The Hoover Frame of Mind

by REBECCA WEST

1

THE young person who is forever strumming on the piano, or crooning, or crouching before the radio is not, the experts tell me, likely to become a real musician. True love of every kind practices restraint or defeats its hope of rapturous consummation. I sometimes wonder if the extent to which we read has not destroyed our power of reading. We read all the time: newspapers, advertisements, the directions on the packet, textbooks, business letters. We read so much that our eyes get blunt, they no longer see the form of sentences or the content, we peer at the nouns and guess at the trend of argument they indicate, and fabricate a picture of the book on that and what we know of the writer. Thus we build round ourselves a mental world as hypothetical and dangerous as the material world of the blind.

In England we have just now several examples of misapprehended books, the misapprehension of which is grave because they deal with grave matters. Because Professor E. H. Carr’s Conditions of Peace is written in a sober style by a professor with Foreign Office experience, readers ignore that it is packed with errors of fact and judgment based on a thesis ultimately destructive of our human liberties.

I perceive that in America also there is a reading public that is print-drunk as pugilists are punchdrunk, book-happy as pugilists are slap-happy. For I have received a copy of The Problems of Lasting Peace, by Herbert Hoover and Hugh Gibson, clothed in a wrapper spectacularly embroidered with testimonials to its merits by persons who ought to have been able to pass a sensible judgment on it. These persons must have been misled by the facts that Mr. Hoover has been President of the United States and Chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and that Mr. Gibson has had a long career in the American diplomatic service. They assume that therefore the authors ought to know something about the problems of peace. They must each of them have improvised, as they read, an excellent book on the subject which was not that which Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson had written; for that, to a degree probably never equaled by the work of two such eminent men, is merilless.

Doubtless as a compliment to the dove of peace, the book is written chiefly in pidgin English: —

Extreme nationalism does have liabilities to peace and progress. As among individuals, there are ambitions in races for glory and for power of the race.

However, these ideas [Marxism] secured a hold on limited groups of theoretical intellectuals throughout the world, and the influence of their preachings did confuse liberal thought and add to the difficulties of representative government striving to solve the clashes within its own house. They, in some places, infected liberty by introducing government into the operation of and dictation to economic life, instead of regulating abuses by law.

We have generally adopted the expression “personal liberty” and “representative government” or “free nations” rather than the terms “Liberalism” or “democracy.” These latter terms have come to be used for many purposes far from their original meanings and have often been adopted by advocates of other systems.

Sentences such as those, which are altogether too perplexing, are balanced by others which are not perplexing enough: —

The important thing in great ideological changes is the direction in which they are moving.

An all too brief and direct character sketch of Napoleon sends the inquirer empty away: —

There can be no doubt of the sheer militarism in Napoleon. His very phrases burst with war and the glory of war.

If a Channel fog wrote history, it would have much the same attitude to time and the sequence of events as Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson: —

But in the latter part of this period — the end of the eighteenth century — a new world crisis was fermenting. Gradually, nearly 2000 years after free Greece and early Rome, there came a resurgence of the idea of the rights of the individual man. This resurgence of the freedom of men is amply indicated at Runnymede, in the Puritan Revolution, in the Declaration of Rights, in the emigrations to America, in the work of the French Encyclopedists. But it is not our purpose to discuss its growth in detail.

But a Channel fog would presumably be less biased by patriotism than Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson show themselves in another variation on the same theme: —

No one can doubt the challenge of liberty to all peoples during the 140 years prior to the First World War. The success of the United States stimulated and inspired the entire world with the principles of representative government and inalienable rights. The forms of representative government spread over the whole Western Hemisphere. Britain, France, the Scandinavian states, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Italy successfully developed it.

