Dorothy Thompson

Times Dispatch/November 8, 1936

One’s first reaction to the Tuesday election is that it brings about an unhealthy state of affairs. Mr. Roosevelt came within eight votes of winning 100 percent of the electoral votes, and he got around 60 percent of the popular votes of the country, and the entire nation showed approximately the same picture. 

This is a personal victory, and an acknowledgment of personal leadership unique in our history for over 100 years and unique in modern times for all countries. Even Adolph Hitler, in the last free election in Germany in which other parties could contend for recognition, received only 42 percent of the popular ballot—and this followed the Reichstag fire and widespread fear of a Communist rising. The same election which has so unmistakably registered the popular faith in the President has returned a largely Democratic Congress, so that the President has a stronger congressional following than ever. 

Furthermore, the election was not a party victory. The victory was for Roosevelt, not for the Democratic Party since the voters who elected him are not by any means all Democrats.

Nevertheless, some 17,000,000 American citizens voted against Mr. Roosevelt. I say against Mr. Roosevelt, because Mr. Roosevelt and not Mr. Landon, was the issue in the campaign. They voted against personal leadership, against extension of Federal control, against increased regulation of business, for retrenchment in public spending and for a more cautious and traditional policy altogether. There are not 17,000,000 “Economic Royalists.” And that they lost is not so important as is the fact that this minority, still a very large part of the people, is definitely not represented today. And regardless of any estimate of the President, be he pure as Parsifal, gallant as Lancelot and wise as Socrates, this is not the best possible condition in a democracy. 

On the other hand, the vote enormously clarifies things. It registers in a manner that none can possibly evade the overwhelming desire of the American people to continue a new way of life better suited, they apparently are certain, to the realities of the times in which we live. The vote shows that that desire outs through all classes, through all sections, and is alive on the plains of Kansas in the groves of California, in the cotton fields of the South, and on the sidewalks of New York. It is impossible to describe as a “class vote” anything so overwhelming. Every voter on relief, and every voter who is a member of any trade union, could be eliminated, and still Mr. Roosevelt would have been re-elected. We have heard the voice of a nation speak. Only twice before in the history of our country has it spoken so unmistakably, when the Federalist Party died, leaving Monroe practically uncontested, and at the nation’s birth. 

This election also has wiped out the lunatic fringe and the extremists of either the Right or the Left. The American people did not vote for Communism, which in New York State failed even to hold its place on the ballot, or for Lemkeism, or for Townsendism, or for Socialism. Nor did they indicate that they wish the New Deal to proceed in any of these directions. Not one-tenth of Mr. Roosevelt’s voters in New York State supported him, as they had the opportunity to do, under the banner of the American Labor Party. The same election which swept in Roosevelt brought in the progressive New York charter, and in rock-ribbed Republican Massachusetts, Mr. Roosevelt came in while Mr. Curley, for whom Rooseveltism, in the voters’ mind, had become a racket, went down before the impeccable Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Curleyism and Coughlinism were as decisively defeated in this election as was the Old Deal. 

These facts invest the President not only with every possible power short of the limitations imposed by the fundamental law, but with a fearful responsibility. For he must represent not a party, not a class, not this pressure group or that, but the progressive will of an entire nation. That nation has chosen him as its leader and indicated a direction, and the President and his Congress must find the way best to express and incorporate the nation’s will to peace, to progress, to greater security, to more stable and universal prosperity inside the tradition of Liberal Democracy. Invested with a confidence tendered him by every conceivable sort of group, the President will have the lofty duty to harmonize specific interests in the frame of the total welfare. It is a duty and a task which at the first impact must engender in him elation, and on deeper thought evoke humility. 

But the election calls for a renewed sense of responsibility not only in the President, but in all of us. For it is no longer a question for any of us whether, or how far we are prepared to collaborate with the President, but whether and how far we are prepared to collaborate with the national will. It ought to mean that business and industry will face the challenge of formulating programs of collaboration with Government for the good of the nation, to satisfy the desire of the nation, for more security, more stability, for better homes and steadier wages, and that, given such an effort, it will be met by the President without malice and without suspicion. The President, in his first informal talk after the election, recognized the fact of the support of businessmen throughout the country who shared his concept of the new social order.

It ought to mean that conscious of the weakened position of the minority, the President will be the more sensitive to honest criticism and the more willing dispassionately to discuss means and methods for arriving at objectives so universally desired.

Yesterday the United States stood at the crossroads. But today the President stands at the crossroads. He can choose struggle, mobilizing toward coercion, or backed by his tremendous majority, he can choose the widest possible measure of conciliation and collaboration in the liberal temper which exudes light.

Dorothy Thompson

Oakland Tribune/August 2, 1936

Colonel Lindbergh’s Talk to Berlin Stirs Strange Echo of 1917, Dorothy Thompson Says

Writer Goes Back to Incidents Attendant Upon American Entrance Into Great War, Including Political Oblivion for Some

What moved me most about Colonel Lindbergh’s speech in Berlin the other day was the memory of another Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Noting the date—July 23, 1936—I thought of the date April 6, 1917. At that time the United States, by a combination of moves, influences, propaganda and events—the facts about which we are only now beginning objectively to realize—had drifted to the point where war was inevitable. A country which three years earlier had been unanimously of the opinion that the war which had begun in Europe was no concern of ours; a country which, 3000 miles removed from the trenches, was overwhelmingly in favor of neutrality, had gradually become obsessed with the war spirit until the few protestant voices were being over-shouted by the would-be warriors, who claimed for themselves a monopoly of patriotism.

I am neither so young nor so old but that those days seem but yesterday in my mind. Still I can see the great mass meeting in Buffalo which I, a young girl just out college, attended. Still I can hear the speeches, and still I can remember the resolution put to the crowd. “We call upon the Senate of the United States to declare war upon Germany. All those in favor will say ‘aye’ while we play the Star-Spangled Banner.” There was no choice. Either one voted for resolution to bring down Prussianism by the methods of Prussia, on one sat and insulted one’s national anthem. The die was already cast. We were already at war.

