National Affairs: Far from the Cannon’s Roar

The Korean war was being fought by a small segment of the U.S. people. The U.S. forces on the battle line were not as big as the baseball crowd that jams Yankee Stadium for sell-out games, and only a minority of Americans—servicemen out-s’de the battle zone, families of men in action and civilians subject to military duty—were directly concerned even in a secondary way. For all its savagery and import, the Korean conflict was working little more hardship on most citizens than the Battle of Wounded Knee.

Last week it was not even causing such compensating annoyances and minor inconveniences .as gasoline cards, tin-can drives or cigarettes flavored with coffee. The nation’s production lines went on spewing out gleaming new automobiles, television sets and dish washers. The U.S. had seldom had more sugar, meat, steel, gasoline, whisky and nylon, or more manpower for the mink coat, bubble gum and trout-fly trades. Though prices were edging higher (in part because of unblushing profiteers), so was employment.

The nation so far seemed to accept this plethora of prosperity and plenty with none of the qualms of conscience which had afflicted it during World War II. Nobody was demanding that men chop the cuffs off their pants, or that women make bandages and adopt a look of austerity. Advertisements for piecrust mix and plumbing plungers made no pretense at all that the product was being gotten out as a reward to “the boys” overseas. There had been no revival of such phrases as “The home front” and “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

None of this meant that U.S. citizens read the headlines from Korea without a sense of tension and foreboding—or a sense that the U.S. was proceeding too leisurely to arm itself against the threat of a World War. But few seemed to see anything incongruous in the fact that Milton Berle was billed as Mr. Dynamite simply because he could make foolish grimaces, or that hundreds of thousands of vacationers were lounging on beaches.

Americans—who were getting somewhat used to wars, even if they wished they were not—seemed to feel that any other attitude would have seemed forced, and perhaps even a little silly. The U.S. citizen of 1950 had an idea that he would be lucky if the nasty business in Korea did not flare into something immeasurably worse and he hoped his Government was diligently preparing for the worst. But meanwhile he proposed to eat steak and put some more miles on his new car. If there was anything else to be done, he figured, it was up to Washington to tell him.