The Charlotte News
Friday, September 30, 1938
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: We include below from this day's News an editorial by Herbert Agar on an article by Jonathan Daniels, "Democracy Is Bread", appearing in the Virginia Quarterly. The notion posited by Daniels, and in turn echoed by Agar, is always one well worth keeping, then or now--and demonstrates that Cash was not alone in his own thinking along similar lines, as exhibited in The Mind of the South in such passages as this:
The final great result of Reconstruction we have to consider in this chapter (a result which stands as a sort of summation of the things we have been seeing) is that it established what I have called the savage ideal as it had not been established in any Western people since the decay of medieval feudalism, and almost as truly as it is established today in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia--and so paralyzed Southern culture at the root.
Here, under pressure of what was felt to be a matter of life and death, was that old line between what was Southern and what was not, etched, as it were, in fire and carried through every department of life. Here were the ideas and loyalties of the apotheosized past fused into the tightest coherence and endowed with all the binding emotional and intellectual power of any tribal complex of the Belgian Congo. Here was that mighty frame the Democratic Party, as potent an instrument of regimentation as any totemic society that ever existed. In a word, here, explicitly defined in every great essential, defined in feeling down to the last detail, was what one must think and say and do.
And one thought it, said it, did it, exactly as it was ordained, or one stood in pressing peril of being cast out for a damned nigger-loving scoundrel in league with the enemy. Let a man deviate from the strait way once, and by dint of much eating of meek bread he might yet win forgiveness. Let him deviate twice, three times, and men's eyes were hard and dangerous in his, women began to gather their skirts closely about them as they passed, doors that had formerly swung hospitably open slammed in his face, marriage into a decent family became difficult or impossible, the children in the village street howled and cast stones, the dogs developed an inexplicable eagerness to bite him, his creditors were likely to call in the sheriff.
Had it still been possible in the Old South to be an open atheist or skeptic without suffering any physical penalty? Pious and patriotic drunks, riding home from a camp-meeting or a party rally, were apt now to send bullets crashing through the unbeliever's windows. And sooner or later the Klan was almost certain to pause in its routine labors long enough to teach him reverence and a proper regard for the safety of his country with a horsewhip or a coat of tar.
Tolerance, in sum, was pretty well extinguished all along the line, and conformity made a nearly universal law. Criticism, analysis, detachment, all those activities and attitudes so necessary to the healthy development of any civilization, every one of them took on the aspect of high and aggravated treason. Indeed, this is only half to state the fact, for the peculiar effect of the extraordinarily close identification of the individual with the idea of the South, and of the continually sharpening personal outlook, was this: that any questioning or doubting of the South in any respect (and in this atmosphere of boiling emotion, merely to stand aloof a little was ipso facto to be convicted of such questioning and doubting) was inevitably felt by each loyal Southerner as a questioning and doubting of his immediate ego. Which is to say that, being what he was, he inevitably felt it as a challenge to be resisted with all the enormous pugnacity at his disposal, as an affront to his person to be avenged with every means he could command, either alone or in collaboration with his neighbors. (The Mind of the South, Book Two, Chapter I, "Of the Frontier the Yankee Made", section 11, pp. 134-135)
Or, as when Cash spoke of the origins of the Klan:
In its essence the thing was an authentic folk movement--at least as fully such as the Nazi movement in Germany, to which it was not without kinship. And its name was no accident, save as the movement of the planets among the stars may be an accident, but a significant projection from the past into the present, a meaningful witness of the continuity of Southern sentiment.
Its body was made up of the common whites, industrial and rural. But its blood, if I may continue the figure, came from the upper orders. And its bony framework and nervous system, the people who held it together and co-ordinated and directed it, were very near to being coextensive with the established leadership of the South. People of great prominence in industry and business, indeed, were often, though not always, chary about actually belonging to it, but they usually maintained liaison with it through their underlings and the politicians. And its ranks swarmed with little business men. Except in North Carolina and Virginia, the rural clergy belonged to it or had traffic with it almost en masse, and even in those two states the same thing was true in many districts. It was true, too, in many towns throughout the South, and everywhere the great body of the ministers either smiled benignly on it or carefully kept their mouths shut about it. Planters joined it by the wholesale, and more often than not worked with it when they did not join it. So did the landowning farmers generally; indeed, in proportion to their numbers, these perhaps went into it or sympathized with it more generally than even the unpropertied commons. (The Mind of the South, Book Three, Chapter II, "Of Returning Tensions--And the Years the Cuckoo Claimed", section 25, pp. 335-336)
The piece by Daniels, much as Cash did in the final pages of his book, forecasts something ominous on the horizon, an unrest which would ultimately spill over in fact into the streets of the "little towns" of which Daniels speaks--though the intervention of the war and the new prosperity of the fifties would delay it for 17 years until Brown v. Board of Education and its order to integrate public schools "with all deliberate speed" caused this brewing anger deep down for decades to surface and coalesce around a new "cause" more formidable as a challenge to the ingrained savage ideal, the intransigence to change, than mere anti-unionism in the thirties had, a threat to a very way of life understood as a given for the common white, especially in the small towns of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and South Carolina, where it thrived most mightily, for all time, insofar as this hungry man could measure time, back to his grandfather and his father before him.
