour.
Bill Casper, the defending champion, is more than just a great putter — the label some people have hung on him. He is a fine all-around player. Dow Finsterwald, one of my closest friends, is always a threat. This is a cold business with him, and he approaches it like a machine. Ken Venturi is a classic player, capable of reaching brilliant heights. Mike Souchak is the strongest man in golf and is hard to beat when he is rolling, but he is inclined to be streaky. Gene Littler is solid as an oak, with wonderful natural talent, but has seemed to lack inspiration. Art Wall and Bob Rosburg have proved they can be top players despite their unorthodox baseball grips.
In my opinion, this is the select little group I’ll have to overcome if I’m to keep my grand-slam attempt alive by winning the U.S. Open. I have one wish for this tournament. I just hope things will work out so that I can come down to the final two holes needing one birdie to tie and two to win.
Eight days after this story was published in the 1960 Post, Arnold Palmer won the U.S. Open. At the British Open in July, he came in second — by a single stroke — to Kel Nagle, ending his chance at the modern-day Grand Slam. (To date, the challenge of winning the four major PGA tournaments in a single season remains a unicorn for professional golfers, who credit Palmer with the concept.) In October, Palmer was voted 1960’s PGA Player of the Year, receiving 1,088 of the 1,217 votes cast by professional golfers and the media.
The international golf star gained 95 professional and 26 amateur wins before he retired at age 76 — nearly three more decades of golf than “Pap,” his father and golf teacher, had predicted for him in 1960. Palmer died Sunday at the age of 87.
What is a proper reaction to reports, in the 1940s and ’50s, that imply the existence of 4 million drug addicts in the U.S.? One reaction — the one ultimately chosen the federal and state governments — was to pass stricter new laws and regulations that sought out those involved with both using and selling drugs and locked them up, away from civilized society. Another way, the one championed by Dr. Laurence Kolb of the U.S. Public Health Service, was to check those numbers and find out if the problem was really so widespread.
To be sure, there was a narcotics problem. At the end of the 19th century, opium and its derivatives — like heroin, morphine, and laudanum — had found their unregulated way into hundreds of over-the-counter pain relievers for everything from teething to arthritis. People were becoming addicted, and doctors were starting to notice.
In 1914, the Harrison Act limited access to opiates and cocaine. Clinics were set up to help the addicted under the care of professional supervision. But over the next 10 years, most of those clinics closed as political positioning and journalistic sensationalism shifted public opinion away from helping addicts and toward criminalizing them. New laws and their interpretations meant that addicts seeking medical help were more likely to face conviction than convalescence.
Amid the hysteria, in 1924, Dr. Kolb published his report for what would become the National Institute for Public Health, estimating that addicts in the United States “never exceeded 246,000.” Drug addiction was a problem, yes, but not as great a problem as headlines led people to believe. What’s more, Kolb argued, our reaction to the drug problem was wrong-headed.
In 1956, Dr. Kolb wrote “Let’s Stop This Narcotics Hysteria!” for the Post. In the 32 years since his original report, our approach to drug addiction hadn’t changed much. In this article, he argues for a more enlightened view, showing how treating all drug addicts as criminals makes little sense medically, economically, or socially. He also offers an alternative.
Today, the so-called war on drugs continues, and the outlook doesn’t seem much different. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, nearly half of federal prison inmates are there for drug violations. A Justice Policy Institute study has shown that treating a drug addict costs, on average, $20,000 less per year than imprisonment. Given the cost of incarceration, punishment instead treatment is not simply shortsighted and vengeful, but it’s also impractical.
Let’s Stop This Narcotics Hysteria!
By Laurence Kolb, M.D.
Excerpted from an article originally published on July 28, 1956
Many years ago, when I was a stripling, I sat listening to a group of elderly men gossiping in a country store. They were denouncing the evils of cigarette smoking, a vice that was just coming in.
This store had on its shelves a jar of eating opium, and a carton of laudanum vials — 10 percent opium. A respected woman in the neighborhood often came in to buy laudanum. She was a good housekeeper and the mother of two fine sons. Everybody was sorry about her laudanum habit, but no one viewed her as a sinner or a menace to the community. We had not yet heard the word addict, with its sinister, modern connotations.
Since those days, public opinion has done a complete about-face. The “sin” of smoking cigarettes, in 50 years’ time, has become a socially acceptable habit, while drug addiction has been promoted by hysterical propaganda to the status of a great national menace.
As an example, one prominent official has said that illegal heroin traffic is more vicious than arson, burglary, kidnapping, or rape, and should entail harsher penalties. Last May 31st, the United States Senate went even further, in passing the Narcotic Control Act of 1956. In this measure, third-offense trafficking in heroin becomes the moral equivalent of murder and treason; death is the extreme penalty, “If the jury in its discretion shall so direct,” for buyer and seller alike, whether addicted or not.
In my opinion, the lawmakers completely missed the point. For drug addiction is neither menace nor mortal sin, but a health problem — indeed, a minor health problem when compared with such killers as alcoholism, heart disease, and cancer.
I make that statement with deep conviction. My work has included the psychiatric examination and general treatment of several thousand addicts. I know their habit is a viciously enslaving one, and we should not relax for a moment our efforts to stop its spread and ultimately to stamp it out completely. But our enforcement agencies seem to have forgotten that the addict is a sick person who needs medical help rather than longer jail sentences or the electric chair. He needs help which the present Narcotics Bureau regulations make it very difficult for doctors to give him. Moreover, no distinction has been made, in the punishment of violators, between the nonaddicted peddler who perpetuates the illicit traffic solely for his own profit and the addict who sells small amounts to keep himself supplied with a drug on which he has become physically and psychologically dependent.
“Two Hunter College students covering their faces with books, at police headquarters after they were picked up on narcotics” World Telegram & Sun photo by Herman Hiller.
Library of Congress
The Council of the American Psychiatric Association, in a public statement issued after the Senate passed its bill, declared that this and a companion measure introduced in the House, “represent backward steps in attacking this national problem.” The association, after listing some of the points I have just made, concludes by remarking that “additional legislation concerning drug addiction should be directed to making further medical progress possible, rather than discouraging it. The legislative proposals now under consideration would undermine the progress that has been made and impede further progress. Thus, they are not in the public interest.”
I was launched in this field of medicine in 1923, when the United States Public Health Service assigned me to study drug addiction at what is now the National Institute of Public Health. In 1935, I opened the service’s hospital for treatment of addicts at Lexington, Kentucky. Three years later I became Chief of the Division of Mental Hygiene, overseeing administration of the Lexington hospital and a similar institution at Fort Worth, Texas. And after retiring from the service in 1944, I continued to be active in psychiatry. So I know a great deal about addiction, and how perverse our attitude toward it has become.
Most addiction arises from misuse of marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, opium, or opium’s important preparations and derivatives — eating opium, smoking opium, laudanum, morphine, and heroin. Alcohol is a yardstick with which to measure the harm done by other drugs. There are 4,500,000 alcoholics in this country, and about 700,000 of them are compulsive drinkers who are on “skid road” or headed for it — gripped like opium addicts by psychological forces they cannot control.
Until recent times, millions of people in Asia and Africa were habitual users of opium. Dr. C.S. Mei, a physician and Chinese government official, told me in 1937 that there were about 15,000,000 opium smokers in China. He was interested in the anti-opium campaign because the slavish habit was lowering users’ diligence and industry. But he remarked that opium smoking had little or no effect on health and no effect whatsoever on crime.
Addiction is far less common among Western peoples, chiefly because of our preference for alcohol. At the highest point of drug addiction in the United States, 1890–99, when all kinds of opiates could be bought as freely as candy or potatoes, there was only one opium addict for every 300 of the population. Today we have about 60,000 addicts in the United States — that is, about one in 2,800 of the population. About 50,000 of them are addicted to opiates, mostly heroin, about 5,000 to opium-like synthetic drugs, and about 5,000 to marijuana. Cocaine, once widely used, has practically disappeared from the scene.
Lawmakers may feel that addicts as well as sellers deserve death, but few doctors would agree. I have in mind particularly a report issued in June 1955 by a group of prominent New York physicians, appointed by The New York Academy of Medicine to study the addiction problem. The gist of their report is that drug addiction is not a crime, but an illness, and that the emphasis should be placed on rehabilitation of addicts, instead of on punishment.
This committee deplores the fact that addicts are forced into crime by unwise suppressive methods. It recommends that, under controlled conditions, certain morphine and heroin addicts be given the drug they need while being prepared for treatment. For certain incurable cases, the committee advocates giving the needed opiate indefinitely at specially regulated clinics, although many physicians oppose using clinics in this way. My own proposal, which I shall go into later, would be to have such cases evaluated by doctors appointed for their competence in this field. The New York committee also recommends counseling services for patients after withdrawal treatment, to help them resist the temptation to return to the drug when stress situations arise.
A key fact to bear in mind is that the man addicted to an opiate becomes dependent on frequent regular doses to maintain normal body functions and comfort. If the drug is abruptly withheld he becomes intensely ill. In rare cases he may even collapse and die.
I once saw a woman who had come here from abroad, where she had been taking eight grains of morphine daily. Cut off from her supply, she got into an American hospital where suppression of the “drug menace” was more important than the relief of pain. She died in two days, due to sudden stoppage of the drug. There was nothing in the law to forbid giving this woman morphine to relieve her suffering, but propaganda about drugs had clouded the judgment of someone in authority.
The effect of opiates on the general health of addicts is not definitely known. There is a lack of positive evidence that a regularly maintained opium habit shortens life, but it probably does so, especially when large doses of morphine or heroin are used. The few reports that indicate harm are based on death statistics of groups of addicts, mostly opium smokers, many of whom started using the drug to ease already existing illness. Addicts in American jails undoubtedly have a high death rate. Some are repeatedly ill due to many periods of forced abstinence. Others, unable to buy enough food after paying for needed drugs, arrive at the prison gates half starved and a prey to infections.
In the 1920s, the average American addict was taking six grains of morphine or heroin daily. It was impossible to find harmful effects among those who got their dose regularly. I have known a healthy, alert 81-year-old woman who had taken three grains of morphine daily for 65 years. The well-fed opiate addict who regularly gets sustaining doses is not emaciated or pale, nor does he have pinpoint pupils, as is popularly supposed. He cannot be recognized as an addict on sight.
Cocaine is another story. It is fortunate that cocaine addiction is seldom seen nowadays, for excessive use of this drug causes emaciation, anxiety, convulsions, and insanity. Neither cocaine nor marijuana has the merit of making some neurotic people more efficient, as is the case with opiates. And the use of marijuana or cocaine can be discontinued abruptly without bringing on uncomfortable or dangerous withdrawal symptoms. When cocaine is suddenly denied a large user, he simply goes into a deep and very prolonged sleep. Therefore, there is no reason why any cocaine or marijuana user should be allowed to have his drug, even for a short time.
In an earlier period, opiates could be bought anywhere in America without restriction, and many people became addicted. Still, they worked about as well as other people and gave no one trouble. Only the physicians were concerned. They saw that the cocaine user and 60-grains-a-day morphine addict were injuring their health. More important, they saw thousands of unhappy opium eaters, opium smokers, and laudanum, morphine, and heroin users seeking relief from slavery, and often failing to get it.
Distressed by the evil, physicians advocated laws to prohibit the sale of opiates without prescription. By 1912, every state except one had laws regulating in some way the prescribing or sale of opiates and cocaine. As a result, the number of addicts fell from 1 in 300 of the population during the decade 1890–99, to 1 in 325 during the next decade. And after 1909, a ban on smoking opium caused a further decline in addiction.
Until 1915, however, addicts who needed opiates to continue their work in comfort could get their supplies legally without much trouble or expense. Then the Harrison Act became effective. This important federal law had both good and bad effects. Unable to get opiates, hundreds of addicts were cured by deprivation. These were mostly normal or near-normal people who were not seriously gripped by the psychological forces which hinder treatment of neurotic addicts and drunkards.
The bad effect came through unwise enforcement of the law. Physicians thought they could still prescribe opiates to addicts who really needed them for the preservation of health or to support the artificial emotional stability which enabled so many addicts to earn their livings. However, physicians prescribing for such people wound up in the penitentiary. Inability to get opiates brought illness to many hard-working citizens, and illness cost them their jobs. Some of them committed petty crimes to procure narcotics.
To remedy the situation, narcotic clinics were established throughout the country, where addicts could get needed drugs. Practically all of these clinics were forced to close by 1923. They had not been well run, but the chief reason for closing them was that addiction had become a crime, by legal definition.
The arrests of physicians, some of which were justifiable, and the sending of hundreds of addicts to prison, brought about a perversion of common sense unequaled in American history. Uncritical observers concluded that opium caused crime. The sight of so many law-abiding citizens applying to the clinics for help, instead of arousing public sympathy, was interpreted as evidence of moral deterioration, calling for increased penalties. The stereotype of the “heroin maniac” was born.
The number of addicts continued to decline. In 1924, the United States Public Health Service reported there were only 110,000 of them. By 1925, however, propaganda had led people to believe that there were 4,000,000 addicts in the country, and our fancied heroin menace was in full swing.
An ex-congressman appeared before the Senate Committee on Printing in 1924 to urge publication of 50,000,000 copies of an article entitled “The Peril of Narcotics — A Warning to The People of America.” He wanted a copy in every home.
Among other strange things, the article warned parents not to allow their children to eat away from home. If they did, it was said, some other child — a heroin maniac — might inject the drug into an innocent-looking titbit; whereupon the child eating it might instantly become an addict and join in a campaign to promote heroin addiction among other children. A Public Health Service physician persuaded the committee that this was nonsense, but propaganda about the heroin menace continued.
There was money to be made in movies about the drug problem, particularly if the film used generous helpings of lurid imaginings. By Willis Kent Productions (The Cocaine Fiends (1935) at the Internet Archive) [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsIt was said that thousands of school children in New York were heroin addicts. An investigation was made, and in 1927 Dr. Carlton Simon, Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of the Narcotics Bureau, stated that a thorough survey had failed to reveal one case of heroin addiction among 1,000,000 New York City school children.
When American physicians advocated laws regulating narcotics, they had in mind the kind of laws in force in most Western European countries. What our physicians did not foresee was that they would be bound by police interpretations of the regulations; and that doctors who did not accept police views might be tricked into giving an opiate to an informer, who pretended to need it for pain or disease. Conviction meant that the physician went to prison.
Europeans regulate narcotics, as we do, but they are not alarmed by addiction, as we so obviously are. They have never lost sight of the fact that, as a great English physician wrote in the 17th century, “Opium soothes, alcohol maddens.”
In 1954, England controlled the illegal-narcotic traffic with the conviction of only 214 persons, 74 for opiate violations, 140 for violations involving marijuana. In the same year 12,346 persons were convicted in the United States for similar offenses. Allowing for differences in population, we had about 14 times more convictions than the English. Prison sentences meted out here ran into thousands of years — a fact that zealots boast about. In England, light sentences sufficed to discourage illegal traffic — 28 days to 12 months for opiate offenses, 1 day to 3 years for marijuana violations.
England’s sensible, effective policy is in sharp contrast with what goes on in the United States. I became well acquainted at the hospital in Lexington with a paralyzed, bedridden man who had been sentenced to four years for a narcotic violation. Just how he could be a menace to society was never clear to me. In Europe he would have been allowed to live out his last days in comfort. Only in the United States must addicts suffer and die or deteriorate in prison.
Unreflecting and sometimes unscrupulous people — and newspapers too — have contributed to the hysteria about drug addiction. News items reporting the seizure of “dope” frequently exaggerate the contraband’s value. One “$3,000,000 seizure” of heroin which made headlines was actually only enough to last seven six-grains-a-day addicts for a year. To justify the $3,000,000 figure, heroin would have to bring $196 a grain. Some addicts do spend from $5 to $10 a day on the habit, but few can afford it; hence the sickness and stealing.
Distorted news has prepared the public to support extreme measures to suppress imagined evils. When legislators undertook last spring to do something about the so-called drug menace, federal law provided two years in prison for a first-time narcotic-law offender. The minimum for a second offense was five years, and for a third, 10 years, with no probation or suspension of sentence for repeaters. The Narcotic Control Act of 1956 proposed increasing penalties for heroin trafficking to a minimum of 5 years for the first offense, 10 years for the second offense, life imprisonment or death for the third offense.
What happens under such laws? In one case, under the old law, a man was given 10 years for possessing three narcotic tablets. Another man was given 10 years for forging three narcotic prescriptions — no sale was involved. And another 10-year sentence was imposed on a man for selling two marijuana cigarettes, which are just about equal in intoxicating effect to two drinks of whisky. Extremists have gone on to demand the death penalty. They would do away with suspended sentences, time off for good behavior, the necessity for a warrant before search. They want wire tapping legalized in suspected narcotic cases, and they would make the securing of bond more difficult.
Existing measures and those which are advocated defy common sense and violate sound principles of justice and penology. There is nothing about the nature of drug addicts to justify such penalties. They only make it difficult to rehabilitate offenders who could be helped by a sound approach which would take into account both the offense and the psychological disorders of the offender.
Drug addiction is an important problem which demands the attention of health and enforcement officials. However, the most essential need now is to cure the United States of its hysteria, so that the problem can be dealt with rationally. A major move in the right direction would be to stop the false propaganda about the nature of drug addiction and present it for what it is — a health problem which needs some police measures for adequate control. Our approach so far has produced tragedy, disease, and crime.
The opinion of informed physicians should take precedence over that of law-enforcement officers, who, in this country, are too often carried away by enthusiasm for putting people in prison, and who deceive themselves as well as the public about the nature and seriousness of drug addiction. We need an increase in treatment facilities and recognition that some opium addicts, having reached the stage they have, should be given opiates for their own welfare and for the public welfare too.
Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished, so that judges and probation and parole officers can do what in their judgment is best for the rehabilitation of offenders.
Medical opinion should have controlling force in a revamped policy. This is not to say that every physician should be authorized to prescribe opiates to addicts without restrictions. Some would be dishonest, others would be indifferent to consequences. Neither should the old type of clinic be re-established. A workable solution would be to have the medical societies or health departments appoint competent physicians to decide which patients should be carried on an opiate while being prepared for treatment and which ones should be given opiates indefinitely. Physicians would report individual cases to local medical groups for decision. And that decision should never be subject to revision by a nonmedical prosecuting agency.
The details of a scheme of operation should be worked out by a committee of physicians and law-enforcement officers, with the physicians predominant in authority. The various states could make a start by revising their laws to conform to actual health and penological needs. The medical profession could help by giving legislators facts on which to take action.
It should be stressed that it is easy to cure psychologically normal addicts who have no painful disease. Even the mildly neurotic addict is fairly easy to cure. Severe withdrawal symptoms pass within five days, although for several months there are minor physical changes that the patient may not feel or even know about, but which increase the likelihood of his relapse. The reason for the apparently large relapse rate among addicts is that a difficult group remains to be dealt with after the cured cases have been dismissed. The most difficult cases, perhaps, are neurotic addicts who suffer from migraine or asthma. Neurotics who have a painful disease are liable to have a psychic return of pain when their drug is withdrawn. When several treatments fail, such persons should be allowed to have the drug they need.
Thomas Jefferson, distressed over the ravages of alcohol, once said that a great many people spent most of their time talking politics, avoiding work, and drinking whisky. One wonders what he would say today if some muddled citizen warned him that opiates were rotting the moral fiber of our people. I suspect that he would advise his informant to take care, in walking down the street, lest he stumble over one of our 4,500,000 alcoholics and break a leg.
Hugh O’Brian By ABC Television (eBay itemphoto frontphoto back) [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsHugh O’Brian has passed away at the age of 91. He’s best known to people of a certain age as Wyatt Earp in the late ’50s/early ’60s series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He also starred in the private-eye show Search in 1972 and ’73 and appeared in movies like The Shootist, In Harm’s Way, Game of Death, Twins, The Cimarron Kid, Rocketship X-M, There’s No Business Like Show Business, as well as in many TV shows. He also started the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership organization, which aims to inspire kids and help them become leaders and good citizens. He created it after meeting and working with Albert Schweitzer.
If you watched any television in the past 35 years, you knew Jon Polito. He guest-starred on numerous shows, including Seinfeld (he was landlord in the episode where Kramer and Newman reverse their peepholes), Modern Family, Miami Vice, The Equalizer, NYPD Blue, Murder, She Wrote, and too many others to mention. He was also a regular on Crime Story, Ohara, and Homicide and appeared in such movies as Stuart Little, Highlander, The Tailor of Panama, and Big Eyes. He was also a common sight in Coen brothers movies, like The Big Lebowski,Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Miller’s Crossing.
If you’re like me, you wash your hands a few times a day with antibacterial soap. Turns out, we’ve probably been fooling ourselves for the past few decades.
Not only do scientists say that antibacterial soaps aren’t any more effective than regular soaps, they might actually be harmful. The FDA is giving companies one year to get rid of products that contain triclosan and triclocarbon, along with 17 other antibacterial chemicals currently found in the soaps. Of course, most companies will just reformulate their products, so we probably won’t notice any difference unless we read the ingredient list.
Interestingly, the ban will not include antibacterial soaps used in hospitals.
Back to School!
This week marked the return of kids to school. Sorry kids!
Actually, some kids started school in August. As I mentioned last year, I can’t imagine doing that. It just wouldn’t feel right. When I was a kid in Massachusetts, we started school after Labor Day, and that is still true today.
Philip Gulley has a really nice piece about the kids going back to school — how the neighborhood is quieter when they’re back in class and how school has changed since he was a kid. And here’s a series of covers from The Saturday Evening Post and The Country Gentlemen that show how much dogs hate school.
A Worrrrrrrld of Pure Imagination
Last week, Gene Wilder passed away, and many publications and websites gave tributes. One of them was The New Yorker, which ran a Willy Wonka-themed cartoon that nobody understands. Slate actually came up with 38 things that are wrong with the cartoon.
Sure, the cartoon is easy to “get,” but it still doesn’t make any sense. Was the cartoonist on deadline and had to get something done quickly? It’s just odd and lame. I mean … dankyougene?!
This Week in History: Star Trek Debuts
Star Trek — or as it’s known in fandom, Star Trek: The Original Series — debuted on September 8, 1966. It was almost canceled after two seasons, but a fan campaign saved it and it lasted for one more season. Little did they know that it would lead to so many spinoffs, so many movies, so many comic books and action figures and conventions that are still going strong all these years later.
A new series, Star Trek: Discovery, will premiere on CBS’s All-Access streaming network in January 2017 (after debuting on the CBS broadcast network).
This Week In History: The United States Becomes “Uncle Sam” (September 7, 1813)
The nickname “Uncle Sam” has been used for a very long time, but how many people actually know how the U.S. got that moniker? No one is 100% sure, but evidence points to it being named after New York meat packer Samuel Wilson during the War of 1812. Then again, “Uncle Sam” is mentioned in the lyrics of the Revolutionary War-era song “Yankee Doodle,” though it’s not clear if those lyrics refer to the United States or to something else.
This Week in History: Japanese Bomb Oregon (September 9, 1942)
Yes, I’m as surprised as you are. I never thought the Japanese had bombed the continental United States during World War II, but it actually happened. A Japanese plane, piloted by Nobuo Fujita, dropped bombs in western Oregon in order to start major forest fires.
Fujita actually came back to Oregon several times, to plant trees and dedicate the spot where he dropped the bombs. His trip was paid for by donations in Brookings, Oregon, and later he paid for several residents to visit Japan.
Believe it or not, this wasn’t the only event in Oregon involving a Japanese bomb. In May of 1945, school children found a Japanese balloon in the woods, and as they were dragging it out, a bomb attached exploded, killing five students and their pregnant Sunday school teacher.
National Honey Month
I never think about honey. I never buy it and never really think about making anything with it. If I do consume honey, it’s from foods I buy that already have honey in them. It’s so sticky I hate using it.
That might make for a good afternoon snack when the kids get home from school. They’ll dankyou for it.
Next Week’s Holidays and Events
Patriot Day (September 11)
Where were you on 9/11/01? I was at a Barnes & Noble when someone asked me if I had heard what happened. I ran over to Sears and watched the TV coverage with several other shoppers.
It became that instantly. For more than a year events had been shaping toward a showdown between the radical elements of organized labor and the American public, and the moment the Boston police walked out they precipitated the fight. Not that they intended to do so or even dreamed of the effect. To the police it was a local dispute, with purposes limited to betterment of their condition. They were far from wishing to bring on a conflict with public opinion. Indeed they hoped and confidently expected that public opinion would side with them. But circumstances carried the clash between the policemen and Commissioner Curtis into every city and town and hamlet in the United States; a mob of hoodlums elevated a local issue to a national crisis.
What happened in Boston on the night of September 9 woke the country with a jolt. Had no serious disorders occurred, probably the people of America would have viewed the policemen’s strike as merely another manifestation of organized labor’s ever-widening activities and bothered their heads very little about it. But a lawless rabble looting in the heart of Boston jarred like a blow in the face. The scales of indifference fell from their eyes; abruptly they realized the peril hanging over the Republic.
