America at War
By RICHARD LEE STROUT
Two pretty, tanned " hostesses " serve an excellent meal from trays aloft. It is Friday and there are crab cakes. The arrangement and packaging of the tray are really remarkable. Even the pepper comes in a little separate corrugated paper container ; the salad- dressing has an individual half-gill covered paper container, too. The potatoes and cakes are hot ; the super frozen ice-cream thaws through the meal and is manageable at dessert-time. The land is flat as a pancake. This deep, rich black soil below is the heartland of American agriculture. Farms are two to three hundred acres. Lake Michigan slides under us with tiny fishing-craft making long triangular wakes through the rippled surface in the twilight. Here is Milwaukee. Before night I reach my destination in the little town of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, for a three-day holiday.
Wisconsin is Senator McCarthy's home state. The " eastern " newspapers along the coastal area have ridiculed McCarthy. In England all the United Kingdom is within twenty-four hours of London, and the same multi-million circulation newspapers blanket the country. Not so continental America. First and deepest impres- sion is how far away Washington now seems, vastly further than the thousand miles I have flown ; as far away, perhaps, as Paris or Berlin. There is a local paper in town that has little more than bulletins. Then the Milwaukee morning paper arrives. Both papers banner Korean news, but there is a queer, unaccountable confusion about it ; the basic facts I need, and that would be discoverable in the big New York papers, are missing. One story from London is bannered under the headline, " Britain wants Yanks to do the Fighting." It is hard to believe there is not bias in this. There is a great deal of local news. If I am not satisfied with these papers I can buy the Chicago Tribune. It is the only daily beside the Communist Daily Worker which has denounced Truman's decision to join issue in Korea. It is a well-edited fabulously rich paper of a particularly poisonous kind, and is circulated in half a dozen neighbouring states, the states where a trace of old Republican Isolationism still flourishes. Readers sheepishly assert that they do not read the editorials. But most Tribune readers seem suspicious of Washington,' of Acheson, of Britain. Perhaps you have some idea of the kind of town Two Rivers is from Sinclair Lewis. It has a magnificent high school, including indoor swimming pool and basketball court. It has tremendous local pride. It has a good library, lovely lawns, shady trees, lakes, a factory or two. The daughter of the banker goes to school with the children of the woman who scrubs the banker's floors. I do not see how there could be a better place to raise boys and girls. From kindergarten to college at the fine Wisconsin University tuition is free. But now a grave misfortune has fallen on the town. As you drive into Main Street a sign . proclaims the population as " 10,280." That was the 1940 census. All supposed the 1950 census, the preliminary report of which is just completed, would show a great increase, for there are certainly more homes, business is booming, families are more numerous. But alack and alas, the figure is 9,850! A major crisis results, for there are certain privileges and perquisites to towns of 10,000, a number which is as important to a city as twenty-one years to a young man. The Chamber of Commerce has put up $200, with $1 for each bona fide inhabitant that was missed by the census enumerators. Some fifty such names have appeared. It looks as though Two Rivers may yet go over the 10,000 mark.
I find McCarthy stoutly defended among the employer-managerial group with whom I am thrown. Maybe McCarthy has been too headstrong, they say. But the Democrats have been in power eighteen long years. I can see the ferocious hope that now at last a weapon has been welded to overturn them—yes, even if it- is an unfair weapon. I am not prepared for `the hatred of Acheson. Again and again I am asked how he could ever have said, " I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss." Hiss was a traitor, giving secrets to Russia. How could the Secretary of State say such a thing? It is useless to argue. To them that far-off city of Washington (only eight hours away, as I have just shown) is a suspect spot, given over to corrupt politicians and probably to English-loving State Department officials whose inadequacy is shown first by the loss of China and now by the Korean invasion itself.
Is this typical ? No—only of a special group. The trade unionists and many of the farmers voted for Truman and elected him, and would again today, I believe. But this distance from the capital and distrust of it, which have no exact equivalent in Britain, are not to be minimised. It is the revolt of the continental outland against the central Government which is as old as the democracy itself. It is, too, the revolt of the primitives against the unpublicised and sensational Second American Revolution wrought by Roosevelt which has brought vast social reforms, the rise of organised labour and the virtual end of 150 years of isolationism almost too fast to be digested.
• I leave Two Rivers celebrating the great holiday of the Fourth of July. Main Street is shut off at either end, and every child in town parades with a bicycle, cart or tricycle festooned with crêpe paper which they have been preparing for days. The three-man police force escort them sheepishly but gamely ; the proud parents line the streets, everybody knows everybody and smiles and nods ; there will be free ice-cream, puppet shows, races, patriotic oratory and fireworks. It is the relaxed democratic American city-town at its magnificent best—a background world that travellers who know New York and Chicago rarely see or understand.
Back in Washington it is hot and humid again. I am more mindful now that the American big cities are surrounded by thousands of " Two Rivers " like the one I have visited, where the final power of opinion lies. It is notable that since the crisis began Mr. Truman (down to this writing) has not gone to the radio to explain the situation to the public in the outside towns. Roosevelt would have turned to the radio in the first hour. It was there that- his power lay; he could reach the earnest families sitting in their front parlours and make them see and understand. Truman is less gifted that way.
Korea has changed the world and brought all the free nations together under the moral aegis of the United Nations, and it is also changing America. Suddenly the United States finds itself acting the part of global policeman which everybody for so long has said it was but which no American before quite visualised. Truman's resolute action was popular, whether in the conservative Republican group I have described at Two Rivers, or with the liberal-leftists. The nation is grimly resolved. " If this means war with Russia then America is ready to go the limit " ; this is not said chauvin- istically by those who say it ; the other war is too near for that sort of thing. There is no hysteria, either, so far as I can see, at least outside of Wall Street, and even there the gyrations of the market seem to come from, the unloading of millions of inexperienced traders who have ridden the boom market up and now are selling their shares without quite knowing why or what to do with their money after they have it back.
The American Government is unique in this, that it is loose and lax and rather triumphantly inefficient in normal times but in emergencies can be transformed in no time at all into a machine as streamlined as a dictatorship itself. This is because of the vast untapped powers of the presidency, the full extent of which has never been established. The process of testing out the emergency is now going on. Mr. Truman is feeling his way. General belief at this stage is that Russia does not mean to force a conflict. Congress is eager to go home and get ready for the election. Taxes are unlikely to be raised much—yet. There is a brooding uncertainty in the news of initial set-backs from Korea. But over the nation, in Two Rivers as I found it or back here in Washington itself, there can be no doubt about one thing any longer. America is prepared to assume international commitments that would not have seemed possible a few years ago. For those who have asked whether the United States tould be depended upon in the Atlantic Pact, or for a continuing support after the Marshall Plan ends, this seems to be an answer.
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