The shape of this war was created in dark back rooms of cheap saloons, in a lodging house in Geneva, in several prison cells, in small half secret meetings, up back flights of stairs, behind drawn shades, in boarding houses over the dining table, in the lobbies of movie-houses, at lectures attended by the idle and the curious and the hopeless, in the kitchen of a New York restaurant where waiters talked more about the future than about tips; it was molded also in British pubs and by the sullen lives of dole-gatherers; it took a definable shape and could have been re-formed but was not, so that its shape today is the result of the pressure of those who willed to act and the missing pressure of groups which failed to meet and talk and plan.
The earth-shaking events of our time may have been created by the great and mysterious forces of history, but their exact form was fixed by obscure people: the Russian Revolution by Lenin and Trotsky, students, impractical men, and the homeless Stalin; and the war by Hitler, the house painter, the despised little man, the corporal who couldn't get over his military dreams. These were the leaders, the conspicuous ones. They planned—and wrote—and gathered a few even more obscure followers, and talked and lived in utter darkness until the time came for them to fight.
For a thousand years the destiny of mankind will be shaped by what these men did in countries barely emerging into freedom—and we to whom the gods have given all freedom, sit by and hesitate even to talk about the future, folding our hands and piously saying that in any case it will be decided for us. That is the result of forgetting our democratic rights and duties; with them we have forgotten that the future is ours to make.
It will not be made for us; it will not be made in our favor unless we make it for ourselves; the weapons with which we fight the war will be strong and terrible when we come to create the peace. And we will create it either by using the weapons or by dropping them and running away from our triumph, which is also our responsibility.
We will not escape the responsibility by saying that we cannot control "the great forces", the "wave" of events. We can do what Hitler and Lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can work and wait and work again. We must not say that we are helpless in the face of international intrigue. We—not Churchill and Roosevelt—wrote the Atlantic Charter, and we can un-write it and write it over again; we the people, not Henry Cabot Lodge, crushed the League of Nations by our indifference; we, not Congressmen bribed by scrap-iron dealers, armed Japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let Hitler go ahead by our ignorance. We have done all these things without working; and the only thing we have not tried, is to put out our hands and take hold of our destiny. In the first dreadful crisis of our war, we saw China begin to plan the world after the war, preparing a democratic center of 800 million people in Asia, putting pressure on Britain to proclaim liberty for India, taking hold of the future with faith and confidence—while we said not one open word to Asia, and had barely spoken to our nearest friends, the oppressed of Europe, to tell them that our purpose was liberty.
We cannot let the shape of the future be molded by other hands. The price of living as we want to live is more than sweat and blood and tears: we have to make the grim effort of thinking and take the risk of making decisions. A painful truth comes home to us: we are no longer the spoiled children of Destiny—our destiny is our action.
For more than a hundred years the people of the United States did not have to act and avoided the consequences of Democracy in international affairs. Officially we had nothing to do with Europe, except on special occasions when we snapped at Britain, frightened the Barbary pirates, helped Napoleon I, drove Napoleon III out of Mexico. We had no continuing policy and the details of foreign affairs were not submitted to the voter. This was natural enough; the eyes of America turned away from the Atlantic seaboard toward the Mississippi Valley; turned back from the Pacific to Chicago and the east; turned again to Detroit and Birmingham and Kansas City.
We have not yet got the habit of thinking steadily about other nations. Our post-war suspicion of the League, our terror of the USSR, our pious agreements with England and Japan, our weak dislike of Mussolini and Hitler, still left us unconcerned with policy. We remained in the diplomatic era of William Jennings Bryan while Europe marched back into the era of Metternich or Talleyrand.
Yet the voters have, since 1893, determined some aspects of our foreign policy. They did not vote on a loan to China, but they did keep in power the party that made war in Spain, bought the Philippines, protected Cuba, and policed Central America. This tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the Republican Party had always a better one, which was prosperity. In the early twentieth century, the American voter only accepted, he did not directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook.