CMTC candidates got 3¢ per mile to and from their homes, no other money.
In 1925 I was appointed midshipman. There were 51 qualified applicants trying for that one appointment.
240 of my class graduated; 130 fell by the wayside. One of that 130 resigned voluntarily; all the others resigned involuntarily, most of them plebe year for failure in academics (usually mathematics), the others were requested to resign over the next three years for academic, physical, or other reasons. A few resigned graduation day through having failed the final physical examination for commissioning. Three more served about one year in the Fleet, then resigned—but these three volunteered after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 28 of the 129 who left the service involuntarily managed to get back on active duty in World War Two.
So with four exceptions all of my class stayed in the Navy as long as the Navy would have them. About 25% were killed in line of duty or died later of wounds. Neither at the Academy nor in the Fleet did I ever hear a midshipman or officer talk about resigning. While it is likely that some thought about it, all discussion tacitly carried the assumption that the Navy was our life, the Fleet our home, and that we would leave only feet first or when put out to pasture as too old.
Enlisted men: When I entered the Fleet, before the Crash of '29 and about a year before unemployment became a problem, Navy recruiting offices were turning down 19 out of 20 volunteers; the Army was turning down 5 out of 6. The reenlistment rate was high; the desertion rate almost too small to count.
Span of Time—Today in the Armed Forces
I have said repeatedly that I am opposed to conscription at any time, peace or war, for moral reasons beyond argument. For the rest of this I will try to keep my personal feelings out of the discussion—as I did in the rosy picture painted above. I reported facts, not my emotions.
I will not review details showing that the USSR is today militarily stronger than we are as the matter has been discussed endlessly in news media, in Congress, and in professional journals. The public discussion today concedes the military superiority of the USSR and centers on how much they are ahead of us, and what should be done about it. The details of this debate are of supreme importance as the most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win. At the moment the three-cornered standoff is saving us from that silly way to die . . . but I cannot predict how long this stalemate will last as key factors are not under our control, and neither our government nor our citizens seem willing to accept guns instead of butter on the scale required to make us too strong for anyone to risk attacking us. Polls seem to show that a controlling number of voters think that we are already spending too much on our Armed Forces.
What I set forth below comes primarily from an article by Richard A. Gabriel, Associate Professor of Politics, St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hampshire, author of Crisis in Command. I lack personal experience with Army conditions today but what Dr. Gabriel says about them matches what I have heard from other sources and what I have read (I belong to all three associations—Army, Navy, Air Force—plus the Naval Institute and the Retired Officers Association; I get much data secondhand but no longer see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears).
Readers with personal experience in Korea, Viet Nam, and in the Services anywhere since the end of the Viet Nam debacle, I urge to write and tell me what you know that I don't, especially on points in which I am seriously mistaken.
Summarized from "The Slow Dying of the American Army," Dr. Richard A. Gabriel in Gallery magazine, June 1979, p. 41 et seq.:
Concerning the All Volunteer Force (AVF): Early this year the Pentagon admitted that all services had failed to meet quotas.
30% of all Army volunteers are discharged for offenses during first enlistment. Of the 70 per 100 left, 26 do not reenlist. The desertion rates are the highest in history . . . and this fact is partly covered up by using administrative discharges (—i.e., "You're fired!") rather than courts martial and punishment—if the deserter turns up. But no effort is made to find him.
According to Dr. Gabriel, citing General George S. Blanchard and others, hard-drug use (heroin, cocaine, angel dust—not marijuana) is greater than ever, especially in Europe, with estimates from a low of 10% to a high of 64%. Marijuana is ignored—but let me add that a man stoned out of his mind on grass is not one I want on my flank in combat.
Category 3B and 4 (ranging down from dull to mentally retarded) make up 59% of Army volunteers . . . in a day when privates handle very complex and sophisticated weapons and machinery. Add to this that the mix is changing so that a typical private might be Chicano or Puerto Rican, the typical sergeant a Black, the typical officer "Anglo." And that officers are transferred with great frequency and enlisted men with considerable frequency and you have a situation in which esprit de corps cannot be developed (an outfit without esprit de corps is not an army unit; it is an armed mob—R.A.H.).
Today we have more general officers than we did in World War Two. Our ratio of officers to enlisted men is more than twice as high as that of successful armies in the past. But an officer is not with his troops long enough to be "the Old Man"—he is a "manager," not a leader of men.
Dr. Gabriel concludes: "The most basic aspect is the need to reinstate the draft."
I disagree.
My disagreement is not on moral grounds. Forget that I ever voiced opposition to slave soldiers; think of me as Old Blood-and-Guts willing to use any means whatever to win.
Reinstating the draft would not get us out of trouble, even with the changes Dr. Gabriel suggests to make the draft "fair."
As everyone knows, we were in the frying pan; shifting to AVF, instead of producing an efficient professional army, put us into the fire. Dr. Gabriel urges that we climb back into the frying pan—but with improvements: a national lottery with no deferments whatever for any reason.
