After a Year

Just 365 days ago this morning, enemy airmen swooped down on our sleeping, though forewarned, naval base at Pear! Harbor. Not until yesterday were the details of that disgraceful monument to official laxity and stupidity unveiled to the American people. Had the Japes known immediately what they had accomplished, the flag of the Rising Sun might even now be waving over Hawaii. Though we were spared that disaster, which might have knocked us out of the war before we had even started, we suffered defeat after defeat, retreat after retreat. Hong-Kong was the first to fall; them the Philippines and the "impregnable" stronghold of Singapore, and with it the only large-scale naval base in the Far East. The loss of the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and parts of the Russian Caucasus deprived our armed forces of badly needed oil, rubber, and metals.

Not only on the battlefields of the world did democracy seem to be on the run. At home, there was bungling of the manpower, problem, of the gas and oil mixup, of racial disputes, of censorship and news dispensation. In Congress, politics played havoc with such measures as the lowered draft age and the tax bills. On the education front, college officials raised their voices in a pleading chorus crying for a blueprint from the War Manpower Commission, and Washington answered with equal vehemence that the job should be done by the colleges. Enticing reserve plans were set up by every branch of the armed services, colliding with the necessity for drafting married men to build a 10,000,000 man army. Statement like that of the War Manpower Commission which proclaimed "every able bodied male is destined for the armed services, bucked the needs of industry and the desperate lack of trained doctors, physicists and chemists.

The past is black, and the future scarcely brighter. Ahead lies the overwhelming task of invading the continent of Europe. We still must take Tunis and Bizerte to make our African venture reap the profits for which it was designed. Japanese island forts like Truk must be cleaned out, all we have lost must be regained, and a method of defeating the Nipponese must be devised. The Russians and Chinese must benefit from a flow of supplies from the American cornucopia. In the nation, "black markets," devastating crimps in production, and on a more lasting scale the uisheartening defeats of democracy like the recent Southern filibuster over the poll tax bill show than there is still a long road to travel.

We are considerably further along than we were December 7, 1941. We seem at last to be on the road. Naval victories in the South Pacific, the successful invasion of Africa, increasing bombardment of German and Italian factories, show that at last we have taken the offensive. Slowly the manpower tangle seems to be nearing solution, nation-wide gasolenc rationing has finally been imposed, and the blueprint for colleges is apparently ready.

But Pearl Harbor taught us that military victory is only the opening phase of our job. First we must solve the old conflict which began long before World War 1, before the French Revolution, before the shots were fired at Lexington, and before the Revolutions of 1848; this conflict which has its origins in the liberal, revolutionary ideas of John Locke and on the other hand the reactionary counter-revolutionary attacks of those who have tried to cripple the growing influence of the common man. We must solve the conflict with modern guns and ships and planes. Then we must stand by our promises and resolutely construct machinery which will perpetuate our military victory. And, finally, we should do our share to make the new mechanism work by breathing life into it, and adapting it to changing situations so that, like our Constitution, it will last, though man's ideas and institutions radically change.