Fear Itself (7 page)

The scope of sources generating fear continued to grow. In the two years before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Nazi Germany “had regained a dominance in Europe at least comparable to that of Bismarck; and like that of Bismarck, it was exercised with the willing consent of the British government and the glum acquiescence of the French.”
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With American neutrality, the relative absence of opposition to Hitler’s hegemony, near silence about Nazism’s fierce discrimination and humiliation of German Jews, and widespread democratic exhaustion and indifference, the surviving democracies seemed limp and incapable. Even more seemed lost in the demoralizing dislocations at the start of the 1940s. Poland, France, and a host of other countries were seized by the Nazis. Collaboration, whether official, as with France’s Vichy government, or quotidian, was far more common than resistance. The stream of refugees became a torrent on a biblical scale.
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The sudden fall of France in June 1940 was especially shocking. Late that month, the president of the Swiss Confederation, Marcel Pilet-Golaz, addressed the country by radio. He counseled that “this is not the time to look with melancholy toward the past,” explaining why the country’s legislative procedures would be suspended. “The government has to act. Conscious of its responsibilities, the executive branch will fully assume them. Outside and above party lines, the Federal Council will serve all Swiss. . . . Confederates, you will have to follow the Federal Council as a devoted and steady guide. We will not always have the opportunity to explain, comment, and justify our decisions. Events are happening fast; we have to adapt to their pace.”
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The morale of the other democracies was also shaken.

Wartime violence placed civilians at a risk higher than they had faced during World War I. Then, as with prior wars, if on a much more intense scale of killing, “the armies destroyed everything in their path, but the path was narrow, and towns a little way out of the path were hardly affected.”
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The road of devastation was not nearly as narrow the second time around. Rotterdam was entirely razed from the air in May 1940. German bombers conducted raids across the Channel, hitting Sheffield, Birmingham, Hull, Plymouth, Glasgow, Coventry (smashing its cathedral and putting one-third of its homes in ruin), and London, damaging the Tower and Westminster Abbey, demolishing the northern wing of Parliament, and devastating much of the East End—at a cost of 30,000 lives and 100,000 homes. “Entire chunks of the city centre, including the busy shopping and office area between St Mary-le-Bow and St Paul’s Cathedral, returned to the primal state of the old London, a wilderness of mud, rubble, and tall grass, a plain where only a few footpaths bore the names of former streets,” anticipating by three decades the apocalyptic scenery imagined by J. G. Ballard.
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Despite its ill-fated August 1939 Non-Aggression Pact with Germany, the Soviet Union was being pummeled even more spectacularly. Hitler’s exterminationist empire was confidently on the march.
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In what Timothy Snyder has called the “forgotten Holocaust,”
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SS Einsatzgruppen murdered tens of thousands each day in Belarus and Ukraine; in July 1941, orders were given to shoot all the Jews of Minsk; in just two days, September 29 and 30, 33,771 Jews who had been rounded up at Kiev were executed, naked and their faces to the ground, in an immense ravine at Babi Yar. More Jews were put to death behind the front that year than Soviet troops killed by German soldiers in battle.
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Japanese militarism controlled much of the Pacific and the Asian mainland, having conquered the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Australia was threatened by invasion.
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China seemed quite likely to yield to Japanese force. America faced an uncertain two-front war that was exacting high casualties. “Nationalism, capitalism, liberalism are in the crucible; it may take years,” the lawyer and sociologist David Riesman declared in 1942, “before a new amalgam of social forces emerges which can give promise of some stability and peace.”
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Even before the Cold War rent the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Allied powers, scorning postwar hopes for a United Nations that would mean more than a new global institution, World War II had proved to be “a tainted triumph.”
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The United States fought with a segregated army. Xenophobia and racism helped frame the campaign against Japan; “Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, wrote to President Roosevelt in March 1942 that the USA could not permit the ‘white man’s countries’ of Australia and New Zealand to be conquered by Japan ‘because of the repercussions among the non-white races of the world.’”
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Terrible destruction had been wrought by incendiary carpet bombing, then by atomic weapons.
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City after city, by war’s end, not just in Europe but also in Asia, lay in ruins.
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And even before the inevitable diffusion of the relevant knowledge and capacity, the very existence of the first nuclear bombs utterly transformed the human condition. The rain of actual and potential destruction had grown more intense, more widespread, far more promiscuous. And there was no turning back.