I can't disagree with the even-steven rule . . . but my reason for thinking that Dr. Gabriel's solution will not work is this:
A lottery, even meticulously fair, cannot make a man willing to charge a machine-gun nest in the face of almost certain death. That sort of drive comes from emotional sources. Esprit de corps and patriotism cannot be drawn in a lottery.
Conscription works (among free men) only when it is not needed. I have seen two world wars; we used the draft in each . . . but in each case it was a means of straightening out the manpower situation; it was not needed to make men fight. Both wars were popular.
Since then we have had two non-Wars—Korea and Nam—in "peacetime" and using conscript troops. And each non-War was a scandalous disaster.
I don't have a neat solution to offer. If the American people have lost their willingness to fight and die for their country, the defect cannot be cured by conscription. Unless this emotional condition changes (and I do not know how to change it), we are whipped no matter what weapons we build. It could be overnight, or it could continue to be a long slow slide downhill over many years—ten, twenty, thirty. But the outcome is the same. Unless something renews the spirit this country once had, we are in the terminal stages of decay; history is ending for us.
Our foreign masters might graciously let us keep our flag, even our national name. But "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" will be dead.
Time Span—Inflation
The Winter of '23–'24 I paid a street vendor 5¢ for a five billion mark German note and I paid too much; 5,000,000,000 DM was worth a trifle over 1¢. A bit later it was worth nothing.
In 1955 at the foot of the Acropolis I bought a small marble replica of the Venus of Melos for 10,000 drachma. I wasn't cheated; that was 3.50 USA.
There are the British pound, the Turkish lira, the Italian lira, the Mexican peso, and several others; all mean one pound of silver. Look up "exchange" and "commodities" in your newspaper; grab your pocket calculator and see how much each is inflated.
When I was a child of four or five my brothers and I used great
stacks of hundred-dollar bills as play money. Confederate—
After two centuries, "Not worth a continental," still means "worthless." Memory is long for the damage done by inflation.
Before paper "money" was invented, inflation was accomplished by adding base metal to silver and/or gold while retaining the name of the coin. By this means the Roman denarius was devalued to zero during the first three centuries A.D. But inflation did not start with Caesar Augustus. In the early days of the Republic before the Punic Wars the cash unit was the libra (libra = lb.—pound = 273 grams, or about 60% of our pound avoirdupois, 454 grams). That's too large a unit for daily retail use; it was divided into 12 unciae (ounces).
A "lb." of silver was called an "as." 1/12 of that, struck as coinage, made efficient currency. Now comes war and inflation—
Eventually the "as"—once a pound of silver—was so debased that it amounted to a penny, more or less. Augustus, by decree, went back on a silver/gold standard and created the denarius, 3.87 grams of fine silver. He made 25 denarii equal in value to one aureus (7.74 grams of gold), or a ratio of 12.5 to one. ("Free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one!" The Great Commoner and the august Emperor had similar notions about hard currency.)
One Augustan denarius equalled in gold at today's London fix ($385/troy ounce) a nominal $3.83, or about 3/10 of a gram of gold. This tells us nothing about purchasing power; it simply says that the Augustan denarius was a solid silver coin almost the size and weight of the solid silver quarter we used to have before the government foisted on us those sandwich things. How much olive oil or meal that would buy in Rome around 1 A.D. can be estimated from surviving records—but all the gold in Rome could not buy an aspirin tablet or a paper of matches. No way to compare. And hard money was not supplemented by printed money, bank checks, and transactions that take place entirely inside computers—but I can't go into how those phenomena affect purchasing power without writing a book twice as long as this one on fiscal theory (which I am quite willing to do but nobody would buy it).
What Augustus did was to stabilize Rome's money by defining it in terms of two commodities, each intrinsically valuable, each stable in supply, each almost indestructible, and he defined also the legal ratio between the two coinages—an effort to circumvent Gresham's Law, unknown then but Augustus appears to have had a gut feeling for it. (Not Bill Gresham—the other one. Thomas Gresham.) But a bimetallic standard has its problems; the free economy ratio tends to drift away from the legal ratio, and Gresham's Law begins to work. But this happens very slowly with hard money and is not the disaster that printing-press inflation is, or the debasing of hard money.
Caesar Augustus died in 14 A.D.
His corpse was hardly cold before the vultures got to work. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero—even Claudius did nothing to stop the robbery. Titus attempted an Augustan return to honest money in 80 A.D. but he died in September the following year; his successor was a disaster even as Caesars go.
"Put not your trust in Princes." Debasement of the currency continued under every Caesar for the next two centuries. Diocletian (reign: 294–305) inherited a worthless denarius; he returned Rome to the bimetallic standard at a level barely below that of Augustus. But he increased enormously the bureaucracy, instituted the harshest of taxation to pay for his "reforms," and decreed price-fixing—which worked just as it always does.
On his retirement (not assassination[!]) debasement was resumed while taxes stayed high, and Rome was on the skids. The decline and fall of the denarius and of Rome paralleled each other.