Seldom have all classes reacted so unanimously in peacetimes. They rallied in a day for a finish fight. It was no longer Boston’s affair alone, but the nation’s. Boston happened to be the standard bearer, as she has so often been in the past, but back of her stood the American public. It was hard on that stout old defender of liberty, but Boston never hesitated.
“If the radical crowd in organized labor gets away with this,” she said in her chaste fashion, “they can get away with moider.” And she girded herself for the fray.
In the nature of things it had to be a fight without compromise — and the public won. Never was a victory more complete. With defeat absolutely certain from the outset, the American Federation of Labor declined to lock horns over any such issue. They refused to sanction a general sympathetic strike to support a walkout which had never been approved by the older leaders of organized labor, and when the Central Labor Union declared its stand, the policemen’s union was finished. Without the federation they were powerless, and the federation had been obliged to let them down.
The Labor Camp Divided
Many observers see in the ignominious failure of the Boston strike a bad black eye for organized labor, but I would not call it that. It’s a lovely black eye for the elements which have been striving to stampede the federation, and for that very reason may prove of distinct service to the cause of labor. Every honest man ought to rejoice over it. But never lose sight of the fact that the federation did not approve of the strike. Whatever outside encouragement stimulated hopes in the policemen which could not be realized, it certainly did not come from the head of the American Federation of Labor or his friends. And the policemen’s union charter expressly forbade a strike.
Then who encouraged it? For it is reasonable to suppose that the police would not have dared a walkout without some sort of understanding that they would be backed by labor. Their counsel did not. James H. Vahey and his associate not only advised their clients strongly against a strike but urged them to give up affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. In spite of that — in spite of the provision against a strike in their charter — they walked out. Who egged them on?
The ultimate effect of this police strike will probably be to strengthen the hands of President Gompers and the more temperate leaders, against whom the radicals in the federation have been waging war for years. In fact, there is more to several recent labor disturbances than the usual dispute between capital and unionism. A lively fight has been going on inside the federation itself. Elements which formerly were identified with I.W.W. thought and aims procured a foothold in the American Federation of Labor and immediately came into conflict with the established leaders. Every minute since then they have sought by hook or crook to wrest control of organized labor from Gompers and his associates.
I have heard gentlemen who had no worries more poignant than their golf scores and the income tax assail Samuel Gompers with the peculiar venom we reserve for those who hit our pockets. To that class he is a dangerous demagogue, a near-Bolshevist, a menace to American institutions and dividends. On the other hand you hear the radicals charge that Gompers is the tool of capital and belongs among the reactionaries. And there you are! Score this to Gompers’ credit — during the war, he proved himself 100 per cent American.
The radicals would now oust him from the headship of the federation. They have nearly got the Old Man’s scalp on several occasions, too. While he was absent in Europe, they contrived to gain support for several things to which Gompers was opposed, and their power has grown so greatly with the deep discontent and socialistic ideas engendered by the war that Gompers has been obliged to acquiesce in a number of activities he would not have countenanced a moment in the days when his word was law to the unions.
On occasions the radicals have practically run away with the federation, and Gompers has been forced to sanction strikes which no man of common sense and judgment could conceivably approve. Now, nobody ever disputed Gompers’ common sense; consequently, it seems safe to assume that the disastrous failure of these frenzied efforts and the resultant loss of prestige to those responsible have been borne with a certain equanimity by the older leaders. There is an ancient saw to the effect that if you give a calf enough rope, it will hang itself.
To everybody but a Bostonian, it seems peculiarly fitting that The Hub should have been the battleground, for whenever in American history the drums beat to arms in defense of a principle, Boston has led the van. Bostonians think pretty well of themselves, but I doubt whether they have even a glimmering of the deep veneration in which the bulk of American citizens hold their city. This is especially true of rural America. To them and to the Middle West and West, Boston stands as a shrine to which pilgrimages are made when the crops bring good prices or the school board raises salaries.
The Home of Forward Thinking
Provincial Americans entertain a certain awe of a New Yorker because of his airy ways and city manners, but deep down in their hearts they know that under his veneer, the New Yorker is just as big a rough-neck as they are. But toward the Bostonian they feel a real respect as the possessor of a superior culture and finer grain. That this notion belongs in the category of silly national illusions doesn’t alter the fact of its existence.
Of course, New York and other places which are always in a hurry have been known to laugh at Boston, and they make her the butt of their vaudeville jokes. Often I have seen the ribald press get off paragraphs like this: “Why not make a test case by taking an obsolete city, say Boston, and let everybody and everything in it strike to a finish, and abide by the result?” But Boston never pays such no-account trash any attention. She goes her way serenely, secure in the knowledge that she is The Hub of the universe and the last word in culture and good breeding.
To be sure, she takes her time. Sometimes—sometimes — she seems just a leetle bit slow. That was the impression I got on revisiting Boston after an absence of 10 years. The city didn’t appear to have changed at all. Everything looked the same — only smaller. I dropped into a restaurant which some of us used to patronize on pay nights; the same waiters, the same bill of fare, the same orchestra — and as heaven is my witness, the same clam chowder! Mike, the waiter, wanted to know where I’d been keeping myself the last few days. He had changed his collar, otherwise I could detect no difference in Boston.
Yes, Boston moves slowly and is inclined to hold herself aloof — perhaps her most pressing need is to learn the United States — but if you take the trouble to trace any important civic movement or social-uplift plan or humanitarian campaign to its source, you will invariably find it in The Hub. She has generally led in forward thinking, just as Massachusetts has led in progressive legislation.
This is due to the caliber of her citizenship. Nowhere in America can you find proportionately such great numbers of business and professional men with a high sense of public duty. First impressions of Boston may be unfavorable. The visitor is apt to dislike the New England coldness. He may grow impatient of their woeful ignorance of the world beyond Jamaica Plain and chafe at a viewpoint which strikes him as narrow and hopelessly provincial. The complacence of Bostonian satisfaction with itself may excite levity in the barbarian bosom of a guy from Chicago, and the seriousness with which they take their proud old families of 1776 and 1913 frequently causes outsiders to exclaim, “This darned place is a trance.” But let anyone remain a year and he will end up with a profound respect and affection for Boston, its institutions and citizenship.
So much for the setting of the drama. In this rock-ribbed stronghold of American ideals an issue was forced which involved the very principles on which the Republic was founded. One would have thought that Boston would be the last place on earth the radicals would pick for a test of strength. The police assuredly showed rotten judgment. Imagine anybody or any group of men hoping to scare that New England breed into acquiescence! As well try to hurry them!
To the United States, the policemen’s strike came like a bolt from a clear sky, but in reality there was nothing sudden about it. It had been looming as a possibility for a month, and the causes leading to the impasse are of long standing. Until I investigated the situation, my voice was joined to the chorus of unqualified denunciation which was directed against the police from coast to coast; they were damned from every quarter of America, branded as deserters, traitors, and fit bedfellows for Trotsky. The condemnation was justified, but some of the denunciation was grossly unfair.
Nothing can excuse or palliate the offense of walking out and leaving a city unprotected, but intention counts both in law and morals and the police stoutly contend they hadn’t an inkling of what the consequences would be. They had real grievances, which experience had taught them were impossible of redress through the usual channels, and they thought only of those. They point to assurances given to the public by the commissioner that ample protection would be provided for the city in event of a strike and declare that they accepted these assurances at their face value. If so, the cops pulled a bone.
Two hundred and five members of the policemen’s union served in the Army during the world war; 89 were veterans of the trouble with Spain — to stigmatize men like those as traitors and cowardly deserters seems going it a bit strong. A statement from one of their number, who received the Croix de Guerre, gives their viewpoint. His name is Edward M. Kelleher, Division 15: “I have never been accused of disloyalty or lack of gameness before. Gameness is part of the policeman’s job.”
Passing the Buck of Responsibility
“You say our grievances could have been redressed. I know that. But they were not redressed in 15 years. Now the policeman’s pay has been raised and the stations are to be fixed; the hours even may be made better. But it took a strike to do it. I want to say that I joined the union because we could not get our grievances redressed or even listened to any other way.
“I didn’t want to strike and I don’t know any other man who did want to. I went out when 19 men were discharged by the commissioner because I and the others had elected them officers of the union. They were no more guilty than I was, and I wouldn’t be yellow enough to leave them to be the goats for all of us.
“I wouldn’t have gone on a strike if I had thought the city was undefended and there was going to be a riot. The papers said there were plenty of men to keep order and handle the crowd. The commissioner himself said so.”
However, the measure of their guilt is a matter of purely local concern. Nor has the country at large any special interest in the effort to fix the blame for failure to protect Boston adequately after the police went out. Debate over that point has frequently been of the knock-down-and-drag-out variety in The Hub. The mayor blames the police commissioner and Governor Coolidge; the commissioner has passed the buck to some of the metropolitan park police, who failed to obey orders; the governor and Samuel Gompers had a telegraphic tilt from which Gompers emerged a bad second; the union men assert that the strike could have been entirely averted and the policemen withdrawn from affiliation with the federation if Commissioner Curtis had indicated willingness to meet the men anywhere near halfway; the police feel they were deliberately jockeyed into an impossible position; and charges have been hurled that the whole affair was a frame-up by the capitalistic interests, which desired a showdown at a moment highly favorable to them. Indeed I heard numerous claims that influences were at work to make a test of strength at an opportune time on the general labor situation, entirely apart from the policemen’s union, with an eye to the impending steel strike. Such reports are characteristic of every trouble.
On every side they’ve been denouncing and calling names, and feeling has grown intensely bitter. The inevitable injection of politics into the trouble did not ease the rancor, and the issue livened the gubernatorial contest. Politics has a way of horning into every dispute and capitalizing it, and this is especially true of Boston, whose large population of Irish descent has furnished more politicians to the square yard than any other community in the United States.
Wherever blame may lie, two facts stand out baldly: The police abandoned their posts, and from 6:00 Tuesday night until 8:00 Wednesday morning, Boston remained without protection, a prey to marauding bands of hoodlums. Those occurrences speak for themselves — a grievous blunder was committed somewhere.
A very unusual situation exists there in regard to control of the police. For many years, the police commissioner has been appointed by the governor, an arrangement made during an earlier city administration which did not enjoy public confidence. Boston finds the money to pay the force, but the department is under state control. However, the consensus of opinion appears to be that the scheme worked very well.
The unionizing of policemen had been threatening for two years. Organizers of the I.W.W. stripe and the element in the American Federation of Labor belonging to the same school of thought discerned tremendous possibilities in the affiliation of police unions throughout the country with organized labor. It would give them control of a weapon frequently employed against labor in strikes; in an emergency, they could practically dominate the communities where the police were affiliated; they would have the country by the throat.
The Old Leaders Outvoted
Conservative leaders like Gompers saw all this, but saw also the dangers. They were not blind to the impossibility of winning anything against an aroused and united public, and they perceived clearly that if a police force should strike and leave a city defenseless, the entire American people would clamor for action. In such event, what chance would the federation stand with a sympathetic strike? And yet they would be bound to stick by their brothers. So the conservatives headed off the movement as long as they could. But the wild-eyed factions were persuaded they could throttle the public into granting labor’s demands — or at any rate they were not afraid to try, and they pressed for membership of police unions in the federation. Last June at the convention in Atlantic City, they triumphed. Against the better judgment of the old leaders, it was decided to grant charters to the police. And right there the radicals played hob.
By the time the Boston police had organized, the police forces of 20 cities already belonged to the federation — not without protests and some strenuous opposition from civic officials. But in the main, affiliation took place quietly, and the general public either did not know of it or remained in ignorance of its significance and the menace hanging over them.
The Boston union cannot complain they did not receive fair warning. They did it with their eyes open. As far back as June, 1918, the then police commissioner, Stephen O’Meara, issued a general order setting forth his objections to the organization of a union to be affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, of which there was talk. Commissioner Curtis repeated the warning on July 29 last, and on August 11 promulgated a rule. In this he pointed out it should be “apparent to any thinking person that the police department of this or any other city cannot fulfill its duty to the entire public if its members are subject to the direction of an organization existing outside the department,” and he forbade any member of the force joining any body which was affiliated with any organization outside the department except the Grand Army of the Republic, the United Spanish War Veterans, and the American Legion of World’s War Veterans.
To quote from his and Mr. O’Meara’s arguments: “Policemen are public officers. They have taken an oath of office. That oath requires them to carry out the law with strict impartiality, no matter what their personal feeling may be. Therefore it should be apparent that the men to whom the carrying out of these laws is entrusted should not be subject to the orders or dictation of any organization, no matter what, that comprises only one part of the general public.
“The police department exists for the impartial enforcement of the laws and the protection of persons and property under all conditions. Should its members incur obligations to an outside organization, they would be justly suspected of abandoning the impartial attitude which heretofore has vindicated their good faith against the complaints almost invariably made by both sides in many controversies.
“It is assumed erroneously that agents of an outside organization could obtain for the police advantages in pay and regulations. This is not a question of compelling a private employer to surrender a part of his profits.
“To suppose that an official would yield on points of pay or regulation to the arguments or threats of an outside organization, if the policemen themselves had failed to establish their case, would be to mark him as cowardly and unfit for his position.”
Despite the warnings and in the face of an order forbidding it and an increase of $200 in pay, the police went ahead with organizing their union. They justify their action by the failure of every other means to obtain redress of their grievances. A local organization known as the Boston Social Club had been in existence 14 years, but the police had been unable to win through it improvement in pay and conditions. They contended that this union of their own had fallen under the control of headquarters and was impotent to help them. Nor did they succeed much better with a grievance committee instituted by the present commission.
It has always been the popular belief that a policeman’s job is a sinecure — that he has it pretty soft and easy, with fine pay, little to do and plenty of perquisites. Indeed the notion that policemen could possibly have grievances calling for drastic action roused derision everywhere; sympathy for the Boston cops was nonexistent except among their personal friends. Had anyone suggested to the average citizen that possibly they had a strong case and were not receiving fair treatment, he would have been hooted. The very mention of a cop suggested easy pickings.
Long Hours and Low Pay
But as Boston learned with a shock and to its deep humiliation, the police scale of pay was pitifully low and their hours longer than almost any class of labor. The minimum pay was round $21 a week, and the maximum — reached the sixth year — $31. Out of this, a policeman had to buy a complete uniform and equipment, which cost $207.
The wagon men worked 98 hours a week, the night men did a total of 83 hours a week, and the day men averaged round 73 hours. Pay ran from 21 to 28 cents an hour — and, of course, any sort of labor can command higher rates than those nowadays.
Also, conditions in several of the station houses were deplorable. In the dormitories, beds were used by two and three men in succession during a day and night without being remade.
“At Division Two,” declared John F. McInnes, president of the policemen’s union, “there is but one bathtub for 135 men and only four toilets. Bedbugs, rats, and other forms of vermin roam at will in Stations 9, 13, and 18.”
The police received no extra pay for overtime work. They had to attend every unusual event, like a parade, band concert, or large gathering, and they wanted that considered in their pay. They also objected to delivering unpaid tax bills when it was obviously the duty of a civilian employee, and complained of being forced to do the listing. They condemned the conditions under which civil-service examinations were held and objected to the commissioner reserving to himself the right to promote a man regardless of the showing made in competitive examination.
Those are a few of the grievances which the men assert they could not get redressed. They were news to Boston and gained lots of sympathy for the strikers — without, however, weakening one iota the conviction that the policemen had no right to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor and no right either in law or morals to go on strike. The Hub stands like Gibraltar on that issue.
Not an officer or sergeant of the force joined the union, being ineligible, and many a policeman who followed the crowd did so against his judgment and inclination. They were coerced. As always happens, the leather-lunged aggressive minority practically compelled the others to fall in line. I talked with a striking policeman who had been nine years on the force. He did not want to join the union in the first place, but he could not stand the ostracism which “scab” entails for a nonunion man and his wife and children; and though he was opposed to a strike, he could not leave the others in the lurch after they had decided to walk out.
“How many wanted to go on strike? Less than 50 percent, but a lot were led to vote that way because they didn’t want to desert the boys,” he said.
Another member of the force, who had been with it so many years that he could have retired on half pay in another seven months, joined the union virtually under compulsion, and once in it had to walk out when ordered. And now in his old age he is out of a job and without means of support. What’s more, it is doubtful if he could perform any work but that of a policeman, for when a man has put in many years on a police force, he is unfit for most other jobs. “I didn’t join the union at first,” he said. “But one day I went into the station house and opposite my name on the bulletin board somebody had written in red ink, “Scab.” The kids at school yelled it at my children too. What is a man going to do?”
The Trouble-Making Minority
A minority jammed through unionization of the Boston police and a minority forced the strike, whatever the tally of votes may have showed. It is always the case. In New England less than 25 percent of organized labor is radical, according to those who ought to know. The percentage grows the farther west one goes, yet men who have studied the subject doubt whether 33 percent of the total membership of the American Federation of Labor belongs among the radicals; and organized labor constitutes only 3 percent — or less — of the population of the United States. In other words, about 1 percent of the American people is raising Hades for the other 99 percent and threatening to overturn the institutions in which they believe. It is the realization of this that makes the average citizen grow hot under the collar and sometimes long for command of a firing squad.
Well, the police formed their union and persuaded practically all the men of the force to join it. Charges were soon filed against 19 of them.
“At the request of counsel for the men,” says a statement from Commissioner Curtis, “I heard the cases myself instead of referring them to a trial board. The facts were undisputed. I found the men guilty and delayed imposing the finding, merely suspending them from duty. I did not discharge them because had I done so I would be without power to reinstate them at any time. Instead of taking the opportunity which was thus open to save their positions, the majority of the force deliberately deserted and abandoned their duty and the city which they had sworn to protect.”
Threats of a strike if the members of the union under charges should be suspended were freely made before their cases came up for hearing. In view of the gravity of the prospect, Mayor Peters appointed a committee to investigate the trouble and act as mediators, and endless negotiation and argument and conferences followed. This committee did their utmost, but to no avail. Their executive committee succeeded in drawing up a plan to which the tacit consent of the policemen was given, but the commissioner could not see his way to accept it. The plan received Mayor Peters’ endorsement, and the committee which presented it was composed of well known Bostonians —James J. Storrow, B. Preston Clarke, George E. Brock, P.A. O’Connell, James J. Phelan, A.C. Ratshesky, and F.S. Snyder. Briefly, it provided that the policemen should give up affiliation with the American Federation of Labor but maintain a union within the department to deal with questions relating to hours and wages and physical conditions of work; called for an investigation of the police demands and grievances by a committee of three citizens, which should continue to act as a sort of court of arbitration; and stipulated that no member of the force should be discriminated against because of any previous affiliation with the American Federation of Labor — neither should there be any discrimination on the part of the policemen’s union against any member of the force because of refusal to join.
The main objection to the plan, of course, was that it gave immunity to the ringleaders in the unionization of the police. Anyhow, the commissioner would not agree to it; the 19 policemen were suspended; and after taking a vote, about 1,400 policemen made good their threat to strike.
Everybody knows what happened after that. The spectacle of Boston given over to lawless mobs shook the whole country. President Wilson denounced the strike as a crime against civilization, and Elihu Root told the National Security League: “What does the police strike in Boston mean? It means that the men who have been employed and taken their oaths to maintain order and suppress crime as the servants of all the people are refusing to perform that solemn duty unless they are permitted to become members of a great organization which contains perhaps 3 percent of the people. Now, if that is done that is the end — except for a revolution. Government cannot be maintained unless it has the power to use force. If the power to use force passes from the 97 percent of the whole people of the United States to this organization of 3 percent, the 97 percent are no longer a self-governing people.”
The 97 percent were quick to take alarm — and up to date they give every indication of maintaining self-government! The whole country blazed into resentment. If policemen could join the American Federation of Labor and go on strike, leaving their communities helpless, where would unionization end? The police in a score of cities were watching the outcome. Already many fire departments were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor; what if they should strike too? What of sympathetic strikes? And if the police could owe allegiance to a union, why not the Army? Where would it all end? In soviet government? A night of rioting in Boston woke the United States to the real nature of the menace.
The Governor’s Reply
Even labor-union men condemned the walkout. They might uphold the right of the police to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, but when the consequences endangered the safety of their own families and property and threatened to make them jobless through general demoralization of business, they realized that it was carrying the thing too far. Tying up the public was one thing; letting anarchy loose was another.
The bulk of organized labor disapproved of the cops’ action. Only the newer membership of the unions supported them and favored a sympathetic strike. As a lot of new members had been admitted into the union of the car men on the elevated, a ticklish situation was produced, but aside from this union and the telephone operators, who voted to strike, organized labor blew cold on the proposition.
And what about the federation? Gompers realized immediately that the policemen’s case was hopeless and sought to exert pressure to the end that the men might be taken back and all action against them suspended until after the labor conference in Washington in October. To this request Governor Coolidge of Massachusetts made a reply which struck a responsive chord in every corner of America and lifted him into national prominence overnight:
“The right of the police of Boston to affiliate has always been questioned, never granted, is now prohibited. The suggestion of President Wilson to Washington does not apply to Boston. There the police have remained on duty. Here the Policemen’s Union left their duty, an action which President Wilson characterized as a crime against civilization.
“Your assertion that the commissioner was wrong cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded. That furnished the opportunity, the criminal element furnished the action. There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.
“You ask that the public safety again be placed in the hands of these same policemen while they continue in disobedience to the laws of Massachusetts and in their refusal to obey the orders of the police department. Nineteen men have been tried and removed. Others having abandoned their duty, their places have under the law been declared vacant on the opinion of the attorney general. I can suggest no authority outside the courts to take further action.
“I wish to join and assist in taking a broad view of every situation. A grave responsibility rests on all of us. You can depend on me to support you in every legal action and sound policy. I am equally determined to defend the sovereignty of Massachusetts and to maintain the authority and jurisdiction over her public officers, where it has been placed by the constitution and laws of her people.”
I asked Governor Coolidge whether he thought the American Federation of Labor had advised or sanctioned the strike. “The federation has never advised a strike there was no hope of winning,” he replied cautiously.
I asked one of their counsel whether he had done so.
“No, I advised against it,” Mr. Vahey declared earnestly. “They had already affiliated with the federation before I was called in, but both Feeney and I urged them to give up their membership in it. We told them we could get more for them than they could through the federation. But they stuck. When their leaders were suspended the men had to stand by them.”
Mayor Peters had received assurances that ample protection for the city would be available in the event of a police strike. Consequently the tangle was left to the police commissioner, and statements from the department persuaded the public that the situation was well in hand. He had at his disposal all the sergeants and officers of the force; also a hundred men of the Metropolitan Park Police, an organization distinct from the Boston department.
Such was the official force the commissioner could count on, and it seemed adequate to him. For the protection of the banking houses and large business establishments of the city, bodies of guards had been organized privately, and these were supplemented by hundreds of volunteers who offered their services as patrolmen.
In fact big business and the larger mercantile concerns had prepared fairly well for eventualities. But Boston hadn’t guessed a tenth of what those eventualities would be.
The police went out before six o’clock on a Tuesday night. Several hours later the scum of South Boston and the West and North End were on a rampage. Scollay Square, the district between Boylston and School streets, all along Washington and Tremont streets, echoed to the crash of glass as the mobs of rowdies and thieves looted where they willed.
The Shop-Window Raiders
A crowd of more than 5,000 persons gathered in the vicinity of Broadway in South Boston, and when charged by about 50 of the park police met them with a barrage of stones and sticks and bottles and eggs. The rioters rocked the streetcars and stoned some loyal patrolmen of D Street station who had declined to go on strike.
Long before midnight, the mobs held undisputed possession of the streets. With nobody to hinder, huge bands of hoodlums went prowling through the heart of the city, holding up any unlucky pedestrians who came their way and pillaging stores which caught their fancy. A swift kick on a plate-glass window, then a scramble for the spoils.
“At about 12:30 we heard a far-off sound of smashing glass,” said a former newspaper editor, who was on guard at a fashionable specialty shop, “like the tinkle of a toy bell. After a while we saw a mass of people swing out of Avery or Mason Street into Tremont. There wasn’t any noise. They were walking along at a moderate pace — perhaps two miles an hour — and saying nothing. All of them were young — mere boys — averaging from 18 to 20 years, I should say. And they were entirely sober. We did not see a single drunk that night. There were no women, but a few waited on the other side of the road, perhaps out of curiosity. A large battered automobile was creeping along close to the curb.
“Suddenly came a crash of glass. They had demolished a window and were going after the stock inside. We could see them surrounding the store and hauling out stuff. A taxi or two, devoid of lights or numbers, stopped across the road and men inside them got their share of plunder. Quite a few taxis operated in this fashion during the night.
“Approaching us, the crowd left the sidewalk and took to the gutter and middle of the road. They slowed down opposite and we heard, ‘Let ’er go ! Let ’er go!’ However, no bricks were heaved. Somebody yelled, ‘Whatcha got in your hand, Jack?’ for we kept our hands in our pockets. I answered, ‘On your way!’ And after loitering a moment longer somebody cried, Ah, come on! He looks like a pretty good guy!’ And the whole mob drifted.
