20
Onward as to War

With something approaching acclaim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term by the Democratic convention in Chicago the night of July 17, 1940. There remained only his decision as to his running mate. That same morning Robert Maynard Hutchins phoned his friend Harold Ickes—in town for the convention—and asked to see him. "To my surprise," the secretary of the interior wrote in his diary that night, "he suggested that either he or I ought to be nominated for Vice-President. He had come from the Chicago Club where he had been talking the matter over with a group of friends and apparently something in the way of a boom had been started for him. I laughingly told him that Jane"—Mrs. Ickes—"was managing my own campaign for Vice-President and I agreed with him that either one of us would make the kind of candidate the situation required. I had not thought of Hutchins in connection with the Vice-Presidency and I did not think that at any stage he was available because he had no record in public life, and the booms of others, who had a considerable following in the Democratic party, had gone too far. However, I was bound to say to Jane, and to admit to myself, that Hutchins makes an ideal candidate. He is highly intelligent, speaks well, is young and highly personable. I could think of nothing better than having Hutchins trail Willkie"—the Republican presidential nominee—"around the country. . . .

"What Hutchins really had come to see me about was to enlist my support for his own candidacy. When he discovered what had been running in our minds, he offered to do anything he could in my support. I told him that I would be perfectly satisfied if he were nominated and, in the end, we agreed to team up. He volunteered to have some of his friends send telegrams to the President in my behalf and, personally, he sent one to [presidential intimate] Tom Corcoran, although that could not do any possible

good. He volunteered once or twice to telegraph directly to the President, but I asked him not to do that. It was on this same day that I sent the following telegram to the President:

Chicago, July 18, 1940

PERSONAL

STRAIGHT MESSAGE

The President

The White House

Washington, D.C.

I doubt whether anyone is happier over the action of the convention last night than I and my warmest regards and congratulations go to you. I do not know whether you have considered the advisability of selecting as Vice-Presidential candidate a man like Robert M. Hutchins. He is well located geographically, is a liberal and one of the most facile and forceful speakers in the country. It might appeal to the imagination of the people to give them a new and attractive person like Hutchins and I know of no one better able to take care of himself in a free-for-all fight with Willkie. I am inclined to think that he would be the strongest man we could name. May I say also that if Hutchins does not appeal to you, I would feel honored to be considered as your running mate. . . . However, you know better than I whether I am available and I need not tell you that, whatever your decision may be, the fact that you are the head of the ticket is all that is necessary to assure it of my loyal support.

Harold I. Ickes

"I sincerely believed what I said in this telegram about Hutchins. I also believed that I had some availability." The next morning—the day of the vice-presidential nomination—Ickes had several visitors, among them Hutchins, who "again offered to telegraph the President. I said that it was too late and I showed him a copy of the telegram that I had sent the afternoon before." Just then a call came through to Ickes from "Pa" Watson, the president's secretary in Washington. Watson said that "considering the farm vote, the labor vote, and the foreign situation, the President thought Henry Wallace would make the strongest candidate." "Obviously, this was the President's indirect reply to my telegram of the afternoon before in which I had suggested either Hutchins or myself for the Vice-Presidency. He didn't like to turn me down himself, but something had to be said to me. This was the only communication, direct or indirect, that I had from the White House during my days in Chicago."^[1]

So much for Hutchins' haughty I-am-not-interested-in-public-life. He wasn't interested in public life—except at the top. Often elected and never

a candidate, this once he abandoned his above-it-all posture and made a lunge at the brass ring in clumsy competition with the seasoned lungers of American party politics. His one-day campaign was not generally known—none of the "group of friends" at the Chicago Club ever spoke up—until the Ickes diaries were published in 1954.

What was known, of course, was that admirers of his had here and there been touting him for the presidency since 1936 (when columnist Dorothy Thompson proposed him against Landon and Roosevelt).^[2] Yale men William Benton and Thornton Wilder were confident that he would one day occupy the White House to the greater glory of Yale.^[3] Harvard man Walter Lippmann (to whom Hutchins offered a professorship) admired him ever more fervently. New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott, taking a long, easy look in the Roosevelt spring of 1940, publicly "nominated" him for president in 1944.^[4] (FDR was a third-term shoo-in, and it was unthinkable that he would run a fourth time.)