2

THE tone of this last extract reveals the true nature of this curious volume. Mr. Hoover’s term as President was in the eyes of others a tragical passage of American history, for reasons that cannot be accounted to his discredit. It was not his fault that in the autumn of his first year of office there broke on the United States a dire economic catastrophe, a slump comparable to the droughts and famines which afflict tropical lands. It was not his fault that this crisis could not be abated by a competent administrator such as he could justly claim to be, but only by a rare genius, brother to the poet and the seer, who could administer spiritual comfort to a people who, not meaning any harm, worshiped the goddess of fortune and had suddenly seen her for what she was. It is natural enough that a persistent nature like Mr. Hoover should want to reverse this undeserved failure, which had been followed by such undeserved success on the part of his opponent. Hence Mr. Gibson, a leading member of the Republican Party, has joined with Mr. Hoover to write this book as a love letter to the American electorate.

Mr. Hoover presents himself as a sober and wise person, free from the experimental rashness of Mr. Roosevelt, certain to keep America out of trouble. He wishes to write so that the reader can think, “What a superior being this is, and what a superior being I must be to see that he is superior.” To create this impression he employs many devices, some of them singularly disingenuous, but chiefly he relies on a certain terror of forthrightness which is common just now among people who are passively intelligent.

I have seen it lately among audiences at meetings where a speaker has had to allude to crimes committed by Germans against the peoples of the occupied countries. The members of the audience know quite well that the Germans have committed enormous crimes, and they may even be making great sacrifices to help in the termination of those crimes. Nevertheless a kind of wavering distress comes over them when they hear a speaker denouncing the German crime.

It is not that they believe the anti-German speaker to be wrong. This distress has no intellectual basis at all. It is, indeed, not unlike the embarrassment which pinkens persons of the class who consider it unrefined to eat onions when they hear those who are above or below them in social status express delight in that gross vegetable. Isn’t there something rather coarse, rather too forthright, in saying that what the Germans have done is flatly abominable? Is it ever right to say that black is black, and white is white, without qualification?

The emotion does not last long. A normal hardheaded audience realizes soon enough that there is no subtle way of regarding the dispatch of innocent people in cattle trucks to starve on the frozen wastes of Lublin. But just for a minute the audience is uncritically abandoned to a feeling that life must not be taken straight. The temptation to forget the necessity, to stick forever at the stage of asserting one’s distaste for unrefined action, is a perpetual temptation to all of us, and is not dismissed when it ought to be by people who lack vitality or have not much vitality over and above that required for their personal lives.

This lack of forthrightness Mr. Hoover continually exploits. By a wholesale sacrifice of the exact truth he tells the story of the last twenty years in Europe and the rise of Nazism and Fascism in such a way as to suggest that nobody is really deserving of blame. Nobody, according to Mr. Hoover, was entirely in the right, and that is possible; it is indeed almost certainly true. But nobody, according to Mr. Hoover, was entirely in the wrong; and that, in view of the persecution of the Jews and the martyrdom of the occupied countries, is not possible to maintain.

A smug pretension breathes from the pages. “How intelligent you and I are!” says Mr. Hoover to his readers. “How moderate, how free from the vulgar errors to which coarser clay is liable! We are not inflamed by war fever, we have kept our heads.” But the voice of Goring comes across Europe to tell them that Mr. Hoover and his readers are deluded, that immoderate moderation has its drunkenness as besotted as the drunkenness of wine. “If food is short in Europe,” said Göring over the radio, “it is not we Germans who are going to starve.” Black is black. The danger in which man walks is extreme, not only because evil seeketh whom it may devour, but because evil may change its habitation overnight, and only by recognizing it for what it is can we make sure that we shall not be tomorrow what the Germans are today. Our destiny is more dangerous and therefore more dignified than gentility can imagine.

3

MR. HOOVER and Mr. Gibson have set themselves the heavy task of rigging up some sort of platform on which the old-fashioned Republicans could oppose Mr. Roosevelt, and this involves finding an alternative to his anti-Axis policy which is not straight pro-Nazism. For the purpose of accomplishing this task they have found themselves able to make excessive sacrifices.