“Later 25 or 30 men came to us in groups of two and three. They all came for one purpose — to advise us to take our goods out of the windows and draw the curtains. They said they had followed the crowd to see the fun.
“Back came the battered automobile, too, and slowed down in front of the store. ‘Say, youse guys can thank Gawd you was in front of your place when the gang came.’
“The crowd acted without any set plan. At five in the morning I walked a mile along Washington Street and in the West End to see the havoc. I found the same sort of haphazard looting everywhere — one shop battered at this point and another close by, much richer in possibilities, unharmed. What the merchants and financial concerns feared was a quick rough-stuff job by a party of motorists. Cars without lights were scudding up and down all night; I saw one pass our place five times apparently scouting for chances.”
Crap Games on the Common
Crap games started early in the evening and were in full swing on the sacred soil of Boston Common before 7:00. Headquarters was on the paved walks across from the Park Street Church, the famous “Brimstone Corner” of other days. No police or patrols to bother them, the crap shooters displayed a total disregard of the throngs of spectators and pleaded for Big Dick and Little Phoebe according to their needs with the passionate earnestness they would have put into a game in the lane back of the garage.
And next day — oh, boy! Boston became a wide-open town for gamblers. Crap shooting everywhere; staid citizens stumbled over games en route to business, heard the click of the bones in the lobbies of their office buildings. There were even roulette wheels in operation in broad daylight in the open air. And they were not all pikers’ games by any means. In many a gathering men were shooting for $10 a throw.
An incident occurred at one of the games on the Common which is illuminating. A player of the tough-mug variety — one of those guys who talk out of the sides of their mouths — won $40 and became wishful to retire. Evidently he anticipated trouble in getting away with his roll, for he pulled a gun, and holding the money in one hand while he covered his companions with the weapon, backed slowly away. Once law and order are broken down there is no security even for those who did the wrecking.
A night of unbridled hoodlumism was followed by a day of rioting, of fights and thievery, accompanied by considerable property loss, assaults on women, and several casualties. The losses were much exaggerated in the press reports and probably did not exceed $50,000, for there was no organized looting. One of the youths charged in court with larceny of six shoes had the stolen property on him — and not a pair in the lot.
After grabbing some shoes or shirts, a boy would sell them to another member of the mob for 25 or 50 cents. And the novel sight was witnessed of rowdies gravely fitting stolen shoes to one another’s feet while they sat on the sidewalk.
Business concerns took steps to fortify their places against possible raids. Some shops became veritable arsenals. I saw one with barbed-wire entanglements across the entrances at night; wire and all metal trimmings round the door were charged with electricity. Windows were stoutly boarded. Inside a force of guards stood ready, with a system of alarms designed to meet any emergency, powerful arc lights to blind any intruders, and rifles, revolvers and riot guns available for instant use. To supplement these defenses they had a fire hose all set. It would have taken trained troops to storm the place.
For several days no goods were displayed in the windows or showcases of the principal stores. Retail trade was paralyzed. Owners of valuables stored them away in vaults or other safe places. It seems remarkable that no really high-priced stuff was looted the first night. Rich furs and dress goods, silks — all manner of articles which would tempt a professional thief with a knowledge of values — escaped. And they grabbed shoes and cheap jewelry and shirts and umbrellas!
Equally remarkable is it that there was no incendiarism — plenty of false alarms, but no fires. Boston began to speculate about a week later on what might have happened had booze been on sale in the city.
It would take too long to tell all that happened before order was restored, but as Bill Hamilton once remarked in an account of proceedings after a bum decision at a prize fight, “pantomime reigned.” Besides old families and men and women of culture and breeding, besides safe and sane business men, a conservative professional class, and a labor population which is substantial and self-respecting, Boston possesses in considerable numbers a red-necked type which is always eager for a fight and packs a wallop in either hand. And these gentry had free run of the city.
Things became so bad that troops were called out and the Massachusetts State Guard took over the policing under Brigadier General Samuel D. Parker. The mayor is empowered in case of tumult or riot to take over the police department, which Mr. Peters did on Wednesday morning. He called out that part of the State Guard living within the city limits, but their number being totally inadequate, it became necessary to call all the State Guard throughout the commonwealth. Authority for this action rested in the governor, and accordingly Mr. Coolidge took charge of the situation, reinvesting police authority in Commissioner Curtis and instructing him to obey only such orders as the governor might issue.
The State Guard is equivalent to the Home Guards and is composed of men who volunteered for duty to replace the National Guard when it was called into service during the war. Most of them are either above or below draft age or had disabilities which prevented their going into the Army, and they come from all walks of life. You can find wealthy men in the State Guard, and college professors, and boys just beginning to use a safety razor.
These troops were distributed about the city, with a strong force held in reserve for emergency. They patrolled the streets and did guard duty, kept everybody moving, permitted no sidewalk conversations and made scores of arrests. Also they killed a few who resisted the enforcement of law. In spite of their three-speed rifles — you have to cock them three times, but luckily there is no reverse — the State Guard proved themselves efficient troops and handled the troubles firmly.
The Cooper Street Riots
Commissioner Curtis told me that crime dropped 50 percent below normal as soon as they brought in the soldiers to restore order. And I was able to see for myself the salutary effect the presence of the guard had on soapbox agitators and Bolshevik windjammers. They had been fond of street meetings, but evidently something told them that the time was not propitious for incendiary talk. You couldn’t have found a soapbox orator with a search warrant after the troops got on the job.
Soldiers were quartered in Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty. But according to C.H. Eveleth, who was a schoolboy in Boston in 1863, it was not the first time the Cradle had been used for a barracks.
“In July, 1863, at the time of the Cooper Street riots,” he states, “the 45th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, a regiment just returned from North Carolina, was quartered in Faneuil Hall for a few days. Police patrolled the streets, while at night Latin School boys watched at the bridges to Charlestown and Cambridge to open the draws if any riotous mob attempted to enter the city. The above is a fact from my personal knowledge.
“The 44th Regiment quartered in Boylston Hall and with the 45th were kept to be used in a body if the police could not do the work in the streets. The only fatalities were on Cooper Street, when Major Jones gave the mob grape and satisfaction on their attempting to seize the cannon of the 11th Massachusetts Battery, just back from a nine months’ tour of duty in Virginia.”
Meanwhile amateur traffic cops were working up a perspiration at every busy crossing. How those earnest volunteers did step to it! Being new to traffic regulation, they made 10 times more work of their tasks than the experienced policeman, but they handled the streams of traffic somehow and kept things rolling. I saw an aged, white-bearded citizen on duty at one crossing, a marine at another, a captain of infantry directing on Tremont Street, an automobile salesmen and other such plutocrats galore. Taken by and large, the citizenry of Boston can always be relied on to show a fine spirit
Reporters Not Popular
An amusing phase of the strike was the fashion in which the newspapers disappointed the police. The news writers of Boston organized a union, which became affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. In consequence, the police fondly believed they would receive the support of the press in their efforts to unionize, little knowing the extent of reportorial influence in a newspaper establishment. And when the Boston papers with practically one voice scored them unmercifully for their action, the policemen’s chagrin and resentment knew no bounds.
I saw their feeling manifested at a meeting of the “El” men in Fay Hall, called to consider the question of a sympathetic strike. To this the police were invited — the reporters, not. Indeed the gentleman who presided made it plain at the outset that no reporters were wanted. He cautioned everybody to examine everybody else’s card and make sure that no ringers or press representatives were present in the gathering. Then somebody in the smoke-filled hall, jammed to the last inch with breathless, coughing, perspiring humanity — some one of the 2,000 present raised a yell, “Mister President, there’s reporters listening out in the hall!”
“Throw ’em out! Throw ’em downstairs! Shut the door!” cried a babel of voices.
I began to suspect they didn’t want me there, and my chair in the back part of the hall grew stickily uncomfortable. However, the meeting went on and nobody paid me special attention. In about half an hour, the doorkeeper — seized perhaps with a faint recollection of the kind of admission card I had showed — suddenly gave tongue.
“Mister President!” he bellowed.
“What is it?”
“I have reason to b’lieve there’s a reporter at the back of this hall.”
Frenzied shouts to chuck him out and “Lemme at him” and “Fling the pup out the window” — and I had gone to that meeting with the friendliest sort of feelings! However, though I might be conspicuous at a Newport function, there is nothing in my appearance to make me an outstanding figure in a motormen’s gathering, so I let them yell and glare round, and in a minute or two the meeting got back into stride.
That is ever the way. My sympathies are always with the underdog, and often, after thinking over the way wage earners get gouged by profiteers and exploiters, and their real, their terrible grievances, I begin to see red and my heart goes out to the toilers. Then I go mixing with union men and my sympathy is chilled. They won’t let outsiders be friendly.
I have in my time attended labor meetings during which they dropped chairs down the fire escapes in the hope of beaning any newspaper reporters who might be lurking about. And I respectfully submit that labor’s attitude toward everybody not affiliated with them is marked by too evident hostility. They go on the assumption that the whole world is an enemy and treat the world on that basis. What hope of an amicable settlement of differences so long as this spirit rules?
If it could be banished and the old leather-head type of capitalist and employer painlessly removed by strangling or any equally effective method, a long step toward industrial peace would be achieved.
An astonishing thing about labor is its frequent stupidity in bulk. A union man who displays — as an individual — balance and intelligence of a high order will often turn into a shouting, blithering idiot in the tense atmosphere of a stormy meeting. He permits a brass-lunged orator who makes his living talking claptrap and spouting nonsense which would daze even the composers of national anthems — he allows these professional agitators to stampede him into action which his better judgment condemns. But then, the intelligence of the individual members of a crowd is always higher than their collective intelligence, and the noisy 10 percent of men of action overwhelm the 90 who think.
I recall conversing with a union man before a meeting some weeks ago who had eminently sound ideas. He thought that President Wilson ought to have remained at home to straighten out our numerous domestic problems instead of foolin’ round over in Europe with them Juggo-Slavs and such; and did I know that the fair-price lists printed in the newspapers every day were often higher than the prices the wife could get at the stores? In fact, I had formed an excellent opinion of his judgment when the speaker of the evening got up on his hind legs and started to talk, and my friend went loco.
Of all the old, stale, hell-hounds-of-capitalism buncombe I ever heard, his speech was about the worst. It wouldn’t have appealed to the reason of a normal child of 10. But it went big with the crowd, and to my unutterable dismay my acquaintance shouted and banged approval as loudly as the rest.
After that first night, the policemen were doomed. Aroused public opinion blazed up against them. Had every union in Boston decided to go on strike to help, still they would have lost. Had the whole power of the American Federation of Labor been thrown on their side, they would yet have been beaten.
No Jobs and No Union
But the federation had no intention of backing so hopeless a cause. It would have been suicidal. There was much talk of a general sympathetic strike — many threats, a deal of acrimonious debate, of charges and countercharges — but when the time arrived for action, the Central Labor Union approved the recommendation of its committee of 17 that no general strike should be called. Various unions voted financial assistance to the police, but, said President O’Donnell, “for reasons which the committee does not care to make public at this time, your committee is waiting to make sure of its ground in case it is forced to call for a general demonstration to back up the police in its fight and contentions. We don’t intend to give anybody a chance to say we have not used good judgment, as has been said of the policemen. They expect that labor will go out on a general strike tomorrow morning and precipitate rioting. In this they will be disappointed, as the committee and movement believe in law and order, and the committee has decided it is necessary to fight like the opposition, whose representatives spend 52 weeks of the year in preparing their plans to fight us.”
Thus did the policemen’s strike flatten out, flivver, perish as miserably as their bitterest critic could have desired. And now they’re out of jobs, without a union.
Some sentiment has been created in Boston recently in regard to taking back the striking police. The argument is advanced that the city needs these trained men, and since the union is beaten and out of business and the police have learned their lesson and now have their hands up, punishment of the ringleaders ought to suffice. On the other hand, one can hear in Boston and all over the country that there should be no compromise — that by walking out the police vacated their jobs in a manner which prevents their reinstatement under the law, and if they were restored to duty what would be their attitude toward those who had remained faithful to their posts? What would be their attitude in case of trouble toward those unions which had voted them financial help in the crisis?
Whatever may happen to the ex-police, they surely started something. Losing all else, they now take cold comfort in the claim that their strike brought higher pay and better conditions for other police forces — a belated thought, which did not occur to them until they needed its solace. Discerning observers class the complete defeat of the Boston union as a lusty blow against the radical elements of labor. Round One went to the public — to law and order.
The crisis created by the Great Depression was like nothing the United States had ever seen, and the federal government had to scramble to create programs that addressed the nation’s problems. FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, for instance, put young men across the U.S. to work on important, useful, long-lasting projects. But many programs of the time were both more controversial and less successful.
With an unemployment rate that reached as high as 25 percent, state and local welfare systems that had been established primarily to deal with “the unemployable” — the blind, the deaf, orphans, the aged — were faced with a growing population of educated, experienced, but unemployed adults. In 1932, President Hoover established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to help states create new unskilled jobs in local and state government and get people back to work.
But by 1935, FERA had grown into something that looked more permanent, was a drain on taxes, and simply wasn’t improving the situation. What’s more, as Dorothy Thompson argued in “Our Ghostly Commonwealth,” FERA was leading to a new class struggle — “not the class struggle according to Marx — not the workers against the capitalists, but the working against the workless, the haves against the people they support.” And it was creating the same type of social and economic environment that had allowed Adolf Hitler to seize power in Germany.
Our Ghostly Commonwealth
By Dorothy Thompson Excerpted from the article originally published July 27, 1935
There exists in the United States, alongside our so-called normal social and economic life, another commonwealth, a ghostly one — ghostly because it is largely invisible to those who are not its members, and ghostly in the vague uneasiness which its haunting presence provokes. It is a commonwealth of people who live in a separate world of their own.
They are not isolated in some distant state, on some reservation set aside for them, but they live in the midst of us, in our cities and villages, in our very streets. They can vote — although it is suggested in some states that they should not — they look like the rest of us; they have the same desires, the same needs, the same urges. But not exactly, and always decreasingly, the same hopes. They belong to the same trades, professions, crafts, and skills as the rest of us, and, on the whole, to the same races, although there is a larger proportion of Negroes amongst them than in the other society, our own society, and a slightly larger proportion of Mexicans and Filipinos. There are mechanics and farmers, engineers and executives, lawyers and journalists, artists and teachers, laborers and musicians, dancers and actors, miners, carpenters, stonemasons, clerks, stenographers. They are, indeed, a pretty fair cross section of the United States. There are stockbrokers amongst them, and former $50,000-a-year men, and sharecroppers who never in their lives have handled more than $100 a year in cash money. And lots and lots of children. Curiously, there are, proportionately, rather more children amongst them than the rest of us have. They constitute between one-sixth and one-seventh of our population, because, all together, their number is around 20 million, and the experts tell us there are an additional 25 million potential members of their society.
They are the people on relief.
But the people on relief are not usually referred to as “people.” The society in which they live has a nomenclature of its own, as well as a social and economic organization of its own. They are usually referred to as “clients” or as “cases,” and, in groups, as a “case load.” Thousands of them live in barracks, under the supervision of Army officers, but they are not soldiers. They and many of the others work, and at all sorts of tasks: construction, manufacturing, transportation, education, building, mechanics, drafting, moving pictures. They play instruments, sew clothes, manufacture mattresses, till farms, but they do not work at jobs, but on “projects.” They work, but most of them do not receive wages, but “budgets,” and the amount which they earn is not decided according to their merits, but according to their minimum needs — as determined for them by careful investigation. They produce all manner of things, from iron cots and refrigerators to pictures and plays, but they may not sell anything they produce.
Their lives for 10 years back are investigated, recorded, catalogued, and cross-catalogued. More is known about them than about any other part of the population — about their race, and skills, work histories, diseases, even about their personalities — but the knowledge is in the files of state and federal government agencies, and is not part of the public awareness. In so far as the rest of our society is conscious of them, the attitude is a combination of bad conscience and hostility, and of this attitude they are also aware — and repay it, on their part, with a feeling of frustration and hostility.
Limitations of Local Relief
The poor have long been the charges of state, county, and township governments. But possible taxation for such purposes was severely limited. And the whole mentality of local poor administrators was awry. To them, the destitute were so because they were simply misfits. It was, in essence, their own fault. The attitude was embodied in some New England states by laws which disfranchised recipients of public relief. The local poor-law authorities were trained by tradition and experience to take care of the ne’er-do-wells, the village idiots, the aged, the infirm, the orphaned. But they were not prepared for a program of relief for Thomas Smith, able-bodied, aged 35, six years ago receiving a salary of $25 a week and a so-to-speak house owner, meaning that he had a house “worth” $5000 on which he had a $4000 mortgage; four years ago cut to $20; three years ago cut to $12, and unable to pay the mortgage; two years ago dismissed because of “lack of business,” and today totally without resources.
President Hoover, with the experiences of the war, the Belgian relief, the all-European campaign against typhus, the 1930 drought, and the Mississippi flood behind him as justification, believed that there was sufficient goodwill, energy, and organization power in the American people to deal with the administration of this problem on a local and largely voluntary basis.
But the analogy with the war and with President Hoover’s previous great relief administrations was fallacious in one important particular. The war, the postwar starvation, the drought, and the Mississippi flood were catastrophes which affected all parts of the population. People starved in postwar Belgium because there was actually no food. Everybody starved. The good and the bad, the poor and the rich, the deserving and the undeserving. In the war, the banker’s son needed bandages as well as the truck man’s. And the Mississippi rose upon the just as well as upon the unjust, upon the efficient as well as the unlucky. There was solidarity of action because there was solidarity of distress.
No such solidarity of experience exists between the employed and the unemployed. But one thing which President Hoover foresaw has come to pass. Many of the fortunate, being isolated from any participation in the troubles of the unfortunate, except to pay for them, are developing a callousness and hostility toward them which aggravate the whole social situation, and which no amount of press releases from the publicity bureaus of the various relief administrations can dissipate. This country is dividing into two classes — the employed and the people on relief. A genuine class struggle is emerging, but it is not the class struggle according to Marx — not the workers against the capitalists, but the working against the workless, the haves against the people they support.
The Working and the Workless
This is reflected in almost every conversation which one may have with people whom the depression has not touched severely. The Long Island ladies who are indignant that they cannot get a handy man to help lay a carpet; the newspaperman who has kept his job securely all through these last five years; the employers of cheap labor who can’t find men at prices they can afford to pay. Being cut off from the problem, which is isolated behind a bureaucracy, they generalize from their own experience, and there are plenty of experiences to bear them out. They see the relief problem in its bulk and implications only in the un-quieting growth of the extraordinary budget.
In the great cities, in the winter of 1932, the attempts at local relief had certainly broken down. The local charities were bankrupt. Milkmen could not deliver milk, because their cars were overturned and the milk looted. Grocery windows were smashed. There were riots. Gangsters joined the ranks of the unfortunate, and racketeering was coupled with destitution. There was a clamor from all quarters that something should be done.
And President Roosevelt came in, surrounded by youth and social indignation, pledged to action, and a lot of it. And gallantly flinging back their locks from their foreheads, and with a smile cheery and brave, this administration gathered the whole kit and caboodle of the destitute to its bosom.
Since then it has been exceedingly busy trying to bounce many of them off again.
The federal government had no more experience than anyone else in being an eleemosynary institution. It had vast quantities of goodwill, optimism, and idealism. It was manned with as attractive a crowd of people as ever were got together in Washington; for eagerness and earnestness, youth and enthusiasm are extremely attractive qualities. It is probably the most literate administration that this country has ever had since the early days when politics was believed to be a gentleman’s profession, and it is certainly the most talkative. It is also probably one of the most truly representative of administrations, for it shares practically all the illusions of the typical American intellectual. It believes that any action is better than none; that the scientific attitude is synonymous with being willing to try anything once; that economic reform can be interpreted in terms of social uplift; and that the lion and the lamb can be brought to lie down together by persuasion.
This is preeminently the administration of goodwill — on all sides. But the good, says the proverb, die young. It is the wise who die of old age.
A Sympathy All-Embracing
This administration has been truly encyclopedic in its sympathies. It has tried, in the midst of depression, to raise wages and preserve profits. It has encouraged monopolies and sought to protect labor. It has advocated high prices and the protection of the consumer; [Secretary of State] Mr. [Cordell] Hull wants to restore international trade, and so does [Secretary of Agriculture] Mr. [Henry] Wallace, but meanwhile Mr. Wallace scales down production to domestic consumption. It believes in inspiration and in the expert.
Now, the same ambivalence of feeling dominates the relief program. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration is accurately described by one word in the title, and somewhat accurately by another. It is almost “Federal,” and it is certainly “Administration.” But no one whom I have been able to find in the whole organization, whether in Washington or in the field, believes that it is “Emergency.” On the contrary, its members are convinced that we are settling down to deal with a permanent problem, and they are directing policy with this in view. It is not relief. It is — or intends to become — a system of employment and, as such, should be no more relief than the check I hope to get for this article.
The destitute, in the mind of this government, have a right to support. But there is something humiliating about the exercise of this special right. Therefore, work must be provided for them. But the work must not interfere with private industry. The relief worker must be free, but in order to live on his budget, he must be controlled. The relief worker must not be insulted, but the public must be scrupulously protected. The problems of the immediate present must be met. The problems of a distant future must be met. The chief aim must be to provide immediate projects to meet the needs of the individual unemployed; the chief aim must be to construct lasting works of public importance. Every destitute person in the country must be relieved, but the taxpayer must not be overburdened.
Benevolent Serfdom
I am amazed that some people consider that the work-relief system is a form of socialism. Go out and look at it, and you see that it is actually a new form of benevolent serfdom. I say “benevolent” because almost all the people in administrative positions from top to bottom are full of human kindness, full of sympathy. They are not well-paid themselves. They work extremely hard. They are, for the most part, vigorously honest. And most of them know that this system will not work in the long run. Some of them foresee its extension into a universal program of production for use, a sort of nationwide EPIC. Others believe that the government must openly compete with private industry and gradually expropriate it. They should observe that no country yet has managed to edge its way into socialism. Others believe that such a system can only be integrated with the rest of society by political means.
Now, the political means of integrating such a society with the rest is fascism. It is, as far as I know, the only political means which has been pragmatically successful.
Germany, from 1925 onward, built up a system of work relief very similar to this one. In fact, it is the only parallel which I can find in a study of social service in European countries. It had the same sort of projects — subsistence farms, unemployed production for unemployed, and in the Voluntary Works Corps, an organization not unlike CCC. It did not, under this system, stabilize the social order. The resentment of the unemployed against the state was prodigious.
According to the classes from which they came, the younger elements flocked to the extreme right or the extreme left. They furnished strong support for Hitler. And when he came into power, he took over the whole system. It was literally ready-made for him. He reorganized it along military lines. He put the workers in camps into uniforms, and the social workers, to a large extent, as well. He kept the system and changed the psychology.
Now the subsistence workers are not pariahs of the social order but are hailed as its pillars. They are the builders of the New Germany. They have parades. They are drilled, exercised, trained. Arrangements are made to keep many of them permanently in this status. And a vast propaganda machine with the whole field to itself is busy persuading them that they like it.
Well, perhaps they do. But would we?
President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034 less than three months before this article was printed, establishing the more ambitious and unconventional Works Progress Administration. Like FERA, the WPA was accused of promoting communism, socialism, fascism, corruption, and political favoritism. But its results are difficult to argue against: 651,000 miles of roads, 124,000 public buildings, 800 airports, and 124,000 bridges built or improved; 225,000 public concerts presented; 475,000 works of art and 276 full-length books created; plus public swimming and wading pools, utility improvements, and over a billion school lunches.
Struck with gold fever, these determined athletes have overcome deformities, sacrificed good jobs and moved miles from family and friends in pursuit of that precious Olympic medal.
The gold rush of ’49 was but a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park compared to the upcoming gold, silver, and bronze rush of ’84 for medals at the Los Angeles Olympics. The hurdles on the road to the Olympics are many. For most athletes, blood, sweat, and tears are just a starter, but for those who are burning with Olympic fever, no hurdle is too great to overcome. Some of the following athletes will qualify for the American team. Others may fail. Some will be back again in ’88, but for others, it is their final opportunity to satisfy the dream of standing in the winners’ circle.
Rowdy Gaines: 1980’s Loss
In line for enough medals at the 1980 Moscow Olympics to make him the most renowned swimmer since Mark Spitz, Ambrose (Rowdy) Gaines saw his hopes go down the drain with the American boycott. Along with them went his concentration and boyish enthusiasm.
“I couldn’t believe the United States would actually stick to it,” says this Auburn University graduate from Winter Haven, Florida. “I felt cheated, oppressed, and unwanted. I still think the boycott was a stupid decision; it proved nothing.” Rowdy Gaines, at 24, continues to dream his Olympic dream. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting too old, burned out. I think about all my colleagues who didn’t have a chance to swim and turned to earning a living, and I ask myself if I’m not wasting my time. But swimming is what I want to do the most.”
