With the coming of World War II, economic and social experimentation blossomed under Roosevelt's leadership and involved a good measure of national planning, jobs for everyone, and a vast system of post war educational benefits to eighteen million veterans. There was little inhibition; new, radically different national goals were not required for the traditional objective of winning at war. With such an aim, policy could be fearless and far-reaching.
Some coming generation perhaps, while paying proper respects to the spirit of the New Deal, may find, as William James put it, "the moral equivalent of war"—in new social goals, new expectations, with imaginative, undoctrinaire experimentation to attain them. If, in such an adventure, the thought of the past can help, it should be put to work.
6
Who Owns the Sun?
I take this title from a 1996 book by Daniel Berman and John O'Connor (Who Owns the Sun? People, Politics, and the Struggle for a Solar Economy), in which they make out a powerful case for the control of solar energy by the citizenry instead of by the corporate utilities. The article here that I wrote twenty years ago for the Boston Globe (February 28, 1975) may be out of date in its specific proposals for action, but it suggests that problems of class, of poverty and deprivation, were as true in the Seventies (a decade often presented as a prosperous one) as any other time. The spirit of the article, I believe, is still pertinent today.
As kids, we never came straight home from school. Those were the depression years, and I was growing up in New York. The sun set early on winter evenings, and I remember coming home to find my father, who had walked the streets all day looking for work (he was a waiter and a window-washer, a hard-working man who never finished elementary school) sitting with my mother and three brothers in the darkness, in our four-room flat, because we hadn't paid our electric bill. It happened more than once.
When I learned that Boston Edison had shut off the electricity in over 1200 homes last month because people did not pay their bills, an old anger returned.
Why should rich corporations have the right to deprive families of electricity, of gas to cook with, of fuel to heat their homes. These are life's necessities, like food, air, water. They should not be the private property of corporations, which use them to hold us hostage to the dark, to the cold, until we pay their price.
It is as if, all over this country, families lived in intensive-care units, with the dials controlling their supply of precious life fluids manipulated in some office far away, turned on or off, depending on the payment of a fee.
Legally, that is not extortion. But I think it is. Officially, it does not lead to loss of life. But then we have to find some way to describe the act of the Massachusetts Electric Company, cutting off power to that family in Athol earlier this month because a bill was not paid, forcing it to rely on a makeshift kerosene stove for heat, resulting in a fire that killed six children and a woman.
How many families in Dorchester and Roxbury and Somerville are freezing this winter, how many eating cold suppers, how many living by candlelight, because they didn't pass the supreme test of worth in our society, the test of money?
The anger against this is growing. The helplessness, the frustration are turning into action:
L A consumer group called Fair Share walked into a Boston Edison stockholders' meeting last week trying to present proposals against shutoffs and high rates. But there is as much democracy in stockholders' meetings as in an army regiment, and the chairman hurriedly adjourned the session.
2. In the Massachusetts Legislature, a bill supported by the signatures of 97,000 voters would put all new electric power production in the hands of the state, and possibly take existing plants away from the power companies. With publicly owned power, our bills would be much lower. The Federal Power Commission reported in 1970 that municipal electrical systems charged about 40 percent less than private companies.
3. If you think your electric bill is too high, you can appeal to the state Department of Public Utilities. Then your service cannot be shut off and you don't have to pay your bill until you get a hearing, which can take months. A group called CAP-Energy (Citizens Action Program on Energy, 129 South St. Boston) is trying to get at least 20,000 customers of Boston Edison to pledge to withhold payment of exorbitant bills, through this legal method, until rates come down.
Shouldn't it be an elementary rule of civilization that no human being should be deprived of heat or light or cooking fuel because of lack of money? Where does all that gas and electricity come from anyway? From coal, from oil, from the earth, from the stored energy of the sun, shining down for a billion years. Who took it on themselves, in some distant past, to sell the sun to Boston Edison? And what must the public do to get it back?
7
The Secret Word
This article appeared in the Boston Globe January 24, 1976. Twenty years later, the Soviet Union and other countries in Eastern Europe which called themselves "socialist" have overturned their governments and do not call themselves that any more. This is just as well for those of us who think socialism is an honorable idea, and that it was badly tainted by those ugly dictatorships. With those governments fallen, and capitalism failing to solve basic problems of human rights (an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as stated in the Declaration of Independence) this may be a good time to revive the word and the idea.
Do you remember the old Groucho Marx quiz program where, if a contestant happened to mention a certain secret word, the word dropped down and he or she won a big prize?
Well, there's a secret word I've been waiting many years for someone on TV to say—some news commentator, political figure, panelist, entertainer, anyone.
