THE NATION: Democratic Vistas

Out on the Montana range, rattlesnakes were unusually plentiful, and the old men predicted a long warm fall and a short easy winter.

In Chatsworth, Ill. First Lieut. Billie Wittier, an Army nurse, made Page One of the weekly Plaindealer when she got back home: “She has seen much front-line active duty in the European sector, including Italy and Germany. She was able to see the Alps in all their beauty and says Switzerland, especially, is beautiful.”

In Manhattan, a nobly decorated veteran of the Pacific was passed along by a junior executive, who was unfavorably impressed by his willingness to take “anything,” to a junior executive who told him, kindly, “You know, I don’t think this is exactly the job for you.” Upon hearing this, the young hero burst into tears.

Happy days, more or less, were here again. Despite prodigious achievements at home & abroad, the nation had not been essentially changed by war. Now, returning to peace rather than struggling through to it nine-tenths dead, the U.S. was more like itself than ever—in a world which would never again be remotely the same.

The Broad Highway. Butter pats were served again at Schrafft’s and Henrici’s; cases against cigaret blackmarketers were dropped. Along the highways, in whatever cars they had, people were blowing out tires and bumping into each other again; the city traffic tie-ups were something awful. Other moral equivalents to war were the fall’s football games—which drew record crowds—and a shooting season so trigger-happy that Colorado’s game department recommended manslaughter laws for hunters.

Army deaths were totaled 216,966, the Navy’s 55,896; the National Safety Council announced that on the home front, since Pearl Harbor, 355,000 had been killed through accident, and 36,000,000 injured. The great songs of season were Till the End of Time, I’ll Buy That Dream, On the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. Best-selling novels were The Black Rose and Forever Amber. A big movie hit was Love Letters, a romance about amnesia. A psychologist claimed that Superman provided a beneficent Aristotelian catharsis ; a Jesuit saw in him a fascist archetype. Young girls tried to look like Bacall with a dash of Hepburn. Their elders went in for cosmetics with manic names like Fatal Apple and Havoc. They also favored detachable daintiness features and phantom crotches. In ads as expressive as dreams, fathers forfeited their children’s love because of denture breath, and women exclaimed: “Don’t expect me to marry you with a mouthful of cavities!”

A Navy doctor, soon to come home, wrote warning his wife rather sadly that he had gotten bald and heavy. She wrote back gently: “You will find that three years has done quite a bit to me, too.” A partially paralyzed ex-defense worker gave his six-year-old daughter a doll, his nine-year-old son a pack of cards, told them to shut their eyes because more was coming, and shot them through their heads.

The war was over. The postwar world was born. Everywhere the returning traveler saw signs of change, signs of no change at all, signs of change but too fast, signs of change but not fast enough: signs by the millions.

On the Atchison, etc. In Seattle a 25 -year-old veteran was sore about the skimpiness of his civilian shirttails. All over the U.S., businessmen read a brochure: Among Convention Leaders Who Know — It’s Chicago 81 to 65. In New Haven a CIOrganizer told ralliers: “We want full employment and if free enter prise must go, let it go. The manufacturers want to return to normalcy — the normalcy of no labor movement.” In the window of a gas station-soda fountain in McFarland, Calif, (pop. 605), appeared a wobbly handmade sign: “Colored Trade Not Solisited at Fountain.” In New Orleans white housewives, proud for the first time in their lives of doing their own housework, said “those niggers all want $12 or $15 a week and they’re no good at that.” The editor of the Laurel, Miss. Leader-Call listened to servicemen on a train en route to mustering-out camp, talking of sports, and home, and their tremendous desire to get back to the joys of civilian life. He wrote: “I wonder if they aren’t going to get a great jolt.”

Desperate, No Place to Go. In Kansas City, which calls itself the heart of America, a veteran of the Pacific observed: “Over there in the line we talked about life and death, and who was going to get it next. So what happens when I get home? I no more get into the house the old man begins to tell me about his God-damned lawn mower.”

A twelve-year-old delinquent phoned home at 3 a.m.: “Mom! Guess where I am? In jail again.”

At the height of a historic, nationwide housing shortage, such classified ads as this were common in the Star: “Desperate. No place to go. Veteran, wife and two children need home immediately.”

In Davey Markowitz’ place two veterans, former friends and schoolmates, met for the first time in four years. The ex-sergeant gave his boyhood friend, an ex-lieutenant, only a perfunctory greeting: “I hate lieutenants,” he snarled.

Over in Byers, Kans. Wayne Fisk came back from the Navy and said that a long rest would sure look good to him. But a day of loafing was enough. So while he was resting he painted his father’s house.

I’ll Buy That Dream. In its own quiet way, it was a period as madly chaotic in the relatively unscathed U.S. as in the shattered rest of the world. Nobody seemed able to see much beyond the end of his nose. Business tossed on the greatest wave of labor unrest since the middle ‘305. In vast numbers ex-war workers, some unwilling and some unable to live on reduced postwar wages, floated along on war savings or on unemployment compensation while, in vast numbers, jobs went begging. Veterans too wanted time to rest up and to enjoy themselves and to get readjusted, and they didn’t want to be hur ried about it either. Many were jealous of the high wages paid in wartime and paid no longer; many others, who took back their old jobs, left them within a few weeks.

Everywhere, people had expected an immediate, dreamlike postwar flow of the autos and refrigerators and radios and washing machines and farm machines and nylons and plumbing and good clothes which had been promised all through the war to the most machine-dependent and comfort-loving of nations. Everywhere, such hopes were sorely disappointed.

Till the End of Time. Underneath all the pleasure-bending, elbow-bending and tongue-bending (reflected perhaps—and perhaps not—in increased church attendance) lay a more mature awareness, a profound, bewildered foreboding, a tragic and justified uneasiness, a still more disturbing fatalism. Many Americans assumed that the nation’s interracial troubles were barely beginning; that another great depression and another great war were dead certainties; that the next opponent was Russia; that nothing whatever could be done about such matters.

Almost without exception Americans realized that they might not like the neighbors but they had to live with them. Almost without exception they talked a good deal about the atomic bomb; many had it on their minds even more than they talked about it. But almost without exception they were so thoroughly absorbed in immediate troubles, pleasures, hopes, angers and disappointments—and perhaps so essentially far-gone in the basic kind of hope which holds human beings upright—that they were virtually incapable of even trying to take fate into their own hands.

The general attitude about atomic control got no farther than the first primitive reflex of greed and terror; the unkeepable secret must be kept. The general attitude toward racial problems was most sadly expressed by the more thoughtful Southerners, who said they only wished they could spend the next few years where there weren’t any Negroes. The general attitude toward Europe was in the first place insufficiently informed, in the second place wearily or even scornfully indifferent.

Isolationism, in its old, simple, scarehead sense, was somewhere near being a thing of the past. But unconscious isolationism, far more insidious, was an all-powerful and increasing phenomenon of the present and future. If civilization, or time itself in the provincial, planetary sense, was to last more than another few decades, the responsibility rested chiefly on the American people. But for wholly understandable, nonetheless tragic reasons, the American people were not very responsible toward any major responsibility. If this troubled season was any indication, they would be too busy trying to buy that wholly un-purchasable dream.