Having used up his college eligibility, Rowdy still trains with coach Richard Quick at the University of Texas. Here, in the pool at Austin, is where he established his world records in both the 100- and 200-meter freestyle events. And if this training results in victories over the American competition of Chris Cavanaugh and Rich Saeger in the U.S. Trials, June 25–30, 1984, at Indianapolis, he will face Jorg Woithe of East Germany and Michael Gross of West Germany, top contenders in the Olympics.
“It’s been tough the last three years,” says Rowdy. We ‘older’ swimmers were supposed to have reached our peaks in 1980. Hopefully, that won’t turn out to be true.”
Mary T. Meagher’s Postponed Dream
When Soviet military troops rumbled into Afghanistan in 1979, the reverberations jarred the life’s dream of 15-year-old Mary Terstegge Meagher of Louisville, Kentucky. Mary T., as she is known by her colleagues, became one of the athletic-career casualties of President Jimmy Carter’s retaliatory American boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
“The Olympics had always been my dream,” sighs this dedicated young swimmer who, as a high schooler, had followed her swimming coach from Louisville to Cincinnati to continue her training. “And that is what they have remained — only a dream.”
Bitterly disappointed, she had no more than nicely rearranged her goal and rekindled her spirits when an Associated Press reporter phoned with the results of the Olympic swimming competition and told her she could have beaten their times — and wanted to know how she felt about that.
“I felt like hanging up the phone and crying,” she confesses.
In fact, Mary T. nearly quit swimming altogether. But she decided to plunge ahead for the 1984 Olympics. And her “comeback” has already made quite a splash. She has won an NCAA championship, set world records in both the 100- and 200-meter butterfly events and has emerged as one of America’s brightest hopes for ending the domination of East Germany in her sport.
“My American rivals are the ones to consider first,” says Mary T., looking ahead to the Olympic trials next June 25–30 at Indianapolis. “Not having done my best times in a couple of years, I feel somewhat threatened by the newcomers. But with dedication and plenty of hard work I think I can come back just fine.”
Mary Lou Retton—All 93 Pounds
It’s a long way from the coal-mining community of Fairmont, West Virginia, to Texas. But Mary Lou Retton, a ninth-grader at Houston’s Northland Christian School (having left at home her parents, three brothers, and sister Shari — an All-American gymnast at West Virginia University), has come much further in her training since the days she tried to emulate the Soviet crowd pleaser Nelli Kim at the local gym.
Mary Lou’s Texas training, in fact, has unearthed a load of gymnastic talent that, at age 12, has earned her the No. 1 senior-class ranking in the nation. And hopes are high that she will be one of the United States’ most productive natural resources in the 1984 Olympic Games. Standing a scant 4’ 10” and weighing but 93 pounds, her performances combine speed and amazing acceleration with a force that has caused gymnastic experts themselves to flip. Though she believes vaulting and floor exercises to be her best events, an innovative maneuver on the uneven bars has already been named for her.
Mary Lou credits her refinement to coach Bela Karolyi, the Romanian tutor responsible for the stardom of Nadia Comenici in the 1976 Games, before he defected to America in 1981 and opened a gymnasium in Houston. Here, under the eye of this technician, Mary Lou has improved her fundamentals, and here she has benefited from working out with fellow-student Dianne Durham, ranked No. 2.
As to her earlier hopes of emulating Nadia Comenici: “I really don’t want to be a carbon copy of Nadia,” she muses. “That’s a dream only for beginners. I would rather be a gymnast with my own style of performance.”
With Mary Lou Retton, chances are good that coach Bela Karolyi will again strike Olympic gold — only this time for the United States.
Wee Marie—Gymnast Giant
Gymnast Marie Roethlisberger’s tiny voice is a perfect fit for her 4’9”, 82-pound figure. She punctuates her speech with shy giggles, typical of an 11th-grader.
She could be the average student from New Trier High School in Northbrook, Illinois. But she isn’t.
As a result of spinal meningitis when she was two years old, Marie is totally deaf in one ear and has less than 50 percent hearing in the other ear. In addition, when she was still a toddler she had to relearn to walk, an ordeal she dismisses by recalling vaguely, “Oh, yeah, my mother told me about that.”
Of her deafness she says, “It doesn’t bother me or affect my balance. I can hear my floor music fine, but they have to turn up the volume a bit.”
Marie also has asthma, which she says is not really worth mentioning. She does mention that “not too long ago I had Osgood-Schlatter disease in both knees, and it used to bother me — but not anymore. I just have a big, ugly bump under each knee.”
Marie has been uprooting herself and following coaches, leaving both parents at home, since she was 12 years old. St. Louis and Omaha were her training sites before joining coach Bill Sands in Northbrook.
Although her father Fred, a 1968 Olympian and current gymnastics coach at the University of Minnesota, has been supportive, Marie insists that she has motivated herself. “It was something I wanted to do,” she says, “not something he pushed me into.” Marie’s most impressive tune-up came earlier this year. In the Coca-Cola International Invitational at London, England, she won the all-around title. She swept all but one event.
Choreography coach Donna Cozzo warns Marie Roethlisberger: “She’s not your little smiling-All-American-girl-with-bouncing-blonde-ponytails. She’s an extremely serious, intense girl who works about 30 to 36 hours a week.”
While Marie may not have lived the life of a typical gymnastics pixy, there is a better-than-even chance she will become the darling of fans across the United States with no more than a bronze medal at Los Angeles.
Bolden’s Bold Dash
Born premature, asthmatic, and clubfooted, Jeanette Bolden’s leap from life’s starting block was anything but spectacular. For the first 4 of her 23 years, this world-class sprinter was forced to wear corrective braces.
Today, should you happen to be on Los Angeles’ Central Boulevard and spot the 27th Street Bakery, amid the aroma of sweet-potato pies you’ll find three generations of the Bolden family hard at work. Jeanette, who says, “I grew up with flour in my hair,” helps out by making deliveries. Although she uses an automobile, occasionally she could make better time on foot. Some track experts, in fact, give her an excellent chance of capturing the 100-meter gold medal in 1984.
If she does, she first must qualify in the Olympic 100-meter-dash trials next June in Los Angeles. Jeanette, undaunted, has overcome even bigger obstacles.
She not only had to wear corrective braces as a youngster, but several times during grade school she was rushed to the hospital with asthma attacks so severe her life was close to the finish line. At age 12 she was sent to Sunair Home For Asthmatic Children at Tujunga, California, for nine months.
It was there that she had an introduction to sports — first swimming, then branching out to running.
“The more I ran, the more people began taking an interest in me,” she says. “And in 1977, after I beat some pretty good people, I no longer had to hide anything. I just wanted to keep on running.”
Besides filling demands for inspirational talks and doing volunteer work for the American Lung Association, Jeanette can also still be found occasionally delivering a freshly made sweet-potato pie for the family bakery.
Not surprisingly, her favorite passage from the Bible, which she studies avidly, is found in the Book of Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Hard–Hitting Brothers
Farmer Theodore Gray, Boynton Beach, Florida, raises beans, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, squash, and boxers.
He planted the boxer crop eight years ago by hanging a potato sack filled with dirt and wet towels from a tree in the backyard and convincing his sons that it was a punching bag. Later, he drove them 170 miles a day to Miami for professional training.
Today, Theodore and Anna Mae Gray are harvesting a crop of amateur champions.
Last December, at the U.S.A. Amateur Boxing Federation championships in Indianapolis, the two oldest sons, Clifford, 21, and Bernard, 20, became the first brothers to capture titles in the same meet, vaulting into Olympic contention.
Currently, both boxers are working out at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as part of the U.S.A. Amateur Boxing Federation’s “Operation Gold.” Under this invitational program offering educational and athletic assistance to top American boxers, Clifford studies aerobics and speech at Pike’s Peak Community College; Bernard is registered at Palmer High.
“If I make the team,” says Clifford, “I’ll give 100 percent to win the gold medal. Then Bernard won’t have to cut his medal up to share with our father and mother. They can each have one — for the many things they have done for us.”
Thus the U.S. Olympic boxing team — whose trials are tentatively scheduled for next June 4–10 at Ft. Worth — appears to have a very Gray future — and that is a bright forecast indeed.
James Martin—For the Defense
Although James Martin refuses to ingest sugar, white bread, soft drinks, and red meat, opting instead for fresh vegetables, poultry, and fish, there was a period when this nine-time judo All-American wasn’t so particular about what he put into his body. His rocky road to Los Angeles suffered a five-year detour through drug and alcohol abuse.
Spurred by rebellion to the rigid workout schedule set by his father, a Grand Masters champion, James turned his back on judo at age 15. But at 20, suffering ulcers and other symptoms of a badly mistreated body, he was given a shove — which also came from his father — right back into the sport.
“My dad challenged me,” James remembers. “Tryouts for the nationals were a few days away, and he said he bet I couldn’t qualify. With no time to get in shape, I entered — and won.
“I was really lucky, being in the right place at the right time,” he says. “But from it I got the idea that I could come back and go for the Olympics.”
Now 29 years old, the San Gabriel, California, resident has his eye on America’s first Olympic gold medal in judo. And instead of dope, he is injecting himself with doses of confidence from coach Ben Chapman.
James, with an unprecedented six national titles to his credit, says a gold medal itself means nothing. “I’d just like to be the first ever to capture a gold medal in judo for the United States,” he says. “Since judo became an Olympic sport in 1964, Americans have won just two bronze medals.”
Last summer while I was in London, one of our best-known American interventionists arrived there to make a personal inspection tour of the British Isles. Being highly regarded as a sincere and valuable propagandist for the British cause, this American was granted the opportunity to talk at length with Churchill and other cabinet ministers, as well as with chiefs of the British armed forces. From all these conversations the distinguished caller emerged in a puzzled state of mind, and therefore consulted another American, a friend of mine who has lived in London for several years.
“There is one thing I haven’t been able to find out from anybody,” explained the visitor.” Probably it is a deep military secret, but you enjoy the confidence of so many high officials here that you may know the answer. What is Britain’s grand strategy for winning this war?”
“Britain’s grand strategy,” replied my friend, “is to let the United States figure out how to win this war. The bitter truth is that there are not enough Britons in the world to beat the German army on the continent of Europe, and Britons know it.”
This grim fact is well recognized in England, and by this time it should be recognized also in this country, for the United States government has been sending a steady procession of military and technical experts to Britain to study the question of how Britain proposes to win the war. I talked with several of our investigators while in London, and learned that they all had arrived at the same conclusion. As one of these men explained to me, “The British haven’t had time even to think about how to win the war. They have had their hands full to keep from losing it.”
Another American military expert commented upon how many British staff officers express admiration for Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who fought a defensive campaign for four years during our Civil War. They admire General Lee because they, too, have had to fight a defensive war. They have fought that defensive war marvelously, but defensive wars never lead to final victory.
This is an unpalatable fact, a fact which some our political leaders are afraid even to hint at. These statesmen talk constantly about democracy, but when it comes to a showdown, their actions suggest that they do not trust the judgment of the majority of the people, and such trust is the very essence democracy.
Denied access to the facts, our democratic debates on American foreign policy have become as remote from reality as the medieval discussion about how many angels can stand on the point of a needle. To an American who has come home after four continuous years in war-racked Europe, as I have just done, it seems almost as if our debaters had followed Alice into Wonderland.
My work in Europe was to cover the war there as a reporter for The Saturday Evening Post. I stress that word reporter because there are not too many of us left. Some of the foremost American newspaper and magazine writers have been transformed by events, or by their personal convictions, into propagandists. It is not for me to criticize them: a man who becomes converted to any cause is privileged to propagandize on its behalf.
Nevertheless, I suspect that the American people today could use more reporting and less propaganda. The function of a propagandist is to present his cause in the best possible light, while the function of a reporter is to get the facts. In search of the facts, I have covered both sides of this war as thoroughly as it was possible for me to do. I have visited both England and Germany during each of the three war years: 1939, 1940, and 1941. I watched the German army enter Paris, and since that time I have visited practically every country on the continent — the occupied countries and the satellite countries and the neutral countries. I have seen what post-Blitzkrieg Europe looks like, from Finland to Turkey, from Norway to Portugal, and from Poland to the British Isles.
I mention these experiences because they are my credentials. Whatever information I possess has not been obtained by remote control from “secret sources” or mysterious documents or “confidential reports” to Hitler or Churchill. The only facts in my possession are those which I have observed with my own eyes, or obtained from men on the spot whose judgment I trust. The only bias of which I am conscious is a pro-American bias. It is on this basis that I venture to point out how the war stands in its third winter, and how we Americans stand in relation to it.
The first and foremost fact about the war in Europe, so far as Americans are concerned, is that we are definitely in it. It is only in the United States that any doubts still continue on this matter. Every European, whether he is German or British or neutral, understands well enough that we have adopted the European war as our own, and Europeans are bewildered by evidence that some of us still shirk looking this plain fact in the face.
British Logic
To pretend that we are not in the war, merely because our Congress has made no formal declaration, is like refusing to recognize death until one has read a funeral notice. Japan and China have been fighting each other since September 19, 1931, and neither country has declared war yet. Nor did Germany and Russia bother to declare the war which broke out between them on June 22, 1941. We Americans already have gone deeper into the European war than France and Britain did up to the moment when the German Blitzkrieg hit them in May 1940. There was more “business as usual” in both those countries in the spring of 1940 than there is in this country today.
The second fact is that we got into a war which, before we got into it, was a one-sided war. The Germans were more than a match for all their other opponents, and, if we had stayed out, the Germans would have won hands down. In June 1940, when the German army cracked France wide open and drove British forces back across the English Channel, I saw for myself that the Germans were convinced that the war was virtually over, and that they had won it.
Most of the French people thought so, too, and so did most of the people in other occupied countries which I visited in the months which followed. All of Europe at that time was dazed by the extent of German conquest, and these stunned people were resignedly preparing to adjust themselves to a Europe dominated by Germany.
The third fact is that the British people, and the British people alone, stood between the Germans and complete conquest of Europe in those months which followed June 1940. At that time the Germans had no other serious opposition. Our country was not yet in the war, and Soviet Russia still was “co-operating” with Germany.
During those months the British people stood alone against the Germans: 40,000,000 people on some islands against 80,000,000 Germans with the greatest army in the world and in absolute control of the continent of Europe. Yet the British people dared to defy Germany and to refuse the peace which was offered to them. The Germans expected the British to accept peace then. Many Germans kept repeating to me, with ludicrous indignation, “The English are not logical!” But this is not the first time that Germans have failed to understand the British.
As subsequent events proved, British statesmen were entirely logical and knew exactly what they were doing. They understood how one-sided the struggle was then, and that they could not possibly hope to win the war by their own unaided efforts. They recognized that their one chance to stave off German victory was to fight a defensive war until the United States got into it. They also were too well informed about American opinion not to be aware of the risks they ran in depending upon us to come into the war.
But what alternative did they have? Their only alternative was a deal with Germany which would transform Great Britain into a second or third rate power. They had to choose between blood and tears or inferiority, and they chose the blood and tears.
And that brings us to the fourth fact, which I stated at the beginning of this article. As matters stand now, Britain is too weak to win this war. When British statesmen decided in June 1940 to fight on against Germany, they did not believe for one moment that all we Americans needed to do was to provide the tools and that they could then beat Germany singlehanded. Whatever statements they made to that effect were designed to tide over a bad period in their own country and in this country. There is ample evidence in England that British statesmen always have known, and still know, that they cannot beat Germany — barring the improbable and the unforeseeable — without tremendous outside support. They received a large measure of such support when Hitler attacked Soviet Russia. But no British leaders believed this would be enough.
The British have fought a defensive war because they have not had the means to do anything else. British inability to take the offensive was made abundantly clear when Hitler gave them their chance by throwing the major part of his forces into Russia. After the Russian war started, there was such popular clamor in England for “a war against Germany on two fronts” that the idea of some kind of invasion of the continent was seriously considered. However, the British general staff reported last July that such a diversion could lead only to “another Dunkirk.” British strategists had little confidence in the ability of Russian armies to hold out indefinitely against the Germans, and they had to consider the defense of the Near East as well as the British Isles. Most of the million and more soldiers in the British Isles had not been trained for offensive warfare; they had been trained to protect their own country from invasion.
The Nazi Strength
It is understandable that all of Germany’s enemies should look wistfully for signs that Germany is cracking under the terrific strains of total war. It would be very fine indeed for us all if the Germans would crack under the combined effect of British bombing, naval blockades, the war in Russia, and disaffection among the masses of hostile peoples in conquered countries. But everything I have seen in Europe convinces me that we are deluding ourselves by pinning our hopes upon any such outcome of the war. Every military expert I consulted in Europe concurred in the opinion that Germany will not be decisively beaten until her opponents are able to take the offensive against her armies. And Germany’s opponents in Europe simply do not possess enough soldiers to undertake such an offensive on the necessary scale.
However unpleasant these facts about the war in Europe may be, I am enough of a democrat to believe that the American people can take them. It seems to me that there is real peril to this country in concealing or playing down the real facts. There is peril also in attempts to picture the war in Europe as a simple study in black and white, with everything good on one side and everything bad on the other. There has been altogether too much of that kind of oversimplification in the past, which is one reason the American people are so confused today.
The truth is that the war in Europe is not black and white but a dirty gray. It is not a war between democracies and dictatorships, because some of the worst despotisms in Europe are now counted among Britain’s allies; and one of the few genuine democracies in Europe — Finland — has fought alongside Germany. I last visited Finland in January of this year and reported at the time that the Finns would do just what they have done, if ever they got the chance. The Finns did not fight against democracy; they fought against a totalitarian power which ravaged their country in 1940. And that same totalitarian power, Soviet Russia, had to fight later for its life against Germany, with the active encouragement of Britain and the United States.
Does that mean our government made a mistake in supporting Soviet Russia? Of course it doesn’t mean that. Such support of Russia, under existing circumstances, was coldly realistic. Since we have got ourselves into this war, we are compelled by the logic of war to support anybody who fights our chosen enemy. But it is not necessary to drag in such red herrings as religious freedom in militantly atheistic Russia to cover up our awkward predicament. Neither do we have to fool ourselves that, so far as Europe is concerned, this is a crusade for the four freedoms. It is one of the most confused civil wars in Europe’s long history, and is certain to result in the savage aftermath of all such civil wars.
We Americans can appreciate our position most clearly if we accept, without further equivocation, the fact that no matter how gray this war may be, we have got ourselves into it, for better or for worse. As Hugh Johnson recently pointed out, we have even sent the first unit of our expeditionary force across the ocean to Iceland, where our soldiers are serving in cooperation with the British command.
We have taken too many belligerent actions against Germany to be able, as some of our isolationists still propose, to tell the Nazis, “Let’s forget everything; all we want now is to mind our own business.” No nation can make war its business, as we have done, without being forced to face the consequences of victory or defeat. Our only choice today is which outcome we prefer and, such being the case, it may naturally be assumed that we want to win. How are we going to accomplish this?
When we ask ourselves that question, we find ourselves once more back in Wonderland. Some of our political leaders have repeatedly assured us that we can win the war without actually fighting it. That assurance sounded like a fairy tale when it was first advanced, and it sounds even more fabulous to anyone who, like myself, has just returned from the battlegrounds.
I was in London at the time of the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting. It is difficult to exaggerate the disappointment among all sections of the British people which resulted from that conference. When the British first heard rumors of the meeting, they were delighted. The British people have long regarded President Roosevelt as their champion in this country. When they learned that our president had arranged to meet Mr. Churchill, they said, “ Now Roosevelt has figured out some way to bring the United States completely into the war.”
When the so-called Atlantic Charter finally was announced, some Britons almost burst into tears. They were sick and tired of words; they were hoping for nothing less than all-out action from us. And when President Roosevelt told newspapermen, upon his return to home shores, that he did not believe the meeting had brought us closer to a fighting war, then the British cup of woe overflowed. That is the only occasion when I ever have heard Mr. Roosevelt criticized by Englishmen.
According to a credible report circulated at that time in London, the British prime minister returned from his meeting with Roosevelt more depressed than he has been for some time. He was startled to discover, in conversations with our president, that Roosevelt still hoped that the war could be won without American troops. Churchill knew that some Americans still clung to this hope, but he had not imagined that President Roosevelt was among them.
If that report was true, it is possible that our president has changed his mind by this time. Perhaps Mr. Churchill gave him convincing facts to support the view which is held by almost all the best-informed men in Europe — the view that Britain can never hope to fight any kind of war except a defensive war unless the American people back her up with armies as well as with armaments.
Every move which we have made thus far in this war has served merely to enable other nations to continue to fight on the defensive. That is just as true of the Russians as it is of the British and as it was of the French. And meanwhile the Germans succeeded in entrenching themselves upon the continent of Europe as never before in history. They have transformed that continent into a German empire, and they are prepared to strike with the utmost ruthlessness — as recent events in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia proved — at any attempts to challenge their rule. They have so thoroughly ringed the European continent with steel that they have convinced a large number of Europeans that they cannot be beaten. This explains why so many Europeans have decided that the best thing they can do for themselves and their countries is to get in as charter members of Germany’s “new order.”
The recent disorders in Europe inspired the usual false optimism in this country. Yet it should be obvious that mass civil revolts under present conditions are suicidal.
That is well understood by the émigré governments in London. President Benes and Foreign Minister Masaryk, of Czechoslovakia, broadcast appeals from London to their homeland beseeching patriots there to bide their time rather than lose their lives in a premature, fruitless move against Germany. The Polish, Norwegian, and other governments in exile also have tried to restrain their hotheaded countrymen from wasting potential strength in hopeless revolts.
Slav Solidarity
Whence, then, came the inspiration for recent disorders? They were almost certainly directed from Soviet Russia, which desperately needed diversions. The Russians prepared underground organizations for years in every European country, and Stalin relied upon the support of thousands of fanatical followers. Moreover, Russia’s sympathizers were not limited to these organized communists. They included many non-communist Slavs who make up most of the population of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Poland.
In London last September, I attended a diplomatic luncheon at which I sat next to one of the ministers in the Czech government there. In the course of our conversation, I said to him, “As I understand it, about ten percent of the Czech people were members of the Communist Party before the Munich conference. Is that correct?”
He replied, “I don’t know what percentage of our people were communists. But I do know that they were nearly all pro-Russian, and they still are. It is Russia we rely upon to smash Germany far more than we rely upon the British.”
I consider that a typical expression of Slav sentiment in Europe. I have heard similar statements from Poles and Serbs. Due to the nature of this war, European Slays are more stirred by pan-Slav feeling than they have been conscious of for generations. The German Nazis, with their racial theories of Slav inferiority, have driven the Slav peoples passionately together.
The Germans are well aware of this growing Slav solidarity. Hitler has warned the Germans that if they lose the war, the Slavs will break up their country into insignificant fragments and will massacre them and their families. That is very effective propaganda for Germans, because they have guilty consciences. Since they have treated Slavs so brutally, they understand that they can expect no mercy from Slavs. And the Germans are told there is little which Britons or Americans could do to restrain the Slavs, however much they might desire to do so. Because Germans believe this, they are all the more determined to win the war. That is one of the many factors which militates against revolt inside Germany against the Nazis.
Why Hitler Turned on Russia
In as much as European Slavs relied so fervently upon Mother Russia, defeats in Russia were bound to have a disastrous effect upon morale in all Slav countries. Even before the war began, in the summer of 1939, Czech patriots in Prague assured me earnestly that Russia, and Russia alone, could save them from the German rule to which France and Britain had surrendered them. It is significant that recent disorders in Europe were confined largely to countries where pro-Russian sentiment was strongest. Hitler calculated that if he could knock Russia out of the war in Europe, then his most fanatical opponents in conquered countries would be reduced to apathy and despair. That is one reason he wanted to smash Russian armies with maximum speed.
But his chief reason for attacking Russia was that Britain’s defensive strategy had proved so successful. For that reason the German High Command decided that it was necessary to take the offensive against Britain in a new theater of war — the Near East. As a preliminary to such a campaign, the Russian threat had to be removed. It was not essential to annihilate Russia’s armies, as some military observers have suggested, but merely to break them up so thoroughly that they could be immobilized with a comparatively small portion of Hitler’s forces.
When Hitler took on Russia, he did not have to worry about his western front. During the long, peaceful winter of 1940–41, as I traveled all over Europe, I watched German soldiers and French and other prisoners of war transforming the European continent into a fortress — building coast defenses from the northern tip of Norway to the southernmost ports of France; dotting the countries of Western Europe with skillfully camouflaged aerodromes; constructing a network of motor highways to enable Hitler to rush his mechanized divisions to any part of the European coast where invasion might be attempted. The Germans were expending an enormous amount of effort to safeguard themselves from invasion, just as the British were doing in their own islands across the English Channel. And later, during the Balkan campaign in the spring of 1941, I watched Hitler consolidating his defensive position in Southeastern Europe.