Message Of War

It was in such an America that Charles Augustus Lindberg, who had just been defeated for re-election to Congress by his Minnesota constituency, saw the United States swept onward into the war, which he had stoically opposed. The new Congress had convened to hear the war message, “the galleries crowded,” writes Walter Millis “by brilliant assemblage . . . the Supreme Court, seated . . . before the Speaker’s desk; the Cabinet on one side, while behind them the Diplomatic Corps, in full evening dress occupied a place upon the floor of the House for the first time in any one’s memory.”

It was in the midst of an ovation unprecedented in American history that President Wilson read to that assemblage his message declaring war. The tense enthusiasm and emotion of the assemblage hardly permitted him to read the message through and the declaration of war ended in “a hurricane of cheering.” Those were the days in which anyone who still had doubts of the war to make the World Safe for Democracy read himself out of history as a traitor. And it was then that Charles Augustus Lindberg, sire of the trans-Atlantic flyer, stood together with six out of 88 Senators, and 50 out of 423 Congressmen, who voted: No.

Rushing To Brink

Colonel Lindberg spoke in Germany words which were carried around the world. He spoke in the midst of a Europe which is no longer drifting, which is rushing, toward war. With simplicity and candor he addressed his hosts, and especially his fellow airmen of “our responsibility in creating a great force for destruction.” He begged that aviation justify the combination of Power and Intelligence. He prayed for a new type of security, “which rests in intelligence, and not in forts.”

To his words a far-off echo sounds from the dusty pages of the Congressional Record of March 1, 1917, March 1st was the day on which the Zimmermann note to Mexico had burst into headlines throughout the United States, accompanied by public indignation against Germany unequalled up to that time. It revealed that Germany would, in the event of war, attempt to enlist Mexico against us and to invite Japan. True, as we look at it now, the note was in preparation for the event of war, which Count Bernstorff, in America, was desperately trying to stave off.

But to the American public the enemy was already within the gates. And on that day Charles August Lindbergh senior went on record:

“Is civilization breaking down? The facts upon their face show that it is, or else that we have never had a civilization. ‘The Law’ has failed, and shall we now plunge into war in order to maintain the law, and to make its failure more complete, or shall we pick up the few remaining threads of reason and build anew and better? The President asks us to give him authority to enforce the law” (to arm the merchant marine.)

“Let us inquire what the law is . . . ‘The Law’ takes the products of our country to foreign lands for barter, trade, and speculation . . . The privilege of barter and exercising the rights of profit  . . . are abstract rights, but they are not the rights that lead to the exercise of civilization, but the rights that lead to barbarism. It is those abstract rights that we are asked to enforce, instead of dealing with them by common-sense methods. The man who stands by his country today is tagged by the war jingoes as pro-German. But that does not make him so.”

At Cost Of Career

Colonel Lindbergh was a fifteen-year-old lad when his father stated these words, and took the action which cost him his political career. A book which the father wrote on the economics of the struggle was destroyed by the federal censors. In it, I am told, he prophesied the breakdown of the international banking system as a result of the war.

After his fatal stand against the United States entering the war, he could not speak in public without being threatened by mobs. In 1918, when he ran for governor on the ticket of the Non-partisan League; he was howled down as a pro-German and a traitor.

Nearly twenty years later when he was dead his son was to take off alone for a flight across the ocean, which was to make him a world hero and win him a fortune. But which takes greater courage: To risk death as a hero, or to risk calumny as a traitor? Perhaps the elder Lindberg thought of his son when he heard his colleague, Representative Kitchin of North Carolina, another of the ‘wilful men,’ say:

“I know that for my vote I shall be not only criticized but denounced from one end of the country to the other. The whole yelping pack of defamers and revilers in the nation will at once be set upon my heels. My friends, I cannot leave my children riches. I cannot leave them fame, but I can leave them the name of an ancestor who, mattering not the consequences to himself, never dared to hesitate to do his duty as God gave him to see it.”

Divided By Fascism

Who today, looking about upon a world disintegrated by unemployment, divided by fascism and communism with arms, can utter without choking the words “to make the world safe,” “the war to end war?” To find words which still ring true one must go back to that speech of Wilson’s for which he was most damned, and read again:

“It must be peace without victory. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory, upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.”

That was prophecy. The older Lindbergh stuck obstinately to the sense of that speech when its author had been driven to reject it.

The Colonel spoke bravely in the midst of the quicksands, with the backing and aid of world prestige and world renown. But it was from his father, whom the war drove into obscurity, that he inherited both the courage and the right to speak as he did and where he did. There is some justice in history. .And “as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined.”

Dorothy Thompson

Brattleboro Reformer/March 28, 1936

“I am very remorseful. It’s a funny thing, but I never had a feeling that I wanted to kill anybody that I can remember. I was under an illusion. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into when I joined up two years ago.”

The speaker was Dayton Dean, a city employee of Detroit, who was admitting to the peculiarly horrible murder of Charles A. Poole, a W. P. A. worker of the same town, on the date of May 13.

“We wanted it to be a necktie party with ropes and regalia.” said Dean. “That would make it more impressive. But some of the cars got lost. We got tired of waiting, and so I shot him. I thought it was my job.”

And with the death of Poole the Michigan police authorities began an investigation which in the last few days has uncovered a fantastic organization running across state lines, of yet undiscovered ramifications, of “white male Protestants,” pledged to “defend the United States and the Constitution”; to dominate politics in city and county and state; to exterminate anarchists, Communists, Catholics, Negroes and Jews; to restrict immigration and deport all undesirable aliens; to support and participate in lynch law; to arm its members for civil war, while pledging them by a blood oath to absolute secrecy and absolute obedience to their superiors, and eventually to establish a dictatorship in America.

See in your imaginations these men, gathered together at night, in some remote place. They wear black or white hoods to conceal their faces. They wear black or white robes—purchased from the organization; worth $1.25, price $7. Guards with pointed revolvers cover them. They are addressed by a chaplain, the servant of “white Protestantism.”

“Remember,” he whispers, “Our purpose is to tear down, lay waste, despoil and kill our enemies. Mercy . . . has no place in the fighter’s outfit. We recognize but one power (death) to separate us in the hour of peril . . . we are bound by ties stronger than honor.”