The Hutchins boosters in 1940 included two very different men of very different tastes, backgrounds, and interests, with this much in common: social worker Harry Hopkins (Roosevelt's secretary of commerce, confidant and agent) and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis (the one-time husband of booster Dorothy Thompson) were both of them political outsiders, long, lean, sardonic men whose irrepressibly independent views of men and affairs made both of them a great gallery of friends and enemies. Neither of them had the savvy of a political pro, and Lewis had none of the external restraints that Hopkins had in Washington. In the early spring of 1940 the wild and wooly novelist visited Chicago and after two or three agreeable meetings with Hutchins informed his Chicago acquaintances that he was going to go to Washington and push his new friend for the vice-presidency. Bill Benton, who also envisioned Hutchins as FDR's successor, heard of Lewis's scheme and reacted prophylactically. Knowing Washington, Benton knew that Lewis would do more harm than good "wandering around town on any such mission." He asked Lewis to let him go along, and Lewis agreed. "We talked to many of the leading intellectuals in Washington," Benton recalled later. "I suppose most of them were too incredulous to let us know how incredulous they were. The conversation I most vividly remember was the one with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. He said to me flatly, 'Your friend Hutchins could have had the vice-presidential nomination of the Democratic party for the asking, if he had accepted the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission when Roosevelt offered it to him at the time I resigned the chairmanship to go onto the Supreme Court. But by turning it down, he forfeited his chance.'

"There may have been a great deal to this," Benton went on, "but that was not the end of the matter. Later, while the 1940 Democratic Convention was getting under way at Chicago, Harry Hopkins called on Hutchins at his home on the University of Chicago campus. The oldest Hutchins child, Franja, was then about fifteen. She opened the door of her home, peered up, saw Hopkins standing there and said to him: 'Who are you and what do you want?' Hopkins replied: 'I am Harry Hopkins and I have come to offer your father the vice-presidential nomination of the Democratic party.' Hopkins and Hutchins were on the telephone that night with Roosevelt. What was said? I don't know. But there must have been something in the wind concerning the vice-presidency, since important elements at the 1940 Democratic Convention were uneasy and resentful about the nomination going to Henry Wallace."^[5]

Hopkins, like Ickes, was a radical reformer. Neither man (nor, for that matter, Henry A. Wallace) would have been likely to be in any president's cabinet except Franklin Roosevelt's. They came to dislike each other intensely early in the New Deal days, since they found themselves treading on one another's territorial toes, Ickes as head of the Public Works Administration, Hopkins as head of the Works Progress Administration. But they both saw in Hutchins a kindred outsider spirit who had the makings (as neither of them had) of a spectacular figure on the national scene. Each was moved by a passionate desire to see the New Deal perpetuated after Roosevelt's time; each saw in the younger Hutchins the promise for the future.

Like the "group of friends at the Chicago Club" the morning Hutchins called on Ickes, none of the three participants in the telephone conversation between Hutchins' house and the White House ever spoke publicly about it—except that one of them must have told Benton that it took place. One thing that neither Hopkins nor Roosevelt—nor Ickes—seems to have known was that Hutchins wouldn't have done at all. Not at all. Not in July of 1940.

By July of 1940, the real war had begun; the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, France and the Low Countries a month later; the British were driven from Dunkirk in early June; Italy attacked a collapsing France (and inspired Roosevelt's "stab in the back" speech) on June 10, and Paris fell on June 12. Taking office as prime minister the day the Blitzkrieg struck at France, Winston Churchill promised his countrymen "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," but the day Great Britain's 335,000-man expeditionary force evacuated Dunkirk he promised them something more, something that was widely overlooked in his great "we shall fight on the beaches" oration: "And even if, which I do not for a moment believe,

this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old."

Without congressional sanction Roosevelt at once replied, in a public address, that "in our American unity . . . we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation." As it was Churchill's first direct appeal for American aid, so it was Roosevelt's first formal offer of it.

Ickes and Hopkins in Washington were over their ears in the national and international crises of the day. Boosting Hutchins for the vice-presidential nomination, they were both of them guilty (or, more precisely, innocent) of having paid no attention to his recent antics out there in the Chicago wilderness. Had they done so, or taken the time to talk to him, they would have discovered why he wouldn't have done at all. For Hutch-ins opposed American intervention in the war in Europe and had made his opposition known publicly as early as June of 1940—a month before the Democratic convention. In a commencement address, under the title, "What Shall We Defend?" he amplified the view he had been expressing informally, that the outcome of the war, whoever won, would be a disaster for democracy.^[6] The address made modest national headlines, though it could not, obviously, have come to the attention of Ickes or Hopkins. They both supported the president's pro-allied program to the hilt, and they both knew him well enough to know that he would have no truck with anyone who opposed it. In the succeeding months Franklin Roosevelt would push ever more stridently for "all measures short of war," and Robert Hutchins would pull ever more strenuously in the other direction. "Dear Bob" and "Dear Mr. President" would never again, after the 1940 convention, see each other or communicate directly or indirectly.