There has been a widespread belief that the Russian war was a German gamble, the evidence of desperation. But it is now apparent that the German high Command chose this move as the safer of two courses. If the Germans had struck last summer into Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, then they would have been gambling upon the chance that Russia would continue to “cooperate.” But when they hit Russia first, they did so in the belief that they were playing safe. They did not feel that they were risking war on two fronts, because they calculated correctly that the British were incapable of creating an offensive front, either in the Near East or in Europe.
Last summer I met a neutral military observer from the Near East. He said, “The British Empire should thank heaven for Russia. If Hitler hadn’t been afraid of Russia, he would have gone straight into the Near East after his Balkan campaign. And if he had done so then, there was nothing there which could have stopped him. It would have been Greece and Crete all over again. The British didn’t have the necessary warplanes or tanks or guns.”
The Near East Front
There has been so much fanfare in the United States about the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic that the Near East may have looked to us like a sideshow. But it hasn’t looked like a sideshow either to the British or German general staffs, or to farsighted strategists in this country. Britain’s position there is better now, but it is better only because the Russian war has provided time to pour in British soldiers and American materials. It doesn’t seem to be generally known in this country that we have sent most of our warplanes and munitions to the Near East, and not to the British Isles. We have arranged to fly our own planes across the center of Africa, and to send our own munition ships around South Africa into the Red Sea. It is easier to send them from here than it is from the British Isles.
During Germany’s invasion of Russia, the British also have been concentrating their most vigorous efforts upon reinforcing their armies all through the Near East, in anticipation of a German offensive there this winter. The British government has been criticized, both in its own country and over here, for holding back too much while Russia fought. But it has been the same old story with Britain from the beginning of the war. The British have survived only because they have held back enough to resist the next blow, and the next blow in this case pointed straight toward the Near East.
The Waiting Lion
But this sort of thing cannot go on forever. The British have accomplished everything which they hoped to do. They have consolidated their defenses in the British Isles, and they have managed to hold and even to extend their defensive positions in the Near East. They have played a waiting game, because they could not do anything else. What were they waiting for? They were waiting for us.
The time is now rapidly approaching when we Americans will have to put up or shut up. That is not an expression of personal opinion or a piece of propaganda; it is a cold fact. This European war, with all its infinite complications and appalling prospects, has been dumped into our laps. We are confronted now with a fact which should have been apparent to us from the outset — that no nation can get itself into a war, as we have done, without expecting to fight that war.
There was a time when Americans could afford to follow the foreign policy summarized by Tyler Dennett in the epigram, “When we are asked to put up or shut up, we do neither.” Some of us apparently thought we could still do that. But events have proved that these Americans were mistaken. Now, since we have refused to shut up about the war in Europe, we have been compelled to put up one thing after another. And the time is at hand when we shall have to choose between putting up everything we possess, or shutting up completely so far as an effective voice in European affairs is concerned.
So where does that leave us? It still leaves us the most fortunate people in the world. We are fortunate, in the first place, because the war is not going to ruin us, no matter how it comes out. Whatever our nightmare mongers may tell us, no power or combination of powers can emerge from this cataclysmic conflict in any position to destroy the United States.
We are fortunate, in the second place, because we are the only people who still have a clear voice in shaping our own destiny. All the peoples of Europe already have had their destinies shaped for them, either by their own decisions or by circumstances beyond their control.
We still can choose, but our choice is not so wide as it was in 1939, or even in 1940. Since that time we have got into the European war, and this fact cannot be exorcised by any political hocus-pocus. Our choice today is confined within narrower limits.
From both Germany and Britain the same question will soon be directed to us: “What are you Americans going to do now?” And because of our own actions, we are now restricted to only two possible answers.
We can reply, “We are going to do just what we have been doing, edging bit by bit into the war without getting fully into it.” If that is to be our answer, then we must accept the probability that the war in Europe will end at best in stalemate and at worst in German victory. And since we have openly challenged the Germans, a German victory would mean a humiliating defeat for us. The former German consul general in New Orleans, who bluntly told us that Germans will never forget that we sided against them in this war, was speaking the plain truth.
The only other answer we can make now is, “We are going into an all-out shooting war against Germany.” If that is to be our answer, we must realize that American soldiers probably will go into action first in Africa and Asia, in those Near Eastern regions where American reinforcements will be most urgently required.
And then, if we are determined to win this war, our soldiers eventually will have to join in an assault upon the entrenched German empire in Europe. Because the German High Command has so arranged its grand strategy that if the time ever comes when their armies must make a last stand, then the decisive battle will be fought on this battleground of their own choosing.
If we make this maximum choice, we should understand the price we will have to pay. The cost will be incalculable in both lives and treasure. And we shall have accepted the burdens of Europe, not for a year or a few years, but for generations.
The power of the Supreme Court has long been a sore point to critics who dislike the idea of lifetime-appointed judges with a supreme power to overturn the laws produced by Congress.
Writing for the Post in 1916, Reuben Melville Wanamaker argued that the Court was defying the will of the people, as reflected in the work of their representatives. Melville, a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, was particularly outraged by the federal court’s broad interpretations of the 14th amendment. The 14th Amendment may not be as familiar to Americans as the 1st and 2nd, but it has continued to make a significant impact on Americans’ lives.
Originally, Congress passed the 14th amendment to guarantee the civil rights of black Americans recently freed from slavery after the Civil War. Wanamaker felt the amendment had been little help to black Americans, and that the Supreme Court had used the amendment to protect the interests of corporations. Wanamaker was particularly angered by the Supreme Court’s opinion that corporations had constitutional rights as people did and were entitled to equal protection under the law guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
In the 1886 case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, the Supreme Court’s chief justice stipulated that the equal protection rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment applied to corporations as well as people. Today, any act of Congress, unless otherwise stated, equally applies to corporations, associations, firms, and other legal entities as it does to individuals.
So when Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend,” in 2011, he was only stating a legal fact.
Recent court decisions have taken the principle of corporate personhood even further. In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as people to spend money to influence the outcome of elections. And the Court’s 2014 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby acknowledged that a business may hold a religious belief that can exempt it from federal laws.
Having been with us for well over 100 years, the corporations-as-people conundrum will not soon fade away. Nor will the arguments, made by Wanamaker and others, that the Supreme Court exerts too much influence on the shape of the government.
But in his article, Wanamaker proposes a check on the Court’s ability to overturn the work of the legislature. Congress, he claimed, could require the Court to meet a higher standard of concurrence before ruling a law unconstitutional. Instead of acting on simply a one-vote majority decision, the Court would need to obtain a three-fourths vote.
We, the People, or We, the Judges?
By R.M. Wanamaker, Judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio
Originally published on June 10, 1916 (excerpted)
Some years ago the New York City Library published an official statement as to the number of state and Federal statutes that had been nullified by the supreme courts of the states and nation, covering the period from 1902 to 1908 inclusive. That report showed four hundred statutes, passed mostly in exercise of the police power, which had been nullified by the courts on the ground that they were contrary to the provisions of some state or Federal Constitution.
Professor Collins, in his most excellent work on The Fourteenth Amendment and the States, by a carefully prepared chart shows that there have been fifty-five cases decided adversely to state statutes by the Supreme Court of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment alone up to 1910; and that over eighty percent of them were during the last fifteen years of that period. Assuming that each decision affected only ten of the forty-eight states, it would show a slaughtering of over five hundred statutes as being in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment alone — to say nothing about other statutes found in conflict with other provisions of the Federal Constitution.
Judge R.M. Wanamaker
In this same excellent work another chart shows that the Fourteenth Amendment has been invoked before the Supreme Court of the United States in over six hundred cases, in which the Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction and rendered opinions. In three hundred and twelve of these cases corporations were parties complaining of the statute; two hundred and sixty-four were individuals who were, in the main, only nominal parties, some corporation being the real party in interest; and there were only twenty-eight cases in which the negro race itself was affected, though the latter was the prime and paramount consideration for the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. Surprising, isn’t it?
What has caused this large increase in the slaughtering of statutes in our courts? The answer may be found in the surprising and expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the Federal Supreme Court, as will speedily appear.
This amendment, as every student of history knows, was intended as the great Magna Charta for the negro race, which had been but five years previously emancipated by the immortal Lincoln.
The chief part of that amendment — Section 1 — reads as follows:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That the amendment failed as the great Magna Charta of the black race is a matter of common knowledge; that its surprising interpretation by the Supreme Court of the United States has enabled this amendment to destroy the great Magna Charta for both negro and white races, and substitute therefore a City of Refuge for the corporations of the several states, does not admit of doubt on an examination of the official record.
The first cases in the United States Supreme Court calling for a construction of this amendment were decided in 1873, and … known as the Slaughterhouse Cases.
Justice Miller, who delivered the opinion in these cases for the court, said, among other things:
FIRST. This court is thus called upon for the first time to give construction of these amendments.
SECOND. An examination of the history of the causes which led to the adoption of those amendments, and of the amendments themselves, demonstrates that the main purpose of all three last amendments was the freedom of the African race, the security and perpetuation of that freedom, and their protection from the oppressions of the white men who had formerly held them in slavery.
THIRD. In giving construction to any of those articles it is necessary to keep this main purpose steadily in view, though the letter and spirit of those articles must apply to all cases coming within their purview, whether the party concerned be of African descent or not.
FOURTH. We doubt very much whether any action of a state not direct by way of discrimination against the negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision. It is so clearly a provision for that race and that emergency that a strong case would be necessary for its application to any other.
The last language quoted from Justice Miller’s opinion shows that, though he was a good interpreter of the Fourteenth Amendment, as to what its primary purpose was, yet, indeed, he was a bad prophet; for just thirteen years later this same Supreme Court, in Santa Clara versus the Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S., 394, decided in 1886, held, by the syllabus of that case, as follows:
“The provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny to any ‘person’ within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law, applies to corporations.”
The only reference in the opinion of this radical reversal of the doctrine laid down by Justice Miller in the Slaughterhouse Cases appears in the following language, which is self-explanatory:
“Announcement by Mr. Chief Justice Waite:
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a state to deny to any ‘person’ within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”
The corporations referred to in this announcement were the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad.
Are Corporations Persons?
By what legal legerdemain or judicial inspiration this Fourteenth Amendment was amended by the Supreme Court of the United States, the court does not tell us. It seems content with a Thus saith the court!
The Fourteenth Amendment is composed of five sections, and the word person appears in the first three. The language of the amendment itself, reinforced by the debates thereon, the paramount purpose of the amendment, unmistakably, and without the shadow of a doubt demonstrates that in using the word person the framers and adopters intended it to mean a human being and nothing else. Judge-made law is bad enough, but judge-made constitutions are infinitely worse.
No wonder the Supreme Court of the United States denied to counsel all opportunity to argue the question as to whether or not the word person included a corporation! This interpretation was in defiance of the Congress that framed the amendment; in defiance of the negro race, to protect which the amendment was passed; in defiance of the general public understanding and interpretation of the amendment; in defiance of the Supreme Court’s own construction of it in the Slaughterhouse Cases. And, had such an interpretation been anticipated by the states when they came to adopt it, I challenge a denial of the fact that not half a dozen states of the Union, North or South, would ever have ratified that amendment.
The natural and necessary effect of this interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment made the Supreme Court of the United States the supreme guardian and final supervisor not only of Federal statutes but of all state statutes, and even of municipal ordinances. The Supreme Court of the United States had passed from a court of law and equity, as those words are understood in the world’s jurisprudence, and had now become a political court — I do not mean a partisan one — a court that spoke the last word as to municipal, state and national public policies.
During the first century of our Government the Supreme Court of the United States confined its doctrine of nullifying legislative acts chiefly and sparingly to questions pertaining to the organization of courts and judicial procedure; questions relating to the exercise of powers not delegated in the Constitution; interference with state powers; ex post facto laws; laws impairing obligations of contract; denial of trial by jury, and other fundamental individual rights, as recognized generally by the laws of all civilized lands. But, following the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the nullified laws partook of quite a different character. It would be difficult to classify all of them, but the large majority of the laws were nullified on the claim that they were in conflict with some provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, either the “due process” clause or “equal protection of the laws” clause — or both.
A very large percentage of the statutes nullified by the Federal courts, or by the state courts following precedents of the former, may be classified as follows:
FIRST. Labor statutes: Those providing for safety appliances to protect the life and limb of the workingman; sanitary regulation in mines, workshops and factories; workmen’s compensation laws; abolishing company stores; providing for hours of labor, pay days, and so on; and the right of laborers to organize and protect themselves in such organization by denying the employer the right to coerce them out of a labor union, or, if they had not yet joined such union, to prevent membership in such union.
The Bureau of Labor, in 1910, issued a bulletin alleging that one hundred and fifty statutes and ordinances relating to labor had been held unconstitutional, either entirely or in part, by the courts of the land.
SECOND. Rate laws: Those undertaking to fix and regulate public-utility rates; for the Governmental control of public-service corporations; and also for the inspection and taxation of the same.
THIRD. Trade and occupation statutes: Those undertaking to safeguard the public interest under the police power of the state, and providing for certain qualifications, inspection and regulation of certain lines of business closely allied with the public welfare.
Numerous other lesser classes might be named, but these will be sufficient to indicate the general class of statutes that have been challenged and, too often, declared unconstitutional on the ground that they were in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution.
Shall this growing political power under the name of the Supreme Court of the United States go on unchallenged and uncontrolled as the guardian of our American democracy, and as a substitute for “We, the people,” not only in our Federal Government but even in our state and municipal governments?
Justice Hughes, of the Supreme Court of the United States, before the New York State Bar Association, on January fourteenth last, delivered an address in which he used the following language:
“If there were centered in Washington a single source of authority from which proceeded all the Governmental forces of the country — created and subject to change at its will — upon whose permission all legislative and administrative action depended throughout the length and breadth of the land, I think we should swiftly demand and set up a different system. If we did not have states we should speedily have to create them.”
This language is as simple as it is striking. However, there was little need for the learned justice to put the case hypothetically. The great mass of our people believe that there is today “a single source of authority from which proceed all the Governmental forces of the country — created and subject to change at its will — upon whose permission all legislative and administrative action depends.”
The Views of Lincoln and Jefferson
But they go farther than the learned justice and point their finger at the Supreme Court of the United States as that assumed “single source of authority.”
It is but fair to Justice Hughes to say that, during his six years as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States, he has been a frequent dissenter from the prevailing policy of the Supreme Court.
No state statute can be passed today without asking the question: Will the Supreme Court let it stand?
No city ordinance can be passed today without asking the question: Will the Supreme Court of the United States let it stand? But why have states at all if the states shall be mere shapes and shadows; if the states shall not be sovereign in state affairs; if the states must all the while anticipate the viewpoint and judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, and finally be forced to surrender to the court’s view and veto on public policies?
A judicial body was what was intended to be created by the Constitution of the United States; but, instead, we have a political body passing on political questions — not partisan ones — great questions of public policy affecting not only national interests but state and even municipal interests, all the while exercising over them the right to veto, the right to supervise, the right to modify, the right to destroy. And when the people once thoroughly wake up, will they not consider the suggestion of the learned justice to, “swiftly demand and set up a different system”?
Lincoln, on the battlefield of Gettysburg, in an immortal address closed with these words:
“That we here highly resolve … that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln placed the paramount power of the Government in the hands of the people, and forty-six of the forty-eight state constitutions have reaffirmed this doctrine by declaring: “All political power is inherent in the people.”
From time to time various reforms have been suggested to correct this growing evil, all the way from a constitutional amendment denying such power to the recall of judges, the recall of judicial decisions, and various other ways and means of correcting this use and abuse of the power.
Federal constitutional amendments are so difficult and tedious that this method is hardly worth considering. Only two amendments to the Federal Constitution have been adopted in the last fifty years.
The recall of judges and the recall of judicial decisions presuppose that the wrong has been done in a particular case and that an effort should be made to correct it by removing the judge, though his successor may be little if any better; or by recalling the decision, which would be difficult in its practical political operation.
The Ohio Remedy
Ohio has paved the way for a remedy by the states by adopting, in 1912, as part of its constitution the following provision — Article IV, Section 2:
“No law shall be held unconstitutional and void by the supreme court without the concurrence of at least all but one of the judges, except in the affirmance of a judgment of the court of appeals declaring a law unconstitutional and void.”
I do not commend the exception. It results in this anomaly: that if the state court of appeals by a vote of two to one holds the law unconstitutional, four of the supreme court judges may hold it unconstitutional; and if the court of appeals by a vote of two to one, or unanimously, holds the statute constitutional, then six of the seven judges are necessary to hold it unconstitutional. There should not be this discrimination. The exception should have been omitted from the constitution.
As a step in the right direction this constitutional provision of Ohio is generally approved by our people and has been found to work well as an effective and salutary restraint on the judiciary.
Though Ohio furnishes the suggestion of a remedy for the several states, this remedy is of little consequence where a Federal question is involved under the Fourteenth Amendment; for there the Supreme Court of the United States would take jurisdiction, and could, by a vote of five to four, or six to three, as has been quite common of late, hold the state statute dealing with state matters as unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court of the United States, in the exercise of the power to nullify a statute, state or Federal, on the ground that it is contrary to some provision of the Federal Constitution, has uniformly held that it must be “ clearly” so; and as a standard of clearness has again and again held that the conflict must be “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Now, how can the conflict between the statute and the Constitution be clear or be- yond a reasonable doubt when nine men, sitting as judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, presumably of equal integrity of mind and heart, equally patriotic, equally learned in the law and the Constitution, divide on the judgment of unconstitutionality by five to four or six to three?
When we deal with the criminal, no matter how atrocious or how overwhelming the evidence may be against him, he is presumed to be innocent; and before he is found guilty the twelve men in the jury box must find that guilt to a moral certainty or beyond a reasonable doubt. On that proposition all twelve must concur. On a matter affecting the millions of people of a state, and perhaps the hundred millions of a nation, the statute should not only be presumed constitutional — and this is the law — but, before that presumption can be overcome, should it not be by at least a three-fourths concurrence, or seven of the nine judges of the Supreme Court?
Melville Davisson Post, in an article in this weekly under date of December 18, 1915, uses this language with reference to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States:
“Out of seventy-seven consecutive decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States, twenty-nine were given by a vote of five to four, and forty-six by a vote of six to three; in only two instances did as many as seven out of the nine justices agree.”
On the ordinary legal question a mere majority must be sufficient for a judgment, else in many cases there could be no final judgment. But in cases involving public policies, as defined by state and Federal statute — cases involving questions of eminent domain, taxation, police power, and the like, which are inherent and sovereign in the domestic affairs of the state and the home-rule affairs of our municipalities, questions that are more of a political nature than legal — why should not at least a three-fourths vote be required by the Supreme Court of the United States on the fact of clear conflict, before the statute or ordinance should be nullified by the Supreme Court of the nation?
When the statute clearly permits what the Constitution clearly prohibits, or the statute clearly prohibits what the Constitution clearly permits, you then have, in such a situation, that clear conflict where both statute and Constitution cannot stand. Of course the statute should yield to the fundamental law — the Constitution.
But who shall be the judge as to such clear conflict? We have seen that, in England, Parliament alone determines this question — not the courts. In France it is the Senate and Chamber of Deputies — not the judges. And in every leading nation of the world, save the United States, it is likewise the legislative body that determines whether or not there is such clear conflict; and the action of such legislative bodies is final.
The courts of those nations have nothing whatever to do with the question. Their legislative bodies are representative bodies — at least, the controlling branch is elected directly by the people.
But here in the United States, for more than a century, the courts have exercised this power without warrant of the Constitution, but by authority of judicial custom and precedent, which the courts themselves have widened and extended; so that they are not only the Supreme Court but the supreme legislature, the supreme executive, the supreme government of the nation, the states and our municipalities.
How Congress Can Mend Matters
Now the thing that is proposed is not entirely to reverse this order, but to recognize and restrain it by applying the very principles and rules that the Supreme Court itself has for a century or more announced — this doctrine of clear conflict; this doctrine of a conflict beyond a reasonable doubt, which should be clear to more than a mere majority; else it is clearly not clear.
There is nothing radical or revolutionary about requiring more than a mere majority vote in unusual or exceptional procedure. Legislatures of state and nation, when they depart from the regular order in lawmaking, frequently require a two-thirds or three-fourths vote. Why should not the courts, when they depart from the regular order by law-unmaking, be required to do so by more than a mere majority vote — by a two-thirds or three-fourths vote?
In order that Congress may propose an amendment to our Federal Constitution it is expressly provided that two-thirds of both houses shall concur; and such proposed amendment cannot become a part of our Federal Constitution until three- fourths of the states have ratified the same by their legislatures or conventions.
Of course the adoption of a Federal Amendment to the Constitution limiting the power of our Federal courts in this behalf would be effective when accomplished; but the difficulties in the way of its accomplishment would be a repetition of the time and effort made in behalf of the amendment for the election of United States senators by a direct vote of the people, and for an income tax. And it is utter folly, under the enlarged jurisdiction asserted by the Supreme Court of the United States, on the Federal questions arising under the Fourteenth Amendment and other amendments, to attempt to cure this evil through state constitutions; for, as was said of old, “Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.”
So it can be truthfully said today that though the state courts have assumed jurisdiction to nullify legislative acts, the chief offender in this behalf, and from whom the state courts have found precedents more or less obligatory on them, has been the Supreme Court of the United States. Now, how can this limitation on the power of the Federal courts, touching constitutional questions, be brought about?
After a careful examination of the Federal Constitution I am persuaded that there is no need of a further amendment in order to authorize Congress to place a limitation on the Supreme Court of the United States on Constitutional questions. The power and authority are there now in the clearest and most unambiguous terms. It is found in the Federal Judicial Article III, Section 2, in this language:
“In all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
If now Congress should pass an act declaring that no state or Federal statute should be declared null and void, as contrary to public policy or contrary to any state constitution or the Federal Constitution, unless by the concurrence of a three-fourths vote of the Supreme Court of the United States, the evil would be very largely if not entirely remedied.
If this article shall have produced an interest in this subject, a discussion of the underlying principles of democracy, a consideration of the remarkable growth and evolution of this power of centralized government by the Supreme Court of the United States, and whether or not some practical and effective restraint is not highly and immediately essential to the preservation of our American system of government, then it will not have been in vain.
In the summer 1932, more than 17,000 American veterans marched on Washington, D.C., along with 26,000 family members and supporters, demanding payment of the bonuses promised in the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, or Bonus Act, of 1924.
The bonus, which was intended to make up the difference between what they were paid as soldiers and what they would have earned as civilians, entitled every veteran to $1 for each day of domestic service (up to $500) or $1.25 for each day of overseas service (up to $625). Veterans were issued certificates for these bonuses that totaled $3 billion in all, but there was a catch: The certificates couldn’t be redeemed until 1945.
Then the Great Depression hit. With the support of veterans’ groups, Congress, over the president’s veto, allowed veterans to borrow up to half the face value of their bonus certificates. But by 1932, veterans felt an urgent need for immediate full payment. So they marched on Washington to pressure Congress for an early disbursement.
The so-called Bonus Army crowded around the Capitol, camped out on public grounds, and built shantytowns on the banks of the Potomac River. In June, they presented their case to the House of Representatives, which soon voted for an early complete payment of the bonuses.
When the resolution moved to the Senate, though, it was defeated on June 17.
At this point, many veterans simply headed home. Other veterans stayed put, having very little reason to leave, and hoped President Hoover would help them.
On July 28, the Attorney General ordered the Washington police to remove the veterans from the capital. The veterans resisted; two were shot and killed by police. President Hoover, far from helping the remainder of the Bonus Army, ordered the current Army to complete the job. Commander Douglas MacArthur, disobeying orders, launched a full assault on the veterans. Cavalry and tanks backed up foot soldiers who drove the Bonus Army from their shanties, which were then burned.
Writing in the Post two months later, Al Smith, former governor of New York, blamed the summer’s calamity on the American Legion and the House of Representatives for encouraging the marchers in spite of the economic infeasibility of paying the bonuses early. But he names the overall politics that led to the Bonus Act and its various amendments and expansions as the larger perpetrator:
[blockquote]If left to the veterans themselves and to the officials of the Government who have to deal with it, there is no doubt that a just and equitable system of compensation and reward could be arrived at, but the unfortunate thing about it all is that it is bedeviled by politics. [/blockquote]
Smith believed it was irresponsible to offer benefits that the budget couldn’t afford. The politicians had used the veterans for their own purposes, and it would happen again.
Smith worried about the snowballing expense of veterans’ benefits. He estimated that, by 1945, the federal government will have spent $23.5 billion on veterans’ benefits. He couldn’t have known that amount would be dwarfed by the cost of caring for the next generation of veterans, from an even larger war.
Smith’s concerns remain a problem today. Between 2000 and 2011, aid to disabled veterans rose 166 percent, from $14.8 billion to $39.4 billion. The president’s 2017 budget includes more than $180 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, most of it dedicated to disability compensation and pensions.