“They are questioned by the commanding officer: Do you believe in a Supreme Being? A future reward, and punishment? Can you ride a horse, drive a car, shoot a rifle? Do you believe in White supremacy? Would you lie if ordered by your superior? You may be required to do some service on a higher plane than ordinary night riding. And for that you must take an oath in blood.”

They scratch their arms and swear the Black Oath, the Blood Oath. They accept for themselves “for roof the sky, bed the earth, and for reward death.” And in the name of God and the Devil they swear to exterminate the minorities of this country: the radical political minorities, the religious and racial minorities. By blood and fire and murder. By arson and mayhem. “I will show no mercy, but strike an avenging arm.”

Who are these men, standing in the darkness, swearing such oaths, later to be translated into action? “Good people from all walks of life who were brought to their senses when Communism and other isms invaded the United States from other countries,” their leader, a Michigan milk inspector, Arthur Lupp, testified. Who are these men? Poor folk. Hillbillies from the mountains of the South invading Detroit looking for work. “One purpose was to get jobs for members.” None of those questioned were unemployed. Several said they had got jobs through other members. Whom do they hate? Life, which has treated them badly. Who is to blame? Some scapegoat is to blame. The niggers, working in the fields that should be theirs. Or the Jews. Do they not keep the prosperous shops? Or the Communists . . . aren’t some of the papers full of the Communist peril? Or the trade unionists, who enlist the skilled and leave the unskilled. Or the Catholics, who have a Pope in Rome. Or the foreigners who take the jobs. These are to blame. Therefore exterminate them! We are poor and dispossessed. But we are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. Our fathers founded this country. It belongs to us.

They are the poor, the credulous, the violent; little men, full of confused hatred. They are the gullible. The organization, they are told, dates back to Revolutionary days. It has thirteen officers, representing the thirteen original colonies. They have a direct link with the Ku-Klux Klan and its old night riders. “It came up again during the depression,” one leader testified. “In the North there is our true leader, who is descended from the man Quantrell, who originated the first Black Oath under General Forrest’s old night riders.”

They come into the organization unaware of its true purpose. They sign a simple pledge, joining an order to uphold the Constitution. They are lured into it by appeal to their basic racial prejudices, and with promises of recreational activities and business help. The rest is forced upon them. Betrayal of secrets is death. They are now members of a gang.

“It’s a funny thing. I never had a feeling that I wanted to kill anybody.”

The organization is not confined to Michigan. There was that affair a short time ago in Florida. “The Toledo Blade” reports the existence of the movement in Ohio. Echoes of it are everywhere. They are on my desk in the Herald Tribune. Here is Mr. Robert Edward Edmondson, of Washington, who invites me to join the “Christian Vigilantes.” He writes:

“Dear Madam: These two pamphlets are sent you by Post 22 of the Christian Vigilantes, in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who was foully murdered by the Jew Kikes. Over 170,000 copies of these two pamphlets have been distributed in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Death to the Jew Infested league of Nations! Heil Hitler!”

Motto (says Mr. Edmondson) Please Learn by Heart Christian Nordic White America will, in the spirit of Hitler, keep the Jews and niggers in their place of Jim Crow Inferiority.

And he invites me to enlist in a war “against Jews, niggers, Japs, Chinese, all other colored un-Aryan swine, Communists, pacifists, strikers, internationalists, under the Radiant Cross of Jesus.”

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

Or here is another correspondent, who informs me that I am only one of many thousands who have been circularized with the information that the murder of the Lindbergh baby was performed as an act of ritual by Jews in revenge against the Gentile world!

What can be done about it?

Mr. J. Edgar Hoover says the federal government can do nothing. The federal police can participate in action to apprehend kidnappers who have taken a person across state lines to hold him for ransom. But the Lindbergh law, it is argued, does not permit the federal government to track down those who kidnap and kill, not for gain, but because the superior has ordered it; because the victim is a Catholic or a Jew! It is forbidden to send obscene postal cards in the mails, but not literature enlisting my co-operation against a whole class of American citizens, and suggesting civil war. States reserve to themselves, under the Constitution, the right to lynch their own minorities. What the federal government can do, however, under the law is to investigate! Let us at least find out how widespread, how numerous are these murder bands!

Who is to blame? You and I are to blame. All of us who listen tolerantly to intolerant expressions of racial and religious prejudice, without registering our own indignation against such un-American ideas. All of us who tolerate without protest the theory that any man who strikes for better wages is a dangerous radical. All of us who accept lies which we are able to contradict. All of us who sit smugly by and think that It Can’t Happen Here!

Dorothy Thompson

Oakland Tribune/August 30, 1936

Dorothy Thompson Considers Consumer Consciousness in United States Hopeful Sign

Best Distribution of Income, She Writes, Lies in Constantly Growing Enjoyment Of Goods and Services Wages Will Buy

Over the last week-end reports of the revenues of numerous Eastern railroads were made public. It was revealed that the New York, New Haven & Hartford had gross passenger revenues for July 15 per cent higher than they were in July of last year. The Baltimore & Ohio reported an increase of 22 per cent. Both statements are representative of the experience of railroads all over the country. Doubtless some of the increase is attributable to better general business conditions, but the companies are ready to admit that a large part of it comes from the lower fares which went into universal effect in June by order of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The Southern and Western railroads which took the initiative and voluntarily decreased their fares two years ago have shown a steady and quite amazing rise in revenues ever since.

Key To Prosperity

The experience of the railroads is an illustration of the soundness of the theory that has been consistently held by the economists of the Brookings Institution of Washington, namely, that the key to prosperity in this country, and to the more equitable distribution of wealth, is simply the consistent handing on to the public of the benefits of technological progress, in the form of lower prices.

“Increased efficiency makes possible lower prices, while the profit incentive should insure the actual reduction of prices. The greatest profit to the business enterpriser is derived through giving the masses the most for their money. The gains resulting from increased technological and operating efficiency are passed on to consumers, through the medium of price reductions. If, for example, productive efficiency in general should increase 100 per cent over a period of, say, 25 years, costs—other things being equal—would be cut in two, and prices would be reduced proportionately. Thus each dollar of monetary income would purchase progressively increasing quantities of goods. The expanding demand required to take the increasing quantities off the market would be automatically created by the reduction of prices.