At base of it though was, quite arguably, that hunger for bread, a sharing in the wealth which the average laborer labored on small wages to produce, of which Daniels spoke so eloquently in 1938.
But now, by the mid-fifties, the African-American was to be accorded not only equal rights in that labor force but was to have equal opportunity at entry to it to go with it by virtue of the same education enjoyed by the white boys and girls, not just some illusory "separate but equal" cruel joke, with the "Negro schools" having enjoyed for the six decades since Plessy nothing approaching "separate but equal" texts, "separate but equal" facilities, "separate but equal" staffs, which the "white schools" of the same community enjoyed. Yet, this ignobled hungry fellow, humbled by the soil or the factory wage on which he subsisted and had generationally, remained unswervingly rejoicing of this fact, that, for the most part, these "separate but equal" schools got only the leftovers after the white school board provided the best and first of their funding for the white schools.
'Cause if this well-fed hungry boy wasn't superior to a damned nigger, who the hell was he superior to? You know?
And, from that hunger, then, blood would run again in the streets of these small towns across the South, turned unabashedly by the Machiavellian politicians such as Wallace and Maddox and Faubus and Barnett on that "agitator" of which Daniels and Cash spoke, the one from the outside, just as it had to the outside labor agitators of the 1930's unionization movement by their forerunners of the same stripe. That movement had failed, after all, under the boot-heel of the traditionalist. Successful at the former abridgement of the New Deal's laws, the hungry thus knew now that they could prevent the encroachment by the Federal law on that engendered from the Fair Deal's laws as well, even if it was now Ike, not the socialist leaning Democrat Federals who were sending the troops to Little Rock to enforce court orders.
The blood would run, just as Daniels, just as Cash had ominously said it might, just as they both also said they hoped that with foresight to undo the underlying problems of ignorance and poverty giving rise to it, it would not.
And as curious political bedfellows, now by the sixties, they--these hungry boys and girls--would find nurture outside the South proper, from some of the old Okies and the pols left to stir the pot with them, perhaps who had moved west out of the dustbowl during the Depression, but whose ways and cultural attributes remained firm in the old savage ideal, those who had settled in southern California or stopped short maybe in Arizona, when the wrathful truck broke down on the way out or when they were turned away at the California border, perhaps, for want of a new job at the Long Beach or Richmond shipyards as the war came on. These all would coalesce with the Southerner to form a formidable voting bloc along with some of those similarly disposed in the industrial cities of the North whose jobs were similarly threatened by the new labor force with equal opportunity arising out of the freed South by the 1960's, to stop the forward advance of this new intolerable progress of democratic ideals, attempting to turn the clock back, back, back, to that better time, when the plantation thrived back home--before the damned Yankee come in, Sherman and his men, and ruint it all, burnt it all, even the manor house, right down to the ground, left only the columns a-standing out in the forest. Stole all that weren't nailed down. Now they want to steal our way of life down heya, too. Them, them agitatas.
Go on, go out thar and lookit for yoursef, boy. That's what's you is fightin' for to stop. Busstop? We'll teach you young un's at home before we send you out to them nigger, commie schools on no bus.
Daniels, of course, had become a friend to Cash in spring, 1938 after they met at the Charlotte Book Fair, and Daniels, later in fall, 1940, together with the Knopfs, sponsored Cash for his third and successful Guggenheim Fellowship application, as Daniels had received one himself for his book, A Southerner Discovers the South. Daniels's views would be well-fitted to his position at the United Nations during the Truman Administration after also serving the Roosevelt Administration beginning in 1944. Indeed, the views foreordained the tenets of the philosophy of that which would become the domestic policy of the country during the 1960's in the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, the attempt to eradicate poverty in the back country, undereducated, pellagra-ridden region of Appalachia, and abroad the South generally.