In the 1930s, an economist predicted that the cost of armaments and lost production would soon make war too expensive to wage. That didn’t prove to be true. Perhaps the cost of caring for disabled veterans will eventually make war too expensive to be considered as a solution for international conflicts.
Veterans and Taxpayers
By Alfred E. Smith
Originally published on September 17, 1932
No questions in government are so difficult as those that give rise to emotions in the hearts of the people. Nobody will take the negative side of the question that the man who offers himself to the country in time of trouble should be rewarded. Nobody who remembers the returning American heroes who went to France to decide the war would be willing to subscribe to any theory that these soldiers should not receive from the hands of the American people the recognition for that service to which they are entitled. If left to the veterans themselves and to the officials of the Government who have to deal with it, there is no doubt that a just and equitable system of compensation and reward could be arrived at, but the unfortunate thing about it all is that it is bedeviled by politics.
It cannot be disputed that the recent gathering in Washington of veterans demanding the immediate payment of the bonus was certainly encouraged by the attitude of members of Congress. These men received the bulk of their encouragement from the fact that the House of Representatives, the popular branch of the National Legislature, that one which is closest to the people, actually did pass a bill for immediate payment of the bonus. Who can deny that politics entered there into an economic question? Public opinion throughout the country is absolutely right when it lays some part of the blame for what occurred in Washington upon the statesmen hi the Lower House who, by their votes, their speeches and their actions, lent encouragement to that gathering of the veterans. Though I dislike to say it, I feel it is true, also, that they did this in the face of the fact that they could not have believed that their action on the bill was to meet with final success.
The Growing Costs of War
Students of American history knew that when a large Army was being mobilized to strengthen the position of the United States in the World War, the American people for generations to come were incurring liabilities. That lesson was forcefully impressed upon the American people at the close of the Civil War, and the gradual increase every decade in appropriations for pensions revealed the activity of a group organized to exact as much as possible from the Government. Appropriations for Civil War pensioners, between 1880 and 1920, jumped from $55,000,000 to $203,000,000, and in 1930, after the passage of 65 years, the total cost of Civil War pensioners remained at the figure of $125,000,000. All this was brought about by a series of enactments extending veterans’ pensions and benefits, engineered through Congress by a powerful pension lobby.
Pension-Agent Activities
Bonus Marchers’ camp in Washington, D.C., 1932. Horydczak, Theodor, photographer. “Bonus veterans. Camp B.E.F.” 1932. Theodor Horydczak Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
There are times when newspaper cartoons more clearly depict the situation than do columns of reading matter, and while viewing the present situation with respect to veterans, my mind is carried back to a cartoon by Keppler in Puck.
The picture displays the pension agent auctioning off the soldier vote. The pension agent, with his arm around the veteran soldier, is offering him to the two political parties. The Democratic Party is represented on one side and the Republican Party on the other, and the pension agent exclaims: “What am I bid?”
At the time that cartoon was published, everybody knew exactly what that meant. It meant that the pension agent, who received a liberal commission for pensions which he was able to secure, was offering the soldier vote to the highest bidder of the two great political parties. There is within my own recollection a pension agent whose office was in my neighborhood. I remember people who sought him out and the thoroughly satisfactory income, which he appeared to be making from pressing their pension claims.
The United States was able to survive all the abuses that crept into the law as the result of the activity of organized pension agents, because of the phenomenal growth of the country and her industries and her population in the period that immediately followed the Civil War.
During the World War, President Wilson, a careful student of history, sought to protect the United States from the abuses that followed the Civil War by laying down a wise and farsighted plan for payments to soldiers. He began by obtaining a scale of payment for men in the service higher than anything ever paid before in this or in any other country. He established, as a further part of this program, the principle of full and complete care of those wounded or disabled during the war and those whose disabilities are traceable to the war, ‘full care and protection for widows and orphans of soldiers who lost their lives in the war, and a system of insurance for all veterans on a sound actuarial basis, with contributions by the Government and the veterans, so that, in 1917, Congress, desiring to avoid the abuses of our 100 years’ history of pensions, passed the war-risk insurance, disability and compensation act. This, as I have outlined, was planned to take care of veterans killed or injured in the line of duty, or their dependents, and to offer to all veterans term insurance upon an actuarial basis.
At the time that this program was put forth, it was accepted by the entire country, and the great army of American veterans subscribed to it 100 percent. In other countries it was regarded as the most generous plan of government cooperation in the pensioning and care of soldiers and their dependents ever offered in this or, for that matter, in any other Country. Within six years of the close of the World War, however, the bonus bill had been passed and hospitalization had been thrown open to veterans not disabled in line of duty.
When the Minority Rules
After the war, the organization of a formidable lobby not only brought about provision for Federal and state bonuses in addition to the other benefits, but the whole Wilson theory was scrapped by the large number of amendments to the veterans’ laws, all of which had for their purpose the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of veterans and their dependents, whose disabilities and other problems were not remotely connected with the war. It is a matter of fact, and can be proved — and let us hope that it will be — by the congressional committee charged with its investigation, that much of the huge sum now being paid is, in fact, given to men who never saw active service and to dependents of men who never had and never could have any legitimate claim on the Government.
Gradual changes in these laws have put the United States in the position of paying large sums every year to more than 400,000 veterans whose disabilities resulted from causes other than military or naval service. These figures have been issued by a group of veterans themselves, and have never been refuted. Undoubtedly they will form the basis for the congressional investigation, to take place in the fall, of all the statutes passed since the original Wilson plan was adopted by the country.
Now, it goes without saying that unless the rank and file of the American people, who must bear this burden through taxation, pay some attention to these statutes, organized groups will, from time to time, fasten new obligations upon the people, which will result in mounting costs, additional taxation and all the hardship growing from these. The return of prosperity by the encouragement of business and individuals to invest their money in commercial enterprises will thereby be the longer delayed.
It must be borne in mind that by no means all the veterans subscribe to this form of legislation. It is, in all human probability, the well-organized minority which has been successful in securing the enactment of these measures, which are entirely outside of the original program laid down, accepted by all, and adopted.
The real fact of the matter is that those in a position to know have made an unchallenged statement that 75 percent of the country’s veterans are not members of the American Legion and they may or may not agree with its views. This is in accordance with the history of the activity of the Grand Army of the Republic immediately following the Civil War. It presents another example of what can be accomplished in our country by the organization of a group, even though it may be a minority one. Nor is the American Legion the only active organization of veterans of the World War. There are a number of veterans’ organizations of the World War, to say nothing of those whose membership dates to other wars.
The Legion Falls in Line
Even the Legion as a whole, to do it justice, judging by the records of its conventions, came reluctantly to some of this program. At its first organization meeting in St. Louis, only a small minority favored a bonus payment to every soldier, and the plan was turned down. When a bonus resolution was introduced into the 1919 convention of the Legion, its action was reported as follows:
While the American Legion was not founded to promote legislation in its selfish interest, yet it recognizes that our Government has an obligation to all service men and women to relieve the financial disadvantages incidental to military service . . . but the Legion feels that it cannot ask for legislation in its selfish interest and leaves with confidence to Congress the discharge of this obligation.
It must have been the minority even in its own organization that finally forced it into action after the first bonus bill, entitled The Fourfold Adjusted Compensation Measure, was introduced in Congress. From that time on, through all its vicissitudes from 1920, through its postponement at President Harding’s request, and his veto of the bill when passed in 1922, until it was finally passed over President Coolidge’s veto in May, 1924, each successive Legion convention took a more and more decisive, positive and peremptory attitude.
This Adjusted Compensation Act was a compromise of the bonus idea. It gave extra compensation to every service man at the rate of a dollar for each day of home service and a dollar and a quarter for each day of overseas service. It limited the base amount to $500 for home service and $625 for overseas service. The money was to accumulate as an insurance fund for 20 years, the Government putting aside $112,000,000 a year to meet the total, which would be due in 20 years. The maximum amount due any one man would at that time be in the neighborhood of $1600. It was possible for veterans to borrow up to 22 percent of the full amount.
Agitating for Payment in Full
This compromise lasted for six years. Then came the business depression, and brought with it renewed demands to pay the full amount immediately and in full.
In February 1931, over President Hoover’s veto, a compromise was again made. It permitted veterans to borrow 50 percent of the face value of adjusted-compensation certificates. Nearly $1,500,000,000 has already been advanced in such loans, and the original purpose of using it as insurance has been defeated.
Nor was this enough. Agitation to pay all of it at once continued, and the President himself went to the last convention of the Legion at Detroit and succeeded in averting the demand temporarily. Still the Legion seemed to be ruled by indecision and was not unanimous. I quote an address made to the department commanders of the Legion at the end of 1931:
Now, on the so-called bonus legislation … some departments are for it, some are adamant against it, in some others a very close split. That is so right on throughout the Legion. Others cannot make up their minds as to what should be the proper procedure. … I do not think this Legion can afford to oppose the efforts of any group who are asking for the payment of the bonus, in full or in part.
At a very recent meeting of one of the Eastern departments of the Legion, resolutions were passed, from which I quote partially, which indicate that there is a growing consciousness in that organization of the situation and that they do not wish to be held responsible for all such abuses which they rightly say are often sponsored by other veteran organizations, “by politicians or by individuals, sentimental, thoughtless or self seeking.” In the resolution itself this department of the American Legion, to which I refer, “declares itself in favor of a return to the strict policy of liberal and just compensation to the actual dependents of those who lost their lives as a direct result of their war service, and compensation and care for those who were, in fact, disabled thereby; and declares itself opposed to all legislation giving special privileges, hospitalization and compensation to veterans or their dependents for death and disabilities not so incurred.”
Yet, in 1932, the bonus bill for full payment was passed in the House and defeated in the Senate. That is another evidence of the encouragement received by the bonus army in its advance on Washington. To cap the climax, President Hoover, on July 21, signed the bill, which broadens the power of veterans to borrow on their adjusted-service certificates and reduces the rate of interest charged by the Government on the money advanced. This will cost the Government an additional sum of $385,000,000, according to the Treasury statement.
How many people in the United States today have paid any attention to these various enactments as they have occurred since the time of President Harding up to the present? It is only when we run into a period of terrible depression and financial difficulty, when the burden of taxation means something to the people, that they begin to consider some of the things to which in the past they paid no attention whatever. In 1932 the people of the country have suddenly awakened to the burden placed upon them by additional taxation to meet the deficits in the Treasury of the United States, and are inquiring into the causes.
The Rising Tide of Relief Measures
In studying the Federal budget for 1933, let us pay some attention to the largest single item in it, which is for veterans’ relief. It amounted this year to $928,387,795, or approximately one-fourth of the total Federal appropriations for the conduct of the National Government in every detail. From the close of the war in 1918 to June 1931, more than $6,000,000,000 has been spent by the Federal Government in various forms of relief to veterans of the World War, their dependents and beneficiaries. State governments acting by themselves, either for hospitalization, special acts for relief of veterans or direct bonus, have spent more than $580,000,000 additional.
Statisticians have figured out that by 1945, only 13 years from date, the Government will have spent $23,500,000,000, even under existing relief commitments. It is noteworthy that this sum is practically equivalent to the total cost of this country’s actual participation in the war. Twenty years later, if Congress maintains the existing laws and should add the new laws, which are proposed by veterans’ organizations, the veterans will be costing the American people annually, not one-quarter of the present cost of the Federal Government but the whole of the cost of the present Government, which is close to $5,000,000,000.
There is probably no group in the United States today that would be more resentful of a dole system than would the American Legion and those veterans of the World War not members of it, but it is, nevertheless, the fact that the general tendency of all legislation changing the basis of veterans’ relief has had for its purpose diverting increasing amounts to men who suffered no disability due to war service. Veterans’ relief in this respect is certainly in danger of becoming a thinly disguised dole system. As a matter of fact, the United States spends in a single year nearly twice as much for veterans’ relief as the British Government spent in 11 years for its unemployment insurance — its so-called dole.
Unless and until all the facts are known, public men will be besieged on all sides by people who, for sentimental reasons, are with the soldiers without any understanding of what is sought to be done. I have had my personal experience. After I spoke about this situation in a nation-wide hook-up over the radio on May 16 of this year, I received a great many letters from well-meaning people finding fault with me for my attitude, and the general tenor of the letters was along the line that I was out of sympathy with the veterans and unwilling to be with the country in its attempt to take care of them. Of course, nothing could be farther from the fact. These letters came from people who, on the one hand, are finding fault with the cost of the Government and, on the other hand, finding fault with those who would point out injustice and inequalities and waste and extravagance because of the enactments fostered by an organized lobby and not approved even by the American Legion itself.
When Taxicabs Are War Risks
For instance, how many people know that under existing statutes a man who served for 90 days in an American cantonment and who never left this country, but received an honorable discharge at the close of the World War, if he was unable to pay income tax for a full year before he applies for relief, might be injured in a taxicab and, sustaining a permanent injury, become the beneficiary of a pension, ranging from $12 to $40 a month, during the rest of his natural life? One of the proposed enactments, passed in the House of Representatives, but defeated in the Senate, would grant a pension to the widow of a soldier whom she may have married any time after the war, upon his death from natural causes not traceable in any respect to his service to the country. He may also have been one who had never left the United States, but received an honorable discharge.
Headaches in the Pension Systems
In a recent publication, the example is cited of a former soldier who, for example, may get recurring headaches in 1923. He is told that if they can be traced to a wartime origin he can be paid for them. He then recalls that while unloading potatoes in training camp, a sack hit him on the head. He looks about for witnesses to support his story, and since the Government cannot prove that his headaches do not date from the potato-sack episode, he becomes the recipient of a monthly allowance.
The Disabled Emergency Officers’ Retirement Act, passed in 1928, awarded three-quarters retirement pay to civilians who were officers in the World War and who are now considered to be 30 percent permanently disabled because of their war service. Some 6000-odd emergency officers of this category are at the present time drawing an average of $139 a month. One of the ways this operates is shown in the case of a physician who receives a salary of $8000 from the Veterans’ Bureau. In view of his service as an emergency officer in the war, he requested a disability record. He was examined by the staff of the bureau, found partially disabled, and awarded $150 a month. Another doctor, earning $5000 a year as examining physician for the bureau, had himself examined, declared unfit for work and placed on the retired list; consequently, he gets, in addition to this salary, $125 a month.
I have not gone into the problems of preference to veterans in the civil-service laws of the nation and the various states, because I wish to deal here with the economic phase of the situation and the financial injustices brought about by these laws.
There is a vast difference in responsibility for the care of injured and disabled veterans who met with their disability in the war or who thereafter were rendered helpless or died from causes directly traceable to the war. They should be provided for to the limit of the country’s ability. Their dependents should also be cared for. It is an entirely different matter to pass out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to men — to say nothing of their dependents — who received no injury in the war, who saw no real service and who incurred no disability as a result of their enlistment under the colors of their country, pursuant to the call of the President.
It is, to say the least, a bit discouraging to the youth of the country to think that the high and idealistic patriotism spoken of during the time of the war is sought to be cashed in dollars and cents when the war is over by a small percentage of the people, who, in the height and glory of the situation calling for the defense of the flag and the principles for which it stands, were ready to take their place beside Nathan Hale, who regretted that he had only one life to give for his country.
When Leaders Are Misled
The distressing part of this whole thing is that it seems, to me, to be like a snowball going downhill. As it is encouraged, it gathers strength and momentum, and I am afraid that the public authorities in Washington have not heard the real facts from those in control. On the other hand, those agitating for these additional benefits have been encouraged by the attempt of the House of Representatives to make their pilgrimage to Washington successful. Every one of those who came to Washington with the bonus army must know of the present economic situation. Every one of them must have heard of the universal distress in all parts of the country; and certainly they would not, if their patriotism is genuine, desire to be made a favored class of the community to receive relief at the expense of countless millions just as unfortunate in their present position as they are. They were petitioning the Government, a fundamental American right.
The Government made no reply to the petition, as far as anybody is able to see, and, on the other hand, they were sufficiently encouraged to permit the situation to become so aggravated that the United States was compelled to assert its sovereignty by the force of arms.
In times of stress a great many well-meaning people — and they will be found particularly in the ranks of men willing to offer themselves to the Government in times of need — are ready victims of a false and misleading propaganda flowing from people who may not, deep in their hearts, have any great regard for the veteran himself, but who would seize upon such a gathering as the bonus marchers as an opportunity to give vent to some political doctrine contrary to the principles upon which this Government is founded. There is no doubt in my mind that many of the marchers who left the various big cities to camp in Washington were encouraged on their way by groups who had not themselves the desire or the courage to face the hardships.
It certainly must have encouraged the organized minority to have the economy bill suggested by the President — though only a drop in the bucket, with its possible saving of about 5 percent of the total veterans’ appropriations — entirely disregarded by the House of Representatives and immediately thereafter to find the House passing, without debate of any kind, a new bill to include “widows and children of deceased war veterans who die of a disability not acquired in the service.” This legislation, if adopted, would have added a further burden to the American people of $100,000,000 in the next five years, and more thereafter.
How many people in the United States today, paying these additional taxes, suffering silently because of their imposition, hidden and unforeseen victims of an impost on capital that prevents it from pouring its money into the channels of trade and increasing the chances for employment, really realize that the House of Representatives not only refused to relieve but voted to add to their burden?
Robbing the Just for the Unjust
I desire to have myself placed clearly and fairly on the record. I believe that unfair, unjust and inequitable payments to veterans who are not deserving tends to operate against the deserving veteran. It is impossible for any group to receive veterans’ benefits unjustly and unfairly without interfering with that group which is justly entitled to every single thing that this Government can do for them.
In my speech before the Jefferson Day dinner at Washington on April 13, this year, I made the definite suggestion that Congress should publicly air the whole question of veterans’ relief. I had in my mind not only economic but substantial justice to the deserving veteran as against a waste of public money to the organized group which succeeded in securing laws beneficial to those who were not entitled, by any stretch of the human imagination, to the money of the people of the United States.
Yet I deplore the published information that the investigation of the veterans’ laws by the joint congressional committee is to be delayed to a point where right and proper consideration cannot be given to it prior to the convening of Congress. It appears that the committee has notified at least one organization of veterans that it will not meet until the latter part of November, although it is to report to Congress on January 1, 1933.
Recently there has been organized a National Economy League, which is a nonpartisan citizens’ organization stating its general purpose: “To revive and restore the American principle that our Government shall truly be a Government for the benefit of the whole people — a Government of law and order economically administered for all the people, and not for the benefit or at the dictation of any special or sectional interest.” Though their immediate objective is to attempt to eliminate the abuses, which have crept into the administration of veterans’ laws generally, they state they desire, “to cooperate with other nonpartisan citizens’ organizations concerned with the reduction of governmental expenses and taxes.”
Veterans and Party Platforms
Their membership and their advisory board entitle them to the respectful consideration of thoughtful American citizens. I cite their advisory board because that should inspire confidence in the nonpartisanship and disinterestedness of the body. It contains Elihu Root, who, having been signally honored during his lifetime by the people of his own state, to say nothing of the Federal Government, must certainly be considered to speak for this country as a whole; Calvin Coolidge, honored by election to the presidency, must also be admitted to be able to speak for the country; Newton D. Baker, former Secretary of War, progressive, able and thoroughly acquainted with the problem from his personal experience in aiding with the drafting of the early legislation of President Wilson; Rear Admiral Sims and General Pershing, who must certainly have at heart the good of the men who served under them; I leave myself to the last because I am not actuated by any motive other than what is best for the whole country and all its people, including its veterans.
Another vital consideration at the present moment is where the two major parties stand with reference to this question. The Republican platform, citing the achievements of the Republican Party for the benefit of veterans and other dependents, ends the section dealing with the subject by saying:
Disability from causes subsequent and not attributable to war and the support of dependents of deceased veterans whose death is unconnected with war, have been to some measure accepted obligations of the nation as a part of the debt due.
A careful study should be made of existing veterans’ legislation with a view to eliminating inequalities and injustices and effecting all possible economies, but without departing from our purpose to provide on a sound basis full and adequate relief for our service-disabled men, their widows and orphans.
The Democratic platform is brief on the subject. It merely says:
We advocate the full measure of justice and generosity for all war veterans who have suffered disability or disease caused by or resulting from actual service in time of war, and for their dependents.
So much for the platforms. The American people have a right to know where the candidates stand. Let us have pretty plain talk — the American people are entitled to hear it. They should not only be afforded opportunity for study of what has happened in the past, and its relationship to the whole question of public money, but they are entitled to know what their candidates for high office intend to recommend with respect to the future.
There can be no mistake about the gratitude of the American people to the soldiers. Individual states, irrespective of Federal statutes, in the outpouring of their gratitude, incurred large bonded indebtedness for the purpose of showing the states’ individual gratitude to the soldiers who enlisted. In my own state of New York, the people themselves, by their own act, amended their Constitution so that they might bond the state for $45,000,000 to be distributed to the veterans of the World War who enlisted from the state of New York.
Nobody can question the feeling of the people generally for the veteran, but when the burden becomes so great that it oppresses everybody, these forms of gratuities and compensation that are not actually related to the disability or suffering as a result of the World War should be stricken out, and undoubtedly would not be found in the Federal statutes if it were not for the organized lobby.
Where Government Aid Belongs
It is also undoubtedly true that the veteran has a spirit of patriotism, and he must stand in the position of being entirely unwilling to have improper payments made for the benefit of less than 5 percent of the people of the United States when that relief must fall directly or indirectly upon 120,000,000 people through taxation.
I am satisfied that I reflect the opinion of a great majority of the veterans that they were fighting for a great principle when they offered themselves in defense of the flag of our country. They were striking at those who would question the sovereignty, the dignity and the majesty of the greatest republic in the world. They could not have had in their minds the fact that they were later to become favored charges upon the Government.
As to the men who were disabled, again I say, with emphasis: To those who were killed, to their relatives and their dependents and beneficiaries, the gratitude of the American people cannot even be expressed in dollars. For them, I say, everything; but, for those accidental beneficiaries of an organized lobby, it is time to call a halt.
I earnestly hope that a time will never come when the people of the United States will be lacking in expression of their gratitude to the men who offered themselves to the country in her time of trouble, but we must, of necessity, realize that this organized effort on the part of representatives of an organized group must cease when they go beyond the limits of justice, fair dealing and fair play to the rank and file of the American people who must foot the bills.
The year 1907 was a big one for immigration to the U.S. More than 1 million people immigrated to the U.S. that year, a record that wasn’t surpassed until 1990. And on April 17 alone, Ellis Island set a single-day record, processing 11,747 immigrants.
The growing immigrant population certainly hadn’t gone unnoticed. Earlier that year, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1907 to slow the influx of foreigners. It called for the barring from entry into the U.S. of “all idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons, … persons likely to become a public charge; … persons afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” and many other classes of migrants. This reflected a widespread belief that the worst problems of modern life — overcrowding, alcoholism, poverty, crime — were due to unassimilated foreigners.
So while the Statue of Liberty welcomed “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the American people and their representative government were more selective.
On the surface, the goals of this legislation seemed worthwhile: loosening congestion in the cities where new immigrants tended to congregate, lowering health risks from communicable diseases, and reducing reliance on public welfare. But buried within that legislation — couched in the language of economics, science, and pragmatism — was an ingrained racism that favored immigrants of certain nationalities. Though the racist undertones in the Immigration Act of 1907 itself were subtle, those in the arguments for the act’s necessity were not.
In the following article, originally printed in the Post on August 24, 1907, F.P. Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, noted that “during the last few years there has been a marked change for the worse in the character of the immigration into the United States. … two-thirds of the aliens admitted to our shores come from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia Minor.” These particular types of immigrants, he wrote, were “notably inferior” and “to a great extent afflicted with diseases of unpleasant kinds.” And not only would these undesirable immigrants pose an immediate threat to public welfare and local economies, but, as his argument goes, they will become “progenitors whose descendants will reproduce … the degeneracy of their forebears,” threatening the stability of future generations of Americans.
These arguments are remarkably parallel to much of the immigration-reform rhetoric we hear today; only the names have changed. Back then, legislators worried about the spread of “the dreaded Egyptian ophthalmia” (an inflammation of the eye); today, it’s AIDS and Ebola. Then, politicians warned about the “hideous and terrifying” influence of “the Black Hand (Italian mafia) and Anarchist societies”; today, they’re turning back Syrian refugees for fear of infiltration by ISIS and proposing walls to keep out Mexican “rapists and murderers.”
Passage of the Immigration Act of 1907 had immediate and long-term effects. It nearly halved the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. the following year. It also established the Dillingham Commission, which was charged with examining and reporting on the state of immigration and its consequences. The findings of that commission were used for decades to justify sweeping changes in immigration law, leading ultimately to a cap of 150,000 immigrants per year in 1929 and regulations that heavily favored those coming from northern and western European countries.