“This method of expanding purchasing power does not, like wage increases, threaten insolvency to those who follow it. On the contrary, it is conceived to be the road to increasing profits. Instead of running counter to the principles of competition, it is the essence of competition . . .Retail prices remained practically stationary from 1922 to 1929 . . . The methods of disseminating the benefits of technological progress through persistent reduction in prices were largely in suspense during the post-war expansion period.”

Theory Affirmed

The above quotation is from “Income and Economic Progress,” published by the Brookings Institution, and it contains two important statements. The one affirms the theory of capitalistic enterprise and the other reveals that this theory was not put into practice when capitalism was supposed to be strongest—during the boom years. The two statements taken together reveal that the real enemies of capitalism in the past have not been the Socialists, or Communists, whose power until now has been negligible, but the capitalists, themselves, who have often been traitors to the fundamental thesis upon which their system rests.

Policy Continued

If we are not to abolish capitalism altogether, as a few people begin to desire, or put it under complete governmental control, as other groups demand, then the issue will be increasingly one of low prices versus high prices. So far no administration has faced the issue and framed its political practices, whether they concern taxes, or social insurances, or a thousand other matters, with this question clearly in mind. With all the talk about the radical innovations of the New Deal, and the difference between this administration and its predecessors, in this particular they have not been dissimilar, and Roosevelt has merely continued the policy of many who preceded him.

That policy has been the protection of high prices. A series of Republican administrations protected the demand of a part of industry for high prices; Mr. Roosevelt logically carried that process farther by protecting the demands of farmers and laborers for higher prices for their products. Sooner or later the result is a stalemate.

Middle Class

The people who suffer most acutely from this kind of economic theory are the middle and white collar classes, the people engaged directly neither in industry nor agriculture, but who dispense services of one kind or another. And as it happens, they are one of the largest groups in the country. They are schoolteachers, housewives, garage men, government employees, barbers, clerks, journalists, doctors, lawyers, ministers—all the people who are neither farmers, manufacturers, nor industrial workers capable of being organized into trade unions.

The Bookings Institution concludes:

“The wage increase method of disseminating the benefits of technological progress would not extend to more than 40 per cent of the population. In contrast, price reductions benefit the entire population. Assuming that price equilibrium may be re-established by the wage increase methods, it nevertheless at the sacrifice of wealth production.

“Whatever temporary benefits might thus be conferred, it is a method which, if pursued as a long run policy, can result only in stationary or declining standards of living.”

Research Findings

Mr. Hoover’s research committee, which reported to him in 1933 on social trends, found that between 1919 and 1928 more than 1200 mergers had involved the disappearance of more than 6000 independent enterprises. Theoretically, these monopolies should by increasing efficiency and lowering costs have lowered prices. But that was not in fact, their result. On the contrary, and with, of course, some exceptions, they sought higher profit—for both labor and capital—by maintaining higher prices, thereby frustrating the play of forces in capitalist enterprise.

There are outstanding example in industry to the contrary—the automotive industry, for instance, which because of its policy requires no tariff to protect it. The constant reduction in prices has resulted in Americans owning more automobiles per capita than any people in the world. We do not in contrast have the best standards of housing by any means, because the materials which enter into housing, as well as labor, taxes, inflated land values and high mortgage rates, have the effect of monopoly.

Mortgage Money

A large part of England was rebuilt in the last few years because mortgage money could be gotten at 3 to 3¾ per cent. That hundreds of thousands in this country will buy houses at a price is illustrated by the growth of the trailer industry, at this moment the fastest growing manufacturing enterprise in the country. A hundred and fifty thousand Americans are not buying trailers because Americans are nomads, but because the trailer offers them at this moment the best return for their money, everything considered. They get more for their money from the trailer factory than they do from Mr. Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration.

Common Illusions

Probably the most persistent of all illusions is that a man’s income is measurable in dollars. The real distribution of income lies in the constantly increasing enjoyment of goods and services; not in the amount of the paycheck, but in what it will buy. We pay for waste, for bureaucracy, public and private, for monopoly, for racketeering and for business fear. But there is a growing consumer-consciousness in America, and it is one of the hopeful signs of the times, for it is the basis—and the only basis—for real class collaboration. We have workers, and we have employers, but as consumers we are really The People.

Dorothy Thompson

St. Louis Post-Dispatch/March 24, 1936

Behind the discussions going on in London, the statements of rights, the appeals to reason, the proposal for a new arms and economic conference, are certain implacable facts, certain inexorable forces, which in the end will determine Europe’s destiny.

The first is that should the German proposals be accepted, and Europe reconstructed with practically everything in the Treaty of Versailles eliminated except its territorial provisions, Germany would soon by sheer force of disciplined numbers, dominate the Continent, both as a military and as a political power. There are twice as many Germans in Europe as there are Frenchmen. This, and not any immediate fear that her eastern frontier will be violated, is the basis of French apprehension. 

The second is that Great Britain, both by treaty and by the most positive self-interest, is committed to maintaining the territorial integrity of France, even by war if necessary. This was a fact in 1914, as the war proved, but it had not been openly affirmed. Today it is. 

But, and this is the third fact, Great Britain is not willing to commit herself to maintaining by force of her arms, and for eternity, the position which France has held on the Continent since the war. Public opinion in England is not willing, and it would be impossible to commit the British Dominions to such purpose. 

Fourth: The Germans are perfectly aware of the exact limits of British enthusiasm for France, and it is Hitler’s primary policy to exploit them for all they are worth. Collaboration with Britain is the first article in his foreign policy. In this he is absolutely consistent. Twelve years ago, when he first published “Mein Kampf,” he excoriated prewar German diplomacy for bringing about a break with Britain by its colonial policy and naval race; he advocated relinquishing Alsace Lorraine forever and forcing an eventual settlement with France, peaceably if possible, by war if necessary, only for the purpose of winning for Germany a free hand in the East. He said that Germany could only choose between Britain and Russia, and that prewar Germany had managed to alienate both. It is clear that Hitler does not intend to choose Russia. On the contrary, he has openly advocated bringing down Bolshevism in Russia, has predicted that its collapse would be the end of Russia as a unified state, and that Germany would be its chief heir. 