Mr. Agar, who wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal, was associated with the Agrarians of Nashville, and, with Allen Tate, edited the sequel to the Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand; Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, like its predecessor, was a collection of essays by Agrarians dedicated to their back to the land notions of economic salvation, denouncing the industrial state--a thesis which Cash found sentimental, hearkening back to antebellum days, and even comical in its anachronistic implications--"...the curious mixture of sense and nonsense, of Neo-Confederate and Neo-Medieval sentimentality and of sound reason, which figures in the ideology of these people," as Cash summarized a critique of the latter book in his News article of July 19, 1936, "Pseudopodia".
Cash, himself bred as a country boy, saw the Agrarian philosophy as ultimately an Old South aristocratic appeal to keep the subservients, less well-heeled, down on the farm, so to speak, out of the opinion-making circles of society. Though Cash detested Tate, who he described after meeting him as a "pompous ass", he respected Agar as an intellectual. Not surprisingly, the Agrarians were the only group to provide a somewhat negative review of The Mind of the South. In the book, Cash had said of them, in fairly mild, nearly apologetic, terms:
It is true that Allen Tate got into near-Fascist company as one of the editors of the American Review, though that was the result of sympathies which had nothing directly to do with Fascism. I think he was quite candid when he protested to the Nation that he would join the Communists if the only alternative were the Silver Shirts.
It is true also that the majority of the contributors to I'll Take My Stand were primarily occupied with the aristocratic notion in their examination of the Old South. And it is true, finally, that they took little account of the case of the underdog proper, the tenants and sharecroppers, industrial labor, and the Negroes as a group.
Nevertheless, they did take much account of the small landowning farmers--the yeomen. A minority of them, with John Donald Wade of Georgia University as the most eminent, was even more concerned with these people than with the planters. And practically every contributor to the book confessed openly or tacitly that the Old South was in the main more simple, plain, and recognizably human in a new country than the legend had ever had it in the past. Furthermore, it may be said that the virtues they assigned to the Old South were essentially the virtues which it indubitably possessed. Save for the fact that they insisted on making it a good bit more contemplative and deeply wise than I think it was, they are much the same virtues I have myself assigned to it at its best: honor, courage, generosity, amiability, courtesy.
Merely, the Agrarians refused to observe the faults of the Old South and the operation of its system upon the people who lived under it. And, above all, to confess that the diseases which presently afflict the South are not and cannot logically be made to be, as they maintain, solely the fault of the introduction of industrialism and commercialism, but in very great part flow directly out of the pattern laid down in the Old South itself.
As time has gone on, however, they have tended to modify their views in the direction of realism. The tendency to idealize the Old South has gone steadily on, indeed. It is to be observed plainly in such books as Allen Tate's The Fathers and Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back. And above all in Stark Young's So Red the Rose. It is more than a little ironic that the last novel was written by a man who prefers to live in New York (an Agrarian by remote control, as it were) and who serves the New Republic as drama critic. But the case serves brilliantly to illustrate the power of the South over its sons even when they flee from it, and is perhaps explicable enough on the theory that distance tends to heighten and not lessen romantic nostalgia.
But despite the persistence of this tendency to idealize, the movement toward realism which I mention has gone forward, too. Taxed by most of the critics with having no knowledge of the elements of sociology and economics, at which they were inclined to sneer in I'll Take My Stand and their early essays in the American Review, the Agrarians were not long in setting out to remedy the lack, and they have gradually exhibited more respect for the facts in these fields. Moreover, they have gathered many new converts, some of whom are well versed in the social sciences and have no patience with precious nonsense about them--converts of whom the most notable is Herbert Agar of the Louisville Courier-Journal. (The Mind of the South, Book Three, Chapter III, "Of the Great Blight--And New Quandaries", section 11, pp. 382-383)
In Cash's latter days at The News, in April, 1941, he would reference Agar twice attributing to him the exigent observation that at times of greatest peril, it is not inappropriate to question a man's motives, in the particular case being Charles Lindbergh's ascribed Copperhead motives for appeasement. (See "A Formula for Unity", April 24, 1941 and "Accurate Term", April 26, 1941)
Agar would be scheduled to speak at the posthumous award of the Mayflower Literary Society cup to Cash and The Mind of the South on Friday, December 5, 1941 in Raleigh, but was prevented from attending by a snowstorm. Josephus Daniels, newly retired Ambassador to Mexico, and the father of Jonathan, substituted for him.