To do them justice, they would be honestly revolted by straight Nazism; but they have not hesitated to take the risk of diminishing anti-Nazi feeling to a point which might well be incompat ible with the successful prosecution of the war. If I were an American, and had read this book and been persuaded by its argument, I should think myself a fool to make any sacrifice whatsoever in order to win this war. This would be emphatically true were I the kind of person who would be impressed by that section of the book in which extracts from the speeches of Woodrow Wilson and President Roosevelt are printed in parallel columns. There are innumerable people in America — more in proportion than ever were in England, and often of a dissimilar sort — who believe that the First World War was an act of pure, unprovoked folly, like getting drunk and bonneting a policeman on Boat Race night, with the difference that rioters and policemen alike knew death or injury; and that Woodrow Wilson led his countrymen into this unprofitable shambles from sheer caprice, an undertaker harlequin.

This misconception was due to a variety of causes, one of which was to the credit of those who cherished it. They hated the cruelty of war even when it left them the victors; and it is horrible to think of what might have happened to the world had not the children of the last-born continent, energetic and healthy, felt thus. But the other causes were not so creditable.

One of the greatest disadvantages of the United States has been its premature and excessive development of satire. The satirist is necessary to the health of civilization. He is the devil’s advocate who riddles with criticism persons and institutions and ideas held up to public respect, so that only the truly respectable survive; and he contrasts existing authority and its work with what would be hoped for from ideal authority. But before he can fulfill this function he must have wit and a firm conception of what deserves respect, and of how ideal authority would be constituted and would operate.

Some twist of cultural development has given the American people the tongue of the satirist. Nowhere else in the world is wit so general. But there are many, amply endowed with the first of the satirist’s qualifications, who are wholly lacking in the others. Some have been born into sections of the community absorbed in industrial and financial and technical preoccupation and have never established any contact with the world of ideas. Others are immigrants or the children of immigrants who, not so lucky or adaptable as many of their kind, have forgotten their European culture and not yet attached themselves to American culture; and others are merely inert, with the terrible inertia which sometimes befalls transplanted stocks.

These satirists embarked on the established routine of their calling. They jeered at the persons and institutions and ideas held up to public respect, but did not spare those which deserved respect, because they did not know how that award is made; they attacked authority automatically, and not with inspiring references to any New Jerusalem.

Satire in America was therefore as sterilizing as a frost in a garden full of tender plants; and it followed naturally that it was greatly feared — feared to an extent not easily to be realized in this country. In the early twenties, shortly after Mr. Sinclair Lewis had published his dazzling satire on a Middle Western businessman, Babbitt, I traveled through the United States on a lecture tour. Often I was entertained at the homes of businessmen; and I do not think that on one of these occasions my host or hostess failed to make, with a deprecating laugh, some such remark as “I’m afraid you’ll find us all terrible Babbitts here,” or “Well, you know us already. Our name is Babbitt.” The victim of satire, being as uncertain as the satirist of what deserves to be attacked and what to be defended, could not hit back. He had therefore no other resort than to pass over to the satirist’s side and join in the laughter.

This situation made for a mental climate of mindless cynicism which put every instinctive reaction into reverse and derided everything that happened, simply because it happened. The American participation in the First World War was bound to come off badly, for two reasons. First, a brave and efficient soldier has a traditional glory about him, and the satirist’s victim hastened to divest himself of it before the satirist stripped it from him, and the President of the United States was big game, almost as big game as there could be, for those who wanted to pull down by mockery. To be the head of a great state is to be in a proud position, but it is sublime to be the head of a great state which has the intention of virtue, which has from the beginning declared that, it intends to set man’s destiny on a fairer course. To pretend therefore that a President of the United States had led his people into the carnage of modern warfare for no reason at all was delicious; it rubbed majesty itself down to crumbs of nonsense.

4

THIS is not to say that America was in this inferior to England. If the Americans who negotiated themselves into key positions and determined the tone and direction of society were mindless cynics, the equivalent English were mindless without being cynical, which is no real advantage. One goes down the drain just as quickly that way, but without the consolation of laughter. In any case, that age is over. It was terminated by an event and a person, or rather two persons. For universal mockery needs to be conducted in the shelter of a secure community; in danger it becomes plain that some actions are more likely to lead to safety than others, and that one cannot jeer at every movement of the will.