Such a program, of course, is one of long range. Germany has no border on Russia, and the first step would have to be to divorce the small Eastern and Central European countries, the Baltic States, Austria, Czechoslovakia, etc., from their close alliance with France, and bring them under German influence. The German proposals in London are a first step in this direction. 

But the hope of winning Great Britain to a tolerant neutrality toward such a program is counteracted by other facts and forces which Mr. Hitler has apparently not considered so carefully. Until the League of Nations plebiscite, shortly before the Ethiopian affair, England was holding herself increasingly aloof from the Continent, and the League’s prestige was declining in official British circles. England could afford this attitude because of her friendship with Italy which, resting upon long tradition and the historic strength of the British fleet assured her security in the Mediterranean. This traditional friendship went so far that when the Ethiopian affair became acute and the Foreign Office queried the Admiralty as to what plans it had in case of a British-Italian conflict, it was discovered that the Admiralty had none at all. The whole action of the British fleet was therefore improvised. In the Ethiopian conflict England learned, first, that the Italian power in the Mediterranean was more formidable than she had supposed, and second, that unless she stuck very close to France and the League she might have to fear an alliance between these two, who could between them control Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. France is essential to Great Britain. Germany is not. And this fact is seen most clearly by those men in England like Winston Churchill, who are experts on military and naval matters. 

Public opinion in England is not clear, and public opinion in these days when every Englishman with radio can hear the case of France or Germany or Italy presented to his own ear in his own language is very powerful. There are a large number of liberals of whom Lord Lothian is perhaps typical, who have always felt that Germany was not given a square deal, and that there will be no peace in Europe until some of her demands are met. But the pacifist opinion is also divided since Hitler came into power, because in liberal minds the large question looms as to whether any concessions should be made to Hitler’s Germany, and what a further extension of Nazi power would mean to European civilization. On the other side there are die-hards who think it might even be desirable to let Germany “clean up” Russia.

But the French have no such idea at all. France could purchase from Germany right now a guarantee of security which, with British collaboration, would probably secure her peace for generations. But in doing so she would consent to retire as a first-class power and pass that role over to her late enemy. France has a whole network of allies in Central and Eastern Europe, and upon them her prestige rests. It was shaken when she allowed Germany to begin rearming without more than formal protest. That resulted in Poland’s making a settlement with Germany and drifting somewhat away from French control. If France now gives in on the matter of the Rhineland there will be only one course open to Austria, Czechoslovakia and the other small Eastern nations, and that will be either to draw closer to Russia or to make their peace with Germany on the best terms they can. The Poles, Czechs and Austrians are bound to believe that if France will not act to prevent German guns being set up at her own border she will hardly act in behalf of outraged Czechs or Austrians in some distant future. The French peasant might fight today for a menaced Strassbourg, but hardly tomorrow for a menaced Prague.

If France would resign herself to a secondary role, in exchange for security, war would perhaps not be immediate or necessary, provided that the rest of Europe, and especially Great Britain, collaborated to assist German economic reconstruction. That is another big factor. The Nazi system depends upon rearmament and public works, vast sacrifices from the population, prompted by periodic patriotic saturnalias. Experts believe that the Nazi financial situation is very serious, and that without assistance from outside it may crack. Does the rest of Europe want to keep it from cracking? And if it cracks, what will Germany do? Break out somewhere else? 

There is not yet a clear line-up. Britain has not yet chosen. Meanwhile, she will play for time, first because that is her habitual technique, and second, because she feels herself to be inadequately armed. Some weeks ago the Government suddenly ordered 100 bombing planes from the Fairey Company. The manufacturers asked for nine months in which to complete experiments designed to improve the plane. The Government replied: “We have not nine months to wait.”

Dorothy Thompson

St. Louis Post-Dispatch/March 22, 1936

There is no genuine faith in National Socialist circles, apparently, that the German spirit if left alone will give artistic form to National Socialist doctrine. No sooner has “the impulse been given for the reawakening and restoration of artistic vitality,” to quote Hitler, than the impulse itself is put into uniform and carefully regimented and controlled, lest it should desert the new track. The Zeitgeist is simply not functioning as the Nazis think it should, and so an immense apparatus is set up to push, coerce, lure, cajole and bribe it into the correct paths.This apparatus is in the hands of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Chief of the Federal Bureau of Propaganda and Enlightenment, and dictator of German culture. The movement, which rests its case on its claim to issue from the wellspring of the folk soul, apparently believes that the effort of revolution has exhausted the waters. Dr. Goebbels is to prime the pump and shut away the people from other wells.

The work of establishment is undertaken with all the precision, thoroughness and careful organization of the Prussian army. Instead of creating a new culture, one is to be organized. Who may and who may not write, model, compose, play, sing, act, produce, paint, is defined in a set of decrees having the full force of law and carrying penalties for their violation. What shall be written, sculptured, built, composed, played, acted and painted is controlled by an army of bureaucrats and spies. Dr. Goebbels’ bureau is a cultural inquisition, its word is final, its force unchallenged.

The control of every conceivable branch of German culture is complete. It begins, not by censoring what actually appears, but by determining who shall be the creators and transmitters of culture. No publication, no concert platform, no publishing house, no theater, no gallery is open to any writer, artist or musician who has not first of all run the gantlet of the Propaganda Ministry. One may not exhibit a picture, or present a play, or perform on the piano, or write in the papers and magazines, unless one is a member of the established “chamber.” One cannot get into the chamber if one is suspected of being a heretic. And the very first test is a blood test—one must be able to prove a blood stream uncontaminated by non-Aryan admixture.

Now the first result of this, of course, is that a man’s degree of mendacity decides whether he lives or dies, produces or starves. In the main, the newspapers and periodicals today are still written by the same men who wrote them prior to March, 1933. In the main, the same artists are painting pictures, composing music, playing violins.

A vast insincerity, then, lies over the whole of German culture. A shame-faced compromise, an agonized inner cleavage rends the German artist. Day by day, he is forced to ask himself: “Shall I compromise or shall I perish?” This, rather than the enforced emigration of those artists who could not or would not compromise, is the greatest tragedy of German culture.