Undesirable Citizens
(An Authorized and Corrected Interview with the Hon. F.P. Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration)
By René Bache
Originally published August 24, 1907
The new Immigration Law (which went into effect from July 1 of the present year) represents an important step by our Government toward the cure of the mischief of unrestricted admission of aliens into this country. It opens the way to the adoption of means whereby in the future a better control may be exercised over the inflow of foreigners, sifting out the undesirables and establishing a system of selection which will clarify the stream by removal of the dregs.
It will be interesting, then, to consider, first, what the new law accomplishes, and, in the second place, what it naturally leads up to in the way of methods likely to be adopted for the restriction of immigration.
To begin with, it authorizes the President to summon a conference of the nations, for the purpose, first, of regulating, by agreement among themselves, all matters relating to emigration to the United States; second, to provide for the mental, moral, and physical examination of aliens bound for this country by American officers at foreign ports of embarkation; third, to prevent the departure of such aliens, if paupers, criminals, sufferers from dangerous diseases, or belonging to other prohibited classes.
Also, the law creates a commission of nine persons — three Senators, three Representatives, and three men appointed by the President — who are going to Europe for the purpose of making a systematic inquiry into the whole immigration problem, from a European standpoint as well as from an American point of view. This commission, of which Senator Dillingham, of Vermont, is Chairman, will present a report to Congress that will doubtless be productive of judicious legislation for remedying the evils now existing.
Where the Immigrant Goes
In addition, the law authorizes the Secretary of Commerce and Labor to establish a Division of Information, the object of which will be to gather facts relating to the resources, products, and physical characteristics of each State and Territory, and to publish them in many languages, for distribution among admitted aliens at the immigration stations — the idea in view being to encourage them to distribute themselves over the country, instead of settling down in already-congested centers of population. At the same time, it is provided that agents officially appointed by the States may have access to the immigrants, to exhibit to them such inducements as they have to offer.
Now, this matter of immigrant distribution is one of steadily increasing importance. So strong is the tendency of aliens to settle in congested centers that seven in every ten of them come to this country with the intention of establishing themselves in thickly populated districts. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Immigration is being importuned constantly by agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and railroad interests of thinly populated sections, and even by some of the States, for advice as to how part of the stream can be turned to localities where farmers, miners, and laborers are needed.
It is certainly most desirable that this should be accomplished, and the Government is strongly disposed to encourage a plan which has been suggested for creating direct communication by steamer lines between Southern ports and European ports.
Poor Physique as a Bane
The above-mentioned commission is likely to recommend that a competent medical officer, in the exclusive employ of the United States, be stationed at each one of the principal foreign ports of embarkation, whose duty it shall be to inspect every emigrant bound for the United States before the latter is permitted to go on board of the steamer which is to carry him to America. If it be required by law that no alien shall be admitted at any American port who cannot present a certificate of health, mental and physical, signed by such medical officer, large numbers of very undesirable citizens, freely admitted under present regulations, will be excluded.
No serious difficulty should be found in persuading foreign governments to cooperate with us in reducing the flow of immigration, and especially in preventing people of the inadmissible classes from leaving their homes to come to this country. It may be taken for granted, indeed, that they are quite as much interested as we can be in the welfare of their citizens. An immense amount of distress and suffering is caused by the sending of diseased or otherwise undesirable persons from European countries to the United States — the result in such cases being that the unfortunates are either refused transportation by the steamship companies, or else are turned back after they reach America. Meanwhile, they may have sacrificed every dollar they possessed to make the journey, only to find themselves stranded and destitute in a foreign seaport.
A significant feature of recent immigration is the vast number of persons who on arrival have been described by the examining surgeons at our ports as of “poor physique.” A certificate of this kind implies that the alien is afflicted with a body not only ill-adapted to the work necessary to earn his bread, but also unfit to withstand disease. It means that he is undersized, poorly developed, with feeble heart action — in short, that he is physically degenerate; not only unlikely to become a useful citizen, but liable to transmit his feebleness to his offspring.
Of all causes for rejection, outside of diseases, that of “poor physique” should receive the most weight; for in admitting such aliens not only do we increase the number of public charges directly, but we welcome to our shores progenitors whose descendants will reproduce, often in an exaggerated degree, the degeneracy of their forebears.
The influx of aliens into this country now averages about 100,000 a month the year round. It used to be imagined that the supply would exhaust itself eventually, but there seems to be no prospect of anything of the kind. If good times continue, the flow is likely to go on steadily. On the other hand, if an industrial depression in the United States should arrive, there would be a marked diminution of the volume of the stream, the recent augmentation of which, however undesirable from some points of view, is the best possible evidence of our prosperity. Immigration is stimulated by the demand for labor more than by any other single cause.
Drawing from the Lower Grades
Unfortunately, during the last few years there has been a marked change for the worse in the character of the immigration into the United States. Until recently, the inflow was composed mainly of English, Irish, Scotch, Scandinavians, and Germans — people whose race characteristics and ideals in the main agree with our own, and whom, therefore, we could assimilate racially and politically. But, at the present time, two-thirds of the aliens admitted to our shores come from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia Minor. One in every five is from southern Italy. Germans comprise less than 8 percent of the whole; English, Scotch, and Irish combined are fewer than 10 percent.
Furthermore, the immigration which formerly came to us was largely what might be termed a natural immigration. It was the result of an impelling ambition in the minds of freedom-loving people to avail themselves of the opportunities afforded by a new, thinly-populated, and free country. Many of the present-day immigrants doubtless leave their homes from like motives; but, to a great extent, the movement is the result of a general unrest that exists among the laboring classes of southern and eastern Europe, and which is encouraged by the agents of the transportation companies scouring every possible locality for passengers.
Physically, as well as in other respects, these people of the new immigration are notably inferior to those of the old. They are to a great extent afflicted with diseases of unpleasant kinds, which, though common to the masses in the countries from which they come, are as yet almost unknown in the United States. It is unlikely that we shall remain unacquainted with the maladies in question much longer, however, inasmuch as aliens in large numbers are bringing them over; and already one of them, the dreaded Egyptian ophthalmia — known to physicians as “trachoma” — has spread alarmingly in the public schools of New York City.
The Trail of Trachoma
Trachoma is one of the most frightful of eye diseases, and exceedingly contagious. So widely does it prevail in the south of Europe that at the port of Naples, where our Government maintains a medical officer to examine embarking emigrants bound for the United States, 20,000 such emigrants were rejected on this account during the last year. For fear of this complaint, no family in southern Europe which can afford to pay for tuition will send its children to a public school. Should it become general in large cities of this country — and it is said that our climate favors its spread — it would almost destroy the value of the public-school system.
One feature of the new law is the exclusion of alien children under 16, when unaccompanied by parents. Hitherto they have been admitted, unless, in the judgment of our officials, there was some special reason for shutting them out in particular cases. The importance of the fresh departure in this regard lies in the discouragement it will give to the “padrone” system, under which large numbers of young boys, mostly Greeks and Italians, have been brought to this country and farmed out to sell flowers or newspapers on the streets, to work in factories and shops, or to do other kinds of labor. Through contracts made with the fathers of the children for a percentage of their earnings, the padrones hold them in literal slavery. They own the boys outright during the term of the agreement, pay them nothing, and give them barely enough to eat. In any of our large cities such boy slaves may be found today, toiling in bootblacking establishments, or engaged in other occupations.
It is likely that the total volume of immigration would not be more than half as great as it is but for the activity of the transportation companies in their hunt for human freight. Each steamship line maintains general agencies at important points, and these appoint sub-agents, who, in turn, enlist the services of all sorts of people to drum up trade. The companies themselves disclaim all connection with anybody except their general agents, and profess to know nothing of the efforts put forth to induce people to emigrate. As the system works, however, the movement is stimulated in every possible way, and the most remote agricultural valleys in northern, central and southern Europe are invaded by emigration missionaries and showered with advertising matter describing the opportunities offered by the New World.
Emigration as a Business
If the steamship lines waited for such business as would come to them naturally, thousands of people who start for America would never receive the initiative push necessary to dislodge them from their natural environment. But the business of persuading them to go is thoroughly and elaborately organized. The chief evil is the “runner,” who, in these days, is busily going about in eastern and southern Europe, from city to city, and from village to village, telling fairy-tales about the prosperity of immigrants in America and the opportunities offered in the United States to aliens. He claims to be all-powerful, and to have representatives in every port who can open the door of America to anyone.
The steamship agents look upon every emigrant from eastern Europe as one who must go to the United States, whether he wishes to do so or not. Such emigrants, passing through Germany, for example, are considered the legitimate prey of the German steamship companies and their agents. The agent sees very little commission in the sale of a ticket for London. If the emigrant insists that London is the place he wants to go to, he is told that he is a liar. He is an “American” — the technical term applied to all emigrants bound for the United States — and he must buy a ticket for America.
Accordingly, he is taken by a policeman to the emigration station, and is catechized about as follows:
Agent: “Where are you bound for?”
Emigrant: “To England.”
Agent: “How much money have you?”
Emigrant: “How is that your business?”
Policeman: “Don’t talk back! Show all the money you have. If you don’t, I will at once take you back to Russia, and hand you over to the authorities.”
Whereupon, the unfortunate emigrant takes out all the money he has from the various places where he keeps it concealed. The steamship agent counts it in the presence of the policeman, and then deducts the price of transportation, fourth class, to Hamburg or Bremen, and a steerage ticket to New York. What remains he returns to the emigrant, who is not allowed to ask any more questions.
At the present time certain foreign countries appear to be actively engaged in encouraging emigration to the United States. Having made futile attempts to check an exodus which threatens seriously to impair their economic prosperity, they are trying to minimize the evil, and even to turn it to their advantage if possible. With a view to this end, all the political, social, and occasionally religious resources of the countries in question are directed to maintaining colonies of their own people in the United States, instructing them to continue their allegiance to the countries of their birth, to transmit the money they earn here back to their native land, and to avoid all intercourse with the people of this country that would tend to the permanent adoption of American ideals. Agents are actually sent over to keep the colonists together, and to prevent them from imbibing a knowledge of and affection for the institutions of the United States.
The Cost to the Cities
To illustrate some of the disadvantages of our present method of handling the immigration problem, we may point to the enormous expenditures in our large cities for the support of indigent aliens; the records of the lesser criminal and police courts; the roster of our public hospitals, jails, asylums, and reformatory institutions; the gorged habitations of aliens in our cities; the struggle for bare existence in sweat-shops; the formation of large colonies of people wholly alien to American civilization in language, thought, aspiration, and life; and, finally, the introduction into this free country of such hideous and terrifying fruits of long-continued oppression as the Black Hand and Anarchist societies.
Among the means suggested for diminishing the flow of immigration is the enlargement of the prohibited classes by adding those who cannot read or write, and those whom age or feebleness renders incapable, wholly or partly, of self-support. As for the matter of illiteracy, it must be remembered that, while this disadvantage does not of itself necessarily render an alien undesirable, yet statistics show that much of the immigration that is undesirable on other grounds consists of persons who are illiterate. From southern Italy, for example, comes much of our least desirable immigration, and among those people, 48 out of every 100 can neither write nor read.
It is further suggested that, as an ultimate resort, a ratio might be established apportioning the number of alien passengers to the tonnage of vessels, so as to reduce the number of immigrants carried. This ratio could be altered from time to time as Congress saw fit, controlling the inflow absolutely. But all of these ideas and many others will be duly considered by the new Immigration Commission, and it will remain for the national legislative body considering its report to decide in its wisdom just what measures shall be adopted for the restriction of evils which, at the present time, are undeniably a serious menace to the future prosperity and welfare of our country.
As power shuts down, there is darkness and the sudden loss of electrical conveniences. As batteries lose power, there is the more gradual failure of cellphones, portable radios, and flashlights.
Emergency generators provide pockets of light and power, but there is little running water anywhere. In cities with water towers on the roofs of high-rise buildings, gravity keeps the flow going for two, perhaps three days. When this runs out, taps go dry; toilets no longer flush. Emergency supplies of bottled water are too scarce to use for anything but drinking, and there is nowhere to replenish the supply. Disposal of human waste becomes a critical issue within days.
Supermarket and pharmacy shelves are empty in a matter of hours. The city has flooded the streets with police to preserve calm, to maintain order, but the police themselves lack critical information. There is a growing awareness that this power outage extends far beyond any particular city and its suburbs. It may extend over several states. Tens of millions of people appear affected. The assumption that the city, the state, or even the federal government has the plans and the wherewithal to handle this particular crisis is being replaced by the terrible sense that people are increasingly on their own. When that awareness takes hold, it leads to a contagion of panic and chaos.
Preparing for doomsday has its own rich history in this country, and predictions of the apocalypse are hardly new. We lived for decades with the assumption that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real possibility. Ultimately, Moscow and Washington came to the conclusion that mutual assured destruction, holding each other hostage to the fear of nuclear reprisal, was a healthier approach to coexistence than mass evacuation or hunkering down in our respective warrens of bomb shelters in the hopes of surviving a nuclear winter.
We are living in different times. Whether the threat of nuclear war has actually receded or we’ve simply become inured to a condition we cannot change, most of us have finally learned “to stop worrying and love the bomb.” In reality, though, the ranks of our enemies, those who would and can inflict serious damage on America, have grown and diversified. So many of our transactions are now conducted in cyberspace that we have developed dependencies we could not even have imagined a generation ago. To be dependent is to be vulnerable. We have grown cheerfully dependent on the benefits of our online transactions, even as we observe the growth of cyber crime. We remain largely oblivious to the potential catastrophe of a well-targeted cyberattack.
On one level, cyber crime is now so commonplace that we have already absorbed it into the catalogue of daily outrages that we observe, briefly register, and ultimately ignore. Over the course of less than a generation, cyber criminals have become adept at using the Internet for robbery on an almost unimaginable scale. Still, despite the media attention generated by the more dazzling smash-and-grab operations, the cyber criminals whose only intention is to siphon off wealth or hijack several million credit card identities should have a lower priority among our concerns. Their goal is merely grand larceny.
More worrisome is the increasing number of cyberattacks designed to vacuum up enormous quantities of data in what appear to be wholesale intelligence-gathering operations. The most ambitious of these was announced on June 4, 2015, and targeted the Office of Personnel Management, which handles government security clearances and federal employee records. The New York Times quoted J. David Cox Sr., the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, as saying the breach might have affected “all 2.1 million current federal employees and an additional 2 million federal retirees and former employees.” FBI director James Comey told a Senate hearing that the actual number of hacked files was likely more than 10 times that number — 22.1 million. Government sources were quoted as claiming that the intrusion originated in China. The Times report raises a number of relevant issues: The probe was initiated at the end of 2014. It wasn’t discovered until April of 2015. It is believed to have originated in China, but the Chinese government has denied the charge, challenging U.S. authorities to provide evidence. Producing evidence would reveal highly classified sources and methods. “The most sophisticated attacks,” the Times noted, “often look as if they were initiated inside the United States, and tracking their true paths can lead down many blind paths.” All of these issues will receive further attention in later chapters. But as disturbing as these massive data-collection operations may be, even they do not come close to representing the greatest cyber threat. Our attention needs to be focused on those who intend widespread destruction.
The Internet provides instant, often anonymous, access to the operations that enable our critical infrastructure systems to function safely and efficiently. In early March 2015, the Government Accountability Office issued a report warning that the air traffic control system is vulnerable to cyberattack. This, the report concluded with commendable understatement, “could disrupt air traffic control operations.” Our rail system, our communications networks, and our healthcare system are similarly vulnerable. If, however, an adversary of this country has as its goal inflicting maximum damage and pain on the largest number of Americans, there may not be a more productive target than one of our electric power grids.
Electricity is what keeps our society tethered to modern times. There are three power grids that generate and distribute electricity throughout the United States, and taking down all or any part of a grid would scatter millions of Americans in a desperate search for light, while those unable to travel would tumble back into something approximating the mid-19th century. The very structure that keeps electricity flowing throughout the United States depends absolutely on computerized systems designed to maintain perfect balance between supply and demand. Maintaining that balance is not an accounting measure, it is an operational imperative. The point needs to be restated: For the grid to remain fully operational, the supply and demand of electricity have to be kept in perfect balance. It is the Internet that provides the instant access to the computerized systems that maintain that equilibrium. If a sophisticated hacker gained access to one of those systems and succeeded in throwing that precarious balance out of kilter, the consequences would be devastating. We can take limited comfort in the knowledge that such an attack would require painstaking preparation and a highly sophisticated understanding of how the system works and where its vulnerabilities lie. Less reassuring is the knowledge that several nations already have that expertise, and — even more unsettling — that criminal and terrorist organizations are in the process of acquiring it. Our media report daily on increasingly bold and costly acts of online piracy that are already costing the U.S. economy countless billions of dollars a year. Cyberattacks as instruments of national policy, though, tend to be less visible because neither the target nor the attacker is inclined to publicize the event.
America unplugged: “There are three power grids that generate and distribute electricity throughout the United States, and taking down all or any part of a grid would scatter millions of Americans in a desperate search for light. NASA/Shutterstock
History often provides a lens through which irony comes into focus. The United States, for example, was the first and only nation to have used an atomic weapon, and it has spent the intervening decades trying to limit nuclear proliferation. And the United States, in collaboration with Israel, mounted a hugely successful cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program in 2008 and now finds itself dealing with the consequences of having been the first to use a digital weapon as an instrument of policy. Iran wasted little time in launching what appeared to be a retaliatory cyberattack, choosing to target Aramco in Saudi Arabia, destroying 30,000 of its computers. Why the Saudi oil giant instead of an American or Israeli target? We can only speculate. Iran may have wanted to issue a warning, demonstrating some of its own cyber capabilities without directly engaging the more dangerous Americans or Israelis. In any event, Iran made its point, and a new style of warfare has, within a matter of only a few years, become commonplace. Russia, China, and Iran, among others, continue on an almost daily basis to demonstrate a range of cyber capabilities in espionage, denial-of-service attacks, and the planting of digital time bombs capable of inflicting widespread damage on a U.S. power grid or other piece of critical infrastructure.
For several reasons, the clear logic of a swift attack and response that enables a policy of deterrence between nuclear rivals does not yet exist in the world of cyber warfare. For one, cyberattacks can be launched or activated from anywhere in the world. The point at which a command originates is often deliberately disguised so that its electronic instruction appears to be coming from a point several iterations removed from its actual location. It is difficult to retaliate against an aggressor with no return address. Nation-states may be inhibited by the prospect of ultimately being unmasked, but it is not easily or instantly accomplished. For another, the list of capable cyberattackers is far more numerous than the current list of the world’s nuclear powers. We literally have no count of how many groups or even individuals are capable of launching truly damaging attacks on our electric power grids — some, perhaps even most of them, uninhibited by the threat of retaliation.
There is scant consolation to be found in the fact that a major attack on the grid hasn’t happened yet. Modified attacks on government, banking, commercial, and infrastructure targets are already occurring daily, and while sufficient motive to take out an electric power grid may be lacking for the moment, capability is not. As the ranks of capable actors grow, the bar for cyber aggression is lowered. The unintended consequences of Internet dependency are already piling up. Prudence suggests that we at least consider the possibility of a cyberattack against the grid, the consequences of which would be so devastating that no administration could consider it anything less than an act of war.
Ours has become a largely reactive culture. We are disinclined to anticipate disaster, let alone prepare for it. We wait for bad things to happen and then we assign blame. Despite mounting evidence of cyber crime and cyber sabotage, there appears to be widespread confidence that each can be contained before it inflicts unacceptable damage. The notion that some entity has either the ability or the motive to launch a sophisticated cyberattack against our nation’s infrastructure, and in particular against our electric power grids, exists, if at all, on the outer fringes of public consciousness. It is true that unless and until it happens, there is no proof that it can; for now, what we are left with, for better or worse, is the testimony of experts. There will be more than a few who take issue with the conclusions of this reporter that the grid is at risk. But the book from which this article is taken reflects the assessment of those in the military and intelligence communities and the academic, industrial, and civic authorities who brought me to the conclusion that it is.
Widespread recognition of the vulnerability of our power grids already exists. Lots of smart people are already offering partial remedies and grappling with solutions. But there is not yet widespread recognition that we have entered a new age in which we are profoundly vulnerable in ways that we have never known before, and so there is neither a sense of national alarm nor the leadership to take us where we need to go. Our national leaders are in a precarious place. They recognize the scale of danger that a successful cyberattack represents. However, portraying it too graphically without having developed practical solutions runs the obvious risk of simply provoking public hysteria.
The clear logic of a swift attack and response that enables a policy of deterrence between nuclear rivals does not yet exist in the world of cyber warfare.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in an atmosphere of national trauma. The world’s greatest superpower was made to realize its vulnerability to a handful of men armed with box cutters. We remain distracted to this day by the prospects of retail terrorism when we should be focused on the wholesale threat of cyber catastrophe. In such an event, the Department of Homeland Security would be working with industry to help them restore and maintain service. It should be focused on developing a more robust survival and recovery program for the general public; but DHS has neither the capacity to defend our national infrastructure against cyberattack nor the wherewithal with which to retaliate. A criminal attack would be the responsibility of the FBI; an attack on infrastructure by a nation-state or a terrorist entity would become the immediate responsibility of the Defense Department. Anticipating and tracking external cyber threats to U.S. infrastructure should be, by virtue of capability if nothing else, the responsibility of the NSA.
Limits that were established in a different era still exist on paper, but they are eroding in practice. The CIA is precluded, by law, from operating within the United States, but maintaining national boundaries in cyberspace may be impossible. Cyber Command is a military operation tasked with organizing the defense of U.S. military networks. The extent to which it can participate in the defense of critical infrastructure within the United States remains murky, but sidelining critical U.S. defense capabilities because we haven’t quite adapted to the notion that a major cyberattack can be as devastating as an invasion makes no sense.
The imposition of order, the distribution of essential supplies, the establishment of shelters for the most vulnerable, the potential management of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of domestic refugees will be complex enough if the general public knows what to expect and what to do. In the absence of any targeted preparation, in the absence of any serious civil defense campaign that acknowledges the likelihood of such an attack, predictable disorder will be compounded by a profound lack of information. It would be the ultimate irony if the most connected, the most media-saturated population in history failed to disseminate the most elementary survival plan until the power was out and it no longer had the capacity to do so.
There is, as yet, no real sense of alarm attached to the prospect of cyber war. The initial probes — into our banks and credit card companies, into newspapers and government agencies — have tended to leave us unmoved. Past experience in preparing for the unexpected teaches us that, more often than not, we get it wrong. It also teaches that there is value in the act of searching for answers. Acknowledging ignorance is often the first step toward finding a solution. The next step entails identifying the problem.
Here it is: For the first time in the history of warfare, governments need to worry about force projection by individual laptop. Those charged with restoring the nation after such an attack will have to come to terms with the notion that the Internet, among its many, many virtues, is also a weapon of mass destruction.
The views expressed here do not represent the opinions of The Saturday Evening Post.
Dear Reader: In an election year, one hears many disparate views. But no politician would dare challenge the most sacred tenet of our belief system, namely that American is the greatest nation on Earth. For that, you need to go back to outspoken midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, best known for having the Serenity Prayer adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. The following is his essay published in the Post on November 16, 1963:
America the Smug
By Reinhold Niebuhr
Perhaps our gravest fault as a nation is our exalted sense of American virtue. We see the United States as something unique in the world, a nation whose concerns soar above petty national ambitions, whose generosity and goodwill are unequaled. God, we assume, is invariably on our side, thanks to a special covenant with the Almighty.
In one of his books, Sen. Barry Goldwater ^v e voice to this feeling. “We are the bearers of Western civilization, the most noble product of the heart and mind of man. . . .” he said. “Providence has imposed upon us the task of leading the free world’s fight to stay free.” The Republican presidential contender was expressing not merely his own patriotism but also a notion deeply rooted in our history and national character.
This sense of special virtue—with its dear implication that disagreement with us is tantamount to godlessness—offends our allies and affronts the weaker peoples of the world. It tends to obscure the fact that we are actually a normal country, normally seeking our own interests. And it greatly impedes our legitimate and worthwhile endeavors as the world’s most powerful nation.
The news of the day illustrates our moral pretensions and their consequences. When India, for example, asked our help in building a desperately needed steel mill, strong opposition arose in Congress. The mill, congressmen complained, was to be owned by the Indian government, and our aid. therefore, would serve to encourage socialism. The congressmen gave no weight to the Indian feeling that a measure of socialism is beneficial, given India’s problems. In effect, the congressmen were saying that no matter how desperate the need, the Indians would have to follow the American economic pattern or do without its aid. The Indians chose to do without. Tactfully they withdrew their request. And the future prosperity of the Indian economy which is important to the free world, was correspondingly impaired.
Or consider our relations with the new Europe. In the years following World War II the United States stood as the sole protector of Western Europe against the Soviet threat. The Europeans then were weak and could not defend themselves. Today, thanks in part to U.S. assistance. Western Europe is strong and vigorous. It not only is able to assume a larger share of its own defense costs but wants to make its own defense decisions. To the United States, the idea is unthinkable. We have grown so accustomed to dominance in European affairs that we cannot bear to relinquish the role. We fume at our “uncooperative” allies. We paint General de Gaulle, who embodies the new European spirit of independence, as something close to sinister. To a large degree our reaction stems simply from violated self esteem.
