INSIDE AMERICA

We must preserve our way of life. American democracy cannot survive in a Fascist dominated world. So runs the favorite argument for American intervention in World War II. But just what this way of life actually is becomes more and more of a mystery as the war progresses. While sincerely advocating the preservation of democracy abroad, national leaders have fomented a series of internal movements that throw a doubtful light on democracy at home.

In the past week alone, there has been a plethora of disquieting incidents in the news. The House of Representatives passed a bill providing for the limitation of the number of aliens employed in any one firm. The rules committees of both houses approved a bill calling for the deportation of alleged Communist labor leader Harry Bridges--even though the hearings conducted by Dean Landis last summer failed to disclose any evidence to prove that Bridges actually was a Communist. Editorials in papers throughout the country suggested the advisability of compulsory military training for every young man in the country as a permanent measure. And a Grand Rapids foundry worker, glutted with stories of Quislings and Trojan Horses, shot and killed his neighbor because he thought the neighbor belonged to the fifth column.

Limiting by law the opportunities of aliens in this country is close enough to Nazi racial fantasies to be disturbing. The deportation of a man innocent in the eyes of the law is in no essential way different from the political purges of Italy, Germany, and Russia. Compulsory military training is completely against the American ideal of personal freedom, and leads directly to that choking of individuality which has told so heavily upon the youth of the totalitarian states. And the everyman-a-policeman attitude, strongly encouraged by the F. B. I., that resulted in the unfortunate Grand Rapids incident bears a startling and frightening resemblance to the Gestapo-inspired reign of terror in Germany.

If America has had a way of life in the past, surely these present symptoms are not in agreement with that way of life. Small though they may be now, they must be recognized as the tender yet tenacious roots of an incipient American Fascism that may not have to take off its hat to any breed of Fascism grown abroad. Even if they provide no tremendous threat in themselves, and this is not by any means certain, they can serve as precedents for far more injurious movements in the not too distant future. America's battle against Fascism is in America, not Europe; Fascism in this country will not be caused by insidious international plotters, but by sincere though short-sighted one-hundred per cent Americans; and we must deal with internal Fascism not in the future, but right now.