As one reads "The Choice Before Us", it is well worth keeping that Fascism, as an economic system, is posited on the corporate state; as a political system, of course, the dictatorial will of a central ruling order, paternalistic and autocratic in all respects, democratic in none; and as a social system, ultimately, a hierarchy of aristocrats handing what crumbs are left to the laboring classes, comprising of necessity for the means of production to be adequate to the supply of luxuriant provender for the aristocrats at the top, the bulk of the corporate state below. And, of course, to put down inevitable dissent in such a system, dependent on order and force to maintain it, to keep the laboring classes at a kind of enforced "peace", benumbed in mortification, benumbed by the self-gratifying notion of being a part of that strong handful of twigs, one of the fasci, stronger in bundled sum than as fragile sticks to be broken, in a kind of narcotized acceptance of that order serving the top, a strong authoritarian legion of black-shirted thugs, masquerading as "police", both secret, to gather information and still-birth revolt, and overt, to provide plenty of exemplary display of fortification against any form of deviation from the established pattern, is always and inexorably a requirement as well.
There you have it in its essence: Fascism.
The Choice Before Us
By Herbert Agar
WHILE we are abusing the Fascists abroad with such piety and self-satisfaction, it might do us good to read Jonathan Daniels on Fascism in our own South.
In the autumn number of the Virginia Quarterly, Mr. Daniels has a piece called "Democracy Is Bread." Fascism, he says, "is a foreign word for a foreign thing. And it is absurd to use a foreign term for a condition that was American before Mussolini was born." Yet he uses the word probably in the hope of startling us into paying attention to what is going on at home.
The more we use up our moral indignation on the wickedness of Europeans, the less we have left over for our own troubles at home. And Jonathan Daniels warns us that it is high time to pay attention to those troubles.
"This South," he writes, "may be as the President says, Economic Problem No. 1. But National Problem No. 1 is to get down deep enough in democracy to make it serve where the hungry are. It will not be secure until that is done."
THEY WILL HAVE BREAD--OR THEIR LYNCHINGS
In writing his recent best-seller on the South, Mr. Daniels did much traveling through that troubled region. He visited large areas "where the hungry are." And the sight left him frightened.
"No laws," he says, "no standards will make 'labor' or any of the rest of us in the South secure while these country boys and girls are not. The salvation of the South is at the bottom of the South. We may all fear hunger and fury until these are fed...
"Huey Long and others have shown that these poor on their pathetic hills can be stirred. And why should they not be? For millions of them democracy has failed to give the least that man may hope from government or from an economic order. And, of course, they can be stirred in false theories.
"Southern lynchings represent not merely degrading cruelty, but a wild outlet for despair. Demagogues have led them against Negroes when what they wanted, as other men in other lands have wanted, was bread. Tom Watson baited their hunger in Georgia with the Catholic and the Jew. They will strike at anything until there is something for themselves."
FASCISM IS A RESULT, NEVER A CAUSE
This column has repeatedly tried to make the point which Mr. Daniels puts so strongly. Fascism came to Europe because in country after country democracy had "failed to give the least that men may hope from government or from an economic order."
Fascism, or its lawful equivalent, can come to this country for the same reason. And that is the only reason why Fascism would ever come anywhere.
The danger to democracy is not that there are men like Hitler in the world. The danger is that over large parts of the world democracy has failed to be democratic, failed to do its job, failed to live up to even the shadow of its noble claims. And some of those "large parts of the world" can be found within our own land.
Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin are the results of democracy's failure: they are not its cause. No people would ever relinquish freedom if the freedom was real. But who would not try anything--a Hitler or a Huey Long--if he lived on the "pathetic hills" described by Jonathan Daniels?
Mr. Daniels' article is chiefly descriptive. It is chiefly an eye-witness account of what goes on at "the bottom of the South," and of what, as a result, men are saying and thinking today.
An Astute Choice*
For sixteen years straight, New York has had a Democratic Governor. Heavily Republican up-state, the compact Democratic organization in the city has always managed to swing the election, though usually their victor had a Republican Legislature to contend with.
The problem of the Republicans is to break the grip of the city Democratic organization--better known as Tammany Hall. They appear to have chosen their 1938 nominee astutely for that purpose. The young white knight Dewey already has shown his vote-getting ability by wrestling Manhattan's district attorneyship from the Democrats, and in his prosecution of racketeers and corrupt politicians he has tamed the Tiger until it is become a powerless beast, not quite docile but weak from loss of nourishment. It looks like a Republican year for the Empire State.