On September 7, 1939, six days after the German invasion of Poland, Hutchins wrote his friend John U. Nef, the Chicago economist, "The war has got me down. I wish I could think either that it would be short or that we could stay out of it. I think it will be long, and that though we could stay out of it, we are not likely to. I remember 1914 with horror and 1917 with something worse. I don't see that after the war is over, though Hitler will be gone, the actions of the French and English governments will be any more enlightened than they were after the last war." Two years later, in one of his antiwar speeches: "Before 1917 the country had serious problems. The war settled none of them and produced some new ones we had never dreamed of. From 1919 to 1929 we paid no attention to these problems, or anything else, except the price of stocks. From 1929 to 1939 we thought of nothing but these problems. We applied a whole pharmaco-

paeia of desperate remedies. . . . But there was little fundamental improvement. . . . This, then, is the spectacle of a country with appalling problems, many of them resulting from the last war, about to plunge into another in the hope of ending its troubles that way. In the life of individuals this method of solving problems is known as suicide."^[7]

In 1937 President Roosevelt's "quarantine the aggressors" speech—directed against the Japanese attack on China—aroused no great interest in the country. The rise of Nazism and its successive atrocities, including its 1938 annexation of Austria and occupation of the Czech Sudetenland, likewise left Americans unmoved; even after the beginning of the war in Europe a mere 8.9 percent were willing to supply England, France, and Poland while refusing matériel to Germany. (37.5 percent were willing to sell matériel of all sorts to all comers, 30 percent wanted nothing whatever to do with any warring country, and only 14.7 percent were willing to go to war if the allies should be losing.)

Many of the country's most influential Jews, proud of being assimilated to the secular American life, were shy of supporting their coreligionists in Germany, fearful of intensifying anti-Semitism by being politically conspicuous and supporting unpopular, or even merely controversial, causes. In 1939 a Jewish donor asked Hutchins to try to persuade Felix Frankfurter not to accept Roosevelt's appointment of him to the Supreme Court. Hutchins demurred, saying that such intercession would be improper and, besides, Professor Frankfurter would be a great justice. "I know this," said the donor, "but every time a Jew is appointed to a high post it feeds the fires of anti-Semitism."

There were Jews of that sort before Hitler, one of them one of the wealthiest men in America. "Let me," said Hutchins ten or twenty years after the event, "tell you about him so that you will understand how I became anti-Semitic. I was already anti-Gentile, but I didn't know I was anti-Semitic until the evening of December 31, 1932, at a New Year's Eve party I had to attend because it was given by a man who was reported, erroneously, to have some money left, and the University of Chicago needed money. In order to stay awake past my bedtime, I engaged one of our trustees in a conversation. He had money left, he was generous, and, what was more to the point, he was a leader of the Jewish community—a pushover for purposes of the conversation. I told him that for $250,000 I could make the University of Chicago the greatest university in history in ninety days. He said he thought that the money could be found—I always liked that 'found'—but how did I propose to bring the miracle to pass? I told him that I was a great student of modern European history and that President von Hindenburg could not avoid appointing Hitler chancellor of

Germany for more than another sixty days. (I turned out to be optimistic by thirty.) All I would need, if I could get started right away, would be another thirty days after that to hire every Jewish scholar in Germany—and get them for coffee and buns. The leader of the Jewish community said, 'Oh,' and then he said, 'Bob, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this country, and it's growing. The trouble is that there are too many Jews here now.' In the succeeding years before the war the University had to go into the open market and share the emigrés with the other leading institutions around the world."

A few weeks after the invasion of Poland in 1939 Harry Hopkins wrote his brother, "I believe that we can really keep out of it. Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win."^[8]

But the beginnings of the bitter division of the country between "isolation" and "intervention" were already detectable. Chester Bowles in New York, although he repudiated the idea of American isolation from the world, was among those who were already doing what they could to dampen the incipient war fever. On June 25, two weeks after the fall of France, his one-time advertising partner Benton wrote Hutchins from New York: "Chet Bowles is so steamed up over this problem of aid to the Allies that he'd like to see you take to the radio this week, go on record, address a speech either to the world . . . or to Winston Churchill announcing that millions of Americans are against any form of intervention whatsoever. . . . Chet and I privately agree that if England can and does hold out for one year, the U.S. will drift into this war. There isn't any leadership on the horizon to keep us out of it. Are we reflecting the hysteria to which we are exposed here in the East?"

