Q. Can you still call us complacent after we have conscripted an Army, begun to create an Air Force, gone far toward building a two-ocean Navy, flung a line of outposts from Iceland to South America, appropriated and recommended fifty billion dollars for defense, and told our Navy to sink German fighting ships?
A. The very list you name reeks with complacency. All of that put together does not equal a week of what even the “despised” Russians are doing now. The bitterest thing yet said about us was: “Better a Bolshevik who kills Germans than a Democrat who kills time.” We still unwaveringly and unblushingly expect somebody else to do the job for us. Now it is Russia.
To begin with we said France and England would do the job; then Norway; then the Low Countries; then the Balkans; and now we sit back and actually rely on the Russians. We cheer the news that the Navy is going to fight but shrink at the idea of an American Expeditionary Force. Why? For the same reason that war with Japan has many more advocates than war with Germany, because we could leave a sea war to the professional fighting men of the Navy. We shirk calling things by their proper names. Never have we used so many weasel words. Conscripts are “selectees”; naval war is “hunting pirates”; hiring the British to do our fighting for us is “lease-lend”; isolationists become “noninterventionists”; interventionists argue tediously for “all-out aid,” but few of them ever come out plainly and say we ought to go to war. All of this evasion stems from the refusal to face the supreme reality, namely that we have to go to war, that it is our war and was our war from the beginning.
Q. But haven’t we gone far toward recognizing that it is our war by our lease-lend appropriations of around thirteen billion dollars?
A. Do you realize that we actually delivered only $190,000,000 worth of goods in the first six months of lease-lend to Britain and China? That is only a little over one per cent of the total lease-lend money involved. If it takes us six months to deliver one per cent, how long will it take to deliver 100 per cent? Certainly, the beginning is slowest; certainly speed of deliveries will increase almost geometrically after the new factories begin to produce. But the fact is that we will never produce enough to win this war without going formally to war. As Donald M. Nelson, chief defense buyer, suggested, the only way to get capacity production for armaments is to make the program so big that civilian needs will be irresistibly pushed into the background, and every factory capable of producing armaments will be forced to drop its civilian business and go immediately to work on war materials.
What does “pushing our civilian needs into the background” mean? It means sacrifice; it means a lowering of our standard of living. Do you know anyone, have you a single person in your acquaintance in civilian life, whose standard of living has deteriorated as a result of sacrifice for our so-called defense effort? Leaf through your smart magazines, read the news of the shops, and ask yourself what the fighting folk of Europe would think of the war effort of a country whose rugged males in the bloody autumn of 1941 are asked in full-page advertisements: “Have you seen the new brown diamonds for men? These interesting, subdued stones are rapidly becoming a major item in the well-dressed man’s wardrobe.” Would this make very good evidence against Hitler’s assertion that we are a “decadent, degenerate democracy not to be taken seriously in war”?
Q. But how can we expect to improve morale by criticism? Isn’t it true that if you tell a healthy man he looks ill, and tell him frequently enough, he may actually fall ill?
A. Yes, but if you tell an ill man he looks well, and he therefore fails to take care of himself, he may die. It is not fear that we need; it is awareness. What was the common cause of the death of the fifteen nations which have fallen to Hitler? It was lack of awareness of his threat to their national existence. From Poland to Greece they were all overconfident and hence for six long years did nothing to bring about that coalition which might have saved them. Overconfidence is our danger, not defeatism. The moment our Navy was given orders to convoy and shoot, one prominent voice was raised to suggest that now we might diminish our Army, as though the war were virtually won.
Q. Our morale is very bad, then?
A. No, that is not true. Our morale is high. That sounds like a contradiction but it is not. It is my conviction after talking to audiences all over the country that the American people are eager to find out the truth and when they hear it they are eager to act; that they are far ahead of their leaders in Congress, and even of the President; and that if the President wanted it, he could get directly from the American people, not from Congress, but from the twenty-seven million Americans who voted for him, plus many million more, approval of any measure he advocated, including a formal declaration of war. National morale depends so much on leadership that a great figure, as Roosevelt in this country and Churchill in England, can influence it to great decisions with one broadcast.