Lately, I've been especially careful in listening for it. On news programs, I've seen lines of unemployed people getting longer and longer. I've seen a movie made inside a welfare office, where old people were shunted around like cattle.
I've seen a program about citrus-fruit pickers in Florida, forced to take their little kids out of school to pick oranges with them so they could pay the rent. Meanwhile, the citrus owners were celebrating their prosperity with champagne and making speeches about how wonderful life was for everybody in the citrus industry.
I've watched the President at news conferences and his economic advisers at other news conferences, all pretending that things were going to be all right, but obviously bumbling and incapable of dealing with rising food prices, spreading unemployment, high rents, impossible medical costs and the shameful fact of a fabulously rich country unable to take care of the most basic needs of its people.
Not one of these people, on network programs watched by millions, mentioned the word which, with the obvious failure of our economic system, I thought someone was bound to blurt out.
The word? Socialism.
Of course, it's not just saying the word that is important. It's the idea of it— an idea too threatening to those who profit from the present system to be allowed adequate exploration on TV, radio, the newspapers, the motion pictures.
Let's hasten to say: I don't mean the "socialism" of Soviet Russia or any other oppressive regime claiming to be socialist. Rather, a genuine socialism which not only distributes the wealth but maintains liberty.
That may not exist anywhere in its best form, but the idea has caught the imagination of many people in world history, famous and obscure, who were sensitive to poverty and injustice and wanted a truly democratic world society, without war, without hunger, without discrimination.
There were Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Also, George Bernard Shaw, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, W.E.B. DuBois.
Socialism was once an important movement in the United States. There was Eugene Debs, who organized the railroad workers in the big strike of 1894, went to prison for that, and there, reading and thinking, became a socialist: "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free."
There
was Mother Jones, who at 82 fought alongside the coal miners against the Rockefeller interests in Colorado. There was Jack London, the adventure writer. And Heywood Broun, who organized newspapermen into a union and defended Sacco and Vanzetti against the cold authority of the governor of Massachusetts and the presidents of MIT and Harvard. And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who as an Irish rebel girl, helped the women textile workers of Lawrence in their successful strike of 1912. Socialists all.
In 1776, the time was right for Tom Paine to speak "Common Sense" about Independence, and the idea spread through the country. (It has just reached Gerald Ford.) Isn't the time right, in 1976, for us to begin discussing the idea of socialism?
To break the hold of corporations over our food, our rent, our work, our lives—to produce things people need, and give everyone useful work to do and distribute the wealth of the country with approximate equality—whether you call it socialism or not, isn't it common sense?
PART THREE
WAR
1
Just and Unjust War
I enlisted in the Army Air Corps in World War II and was an eager bombardier, determined to do everything I could to help defeat Fascism. Yet, at the end of the war, when I collected my little mementos—my photos, logs of some of my missions—I wrote on the folder, without really thinking, and surprising myself: "Never Again." In the years after the war, I began to plumb the reasons for that spontaneous reaction, and came to the conclusions which I describe in the following essay, published as a chapter in my book Declarations of Independence (HarperCollins, 1990).
Years before (in Postwar America, Bobbs Merrill, 1973), I had written an essay called "The Best of Wars," in which I questioned— I was unaware of anyone else asking the same question—the total acceptance of World War II. After my own experience in that war, I had moved away from my own rather orthodox view that there are just wars and unjust wars, to a universal rejection of war as a solution to any human problem. Of all the positions I have taken over the years on questions of history and politics, this has undoubtedly aroused the most controversy. It is obviously a difficult viewpoint to present persuasively. I try to do that here, and leave it to the reader to judge whether I have succeeded.
There are some people who do not question war. In 1972, the general who was head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command told an interviewer, "I've been asked often about my moral scruples if I had to send the planes out with hydrogen bombs. My answer is always the same. I would be concerned only with my professional responsibility."
It was a Machiavellian reply. Machiavelli did not ask if making war was right or wrong. He just wrote about the best way to wage it so as to conquer the enemy. One of his books is called The Art of War.
That title might make artists uneasy. Indeed, artists—poets, novelists, and playwrights as well as musicians, painters, and actors—have shown a special aversion to war. Perhaps because, as the playwright Arthur Miller once said, "When the guns boom, the arts die." But that would make their interest too self-centered; they have always been sensitive to the fate of the larger society round them. They have questioned war, whether in the fifth century before Christ, with the plays of Euripedes, or in modern times, with the paintings of Goya and Picasso.
Machiavelli was being realistic. Wars were going to be fought. The only question was how to win them.