But what about the "group of friends" assembled in his behalf at the Chicago Club the morning of the vice-presidential nomination? Surely they knew where Roosevelt stood and, after the 1940 commencement address (and just as surely some of them before it), where Hutchins stood. He may have appeared, at first blush, to have been only incidentally interested in the cosmic calamity of Europe. But there was no mistaking his attitude toward his country's involvement. "What Shall We Defend?" Democracy, said Roosevelt. Hardly, said Hutchins; reciting the painful injustices of American society, he argued that we were not prepared to defend democracy: "Precisely here lies our unpreparedness against the only enemy we may have to face. Such principles as we have are not different enough from Hitler's to make us very rugged in defending ours in preference to his. Moreover, we are not united and clear about such principles as we have. We are losing our moral principles. But the vestiges of

them remain to bother us and to interfere with a thoroughgoing commitment to immoral principles. Hence we are like confused, divided, ineffective Hitlers. In a contest between Hitler and people who are wondering why they shouldn't be Hitlers the finished product is bound to win."^[9] (Stylish prose, that; and, perhaps, a little slick.)

In November of 1940 Mr. Roosevelt was reelected by another colossal landslide, which he took to be something between an acceptance and an endorsement of his pro-allied position. By 1941 the country was sharply divided between the miscalled interventionists and the similarly miscalled isolationists. Each of the two camps was in fact a mélange of divided camps.

The interventionists, so called, included not only the Anglophilic socialites and intellectuals of the east coast (and elsewhere) but the admirers everywhere of the political, cultural, and economic institutions of England; east (and later west) coast residents farsightedly fearful of a victorious Axis attack on the western hemisphere; nearly all the country's Jews and their sympathizers; saber-rattling militarists; international financiers and industrialists with British ties; certainly tens of millions of disinterested freedom lovers and enemies of tyranny who believed that all "measures," "steps," and "aid short of war" to the democratic countries was a realistic program and not a catchphrase or a morally dubious scheme to help the victim up to (and only up to) the point where the helper might get hurt.

The "isolationists" were an even more heterogeneous crew, consisting of the country's few (but disproportionately noisy) Communists prior to Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union; the few (but likewise disproportionately noisy) doctrinaire pacifists both secular and religious; a considerable and influential number of Anglophobic enemies of empire and imperialism in the best American spirit; a tremendously influential assortment of across-the-board xenophobics like William Randolph Hearst; a considerable (but, under the circumstances, decreasingly influential) body of conservative, but anti-Nazi, admirers of Germany; some anti-British Irish; a handful (only a handful this time around) of descendants of German and Italian immigrants, actual immigration having come to a substantial halt in the early 1920s; a few secret Nazi agents; a more than embarrassing motley of "native-American" fascist, racist, and anti-Semitic elements overtly or covertly enthusiastic about Nazism; and tens of millions of genuinely neutralist Americans of purest patriotism who wanted no part of what Jefferson called "the broils of Europe," together with many liberal internationalists like Hutchins who all too clearly recalled the

failure of the First World War to make the world safe for democracy and saw war, not Germany or Nazism but war itself, as the scourge of liberty.

If "isolation" meant simply staying out of war, and no more than that, there was no doubt that most of the "interventionists" were, logically or illogically, isolationists right up to Pearl Harbor. And if "intervention" meant nothing more bellicose than material aid to the Allies there was no doubt that most of the "isolationists" were interventionists. But the opposition of the American people to actual military involvement, more than 85 percent at the beginning of the war, never fell below 70 percent prior to Pearl Harbor, right through the Roosevelt success in obtaining from Congress piecemeal repeal of the U.S. Neutrality Act and its arms embargo provisions, the leasing of overage destroyers to Britain, the arming of U.S. merchant ships, the adoption of peacetime conscription, and the decisive passage of Lend-Lease in March of 1941. (Even congressional resistance to the president was stiffening before Pearl Harbor. In August the House passed the draft-extension bill by a single vote, and in November more congressmen voted against neutrality revision than had voted against Lend-Lease in March.)