The President's Part
Ever since it began, the Roosevelt Administration's conduct of foreign affairs has been something for the country to take pride in. An internationalist, the President has paid due respect to the strong sentiment for American isolation, and he has taken his defeats, as in the narrow failure of the World Court bill, in good spirit and with understanding.
But the compulsion upon him to continue to avoid foreign entanglements has not prevented his exerting in this crisis the prestige of his office and the influence of the major power that is the United States. For peace? Hardly that. Peace in this instance is going to be dearly bought, if it is obtained at all, and the President's hearty contempt for the Fascist nations is such that he would be the last to seek to impose upon Czechoslovakia a peace which he could not endure. The fact that his second communication went only to Hitler and not, as the first, likewise to Benes, clearly revealed where the President placed the blame. But he pleaded nevertheless for negotiation, for discussion, for anything to delay the use of force and admit of reasoning. And he got it, got it as much as anything, we suspect, because of the [indiscernible word] of his direct appeal to Mussolini.
Character Analysis Of Hitler
The Hitler personality is a mystery which has considerably exercised the experts in the human soul. There are those who maintain that he is a great strategist, and others again who say that he is simply a paranoiac with a Napoleonic complex, whose presence on the scene bodes exceedingly ill for civilization. But be that as he may, there are certainly some strange twists in the fellow, as witness the two following fragments from the Godesburg letter to Chamberlain, published in the London White Paper issued Tuesday.
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His Heart The first lies properly in the field of his emotional reactions. Thus: "If formerly the behavior of the Czechoslovak Government was brutal, it could only be described during recent weeks and days as madness." You might say that he was simply lying, but it is far more likely, we suspect, that he is too capriciously sentimental to be reasoned with. His heart so bleeds over his own gross propaganda that in the process he is actually insulated against the facts (1) that by the record he himself is the most assiduous practitioner of brutality in modern times, and (2) that, as reported by every neutral correspondent in Czechoslovakia, the Czechs have shown an admirable restraint in the face of the most deliberate provocation. |
His Mind The second lies in the field of his logic. Thus: "I can only emphasize to your excellency that the Sudeten Germans are not coming back to the German Reich by virtue of the gracious or benevolent sympathy of the other nations, but on the ground of their own will..." He insists, that is, that Sudetenland is historically ("coming back") a part of the German Reich. The facts are that the territory has never belonged to Germany, that it is historically old Bohemia, and that it once belonged to Hungary, which in turn belonged to Austria. Again he seems to be lying. But it is just as probable, even more so, that what suits his purpose to believe, what he wants to believe, immediately gets translated in his mind as the actual state of affairs. |
Site Ed. Note: Here, the brief text of Neville Chamberlain's now infamous "peace in our time" comments, first made this date at Heston airport in London, then repeated outside 10 Downing, immediately after he returned from Munich:
We, the German Führer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognizing that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for our two countries and for Europe.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.
My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
Sadly, of course, no one would be sleeping well in England a mere two years later from this date as the Blitz proceeded through its first month across the Channel, after Chamberlain had been forced to resign in May as the Nazis rolled into Paris. He would be dead from cancer by November 9, 1940. (See, for Cash's character assessment of him, "Without Drums", November 11, 1940)
Chamberlain's successor had been a good bit more restrained and a great deal more prescient in his greeting of "peace in our time". The following day in a speech before Commons, Churchill summed it this way:
I think you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only in months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime. Perhaps they may join it in despair or in revenge. At any rate, that story is over and told. We cannot consider the abandonment and ruin of Czechoslovakia in the light only of what happened last month. It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years--five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defences. Those are the features which I stand here to declare and which marked an improvident stewardship for which Great Britain and France have dearly to pay.
Victory By Bumble
We are probably going to hear now that Mr. Bumble of Downing Street has won a great victory, saved Czechoslovakia, and achieved "peace with honor." But none of it will be true. The peace made at Munich yesterday was essentially an imposed peace. Under it Bumble got (1) the privilege of not fighting just now, (2) ten days' respite for Czechoslovakia, (3) Mr. Hitler's entirely worthless word not to grab the pitiful remains of the country or any other European territory, and (4) the somewhat dubious assurance that the occupation will take place with the decorum and regard for decent appearances so dear to the heart of an English public school man.
