CABBAGES AND KINGS

This crusade business is slowly geting under my skin. Every time we Americans do anything, we feel that we must pose as knights in white armor bringing light to the darkness of the rest of the world. In the last war Wilson was the guardian angel of the great myth. In this war Henry Luce has cast Roosevelt as the champion of the liberal democratic ideal leading the world into an American Century. The strange thing about this simon pure attitude towards America, is that it is embraced by isolationists as freely as interventionists. Ever since Henry James we have tended to consider ourselves apart from the wickedness of the rest of the world, clinging to a charmed existence with a sort of childish naivete.

In this extremely idealistic attitude toward ourselves he the seeds of our failure as peace makers. In the first place it is bad salesmanship. Nobody likes to be told "you're all wrong. This is what you should be doing." That was proved in the last peace. In the second place it just isn't so. Neither our record nor out beliefs bear it out.

Certainly the policy we adopted since 1920 was not that of a great crusading nation. Complete isolation, the Hawley-Smoot tariff, and a profit making reparation policy are hardly milestones on a path of virtue. Having failed to win the peace we walked out on world government as completely as any one. We gave up the cause liberals in all countries were fighting for and set ourselves to a completely self-motivated course.

But even forgeting this period in our national history, it is hard to hold a brief for American purity. The very essence of belief in democracy denies it. We lay claim to basic truth because we feel there is a common bond in the wants of all men, because we feel that the hopes and fears that are in us are in others, because we feel that our type of liberty will unite all men. The essence of this belief is neither liberty nor equality, but fraternity. To set ourselves apart and above the remainder of the world is to deny this most basic tenet. It is to gild ourselves with a false glow that can only blind us to the bitter problems that have brought the world to war.

This is no American Crusade, and we will never end it successfully if we continue to proclaim it so. We are fighting for the same ends as our allies; it may very nearly be said, for the same ends as our enemies, not to impose different ends. It will do us a lot more good to attach ourselves to these bigger ideals than to keep harping on our separatism. Unless we come to Europe with an understanding of the obstacles to her peace, unless we join with European liberals in overcoming these obstacles, we will never get any basis for a final settlement.

What we've got to present must be more than national pride. If we are to do it, we must drop the holier-than-thou attitude both of Hoover in his "American Crusade" and of the Luce-thinking interventionists who envision an Anglo-American world. Let's not be prevented by hatreds and chauvinism from making this war the really allembracing endeavour that it is. Let's recognize that we are one nation of many, and to attain our ends we must make concessions to the interests of others.