Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

We admit our radar screen is leaky. We have dreamed up—and left largely on drawing boards—such weapons as might adequately defend a sky-beleaguered metropolis. In sum, we face the rage of radioactivity, the blast of neutrons, the killing solar fires, with peashooters and squirt guns.

“Indeed, if the findings of our local schoolmarms are accepted, we soon may taboo even the mention of such dangers. It upsets the pupils, they say; Rorschach Tests reveal this remarkable perturbation. All hell may be winging toward us in the sky but, in the name of American education, let us not permit it to ruffle a single second-grader!”

Mrs. Berwyn snorted.

His answering grin was bleak. “It’s the truth! Minerva just sent us some bloody pedagogical bulletin full of ‘data’ about ‘anxiety-curve-rise’ with every set of atom tests in Nevada. Minerva feels, and she’s backed up by nervous parents and whole school boards, that the radio, TV and press should, perhaps, stop publishing any reference whatever to mass-destruction weapons, atomic-energy tests, or anything connected with the subject.”

“The ostrich principle?”

“Yeah. That got us, unready, into two big wars lately and several small ones.”

“Anything else?” she asked. “Just a paragraph or two.” His desk chair received him, squeaked a little as he tipped it back, boosted his feet onto his blotter and spoke:

“America had—and missed—its only golden chance. If, in 1945, or 1946, or even 1947, the American people had seen the clear meaning of liberty, there would have been no war and there would be no danger now. The proposition is exquisitely simple. Our nation is founded on the theory that the majority of the people, if informed, will make appropriate decisions. That, in turn, implies—it necessitates—the one freedom that underlies all others: freedom to know, intellectual liberty, the open access of all men to all truth. That—that alone —is the cornerstone of liberty and democracy. When the Soviets showed the first signs of enclosing, in Soviet secrecy, mere scientific principles like those of the bomb, we Americans could and should have seen that Russian secrecy would instantly compel American secrecy. We should have seen that an America thus suddenly made secret, in the realm of science where knowledge had thitherto been open, would no longer be free, and its democratic people could no longer be informed.

Hence Russia’s Iron Curtain would have been seen as what it was and is and always will be: a posture of intolerable aggression against American freedom.

“If that had been seen at the time, the Iron Curtain could have been dissolved by a mere ultimatum: America then was the earth’s most powerful nation, Russia was devastated. But we were powerful only in arms and trusted them. We were feeble-minded in ideals and ideology: our vision of freedom was myopic. We, too, clamped down on abstract knowledge a new, un-American curtain called ‘security,’ and every kind of freedom commenced inevitably to dwindle in a geometric progression. That was our chance. Our peril today, our ever-growing and ever-more-horrible peril in the visible future, is the cost of saying we were free and acting otherwise.

We flubbed the greatest chance for liberty in human history and hardly even noted our blunder, our betrayal.

“Ten years have gone by. We could, at vast expense, have decentralized our cities. We didn’t. We could, at lesser expense, have ringed our continent with adequate warning devices and learned to empty our cities in a few hours. We didn’t. The cost, still, was too great; the dislocation of human beings, the drills and inconveniences, beyond our bearing. We had cause, in a struggle to regain landsliding liberties, we have always had the cause, to challenge Soviet power earlier, in the name of liberty, brotherhood, justice, human integrity and decency. All we did was to make a few peripheral challenges, as in Korea. We didn’t face the issue when the Kremlin’s bombs were scarce and weak. We are not even good opportunists.

“Now, the sands of a decade and more have run out. We cannot challenge without venturing the world’s end. Quite possibly our death notice is written, a few months or years farther along on the track of this wretched planet. Then, perhaps, our flight from freedom will get the globe rent into hot flinders, atomized gas. But the only question before you, citizens of Green Prairie, of River City, of the wide prairie region, of this momentarily fair nation and the lovely world, is this, apparently:

“What new idiocy can you dream up, with your coffee, your porridge, your first cigarette, to keep yourself awhile longer from facing these truths?”

Coley fell silent. He wiped his brow again.

“What do we do with it?” Mrs. Berwyn asked, a little stunned by the blunt finale.

“Eh?” He was paying no attention.

“I said, what shall I do? Tear it up? Do you want it transscribed? Is it for the archives, so you can whip it out someday in case it’s justified?”

He was looking at her, then, perplexedly. “I said. It’s tomorrow’s editorial.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Why?”

She glanced apprehensively at her wrist watch and back at the smallish man in the chair.

“It would fill the whole page. There’s hardly time to set it up, anyhow, to make the home-delivery edition. Bulldog’s almost out….”

“Shoot it right to composing,” he said, yawning.

She stood up and came to the side of his desk. “You quitting the Transcript, Coley, after you spent your life to build it?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean— maybe? This thing rubs salt in every sore in town! It kicks every private idol to smithereens!”

“Yeah. And may wake up a sleepwalking nation.”

“It violates what people believe. Even some of what I believe.”

“Does it?”

“I think it does,” she answered, suddenly doubtful. She was close to unprecedented tears.

“You can’t do it, Coley. You can’t kick apart the town you love!”

“I’m trying to keep it from being kicked apart!”

“Do me a favor. Do us all a favor. Do the Transcript a favor. Wait till tomorrow. Let everybody mull it over—”

“Remember, Bea, back in nineteen forty-three. When I went abroad?”

“What’s that got to do—”

“To England,” he said, musingly. “The whole Middle West refused to believe in the blitz.

The folks were deluded then, the same way. They wouldn’t face the fury of Hitler’s Luft waffe—

and they wouldn’t admit the British had the guts to take such a beating. I went over, just so they could read the stories of a typical Middle Western editor—written from London, while the fire bombs fell and the ack-ack drummed. Remember?”

“Sure,” she said. “My husband was alive—then.” He ignored that human dating of the occasion. “I went because, by God, I’m an editor. Because I knew what the papers reported was the truth. Because I thought an editor, an American editor, was obligated to help the American people face facts. I still think so!”

“Even, Coley, if it means you commit newspaper suicide?”

He rocked forward in his chair and began, delicately, to straighten and align the objects which comprised his desk set: clock, calendar, pens, pencils, inkstand, paper cutter, memo pad, the engraved paperweight given him by the YMCA Newsboys Club.

He said, “Sure. Even if it marches me off the stage.”

“You think it’s right?”

“I think anything else is wrong. Dead wrong. And almost everybody is wrong. I was on the edge of that conclusion a long while back. Weeks. I reached it when good old Hank Conner came in tonight. Besides”—he turned and smiled at the big woman—“who knows? Minerva Sloan has brains. Lots of brains. The arguments in that editorial make plain common sense. She won’t listen to them; she won’t read them in the places where they’re appearing. In her own paper, though, she’ll have to read them!”