We were born with a sense of having a virtuous mission. Thomas Jefferson expressed it succinctly and admirably: “We exist and are quoted as standing proofs that a government, modeled to rest continually on the whole of society, is a practical government. As members of the universal society of mankind, and as standing high in our responsibility to them, it is our sacred duty not to blast the confidence that a government based in reason is better than one of force.” These sentiments, a typical expression of 18thcentury liberal idealism, claimed more democratic uniqueness for our Government than it possessed. For the nations of Western Europe—including Britain, whose government we had mistakenly defined as an absolute monarchy—were slowly developing democratic institutions and changing into constitutional monarchies. Certainly this exaggeration was excusable in Jefferson’s day. America was a weak infant, and to keep its self-esteem in a world of old and powerful empires, it had to believe that it was new, different and better than any other country ever founded. Jefferson the idealist was enough of a realist, however, to see the potential national domain in the wide open spaces of our virtually uninhabited continent. He engineered the purchase of the Louisiana territory from Napoleon and prompted the Lewis and Clark exploration of the northwest. Nor did Jefferson’s idealism in any way cloud his practical sense of power. “We must marry ourselves,” he said, “to the British fleet and nation.” Already self-interest and virtue were thoroughly entangled in our national character.
The normal expansive impulses of a young nation and the land hunger of our pioneers began to press against all the vestigial European sovereignties on this continent. We risked war with Britain for the sake of Oregon and had a war with Mexico for the sake of Texas. Significantly, we veiled this expansive impulse under the concept of “Manifest Destiny.” “It is our Manifest Destiny,” said the diplomat John Louis O’Sullivan in 1845, “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Our sense of virtue, in short, was both a spur and a veil for our sense of expanding power. Thus early in the 19th century we laid the foundation for a confusion about the relation of our power to our virtue. We have never quite overcome that confusion. It still troubles us in the days of our great power, and lies at the base of what the English scholar Denis Brogan has denned as “the illusion of American omnipotence.”
The real conflict between our sense of virtue, power and responsibilities on the one hand, and our normal concern for the national interest on the other, did not begin until the First World War. The war was our first encounter with the forces which were to lead us to the pinnacle of global responsibility. The encounter, fittingly, occurred under the last of our Jeffersonian idealists, Woodrow Wilson, who thought that America was “the most unselfish of the nations,” and was elected for a second term with the slogan “He kept us out of the war.” Idealism, however, had little to do with our entry into the war. Rather, it was in our national interest that Britain keep her influence in Europe; our peace depended on the power of the British navy. The nation was only dimly conscious of this fact, and Wilson never explicitly acknowledged it. Once embarked on the war, he defined it idealistically as a war “to make the world safe for democracy.” His most cherished object was the League of Nations.
America reacted to this first venture in world politics in almost neurotic proportions. The idealists were naturally affronted with the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles. The nationalists scorned the peace and the League because our national interests were not sufficiently protected. The period between the two world wars proved only to be a long armistice; and in the long “interventionist” debate our nation tried desperately to escape its obvious role in the world and to crawl back into the now impossible continental security. The nationalists and the idealists formed a coalition against involvement so strong that we might not have made the plunge into World War II had the Japanese not made the decision for us by attacking Pearl Harbor.
During the interventionist debate í was a member of a committee advocating an affirmative responsibility toward the war in Europe, The very name of the committee was an indication of our moral ambivalence. It was the ‘Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.’ The very name of the committee would have outraged Woodrow Wilson; but it was shrewdly designed to avoid his too consistent idealism. Many Americans were not willing to admit that the Nazis had to be defeated at whatever cost, because both the national interest and a human value were at stake.
The Second World War raised the old tension in our national soul—between our senses of virtue, power and responsibility—to a global dimension. For we emerged from the war the strongest democratic nation. The war had increased our productive capacity and had impoverished Europe. We were cured of our old nostalgia for innocence at the price of irresponsibility; the very degree of our power made our responsibilities all too clear. In 1946, American mothers were pleading to “bring the boys home by Christmas,” a sentiment that resulted in our leaving our potential foes, the Russians, in possession of much of a defeated and devastated Europe. But by 1948 we were engaged in the Marshall Plan, and our wealth and power were turned to European reconstruction. We had learned our lesson. A powerful and wealthy nation must assume responsibilities commensurate with its power and wealth.
But the old problem of virtue and power assailed us in a new way. We claimed a unique virtue for a policy which actually was an act of wise self-interest. We almost spoiled the virtue of our prudence by remarks such as that of the politician who crowed, “The Marshall Plan was the most generous act ever undertaken by any nation.” That claim prompted derision even among our allies and friends in Europe. The Marshall Plan was not generous but prudent. It saved the European continent for democracy, when all of its wealth, skills and talents were imperiled, and when their loss would have meant our isolation.
The fact is that a nation with a sense of virtuous mission finds it difficult to understand that the moral norm for nations, as distinct from individuals, is not generosity but a wise self-interest— a self-interest that lies somewhere between the parochial and the general interest. Since the Marshall Plan we have wisely sought to help the nations of Africa and Asia up the steep path to modern industrialism and consequent freedom from age old poverty. Our foreign aid program does not exceed one percent of our gross national product and is only a tenth of our total defense budget. Yet it is an unpopular part of our budget, perhaps because there is no bloc of voters to defend it. We constantly worry that we may have become “too generous,” letting the designing nations of Europe and the world take advantage of our pure hearts. However, we are dealing here with moral realities, and moral realities do not fit neatly into the usual moral categories of “unselfishness” and “generosity.” Foreign aid involves relations in which our interests are inextricably intertwined in a whole web of mutual interests.
Many circumstances, in fact, make it difficult for us to view our responsibilities soberly, without undue pretensions of unique virtue. Our living standards, for example, arc twice those of the more advanced nations of Europe and are beyond the dreams of avarice of the Asian and African continents. Further complicating the problem of keeping our national self-esteem in sober bounds is our outrage over the “ingratitude” of widespread anti-Americanism. Some of this anti-Americanism is prompted by envy. Some of it, as in the case of Gaullist France, may be prompted by aspirations to national glory. Some of it is also due to the fact that no human agent is ever as wise or as disinterested as he thinks he is. Criticisms will be directed at us because of our errors and because of our achievements.
Since we are bound to occupy the eminence of world hegemony for a long time (if the uneasy peace of a “balance of terror” does not make an end of us and our civilization in a nuclear catastrophe). We must be prepared to exercise our power with more soberness than our original sense of virtue inclines us to. We have become one of the two “super nations” in the modem world; and the only one of the two which must deal with the great and small allies in the spirit of free accommodation of competing interests. We must be prepared to be unpopular, even if our decisions in crucial issues are right, and to accept unpopularity because our decisions may be wrong. For we are not as omniscient as we seem to be in the day of our seeming omnipotence, and certainly not as virtuous as our whole tradition has persuaded us that we are.
An end to arrogance
One of our chief problems will be to avoid what has been called the “unconscious arrogance of conscious power” as we deal particularly with our great allies, many of them in Europe. Their greatness cannot be diminished by the new magnitudes of modern “super nations,” and their memories of past glories and experience of present frustrations are bound to lead to jealousies.
The moral problems of our national life are so complex that they cannot be understood by the simple categories of good and evil—of “selfishness” and “unselfishness”—which individuals recognize. It is ironic, in view of our early passion for displaying the purity of our virtue, that today the responsibilities of our role should include the mounting of a nuclear deterrent, thus involving us in the proleptic guilt of a nuclear catastrophe. The moral ambiguity of the political order, which we have desperately tried to veil or to ignore, has been raised to the nth degree in our experience of power and responsibility.
Our best chance of avoiding the moral pretension that besets us is to analyze the circumstances that have brought us to this perilous condition. Two points are especially significant. First, it is our power, not our unselfish virtue, that makes the survival of Western civilization depend upon our own survival. Second, the degree of our power is not the fruit of the virtue of our own generation—the generation that wields the power. We are strong because many “gifts of Providence” have contributed to our power. Among them are a hemisphere richly stored with natural resources; the fact that the expansion of our nation coincided with the industrial revolution, enabling us to unify a whole continental economy; and, of course, the fact that the Civil War preserved our national unity.
By steadfastly keeping these two points in mind, we can prevent such virtue as we possess from exuding the sweat of self-righteousness.
Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Last year marked a new low for voter participation in a national election. Normally, less than half of America’s voters cast ballots in the midterm elections, but the 2014 turnout was the lowest in 73 years: 36 percent. It would seem that most Americans believe their right to vote isn’t worth the effort to exercise it.
We’ve come a long way in 50 years, when Americans were ready to die just to get their names on the voter rolls — and others were willing to kill to deny them that right.
In the early 1960s, civil rights advocates traveled through the Southern states to encourage African Americans to vote. They believed the ballot would give people the power to throw out racist government officials and elect leaders who would end discrimination.
But they soon discovered that office-holders across the country had installed a number of obstacles to prevent black people from reaching the polling booths. The obstacles proved especially effective in Selma, Alabama, where only 2 percent of black residents were registered to vote.
In March 1965, activists announced they would march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capitol, and demand the state government end voter suppression. They had little hope that Governor George Wallace would change the state’s racist policy, but they knew the national attention from the march would pressure him to respond.
When marchers sets off on Sunday, March 7, the country saw how firmly some white officials opposed voting rights for black people. Sheriff’s deputies fired tear gas into the crowd, then attacked the marchers with whips and clubs. Fifty marchers were hospitalized. The marchers set out again on March 21, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and with protection from the National Guard and U.S. Army sent by President Johnson.
On the second day, the marchers passed through Trickem Fork, an impoverished hamlet in Lowndes County, Alabama, that represented much of what the protestors were trying to change. The Saturday Evening Post reporters W. C. Heinz and Bard Lindeman noted, “The Negroes outnumber the whites almost four to one, but until the week before the Freedom March not one Negro voter had been registered in Lowndes County in 65 years.” (“The Meaning of the Selma March: Great Day at Trickem Fork,” May 22, 1965)
Several residents had recently tried to register at the county office. White officials turned them back, saying one of their registrars was sick and they didn’t know where the other one was. Two weeks later, when the residents returned, county officials told them to register at the old jailhouse. One of the residents said, “They had the two tables set up in this room with the gallows on the left. While you’re filling out the paper, one white man is saying. ‘I guess many a guy dropped through there.’ Then another is saying, ‘I wonder if the old thing still works.’”
Another resident, an Army veteran, was told he needed to pass a literacy test. “They gave me hard questions. The first was: ‘What part does the Vice President play in the Senate and the House?’ The second was: ‘What legal and legislative steps would the State of Alabama and the State of Mississippi have to take to combine into one state?’”
Literacy tests were the last resort for state officials who wanted to deny African Americans their right to vote. Ever since Reconstruction ended in the 1870s and federal troops left the South, many white politicians sought to limit black people’s voting. In Mississippi, black voters’ names were removed from the registration polls, then required them to pay poll taxes for two years before they’d be allowed to cast ballots.
African Americans who still expressed an intention to vote might be threatened with losing their jobs. And some cities distributed fliers telling black voters they could not enter a polling station if they’d had any trouble with the law — even something as trivial as a parking ticket — unless they first got approval from their local sheriff.
African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs “We demand the right to vote, everywhere” and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Black voters were denied credit, threatened with eviction or even lynching. If nothing else stopped these voters, there was always the literacy test. White county clerks were allowed to refuse to register anyone they considered “illiterate.”
They might require black registrants to read, and explain, complex passages of state law.* In Alabama, they would ask prospective voters questions about Federal law, as in these examples:
Has the following part of the U.S. Constitution been changed? “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each states, excluding Indians not taxed. (No)
Who pays members of Congress for their services, their home states or the United States? (United States)
At what time of day on January 20 each four years does the term of the president of the United States end? (12 noon)
If a bill is passed by Congress and the President refuses to sign it and does not send it back to Congress in session within the specified period of time, is the bill defeated or does it become law? (It becomes law unless Congress adjourns before the expiration of 10 days.)
In the space below, write the word “noise” backwards and place a dot over what would be its second letter should it have been written forward.
Draw in the space below, a square with a triangle in it, and within that same triangle draw a circle with a black dot in it.
Spell backwards, forwards.
Draw a figure that is square in shape. Divide it in half by drawing a straight line from its northeast corner to its southwest corner, and then divide it once more by drawing a broken line from the middle of its western side to the middle of its eastern side.
Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.
As questions on a cocktail napkin, they might have been amusing. But black citizens were required to answer 30 of these questions in 10 minutes without mistakes before they could register to vote.
The insolence of racist government policies may seem extraordinary to us today. Even more extraordinary was the determination of African Americans to overcome these challenges. They were helped in some areas by civil rights activists like members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who taught them how to beat the trick questions. But these efforts couldn’t have succeeded if the men and women in places like Trickem Fork weren’t determined to overcome the challenges that lay between them and their right to vote.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. ” —Constitution of the United States
The ruins of houses in Liege, Belgium, which were shelled and burned by German troops.
By this week 100 years ago, the war had stopped moving.
After just two months of fighting, the Western Front was locked in a stalemate. For the next four years, there would be no significant movement across a battle line that extended from neutral Switzerland to the coast of the North Sea.
No one had expected this in 1914. Germany had launched its campaign with a bold assault across Belgium. For weeks they pushed back every Allied army in front of them — the Belgian, the French, and the English. The plan called for the German armies to sweep down into France, surround the remaining Allies, and capture Paris.
It might have worked, but a fresh French assault on the right side of the German line caused a split to form between the German armies. The French and British troops rushed into the gap. The German advance halted, then fell back to the Aisne River.
Both sides realized the way ahead was completely blocked, but there was still a chance to move around the enemy. The Germans began rushing to slip around the left side of the British army, while the British tried to slip around the right flank of the Germans. Both armies began racing north, trying to outflank each other. But they only succeeded in extending the battle line all the way across Belgium to the coast.
For the next four years, the Western Front would change very little. (The Eastern Front, between Russia and the Central Powers, would change quite a bit.) At no point would any army be able to shift the front lines more than a few miles, though both sacrificed thousands of men to break the enemy’s line.
Sherman Said It; Looking for War in a Taxicab — and Finding It
By Irvin S. Cobb
Irvin Cobb grabbed a taxicab in Brussels and said, in essence, “Follow that war.” When the driver would go no father, Cobb and his companions continued on foot into a small Belgian town.
“A minute later … we had gone perhaps 50 feet beyond the mouth of this alley when two men, one on horseback and one on a bicycle, rode slowly and sedately out of another alley, parallel to the first one, and swung about with their backs to us. I imagine we had watched the newcomers for probably 50 seconds before it dawned on any of us that they wore gray helmets and gray coats, and carried arms —andwere Germans! Precisely at that moment they both turned so that they faced us; and the man on horseback lifted a carbine from a holster and half swung it in our direction.
“Realization came to us that here we were, pocketed. There were armed Belgians in an alley behind us and armed Germans in the street before us; and we were nicely in between. If shooting started the enemies might miss each other, but they could not very well miss us. Two of our party found a courtyard and ran through it. The third wedged himself in a recess in a wall behind a town pump; and I made for the half-open door of a shop.
“Just as I reached it a woman on the inside slammed it in my face and locked it.
“Then a troop of uhlans [cavalry] came, with nodding lances, following close behind the guns; and at sight of them a few men and women, clustered at the door of a little wine shop calling itself the Belgian Lion, began to hiss and mutter, for among these people, as we knew already, the uhlans had a hard name.
“At that a noncommissioned officer — a big, broad man with a neck like a bullock and a red, broad, menacing face — turned in his saddle and dropped the muzzle of his black automatic revolver on them. They sucked their hisses back down their frightened gullets so swiftly that the exertion well-nigh choked them, and shrank flat against the wall; and, for all the sound that came from them until he had holsteredhis gun and trotted on, they might have been dead men and women.”
Liberty—a Statement of the British Case
By Arnold Bennett
Most First World War historians avoid placing responsibility for the conflict with any one government. In fact, historians are now so careful not to ascribe guilt to any country, it seems the war was nobody’s idea. It just happened, apparently.
During the war, though, there was none of this hesitation. Everybody knew who started the war — “the other side.” Here, Englishman Arnold Bennett, author of 30 novels, states in no uncertain terms that Germany and Austria were to blame. What the Post didn’t know when it printed Bennett’s article, was that he was working for the British War Propaganda Bureau.
“The German military caste is thorough. On the one hand it organizes its transcendently efficient transport, if sends its armies into the field with both gravediggers and postmen, it breaks treaties, it spreads lies through the press, it lays floating mines, it levies indemnities, it forces foreign time to correspond to its own, and foreign news-papers to appear in the German language; and on the other hand it fires from the shelter of the white flag and the Red Cross flag, it kills wounded, even its own, and shoots its own drowning sailors in the water, it hides behind women and children, it tortures its captives, and when it gets really excited it destroys irreplaceable beauty. …
“If Germany triumphs, her ideal — the word is seldom off her lips — will envelop the earth, and every race will have to kneel and whimper to her: ‘Please may I exist?’ And slavery will be reborn; for under the German ideal every male citizen is a private soldier, and every private soldier is an abject slave — and the caste already owns 5 million of them. We have a silly, sentimental objection to being enslaved. We reckon liberty — the right of every individual to call his soul his own — as the most glorious end. It is for liberty we are fighting. We have lived in alarm, and liberty has been jeopardized too long.”
Hoping to make an ally out of the United States, Bennett was careful to mention a book that had recently surfaced, written by a member of the German army’s staff. In “Operations Upon the Sea”, Franz Frieherr von Edelsheim proposed an eventual assault on America.
“Von Edelsheim … begins by stating that Germany cannot meekly submit to ‘the attacks of the United States’ forever, and that she must ask herself how she can ‘impose her will.’ He proves that a combined action of army and navy will be required for this purpose, and that about four weeks after the commencement of hostilities German transports could begin to land large bodies of troops at different points simultaneously. Then, “by interrupting their communications, by destroying all buildings serving the state, commerce and defense, by taking away all material for war and transport, and lastly by levying heavy contributions, we should be able to inflict damage on the United States.” Thus in New York the new City Hall, the Metropolitan Museum and the Pennsylvania railway station, not to mention the Metropolitan Tower, would go the way of Louvain [a Belgian town where Germans burned, looted, and shot civilians], while New York business men would gather in Wall Street humbly to hand over the dollars amid the delightful strains of ‘The Watch on the Rhine.’ [A rousing German song from the 1850s, which asserted that the Rhine river must always remain German. It became an unofficial theme song for militant German nationalists during both world wars.]”
New Factors in War
By Samuel G. Blythe
In this report, Blythe observed several developing trends in the ancient art of war. Not only was the horse being replaced but soon airships would be bombing Paris and London. Even more ominous were the reports that France had developed a lethal gas for use on the battlefield. (The first poison gas attack on the Western Front was launched by the Germans in January 1915).
“It has been an axiom of war since wars began that an army travels on its belly. This war, which is the greatest of all wars, has made it necessary to revise that statement. As it now is, an army travels on its gasoline.
“Food, next to men, is the oldest factor in war, and gasoline is one of the newest. Of the two, gasoline—or petrol, as they call it over here — is the more important, because, as modern armies are organized and used, as well as from the sheer size of them, there would be little food for the soldiers if there were no gasoline.
“No staff officer goes anywhere on a horse. He uses an automobile. More than that, the Germans, and presumably the French, have taken auto delivery trucks of the heavier type and mounted field guns on them. These can be moved in any direction almost instantly. They constitute the most mobile artillery the world has ever known. In other wars artillery was shifted by horse or by hand. In this war some of the lighter guns are automobile guns, and they can be transferred from one point to another while horses are being brought up.
“I was told that a Frenchman had invented [a] identical gas that the imaginations of various novelists have invented for use in war fiction — a gas that is so frightful in its effect that when it is liberated all human beings and all living things within a large radius are instantly asphyxiated.
“I was told further that the French Government had the secret of the composition of this gas; that it had been proved out on sheep and cattle — that, at about the time I heard of it, a shell containing it was dropped two hundred feet from a flock of sheep, and that the sheep died instantly when the gas reached them.”
Step into 1914 with a peek at these pages from The Saturday Evening Post 100 years ago.
From the archive: J.C Leyendecker’s 1942 New Year’s Baby reflected the anxiety felt by the American public as we dropped our isolationist stance and prepared for war.
For the past century, the United States has frequently gone to war in the interests of freedom and democracy–often with the unstated (but not necessarily secondary) purpose of protecting our sources of oil or for access to populations who would buy our goods or services.
But the costs lately have become overwhelming, whether measured in cold, hard cash or in lives lost. America has lost its appetite to serve as policeman in the earth’s most horrific trouble spots. We just want to be left alone.
March 2014 marked the first month in more than a decade without a single American combat casualty anywhere in the world. For the vast mass of the American people, getting out of military entanglements is now the expectation rather than some vague hope. After two wars stretching back 13 years, American sentiment has once again tilted toward the isolationism that marked the end of the First World War. “[That conflict] was followed in the ’20s and ’30s by something that…was in fact a rejection of a certain role in the world,” says Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution and a foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. “It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s have a little time out here.’ It was, ‘We are not going to be doing that.’”
In fact, it would take a challenge to our very way of life–in the form of Hitler, Mussolini, and that dastardly backdoor attack on Pearl Harbor–to draw us into World War II. And we never really emerged. The Korean War followed just a few years afterward, then it was on into Vietnam, and almost before we all realized what happened, we were on to the Balkans and Sarajevo; the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan; and now there’s Syria and Crimea and Ukraine.
And each such adventure has its own price tag. Iraq, a country from which we have already technically departed, is still costing us $3 billion per year. The overall Department of Defense budget totals some $496 billion, or 13.6 percent of the total federal budget today–and that’s with a rapidly shrinking military.
Compare these numbers to those of the Korean War, which cost us $30 billion ($262 billion in today’s dollars) or less than one-third of the cost of the post-9/11 war on terror that includes Iraq and Afghanistan, which the non-partisan Congressional Research Service puts at $859 billion.
With 20/20 hindsight, it’s beginning to look increasingly like our all but universally accepted role as the world’s policeman really peaked sometime during the Korean War. Then began a long, slow descent, largely perceptible only to the most astute observers positioned outside the Beltway. When John F. Kennedy sent us swaggering into the Indochina Wars at the very moment a far more nimble Charles de Gaulle was already extricating France, we were still operating under the assumption that America somehow had a higher calling we needed to fulfill. It seemed only America had the might, and the moral will, to prevent the rapid spread of that evil virus called communism across Indochina, into Thailand, down the Malay Peninsula and across Southeast Asia.
As it happens, I was present as a journalist to witness the final days of America’s foray into Southeast Asia. The final days and weeks of the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge were not amusing. Seeing the conflict at this late stage, one forgot the original point of the American mission, to serve in a police capacity in this region.
But was that even an appropriate use of American power and influence? Neither in Korea nor in Vietnam nor in any other police action since–certainly not in Afghanistan or Iraq–has America had the kind of influence over the outcome envisioned at the start of our engagement. Our role was always presented to the public as a limited exercise: Act the role of the good cop, oust the bad guys, clap them in jail, then get the heck out of Dodge.
Of course, it’s never quite worked that way, and we have never learned our lesson. The failure derives not from a lack of good faith, but rather from a lack of vision. When we entered each of these rabbit holes, we never had a real understanding of how we’d emerge. As is clear now, the end game is in most respects far more significant than the entry point.
But if the American people have come full circle in the past century, arriving today at a reluctance for combat that mirrors post-World War I isolationism, many nations still look to the U.S. to play the role of global cop–if only because no other nation has the might or the will to play such a role. “I fear that what is going on now is that Americans are quite understandably not only tired of the burden, but they no longer understand the reasons why we even took on this burden in the first place,” Kagan says.
About those reasons: Sixty years ago, The Saturday Evening Post article “Can We Remake the World Without Going Broke?” observed that the nation’s Mutual Security Program, newly signed into law by Truman with bipartisan support in Congress, was staking the future of the American economy upon “the hope of revolutionizing the non-Soviet world.”
The piece continued: “This program pushes American military frontiers far out into Europe, Asia, and Africa. It consolidates an American pattern for reorganization of the entire non-Soviet world through combined military, economic, financial, and social measures.…It appeals to those who believe that ‘sharing our wealth’ is speeding up some form of world government.…On the other side, it appalls those Americans who are chiefly concerned with the radical changes which ‘mutual security’ means for the American traditional system: indefinite conscription of our young men, Federal expenditures greatly in excess of revenues, unparalleled taxes which are certain to increase, the overhanging threat of monetary inflation which already has reduced the purchasing power of the dollar by more than half.” (For more selections from the Post archive, see page 37.)
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