Some people have believed that war is not just inevitable but desirable. It is adventure and excitement, it brings out the best qualities in men—courage, comradeship, and sacrifice. It gives respect and glory to a country. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend, "In strict confidence...! should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."
In our time, fascist regimes have glorified war as heroic and ennobling. Bombing Ethiopia in 1935, Mussolini's son-in-law Count Ciano described the explosions as an aesthetic thrill, as having the beauty of a flower unfolding.
In the 1980s two writers of a book on war see it as an effective instrument of national policy and say that even nuclear war can, under certain circumstances, be justified. They are contemptuous of "the pacifist passions: self-indulgence and fear," and of "American statesmen, who believe victory is an archaic concept." They say, "The bottom line in war and hence in political warfare is who gets buried and who gets to walk in the sun."
Most people are not that enamored of war. They see it as bad, but also as a possible means to something good. And so they distinguish between wars that are just and those that are unjust. The religions of the West and Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—approve of violence and war under certain circumstances. The Catholic church has a specific doctrine of "just" and "unjust" war, worked out in some detail. Political philosophers today argue about which wars, or which actions in wars, may be considered just or unjust.
Beyond both viewpoints—the glorification of war and the weighing of good and bad wars—there is a third: that war is too evil to ever be just. The monk Erasmus, writing in the early sixteenth century, was repelled by war of any kind. One of his pupils was killed in battle and he reacted with anguish:
Tell me, what had you to do with Mars, the stupidest of all the poet's gods, you who were consecrated to the Muses, nay to Christ? Your youth, your beauty, your gentle nature, your honest mind—what had they to do with the flourishing of trumpets, the bombards, the swords?
Erasmus described war: "There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome." He said this was repugnant to nature: "Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?"
Erasmus saw war as useful to governments, for it enabled them to enhance their power over their subjects: "...once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few."
This absolute aversion to war of any kind is outside the orthodoxy of modern thinking. In a series of lectures at Oxford University in the 1970s, English scholar Michael Howard talked disparagingly about Erasmus. He called him simplistic, unsophisticated, and someone who did not see beyond the "surface manifestations" of war. He said,
With all [Erasmus's] genius he was not a profound political analyst, nor did he ever have to exercise the responsibilities of power. Rather he was the first in that long line of humanitarian thinkers for whom it was enough to chronicle the horrors of war in order to condemn it.
Howard had praise for Thomas More: "Very different was the approach of Erasmus's friend, Thomas More; a man who had exercised political responsibility and, perhaps in consequence, saw the problem in all its complexity." More was a realist; Howard says,
He accepted, as thinkers for the next two hundred years were to accept, that European society was organized in a system of states in which war was an inescapable process for the settlement of differences in the absence of any higher common jurisdiction. That being the case, it was a requirement of humanity, of religion and of common sense alike that those wars should be fought in such a manner as to cause as little damage as possible.... For better or worse war was an institution which could not be eliminated from the international system. All that could be done about it was, so far as possible, to codify its rationale and to civilize its means.
Thus, Machiavelli said: Don't question the ends of the prince, just tell him how best to do what he wants to do, make the means more efficient. Thomas More said: You can't do anything about the ends, but try to make the means more moral.
In the 400 years following the era of Machiavelli and More, making war more humane became the preoccupation of certain liberal "realists." Hugo Grotius, writing a century after More, proposed laws to govern the waging of war (Concerning the Law of War and Peace). The beginning of the twentieth century saw international conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands and at Geneva in Switzerland which drew up agreements on how to wage war.
These realistic approaches however, had little effect on the reality of war. Rather than becoming more contr
olled, war became more uncontrolled and more deadly, using more horrible means and killing more noncombatants than ever before in the history of mankind. We note the use of poison gas in World War I, the bombardment of cities in World War II, the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of that war, the use of napalm in Vietnam, and the chemical warfare in the Iran-Iraq war of the early 1980s.
Albert Einstein, observing the effects of attempts to "humanize" wars, became more and more anguished. In 1932, he attended a conference of sixty nations in Geneva and listened to the lengthy discussions of which weapons were acceptable and which were not, which forms of killing were legitimate and which were not.
Einstein was a shy, private person, but he did something extraordinary for him: he called a press conference in Geneva. The international press turned out in force to hear Einstein, already world famous for his theories of relativity. Einstein told the assembled reporters, "One does not make wars less likely by formulating rules of warfare...War cannot be humanized. It can only be abolished." But the Geneva conference went on, working out rules for "humane" warfare, rules that were repeatedly ignored in the world war soon to come, a war of endless atrocities.