The slump of 1929 provoked a crisis in which the community had to pass from well-being to misery unless certain remedial adjustments were made. But it was not known yet what these adjustments had to be. Some would be effective, others would leave the people doomed. It was impossible, therefore, to take the responsibility of mocking at all adjustments as soon as they were proposed.

That broke the habit of derision and restored the practice of seeking for values; and the Roosevelts reminded America that certain values had already been established. Imperturbably President Roosevelt proclaimed that if the social economy of the United States no longer afforded citizens the rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that economy must be altered until it did, no matter what vested interests suffered in the process. Courageously Eleanor Roosevelt, who is the satirists’ meat and knows it, continued with the good works which are the classic material of satire. But the dead age has left its traces on contemporary thought, particularly among those who do not think. The ebbing tide of cynicism has left a good many tin cans and old boots on the foreshore, and among these is a persistent feeling that somehow or other America made a fool of itself by participating in the First World War.

One would have thought that history had amply justified Woodrow Wilson, since the forces he alleged were dangerous to the United States have in fact re-emerged and struck the blows he foresaw; but this feeling has no connection with reason, it is a vague shame. It is deplorable that Mr. Hoover and his supporters should, for their own political purposes, make use of this decayed stump of a political conviction; but that is what they intend to do when they print extracts from the speeches of Woodrow Wilson and President Roosevelt in parallel columns. They are attempting to suggest to the mind of the American voter that Woodrow Wilson led him into an unnecessary and unprofitable war at the behest of a cloudy and intemperate idealism, and that Franklin Roosevelt is doing the same thing a second time. In view of the assaults of Japan, this weakening of the will to fight is criminal.

The whole aim of the authors is to present the American voter with a picture of the war as a situation which ought to be left to stew in its own juice. It begins with a chapter of bogus scholarship in which, with quick ball-bearing facility, they attempt to analyze the “dynamic forces which make for peace and war.” These, it appears, arc seven, and the first of them is “ideologies.” Needless to say, that beastly word, that philological weed, is misapplied. Mr. Hoover and his supporter mean “ideas,” and a phrase from this section will show how wrong they were ever to bring that matter up: “ the Divine Right of Kings — with all its armor of feudalism.”

But the theory of monarchy known as the Divine Right of Kings was a product of the seventeenth century, and it differed radically from the theories of monarchy which were held in the feudal age. How could a theory which approved absolutism and depended on mystical doodledoo be held by a society which was obsessed with the idea of contract and believed that God imposed His Will on earth by the reasonable means of law? And this is about as near the mark as Mr. Hoover and his supporter ever get.

5

IT is obvious that Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson are in a complete fog about the past. I wish I could think that they had written the chapters in this book which deal with the last twenty years because they were in a fog about the present. These are a series of sour stories about the European peoples who had the impertinence to defeat the Germans in the First World War. The obligation that many of us have felt towards Mr. Hoover for his relief work during the last war has been discharged. We have been bitten by the hand that fed us. It appears that the cessation of hostilities brought into being a welter of stupid and contemptible new states.

And add to this the fact that the officials of every one of these new states were for the most part without experience in government. They were nearly all revolutionaries, burning with zeal for the New Order and world politics and so engrossed in that zeal that they had little time or thought for keeping the machinery of everyday life in motion.

They were such men as Masaryk and Beneš, rashitch and Raditch; men who had studied at the universities of Paris and Berlin and Prague and Geneva, who would have looked with amazement on this illiterate and ignorant book; men who had written and spoken profoundly on various aspects of political practice and theory. Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson complain that the small nations disturbed the peace by their economic nationalism, which led them to erect trade barriers. There is not a word to suggest that the Danubian states were forbidden to form an economic federation by the pressure of Fascist Italy, and that the Scandinavian and Baltic states were joined in the friendliest working partnership.