Above all, the victory of 1945 was tarnished by the discovery of the Holocaust, an orgy of organized slaughter that exceeded earlier twentieth-century instances, including the attempt, between 1904 and 1907, to exterminate the Herero and Namaqua peoples of German Southwest Africa by driving them into the Omaheke desert and poisoning their wells after their insurgency against colonial rule, or the Ottoman Empire’s mass killing and starvation of Armenians during World War I. This shocking enlargement of genocide had been accompanied mainly by passivity or complicity.
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After the war, a swollen mass of forced emigrants and displaced persons again filled the roads. “It was estimated that by May 1945 there were perhaps 40.5 million uprooted people in Europe, excluding non-German forced labourers and Germans who fled before the advancing Soviet armies.”
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Writing about the death camps, the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan described it as a time of “black milk” in his poem “Todesfuge.”
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Even after the fighting stopped, there was no escape from its unprecedented compound of violence, willful mass murder, ideological fervor, and radical versions of state and party. The war, moreover, left the United States deeply unsure about how to deal with Stalin’s Soviet Union. “At best optimistic and at worst naïve,” the historian John Morton Blum judged, American policymakers had “projected their own understanding of American politics beyond the borders of its relevance,” and thus found themselves, both in East Europe and in Asia, caught between an unwillingness to impose liberal democracy by brute force, especially in a confrontation with the Soviet Union at war’s end, and an acceptance of a division of the world by realist, great power, principles, and thus the acceptance of the actuality of Communist global power.
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“The war changed everything,” Tony Judt observed, making key features of the past “unrecoverable.”
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Moreover, fear did not dissipate once the fighting stopped. It became pervasive, persistently constitutive, both deeply particular and broadly abstract. With unlimited power having joined unlimited violence, and with killing, married to passionate causes, having gone beyond any reasonable assessment of instrumental utility, even what had remained of conventional standards after World War I eroded. Only with the depredations of World War II was it absolutely clear, as Leszek Kolakowski has put the point, that “evil is not contingent. It is not the absence of deformation, or subversion of virtue . . . but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.”
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Only then did all humankind, even its most advantaged, fall within the ambit of a permanent fear.

IV.

E
VEN IN
the mid-1930s, when the New Deal’s domestic achievements seemed most apparent, many contemporaries were not convinced that fear had been conquered. Howard Odum, for example, a sober southern moderate who was a leading student of the demography, culture, and economy of his region, strongly supported President Roosevelt’s initiatives. Odum warned in 1935 (the year the Wagner Act, chartering unions, and the Social Security Act passed into law) that American democracy was at risk from the country’s “multiplied inequalities of opportunity for the majority of the people.” He noted the “increasing injustice throughout the Nation,” “a well-nigh universal lack of security,” and “widespread confusion, unrest, distrust, and despair.” Describing “a mixed picture,” he took note of American “movements toward violent revolution,” “the movement toward fascism and dictatorship,” and various messianic currents and regional discontents. Despite the apparent solidity of the two-party system and constitutional arrangements, a strong possibility existed, he believed, for “anything but orderly transitional democracy,” especially in the South. Calling for unprecedented national planning, he concluded “in simple language . . . that there will be no democracy or formal alternative to democracy in the United States for the next period, say twelve years.” Rather, he predicted that the nation would experience a deeply uncertain “struggle to evolve an orderly democracy . . . in competition with the other alternatives of chaos, revolution, super-corporate control and centralization, socialism, communism, and fascism.”
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Of course, no single essay can accurately reflect the ethos of an era. But even if judged to be an overstatement of actual danger for American democracy, Odum’s words of warning in fact were characteristic. They were echoed many times over. Explaining in
I’m for Roosevelt
why he supported the president, Joseph P. Kennedy, then the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (and the father of the nineteen-year-old John Fitzgerald, the eleven-year-old Robert Francis, and the four-year-old Edward Moore), commented in 1936 that “democracy will not be safe for this country unless we constructively deal with causes of dictatorships. . . . If our democracy is to survive the attacks of dictatorship, whether open or veiled, we must solve the problem of security.”
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In an election-eve radio address in November 1938, even President Roosevelt mused aloud about the safety of the American political system when “in other lands across the water the flares of militarism and conquest, terrorism and intolerance” had grown. “Comparisons in this world are unavoidable,” he noted, arguing that “in these tense and dangerous situations in the world, democracy will save itself with the average man and woman by proving itself worth saving.” He then ventured “the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism . . . will grow in strength in our land.”
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By the late 1930s, Walter Lippmann had become a sharp critic of the New Deal. Referring to Woodrow Wilson’s unredeemed promise of global peace, the Republican party’s ill-fated guarantee of permanent prosperity in the 1920s, and what he thought to be the New Deal’s still-unrealized pledge to end the economic devastation of the Great Depression, Lippmann wrote of how mass disaffection after the deep recession of 1937–1938 had caused popular hopes that the economy was recovering to recede. He attributed America’s vulnerability to the power and lure of the globe’s dictatorships in 1939 to “the accumulated disappointments of the post-War era,” reminding his readers that “three times in these twenty years the American people have had great hope and three times they have been greatly disappointed.”
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The idea of hope restored rang hollow.

The next year, Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals, was troubled by “the disintegration of liberalism.” Notwithstanding the enactment of all the major New Deal legislative achievements, he cautioned:

. . . the philosophy of liberalism has been dissolving before our eyes during the last decade: too noble to surrender, too sick to fight. The liberal has begun to lack confidence in himself and in the validity of his ideals. . . . Unable to take measure of our present catastrophe, and unable because of their inner doubts and contradictions and subtleties to make effective decisions, liberals have lost most of their essential convictions: for ideals remain real only when one continues to realize them. . . . If we are to save the human core of liberalism—and it is one of the most precious parts of the entire human heritage—we must slough off the morbid growths that now surround it.
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The scope of the era’s fearful concern for democracy soon widened. In 1941, the University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell identified the “garrison state” as a new form of rule, presided over by specialists in violence, that cut across the distinction between democracies and dictatorships. The maturation of total war as a concept after World War I, he feared, had utterly transformed not just the technology of warfare and the mobilization of production and propaganda. It had also altered the very character of modern states, including the United States. “With the socialization of danger as a permanent characteristic of modern violence the nation becomes one unified technical enterprise.” In such circumstances, he asked in anguish, “what democratic values can be preserved, and how?”
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Lasswell’s University of Chicago colleague, the prominent sociologist David Riesman, took up this theme a year later. Considering “civil liberties in a period of transition,” he showed how the traditional distinction between normal and special times had become obsolete. “It is unrealistic,” he cautioned, “to rely on sharp distinctions between war and peace to test the limits of civil liberty,” for “today, it is ‘peace’ which is anomalous, not war.” He predicted “that after this war (which may last for many years), it is most unlikely that we can, or even if we can we will want to, return to ‘normalcy.’” Liberal democracy, he argued, must be rethought in this context of permanent uncertainty and civic mobilization in order to discover how, by way of “affirmative governmental action . . . an aggressive public policy might substitute new liberties for the vanishing liberty of atomistic individuals.” Haunted by the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic, he concluded with a charged warning about Fascism in America: “Like a flood, it begins in general erosions of traditional beliefs, in the ideological dust storms of long ago, in little rivulets of lies, not caught by authorized channels.”
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