For those who have gone abroad, there has been no drastic break with the continuity of the stream of German thought. They are exiled and cut off; yet all of them have survived, in their intellectual and spiritual lives, the terrific earthquake of the National Socialist experience. None is quite the same today as he was yesterday. But none has been forced to deny his own past, and none has been forced to compromise his own spiritual future.

It is even possible that this new diaspora may be the savior of German culture; indeed, may keep alive the very spirit which aborted in the revolution. In Switzerland and Holland, in France and in England, in America, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germans are playing and composing German music, writing German poetry and novels, adding to the structure of German science, not unmoved by the National Socialist revolution, not unchanged in their sense of values because of it, but free of its shackles.

Of course, the flight abroad of German artists, writers and scientists has been prodigious. The roster of their names reads like pages torn from a German Who’s Who. Most of them, to be sure, are not classed as Germans in the Third Reich, because they have non-Aryan blood in their veins. But they have German science, German tradition, German history and a German experience in their hearts and heads.

The withdrawal of these naturally leaves an immense gap in German cultural life. But more important than their personal absence is the cultural atmosphere which has settled upon the land. A peace pervades it, like the peace of death.

The pre-revolutionary years were years of intense, almost feverish, cerebral activity. The most divergent viewpoints and experiences found form and expression. The struggle to create a new social order was paralleled in the struggle for new artistic forms. It was a period of conflict, and this was reflected for better or worse in art.

Now the conflict is stilled; indeed, say the Nazis, permanently settled. The “alien and disruptive” spirits have departed. The coarse night clubs, the extravagant theaters which subjected content to effect are closed. Germany, they assert, has returned to her essential spirit, and found for it a fitting habitation. Now the soul is at peace; now true art can emerge, in what Rosenberg calls “the smooth monumental style of the National Socialist way of life.”

But it does not emerge! The artists are assembled, each in his proper compartment, each properly certified as to ancestry and breeding, competency and ideology, each folding from the proper authority his license to create. No Jewish taint corrupts them; no breath of non-German internationalism, of bourgeois secularity, of Catholic obscurantism perverts them.

The green-uniformed hordes of the Work Army are ordered: “Dig! Plant! Build!” And they dig, plant and build. The brown-uniformed hordes of the Storm Troopers are ordered: “March! Present arms! Collect the winter-aid fund!” And they march, present arms and collect. And in the same manner, the state says to the artists, so perfectly organized, so immaculately regimented: “Create!”

But when God, in the form of Dr. Goebbels, says: “Let there be light!” there is no light.

Dorothy Thompson

The Cincinnati Enquirer/March 24, 1936

There is something grandiose and awe-inspiring in natural catastrophes. They reestablish a sense of proportion. They remind man, the only paranoiac amongst the animals, that he lives dangerously and is not yet lord over all of nature. At the same time, and for brief moments, they release the heroism and the sacrificial spirit of wars, without the hatred and bad conscience with which war cankers the soul. They wipe out, for a moment, class lines and race lines; they shift ownership of property; they raise rich men’s houses and slums, and all without creating the antagonism of economic warfare. The banker on the rooftop, wigwagging for a rescuer, asks nothing better than to be in the same boat—any old boat—with the relief worker. When the Mississippi rose a few years ago, and broke the levees, “red necks” who in more fortunate times enjoyed the fiesta of lynchings, swam out to rescue stranded black men. Water, fire, earthquake—these things do not divide men. They bring them together.

In such natural catastrophes men, for the most part, show their noblest, and most decent human qualities. There are, of course, exceptions. In Hartford the police had to take sharp measures against looters. But for every one who uses a catastrophe for his own gain, there are a hundred who show exceptional courage, endurance, and generosity. Men also display their genius. No modern civilization has been permanently wrecked by forces of nature. The streams swell into torrents, the torrents rush into oceans, the great waves of water rise and break the confines built against them; they descend greedily, inexorably upon fields, factories, and cities. Crops are grounded, factory chimneys toppled into the tide, mortgages are wiped out. Epidemics flourish.

But when the flood subsides and the water recedes, physicians mobilize against the plagues; farmers go out again with plows and hoes; bricklayers and carpenters rebuild broken walls, new homes rise on the wrecks of old ones. Neither nation nor city perishes.

Indeed, the catastrophe is too soon forgotten, Were men’s memories longer they would prepare against its recurrence.

It is scandalous that in this country of builders and engineers we have not controlled flood water. The reason is not lack of knowledge or power. It is only the perversity of human nature. For no gigantic public works such as these can be undertaken without stepping on somebody’s toes. The same difficulty attends slum clearance. Everywhere some special interest has to be sacrificed for the general good. Billions have been spent in the last two years, but not on the great works vitally needed. Why not? For two reasons: Such works take long-range planning. This country greatly needs a permanent body of engineers, as divorced from politics as is the War College, insured in their positions by long appointments at adequate salaries, who will look ahead, and when there is unemployment and it is advisable for government to spend, will present specific plans for real achievement. The other reason is that raking leaves or its equivalent may not do much good, but neither does it encounter intrenched interests. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in her last book a cycle of sonnets called “Epitaph For the Race of Man.” One of the most eloquent of living poets, she has never written more movingly. Man, that “piece of work” of Hamlet, “noble in reason and infinite in faculty,” is a fossilized skull in the world which she foresees, the earth inherited by strange gods all limb and muscle but devoid of brow. What has destroyed man? In sonnet after sonnet she describes the griefs which have overtaken him. Was it flood that encompassed his end? She writes:

“The broken dyke, the levee washed away,

The good fields flooded and the cattle drowned,

Estranged and treacherous all the faithful ground.

And nothing left but floating disarray

Of tree and home uprooted

was this the day

Man dropped upon his shadow 

without a sound,

And died, having labored well

and having found

His burden heavier than a quilt of clay?

No, no. I saw him when the sun had set

In water, leaning on his faithful oar.

Above his garden, faintly glimmering, yet

There bulked the plow, there

washed the updrifted weeds

And scull across his roof, and

make for shore,

With twisted face, and pocket

full of seeds.”