I'm tempted to discuss France's incredible inflation and collapse thereof during the French Revolution (and three more French inflations since then), and the inflations of several other countries in other centuries. But they are monotonously alike and differ from debasement primarily in the fact that the invention of paper "money" permits the corruption of legal tender to get utterly out of hand before the people notice it. In Germany in the early twenties people used to take wheelbarrows to the grocery store—not to fetch back groceries but to carry money to the grocer. But the early stages of disastrous inflation feel like "prosperity." Wages and profits go up, old debts are easier to pay off, business booms.
It is not until later that most people notice that prices and taxes have gone up faster than wages and profits, and that it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet.
There is a strong emotional feeling that "a dollar is a dollar." (Hitler called it, "Mark is Mark!") But you can reexamine it in terms of prices on bread, or how many minutes to earn a dollar. And don't forget taxes! If you aren't working at least the first three months of each year to pay taxes before you can keep one dollar for yourself, then you are on welfare, one way or another. You may not think you are taxed that much—paycheck deductions and hidden taxes are extracted under anesthesia. Try dividing the Federal Budget by the number of wage earners not on the public payroll, then take a stab at where you fit in. Don't forget the same process for state, county, and city. There are Makers, Takers, and Fakers, no fourth category, and today the Takers and the Fakers outnumber (and outvote) the Makers.
Today it takes more dollars each year to service the National Debt than the total budget for the last and most expensive year of the Korean War. I am not going to state here the amount of our National Debt. If you have not heard it recently, you wouldn't believe me. If you don't know, telephone your Congressman and ask; he has a local office near you. If the telephone information service can't (won't) tell you, the city room of any newspaper does know his number.
Our National Debt will never be paid. We are beyond the point of no return. Inflation will continue and get worse . . . and the elderly on fixed incomes and the young adults trying to start families will continue to bear the brunt.
Every congressman, every senator, knows precisely what causes inflation . . . but can't (won't) support the drastic reforms to stop it because it could (and probably would) cost him his job. I have no solution and only one piece of advice:
Buy a wheelbarrow.
The Age of Unreason
Having been reared in the most bigoted of Bible Belt fundamentalism in which every word of the King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God—then having broken loose at thirteen when I first laid hands on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man—I should have been unsurprised by the anti-intellectual and anti-science ground swell in this country.
I knew that our American temperament, practical as sharp tools on one side, was never more than three quarters of an inch from mindless hysteria on the other side. I knew this—my first long story was "If This Goes On—", a yarn based on the assumption that my compatriots were capable of throwing away their dearly-bought liberties to submit to a crude and ridiculous religious dictatorship.
(In forty years of letters about that story no one has ever criticized this assumption; I infer that I am not alone in believing it.)
I had read much about the Ku Klux Klan during the Tragic Era, talked with many who had experienced it, then experienced its nationwide recrudescence in the early 1920's. I had seen damfoolishness from dance marathons to flagpole sitters, and had made considerable study of crowd behavior and mass delusions. I had noted, rather casually, the initial slow growth of anti-science-&-intellect-ism.
Yet the durned thing shocked me.
Let me list some signs:
a) I CHING;
b) Back-to-nature cults;
c) The collapse of basic education;
d) The current respectability of natal horological astrology among "intelligentsia"—e.g. professors, N.Y. lit'rary people, etc.;
e) "Experts" on nuclear power and nuclear weapons who know nothing whatever of mathematical physics and are smug in admitting it;
f) "Experts" on the ecology of northern Alaska who have never been there and are not mathematically equipped to analyse a problem in ecology;
g) People who watch television several hours a day and deriv
e all their opinions therefrom—and expound them;
h) People who watch television several hours a day;
i) The return of creationism—"Equal time for Yahweh";
j) The return of witchcraft.
* * *
The mindless yahoos, people who think linearly like a savage instead of inductively or deductively, and people who used to be respectful to learned opinion or at least kept quiet, now are aggressively on the attack. Facts and logic don't count; their intuition is the source of "truth."
If any item on the above list strikes you as rational, I won't debate it with you; you are part of the problem.
But I will illustrate what I mean in categories where I think I might be misunderstood.
a) I CHING—easier than "reading the augurs" but with nothing else to recommend it. Chinese fortune cookies are just as as accurate—and you get to eat the cookie. Nevertheless this bit of oriental nonsense is treated with solemn seriousness by many "educated" people. It is popular enough to make profitable the sale of books, equipment, magazine articles, and personal instruction. Paralleling I CHING is the widespread use of Tarot cards. Fortunetelling by cards used to be a playful parlor game, a mating rite—a nubile girl limited by the vocabulary and public manners of the Mauve Decade could convey to a rutty young male almost any message by how she chose to "read his fortune"—with no impropriety. But neither he nor she took the cards seriously.
Tarot cards formerly were used only by Gypsy or fake-Gypsy fortunetellers; they were not an article of commerce, were not easy to find. Today they are as easy to buy as liquor during prohibition, and also books on their "interpretation." Reading the Tarot is taken with deep seriousness by a dismaying number of people—having the Hanging Man turn up can cause great anguish.