Audrey’s father, spare and towering, looked down at the rumpled chemist. “You’re talking nonsense.”
“Nope. You’re thinking nonsense. You and all who think like you. Looka here, Wilson. You wouldn’t do business the way you conduct your politics and nationalism. I mean to say, when a business proposition came up you’d be hell-bent for facts—existing and long-range. You wouldn’t close a deal until you were mortally sure nothing could rise out of the present that would ruin future chances to make money. To ascertain that, you’d be what you call ‘hard-headed,’ ‘factual,’ ‘forward-looking,’ ‘skeptical,’ and ‘strictly from Missouri.’ If there was a spot on the proposition, a little threat that might grow into a ruinous cloud, you wouldn’t proceed till you’d eliminated the spot, or arranged a bulwark against the cloud. You’re a good business man.”
“Thanks.”
“No compliment. You’re a stinking thinker—outside the field of return on invested capital. There’s a spot on America’s future called Hitler. People like Jimmie and I won’t rest until we’ve done all we can to eliminate it—or get ready for it—and we mean all. I repeat. We interventionists can easily understand you isolationists. But you can’t understand us—you get into a holy purple froth over us—because you won’t stop to examine the single, solitary belief we warmongers have in common. We believe Hitler might lick America. By bombers already talked about and soon to be in the air. By economic strangulation. By propaganda and internal division. By other methods we may not be smart enough to guess. Grant that one belief, and everything we do and say makes sense. Aiding Britain, aiding Russia, aiding any bloody damned raging rascals who will fight Hitler. Lending money, breaking the nation, if necessary, to manufacture arms, conscripting the boys, teaching the people of Muskogewan how to wear gas masks and put out fire bombs, giving our lives, arming ships, declaring war, seizing the Azores—
anything! We’re all-out guys—because we are absolutely certain in our heads and in our hearts that no American can sleep a safe night until the Nazis have been wiped off the slate and stamped into the grave of time. I won’t repeat the names of the nations Hitler has. I won’t talk about how a few armed terrorists with Wilhelmstrasse training can hold whole nations in slavery. I don’t need to go through the many flagrant reasons for our opinion—”
“Then don’t!” said Mr. Wilson.
“—but I will say this. You and your crowd have had two years—two long and terrible years—in which to prove that the thing we are getting ready for is a myth. You’ve had more than eighteen months since the blitz to convince us Hitler isn’t coming. You have money and brains, orators and a free press. You have congressmen and senators and leaders. You have radio time and you can print books. You’ve done all of it. And, day by day, more and more Americans have come over to our way of thinking—because, by God, you can’t make a case for your side! Not a convincing case! You can’t offer a guarantee that Germany won’t attack America someday. You can’t offer a guarantee that America can lick a Germany that may have licked everybody else on earth. All you’ve got to offer is your scorn, your negative hopes, and your fear of what preparedness and aid will cost.
None of those is worth a concrete damn! And as long as your crowd can’t prove—prove absolutely and beyond cavil—that we Americans are safe going along as we were, you might as well not try to talk. Because as long as there is a threat, a possibility, a chance, that the Huns are damn’ well after us—or will be—every man, woman, and child in America would be a sap if he was not exerting his utmost effort to whip them. Right?”
“There’s another position,” Mr. Wilson said hotly. “The position that Germany will exhaust herself before she gets to America.”
“Sure. And can you prove that she will? Mr. Wilson, what you can prove is that the Germans are bending every effort to make us Americans think they will be exhausted.