No, it was not flood. Short as his memory is, man after every great catastrophe builds anew and somewhat better against the wrathful gods. Some day the newly awakened realization that even the earth is not permanent unless one takes care of it will force us to control our floods. Even the Mississippi will be conquered. That demon stream which, on the one hand, created from its alluvial deposits the richest land on earth, and on the other spreads a miasma of yellow fever and malaria—that river which four or five times in a generation breaks its levees will one day be shackled, and probably in our generation. Already scientists have routed its yellow fever; they will deal finally with malaria. The army engineers will canalize and divert the water, accelerate its course, and spill it more rapidly and safely into the gulf.

But before they are allowed to do so the politicians will quarrel on behalf of their clients over the price which landowners are to be paid for the land that must be sacrificed for their own salvation. They will haggle like merchants in a moslem bazaar. They are doing so already in Washington Senate Committee, turning cold ears to the army’s proposal that no more shall be paid than three times the assessed value of the land. And after the work is finished, and the tamed river testifies forever to man’s genius, white men along its banks will still not know how to live with black men: plantation owners will still close tight minds to the woes of share-croppers; on the river’s rich delta most people will still live beast-like in hovels and know no way to help themselves except to fight each other. When the waters subside Pittsburgh children’s lungs will still be blackened by uncontrolled coal smoke; Braddock and Homestead, those ghoulish cities, will still stand.

There will always be pity for those whom floods pursue, and callousness, in the long run, for the victims of misfortunes man makes for himself. Yet only mankind can destroy mankind. Floods will not be man’s mortal fate.

Dorothy Thompson

Oakland Tribune/March 29, 1936

It is amusing to remember that only a few years ago many of our own businessmen were hailing Mussolini as the savior of business from communism. One even heard that someone like Mussolini was what this country needed. His last moves have greatly clarified the issues. It is now clear that the totalitarian state can move in only one of two directions, unless it moves in both of them together: Toward complete collectivism and war. Apparently Mussolini chooses both.

Fascism, it appears, is not an antidote for communism nor communism an antidote for fascism. In the long run they approach each other.

Social Discipline

Communism starts as an economic movement, with the aim of nationalizing the means of production in the interests of the working masses. To make its program work it has to regiment the working masses in the interests of the bureaucratic state which assumes dictatorial power in their behalf. This is accomplished by creating a myth and a social discipline, and actually the power of the movement resides in the vigor of the myth, imposed by an immense propaganda apparatus and accepted, especially by the youth, with religious intensity.

The basis of the myth is a Messianic belief in the coming of a perfect world order. Since Russia is to be the agent of this order, the myth is eventually associated with an intense, if unusual, form of nationalism, and a high degree of economic nationalism is inevitable because a completely socialistic state cannot otherwise be organized in a single country.

Different Thesis

Fascism starts from an entirely different thesis, and has an entirely different goal. It is avowedly anti-economic. It repudiates the whole idea of man as an economic creature. It elevates instead what it calls the heroic virtues, and regards the nation as the supreme Good. It is accepted at first as the savior of individualism from economic collectivism.

But whereas Communism, beginning with state ownership and control of the economic life, eventually regiments every individual down to his last thought, Fascism, which begins by regimenting the individual to a nationalist ideal, ends by swallowing the economic system.

Industrialists who are for the most part notoriously incapable of seeing beyond their next dividend and seem to prefer suicide to social reform, have, in Italy and Germany, clutched at the social disciplines of Fascism, thinking that it will keep them in power. But Fascism is only interested in keeping its own bureaucracy in power.

Controlled Industry

Actually, Mussolini’s step in nationalizing the key industries represents no sensational change. Industry was already under complete control. The ownership remained theoretically in private hands, but the owners had little or nothing to say about what they should do with their property. Very early in his career Mussolini had to take over the banks, and the industries, as in most poor countries, were in the hands of the banks. They were broke, and the state salvaged them on its own terms. Many new industries were created by the state for purely national and militarist purposes.

Mussolini’s war policy carries him further and further in this direction. Speaking before the Fascist assembly several days ago, he said that Italy would have to undertake the hydrogenation of lignites, the manufacture of alcohol from plants and the distillation of asphalt rock to take the place of oil imports; she would have to substitute more electrification projects for coal and work even her deepest lying mines, setting research bodies at work to find substitutes for cellulose, rubber and oleaginous seeds. All this is uneconomic in the extreme. Mussolini blames sanctions for it, but the Ethiopian venture itself has no economic justification.

Irrational Basis

What he wants in Ethiopia he could have bought for far less than it costs him to fight for it. The same amount of money invested in real reclamation projects in Italy would have yielded vastly greater material results. Mussolini himself has stopped the emigration of the surplus population, although there are parts of the world better than Africa where they could go. But Fascism is not rational. It is irrational—patriotism gone haywire.

The enterprises which Mussolini is taking over are bankrupt. Not because of Italy’s essential poverty. They are bankrupt because a rampant nationalism makes no attempt to cut its garment to its cloth. Marching troops, a huge party mechanism, a vast bureaucracy, cost money. Someone has to pay it. First the common people pay, compensated by illusions of future grandeur. But they will not pay forever if someone else is making a profit. So eventually profits go, too. The final logic of the totalitarian state is collectivism on the basis of economic levelling, That is the only way the apparatus will work.

Land Tenancy 

And it is just that it should be so. When private property ceases to make free men, its only spiritual justification goes. Democracy and the widespread distribution of private property go together. James Madison knew that; Thomas Jefferson knew it. Not all of our conservatives today realize it, nor all our liberals. They think the abundant life is more ice boxes and automobiles for everyone.

Those who care for democracy should be more concerned with ending land tenancy in this country, reviving local government and merchandising, protecting the small industrialist, who is often more efficient than the large one, and welcoming a vigorous, responsible trade unionism.

Economic nationalism is incompatible with democracy. A rigidly self-contained economy means eventually the complete limitation and control of production, distribution and prices. That means dictatorship, and dictatorship always goes the whole hog. If we love freedom we ought to work to push open the economic frontiers of the world under a more reasonable policy of give and take than has been pursued in the past. These frontiers are not yet completely closed, The British Empire, France, the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland and the North and South American continents have not yet accepted the idea of economic self-sufficiency or hysterical nationalism under a totally powerful state. This, after all, is still two-thirds of the civilized world.

Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/October 18, 1934

Bill Brown, able member of the New York boxing commission, was voted down by his two associates on the most sensible suggestion that has been made by that august body in some time.

Perhaps that is the reason it was voted down.

Bill Brown wanted the present round-by-round scoring of fights in New York abolished, and a point system introduced.

Bill Brown also wanted the matter of physical condition of a fighter at the end of a bout taken into consideration by the officials in reaching their decision, a suggestion even more important than the other.

Bill Brown’s idea is that if a fighter is tottering around and ready to dive into the resin at the end of the final round, that is something distinctly in favor of the other fellow, no matter how many early rounds the tottery bloke has won.

Bill Brown is quite right.

Old time referees always took the condition into their reckonings, and this writer has for years contended the importance of the point.

A great “come-behinder” may be stabbed all over the premises in the early rounds, yet have his man staggering up Queer St. at the finish, and thoroughly beaten.

The “come-behinder” ought to have the verdict.

It is silly to give a decision to a man who could not get off his stool for another round.

The writer thinks judges should be done away with entirely, and the referee made the sole arbiter of a fight.

If the objection is that this plan would deprive some worthy citizens of occasional work, let them be paid anyway to remain away from the ring.

The one-man system would cut down disputed decisions about 50 per cent. It would facilitate matters generally. The three-man jury now employed is cumbersome and retarding, and experience has demonstrated that it has not raised the standard of decisions one little bit.

Indeed, the writer is inclined to think that it has lowered the standard.

The evil-minded will at once say that one man is easier to reach than two, and that with only a referee the larceny boys would have a better opportunity to get in their dirty work.

The writer’s reply to this is that if boxing cannot trust its referee, we ought to do away with boxing. It might be a good idea, regardless of other considerations.

In the old days of boxing when only a referee did the deciding, there were no more complaints of dishonesty or favoritism than you hear nowadays when a posse does the judging, if as much. No more than you hear right now about baseball umpires, or other sports officials.

The old time referees were proud of their reputations, and rarely did anything to jeopardize them. George Siler, Malachy Hogan, Jack Welsh, Billy Roche, Tim Hurst, Charely White, Jim Griffin, and scores of old timers worked in hundreds of tough boxing bouts, gave their decisions promptly, and while sometimes their judgment might be deemed faulty, their honesty was never questioned.

To this day, when boxing men find themselves in doubt as to the impartiality of the officials that may be offered them, they turn to one man, whose presence in the ring is regarded as the 18-karat mark of square dealing. That man is George Blake, of California.

No manager, or fighter, cares if any judges are present if they can get Blake.

There are many honest and capable referees in New York City.

They would do much better work if they were permitted to handle a bout alone, unhampered by judges. Often a referee gets blamed for some incompetency of the judges.

A real referee takes a sort of mental picture of a bout as a whole, without bothering to jot down his impressions between rounds, and on that picture he renders his verdict, and in nine times out of ten it works out better than the joke expert-accounting system employed in New York.

Bill Brown will be doing the game a great favour if he can induce his associates to throw away the judges, and get back to first principles. But perhaps that suggestion is also a little too sensible.

Damon Runyon

Wilkes-Barre Evening News/March 30, 1934

In the now sacred name of revenue much crime against public morals is being fostered in this country.

The popular form is open gambling on horse and dog races. In most states, the parimutuel system prevails. In New York, the old-fashioned bookmaker is to be revived under legal protection until the parimutuels can be submitted to a vote. 

You are a knocker and a killjoy if you raise your voice against gambling on the races, because, you are told, it is to produce revenue to the state. Nothing is said about the revenue that it will produce to the track owners.

Yet there is no record of any state that has legalized gambling on the races reducing its taxes on that account. Proportionately to the amount of money wagered by the public, the return to the state is very small, especially after it gets through paying salaries and expenses of the politically appointed crew necessary to keep track of its share of the gambling enterprise.

Public the Loser

It is a well-known fact that the pari-mutuels will eventually milk dry any ordinary community in which they operate for any length of time. The return to the state cannot possibly be commensurate to the distress created among business and working people by the gambling drain.

But in these times you must not decry legalized vice, gambling, or drinking, or anything else. Think of the revenue it all produces, even if your income taxes do continue to increase.

However, I can offer you a tip on a sure thing in connection with this craze to legalize gambling.

The pendulum will swing back a few years. Most of the states that are hastening to declare themselves in on race track gambling will suddenly realize that they are getting the worst of the partnership, financially, and morally.

Then you will find racetracks quoted as about a dime a dozen.

It is bad in principle, and worse in practice, to encourage gambling, and it can’t last.

Free Advertising

Big league baseball has received its usual $5,000,000 worth of free newspaper advertising, for which it returns nothing this spring, and is moving up out of the spring training camps of the South.

The hundreds of thousands of words, mainly persiflage, but quite diverting, sent forth by the newspaper correspondents with the various teams, informed the fans of little they did not already know.

The fans are well aware that the New York Giants will again win the National League pennant, though some of them may not have known, until they read it here, that the St. Louis Browns will win the American League pennant.

A note of sadness in the training camp news is the injury to “Rabbit” Maranville of the Braves, 41 years old, and one of the oldest active players in the game. Maranville sustained a broken leg in a collision with Catcher Norman Kies, of the Yankees, in an exhibition game.

He will be out of the game for months. Perhaps his baseball career is ended. This would be a great pity. You may take it from one who has seen many baseball players that Maranville, called “Rabbit” because of his size, has more of the various elements that go to make up what is known as “color” in a ballplayer, than any other diamond performer of the past 20 years.

Foreigners Coming Back

The William Randolph Hearst Trophy race at Palm Beach taught the Spanish and French outboard drivers something. It taught them that our American outboard racing hulls are far superior to their own heavy hulls in water that is smooth or moderately bumpy.

So, as they return home, Miguel Barilla and Manuel Giro, of Spain, and the Marquis Gonzalo de la Gandara, of France, take with them three American hulls, planning to construct similar boats, modeled to take care of their heavier engines.

The foreigners say they will come back again with these boats prepared to give our drivers closer competition. The William Randolph Hearst Trophy establishes a new field of international sports competition, but as long as we have Horace Tennes, of Illinois, as chief defender, the trophy is likely to remain in this country.