Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Thus a condition is set up in which a vast majority of the citizens, unable to acknowledge with their minds the dread that eats at their blind hearts, loses all contact with reality. The sensible steps are not taken. The useful slogans are outlawed. The proper attitudes are deemed improper. Appropriate responses to the universal peril dwindle, diminish and at last disappear.

“All the while, the primordial alarms are kept kindled in the darkness of self-shuttered souls. Within them, in mortal quaking, march the impulses that set Inquisitions going, threw over liberty, brought down truth screaming, and assembled men repeatedly for bloody rites. Men’s ‘leaders,’ most of them, take up the suicidal expressions of the mob. For leadership, alas, is of two sorts: one, that courageous chieftainship which administers according to high principle, whatever the mob’s view at the moment; the other, specious and chimerical, a ‘leadership’ which merely rides upon the wave of mob emotion, capitalizing it for private aggrandizement, and no more truly leads than a man ‘leads’ the sea as it dashes him toward death on a rock. Such leaders—Hitler is an example—are in the end engulfed by that which sustained them. The other sort, true leaders—Lincoln was one—conduct the people by truth and reason through their panic to security, oftentimes against its stream.

“There are no Lincolns among us today.”

“That,” said Mrs. Berwyn, “will get you some dirty wires from Washington.”

Coley sat down on the edge of his desk and dictated more quietly, sometimes kicking his heels against the bleached mahogany:

“We, the people of the United States of America, have refused for more than a decade to face our real fear. We know our world could end. Every month, every year, several nations are discovering the fabricating instruments which make that ultimate doom more likely. The antagonism between a free way of life and a totalitarian way is absolute. And it appears to be unresolvable owing to the expressed, permanent irreconcilability of Communism.

“What have we done about all this? The answer is shocking. We have failed to meet the challenge. We have shirked the duty of free men. We have evaded every central fact. We have relied on ancient instruments of security without examining the new risks—reinforcing military strength while we left relatively undefended and unarmed the targets of another war: our cities, our homes.

“Many of us, intellectual men, liberals, humanistic in our beliefs, had stood about for upward of a decade muttering, ‘There must be no next war.’ That is childish; it is mad. Wars are generally made by unilateral decision: they are the aggressions of one nation. Not a single man among those who has insisted we get along, henceforward, ‘without war’—since war may spell the earth’s end—has offered a solitary idea or performed a solitary act that has lessened war’s likelihood. How could such people, who call their wishful thoughts ‘ideals,’ be anything but soothsayers? War, if it is to be avoided, must be quenched in the Kremlin and in the broad confines of Russia, taken with its captive states. But these people who say there must be no war are all in Illinois, or Arizona, or New York State—not Russia.

“Others, feeling appalled and thus compelled to do something, however ineffectual, to assuage the pain of their anxieties, have limited their hostility to the here and the now, to the known—and so somewhat evaded, by the delusion, the real, external source of terror. These persons—and they number scores of millions of self-satisfied good Americans—have been content to launch a long and heated crusade against Communism at home, its dupes, its puppets and its sinister agents.

“Conspiracy to destroy this Government by violence is treason. The mere desire to see liberty abolished in order that a compulsive, Communist state may replace it, seems vicious to every person who loves freedom. There is no doubt that domestic Communists are dangerous to liberty. But is it sensible to convert a true dread of the world’s end to a chase of putative traitors and minor spies, giving freedom, the while, no other service and no sacrifice at all? It is not.

“Yet in that one process, multitudes of the people of America and many of their leaders in the Congress have also set aside the concept of freedom itself! They have seized the instruments and ideologies of their foe—with the notion of ‘fighting fire with fire.’ Every private right has been violated, under the Capitol’s dome. The innocent have been condemned without trial. Envy, spite, lies and malicious gossip have been brought to bear on solid citizens, destroying them. So the medieval lust of men cowering before holocaust has been exploited, to make little men look big. We have emulated the tricks of Hitler and Stalin. Today, when some of us pronounce the word ‘un-American,’ what we mean belies the significance of Americanism as every great citizen conceived it from the Founding Fathers until this day. A love of liberty, fair play, justice now is widely held synonymous with ‘un-Americanism!’ Today, a man who defends all we have ever stood for is liable to abuse as a ‘potential traitor.’ All liberty is being turned about: conformity, slavishness, sedulous sycophancy, these are being held true evidences of patriotism. Such traitor-hunting methodology is a sickness of the American mind, a cancer in the frightened soul of a formerly great people. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’ says a cynic’s proverb; even the cynic does not admonish, ‘To catch a thief, become one.’

“Even religion, even the holy name of God, is used to restrict the rights of a people dedicated to religious freedom.”

Mrs. Berwyn whistled. “There you go again!”

His answering grin was bleak. “Then grab your hat, Bea. Because I’m telling the truth, for once.” He went on:

“A few years ago a new President of these United States made several loosely considered assertions about God and America. Americanism, he indicated, is founded in a belief in God; atheism, he suggested, is synonymous with the alien doctrines of the Soviet. This was an exultant discovery—for churchgoers, however evil their private conduct, narrow their views, or sleazy their religious tenets. For now, all atheists, agnostics and all the religiously unconforming could be looked upon by millions with suspicion, as Communists, or near to Communism. Special Faith was made to seem an American imperative—and Freedom died a new death.

“The attitude was a desecration of the principle upon which our nation is founded: religious freedom, tolerance, deliverance from persecution on any, and every, philosophical ground. For if we are a free people, we are not bound to conform to anybody’s belief, but only to let others believe and practice as they will, so long as they do not interfere with the general rights. It matters nothing what Presidents say; they come and go. We cannot, in simple fact, conform religiously. Any overt effort to do so would split and wreck this nation without recourse to arms and bombs. It is liberty that permits us to exist and grow strong, not conformity to one God, one cult, or any other beliefs save a belief in the freedom of the conscience of every citizen.

Religious freedom means we are responsible as a people to freedom itself, not to any God.

Responsibility even to God—if it were mandatory in this land, as so many have begun to imagine—would merely raise the question: Whose God? .

“It is a terrible question to ask in such an hour, a question more destructive and divisive among free men than enemy assault. For we Americans have come our long way in harmony simply because it is ‘un-American’ to insist on belief in aught but liberty. If we do, then shall it be more or less ‘American’ to believe in the Presbyterian Trinity? Or is the Baptist Faith correct and does every individual have to decide for himself about God, acknowledging only certain holy names in baptism. What of the Jews? Is their Jehovah the suitable God of Americans and their Law proper for all? And the Catholics! Is every American obliged to venerate the Virgin in order to show, as all Catholics believe, a true reverence? Suppose a Hindu becomes a citizen here? Are his many ‘gods’ also to be our God? Is Vishnu? And what of a Confucianist who truly believes ‘God’ to be good manners and perfect ethics? Then, let us ask, do Christian Scientists believe in God at all? According to millions of Protestants and others, they are rank heretics, the deluded followers of a woman from Boston. What of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Unitarians?