There are allegations that the militarism of these new states was a threat to the other powers. Now, Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson cannot believe that was true. The new states had little or no heavy industry; only Poland and Czechoslovakia had any that counted, and this was not to be compared with the immense plants of Germany. The new states were poor. They could not afford to buy arms from the states which had heavy industry. Did Mr. Hoover ever lose a night’s sleep for thinking with horror of the day when the white bodies of the women of Berlin would be crushed beneath the monstrous Latvian tanks? Did Mr. Gibson ever go white to the lips at some fancied picture of the Munich sky black with Yugoslav bombers? If not, how did they come to include this curious statement in this book of avowed didactic intention?

And how does it happen that Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson, so severe on states that are stumbling blocks to their neighbors, have hardly a word to say against Germany? This book is full of propaganda, direct and indirect, in favor of the common enemy of Great Britain and the United States. The old complaints against the Treaty of Versailles are stated — even t hat whine about the war-guilt clause, which must always have come hypocritically from the people which was later to invade Poland.

Few words of blame are applied to the Nazis — almost none to Mussolini, who is somehow supposed to have been a creation of France. There is nothing said about Munich; it is alleged in several passages written with an affectation of detachment that Czechoslovakia was a jerry-built state that could not have been expected to survive. (It is one of the oddities of this extraordinary volume that each of those passages contains serious inaccuracies which one would have thought Mr. Gibson would he bound to detect.) There are hints that the United Nations are really as bad as anybody else.

The hideous cruelties of blitz surprise, the sinking of seamen without compassion by submarines, the attacks upon helpless Jews, murder of hostages, the refusal of liberal governments to allow food to their conquered allies — all not only make a ghastly picture of barbarism, but . . .

Mr. Hoover made his name by feeding Belgium in the last war. He has recently been offering his services to perform the same task in Occupied Europe. He must know the messages that come out of the martyred countries: “Do not send us food. The Germans will get most of it. We would rather forgo what we could get.” He must know the agony the decision to withhold or to limit supplies has meant to exiled governments and to the Allies, who have to make these decisions. His remark is to me wholly abominable.

6

THE paper wrapper of this book, as I have said, is covered with messages from prominent Americans who all think well of it. Some of them speak of the book’s sanity, courage, nobility, and inescapable conclusions, though, in fact, there are no conclusions at all. Mr. Hoover adumbrates every possible policy and recommends none, not being sure how the cat is going to jump.

Ironically enough, the chief problem to be solved before we can have lasting peace lies in the existence of the kinds of persons who have praised The Problems of Lasting Peace. They are, from one point of view, commendable people. They hate the cruelty of war. They sicken at the thought of sticking a bayonet into an enemy’s belly. By that much they are on a higher moral level than those who enjoy fighting, who lick their lips when they imagine what armament can do to human flesh, who are indifferent how prosperity is won for them at a distance.

But the war haters are superior by just that much, and no more. For then they demand, without undertaking a certain onerous preliminary measure, machinery for abolishing war and ensuring peace. They want world courts, or some sort of federation, or the League of Nations with the buttons altered; and they do not pause to take the step which was indicated for us so long ago as the eighteenth century, by a reader of the Abbé do Saint-Pierre’s Project of Perpetual Peace. “Admirable,” said Cardinal Fleury, “save for one omission: I find no provision for sending missionaries to convert the hearts of princes.”

Who are the princes today, in our democratic states? Ourselves. And what should be our hearts, when they are converted, when they are turned from the shortsighted aims of the flesh and seek the eternal salvation of our kind? Our hearts should become heads. For hearts by themselves cannot do the work. Generosity desires to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and in a warm daze goes on feeding and clothing the conquered Germans — until, well-nourished and well-clad, they undertake with ease the enterprise of starving and stripping their neighbors. Magnanimity, destroying root and branch its own hatred of the Germans, lovingly aids them to gratify their agelong hatred of the Slavs. Heads are needed for the pursuit of virtue —cool heads, stored with accurate information; wise heads that can form sober judgments and build on them sound working principles; heads such as could not possibly have written The Problems of Lasting Peace, such as would read it only to utter cries of derision. There is no hope for democracy unless we all become such aristocrats of the mind as aristocracy has never produced.