For that he paid:
1--The abolition of Czechoslovakia as an actually independent State. It may very well be that Mr. Hitler will not break his word not to grab the new State outright. He won't need to. For he is to have control of its foreign policy and economy. And with that in hand, he will have no trouble in dictating the establishment of the Nazi government for it, manned by the Germans living within its borders. A German spokesman sneered yesterday that Benes would resign and that he already had his money in Switzerland. Wise Dr. Benes. No one can reasonably blame him for not wishing to spend the rest of his days in a concentration camp.
2--The robbing of one million or so Czechs, now living in the conquered territory, of all they possess. These people are to have six months in which to remove themselves ostensibly under such terms as the international commission shall fix. But no one who knows anything of Hitler's methods believes that they will ever see a penny of compensation for their property. They will simply be so fiercely dragooned that they will be glad to go with no more than their skins.
3--The final destruction of the notion that treaties have any value. It is idle to say that France comes out of this business with her honor intact. It is quite true the Czechoslovakia agreed to the cession, but only when France advised her that she would abandon her if she did not. And what the treaty called for was that France should defend the existing boundaries of Czechoslovakia regardless. France broke that treaty as certainly as ever Mussolini broke one, and when France, which likes to boast that it has the highest sense of honor on earth, breaks its treaties, all treaties obviously become worthless. If Mr. Hitler does not seize the rest of Czechoslovakia, it will not be because he or anybody else supposes that the new "guarantees" by England and France mean anything, but simply because it will suit his purpose as well not to.
4--The final confirmation of the United States in its isolationism. The notion of a common front for the defense of democracy is exploded. And if we cannot fairly blame England for not going to the defense of the Czechoslovakian democracy for sentimental reasons, then we cannot be fairly blamed for concluding that under no circumstance shall we go to the rescue of the English democracy for sentimental reasons.
5--The establishment of Germany as the great power of the Continent. Adolf Hitler yesterday went over the greatest hurdle laid down in "Mein Kampf," and, under the the rule stated by Bismarck, he is today the master of Mitteleuropa. It is quite probable that, here as in Czechoslovakia, he will not break his promise to refrain from grabbing more territory, and for the same reason. All the countries of Central Europe with French power gone from the region have no other choice than to tie up their economies with Germany's and go to Lord Hitler for orders. Hungary is already Nazified, Poland with her wheat fields is well within the orbit, and will be given a Nazi form of government immediately if she undertakes her campaign against Lithuania, which seems imminent. And Rumania, with her wheat fields and oil wells, and Yugoslavia will not be long in following suit. In one to two years Hitler's empire ought to be well enough consolidated for him to undertake his purpose of wresting the Ukraine from Russia. That may get him his come-uppance, but since he will now have food and oil, and since Russia is almost certain to fight alone, it is unlikely. And if he wins he will come out of the struggle the greatest Continental power since Napoleon.
6--The establishment of Fascism as the reigning political pattern of Europe. Aside from France, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, all the Continent is now Fascist, or about to become Fascist, and even Belgium may fall into the latter category. What that means you may see by looking at a map.
7--The reduction of France toward the status of a second-rate power. And not only because of her enormous loss of prestige and the corresponding rise in Germany's. For France has a population of a little over 40,000,000 people. Hitler's new Central European empire will have a population of about 150,000,000, and within two years the whole available manpower in that population will be made into first-class fighting men.
8--The loss to France of one of her best markets, Central Europe. The loss to the United States of a very good market. Last year for instance we sold Czechoslovakia alone $17,000,000 worth of goods. Next year, under the Nazi closed economic system, we will sell her nothing.
Site Ed. Note: And, we suppose we would be remiss not to remark on the subtle irony that, seventeen years from this date of Chamberlain's remarks, now, as this is written, nearly 50 years past, at a country road intersection of highways 46 and 41 at Cholame, California, near Paso Robles, a 24-year old actor would crash his Ferdinand Porsche-designed aluminum Spyder into an all steel Ford Custom Tudor, thereby being thrown from the fragile car and breaking his neck.
In a few days, incidentally, on September 27, 2005, this intersection will henceforth be dubbed James Dean Memorial Junction. There isn't much there, however; just a couple of country roads in the middle of nowhere in a pleasant enough rural valley reminiscent of parts of Europe probably, a marker by a tree in a parking lot of a diner. We know. We passed there once nearly 20 years ago. Not bad burgers though, passable anyway, and the folks were friendly.
Framed Edition
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