PLAIN PEOPLE: Revolutionary G.l.s

Wrote able New York Timeswoman Anne O’Hare McCormick:

“An Englishman arriving in this country since the [British] election declares that the American soldier had as much to do with the result as any single factor. The American Army camped a long time on British soil, and left a deep and disquieting impression, he said. . . . The lavish habits and easy manners of the G.I. attracted the girls, the girls wanted to marry America, and in the drab, hard years of the war young people in general became discontented with a life that offered them so much less than the United States seemed to provide for its citizens. They voted for automobiles, better clothes, mass-production factories, more spending power, modern conveniences. They voted socialist, in other words, in order to enjoy some of the fruits of American capitalism.

“This interpretation may be farfetched, but nobody who has observed the effect of the well-fed, well-equipped, opulent doughboy on the populations of France, Italy, the Near East, wherever he has appeared, can doubt that he has sowed in his wake the fertile seeds of envy and rebellion. . . .

“Does he produce the same impression on the Russian soldier? Does the Red Army man make the same appeal to the populations he liberates? The one thing to be sure of is that the occupying armies, wherever they are, are examples of systems they represent. . . . The G.I., in short, . . . plays a revolutionary role. . . . The idea of freedom continues to exert an irresistible attraction even for those who know it only by hearsay. If there is any reason why democracy does not win in competition with other systems, it is because democrats do not bid for the enormous majorities yearning to follow them.”