Nothing can be hoped for from a world court, or a League of Nations, or any form of federation, officered by executives whose minds are so tangled that they cannot arrange their words in grammatical order or write a coherent account of a sequence of events, who have been unable to grasp the main facts of history though under an incessant compulsion to mention them, and who are so lacking in horse sense as to be unable to gauge the relative danger values of Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Nor, supposing there was a well-officered world court or League of Nations or federation, could it operate effectively if the world public was sloppyminded, credulous, and ready to drop any argument at any moment to go off on a moralistic jag. It would have no firm ground on which to stand. That is the real reason for the failure of the League of Nations as we have known it. Stretching away from Geneva in every direction was an infinity of idiots, saying that Mussolini was a good man because the trains ran on time, and (that imbecility of imbecilities) “It’s all the fault of the small nations.”

Meanwhile the cruel and greedy, who are interested in the maintenance of those abuses which the international authority is trying to abolish, are at work; and as they work on plans which are confined within the limits of cruelty and greed instead of plans which curve out of known experience into a new time and space where there shall be no more unkindness, they impress by their swift ability. In the twinkling of a decade they have the machine which was to save the world out on the waste lot, as scrap iron. And the cause of peace itself is discredited, because those who hate war are associated in the public mind with the support of international machinery which breaks down in expensive ruin.

7

MY personal wish is for the very reverse of this program of unchanged hearts and new machinery; I should be content with a changed heart and old machinery. What—the old machinery of nationalist organization, of standing armies and navies, arsenals packed with hideous munitions, and the chitchat of diplomacy? Yes, exactly that. My preference may evoke a protest from the sort of person who has praised The Problems of Lasting Peace: “But look where that sort of thing has brought us.” They may even particularize: “Look at Europe.”

Well, let us look at Europe. Its state is really not so discreditable, considering that its primeval condition of chaos had hardly been corrected by the establishment of settled societies when the barbarian invasions began, and that they continued for over a thousand years, thus starting all the scrambles for territory and uncertainties about frontiers which idiots blame on “the small nations”; considering also that it has been the battlefield, as no other continent has on any comparable scale, where persons believing in human freedom have fought those who disbelieve in it; considering also that it has been perpetually vexed by the spirit of evil to be found wherever men are, even as the spirit of goodness, which has found its habitation sometimes in France, sometimes in Spain, sometimes in Austria, sometimes in England, sometimes in Germany.

I am sure that often and often in European history the hosts of evil have restrained their savage impulses because the other fellow’s army and navy have looked too strong. I am sure that the arts of diplomacy have often and often kept the peace. Even the balance of power, a doctrine shocking to those not sure what it was or where or when it was applied, can be demonstrated to have allowed millions to complete their natural span and to die in their beds. I would trust this machinery, which has worked not too badly in the past, to serve our future with magnificence, if we who operate it would reform ourselves; if we would bend ourselves not to be gulled by politicians whom one would call mindless, were it not that their ambition must have some place to sit down; if they would remember to keep their wits about them sufficiently to perceive that Beneš is plainly not such an aggressive character as Hitler; if they would keep the democratic faith and never forget that the soul of every man and every people must be given as much liberty as is possible without threatening the liberties of others, so that each may cultivate his unique contact with reality, his relationship with God. International affairs controlled by men and women thus sensible, thus sensitive, thus religious, must travel on the right road.

As I sit here, I am somewhat appalled by the spectacle of an English citizen assaulting the former President of the United States. But I would remind the reader that the problems Mr. Hoover discusses are bone of my bone as well as of his, and that in our common peril I believe it is my right to differ with Mr. Hoover in print as I did with Mr. Chamberlain over Munich.