Thus the isolationist amalgam, though it contained more disparate, and even malodorous, elements than the interventionist, was much more representative of the country. Its spearhead organization was the America First Committee, which was never able to rid itself of its "pro-Nazi" tailcoaters and its reactionary image, though its membership included many distinguished libertarians such as Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation , Amos Pinchot of Pennsylvania, the economist John T. Flynn, and Vice-president William Benton of the University of Chicago, Hutchins' Yale classmate and friend. (Benton's formidable schoolmarm mother, who had home-steaded in the northwest, roundly disapproved of her son's isolationism and told him so: "There is nothing creditable in failing to give the last full measure of devotion to your country when her life is at stake. . . . You have put yourself in a very ugly position because of the America First connection. . . . I fear it is a case of Old Dog Tray getting into bad company. I shall always consider Robert Hutchins responsible for that.")^[10]

So it went, as the frenzy mounted and the lines were more sharply drawn with each day's dire reports from across the sea. In his diary entry of April 12, 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes wrote of a visit from his and Hutchins' old friend Charles E. Merriam. (A prominent Roosevelt advisor, Merriam was a moderate interventionist.) "I asked him," Ickes wrote, "if he could explain Bob Hutchins' late speeches. They have sounded to me like those of an appeaser. . . . Merriam and I found that our view with

respect to Hutchins coincided. We think that his very just resentment over the manner in which the Administration has treated him, plus political ambition, has led him to take the stand that he has. However, on the other side, Hutchins has jeopardized the endowment drive [of the University of Chicago] next fall. Merriam thought that he was looking for a large sum of money from Marshall Field, and Field is distinctly on the other side. . . . The Rockefellers are also against him on this issue."^[11]

So Ickes and Merriam could believe that so low a consideration as political ambition or personal grudge was enough to determine the position of the otherwise admirable Hutchins on the issue of war and peace. The "however, on the other side" gave them away, with their recognition that this politically ambitious cynic in his willingness to jeopardize the endowment drive he headed, was prepared to sacrifice his career to principle. (In 1941 John Gunther, in his notes for Inside U.S.A . recorded his impression that Hutchins might be the isolationists' candidate for president in 1944.)^[12]

Hutchins was widely identified with the America First Committee, although he never spoke under its, or anybody's, auspices. (Forty years later a contemporary inquired if it was true that he had appeared on a platform with the tinhorn fascist Gerald L. K. Smith. He hadn't.) He not only did not become an America Firster, he made a repeated point of his not having done so: "I am not an isolationist. I have not joined the America First Committee. I should like to join a Committee for Humanity First."

Some of his close friends and colleagues were either members or advisors and consultants of America First, among them Wisconsin's liberal Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr. (and his brother, Governor Phil La Follette), Columbia Law School Professor Philip K. Jessup, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Hutchins' most implacable academic enemy on his own campus, the physiologist Anton Julius Carlson. ("It was the only time in our lives that Professor Carlson and I ever agreed about anything.") Hutchins' 1932 candidate for president, Norman Thomas, though he himself headed the Socialist-pacifist-oriented Keep America Out of War Congress, spoke at America First meetings, as did President Henry Noble McCracken of Vassar. The organization boasted such mutually hostile personages as former president Herbert Hoover and United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis. And such eminently credentialed liberals as Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles A. Beard, and Stuart Chase figured prominently in the campaign against the Roosevelt approach to war, in direct or indirect association with the committee.

Hutchins was an ardent internationalist; proclaiming his affinity for an

imaginary Humanity First Committee, he said, "If the United States can serve humanity it should do so, no matter what the cost in blood and treasure." (He had long been a tireless campaigner against separatism within the university structure. "Isolation," he said in a 1936 lecture, "is bad for everybody.") Not only were he and his kind of "isolationists" anti- isolationist (in contrast with xenophobics), they were very far from being neutral. One of the earliest supporters of Bundles for Britain, Hutchins was one of the most forthright advocates of unlimited American rearmament for defense: the Wilsonianism of 1916 all over again—"He Kept Us Out of War" plus "Preparedness." Hutchins: "Will Hitler attack us? Not if we are prepared." Again and again he prefaced his assertion that he was against military intervention by saying flatly, "I am for aid to Britain."

With the Battle of Britain in the winter of 1940-41 and the indiscriminate bombing of London and other cities, men and women like Hutchins recognized that a new kind of war had come into being. With the heavy bomber come into its stupendous own, and then the long-range rocket and missile, the whole world was a battlefield, every city, town, village, factory, farm, shop, school, hospital, prison, cemetery, church, home—and every civilian, of any age or condition, a potential victim. It was not Hiroshima that brought this great new fact home—except in degree. It was London, Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden. It was the eye clinic in the open city of Marburg/Lahn, nearly all of its bandaged patients sightless, squarely hit by an aerial bomb that missed the railroad yard. A new kind of warfare, by definition consummate in the mass of pain it inflicted. And—although the airplane had invented it, and every nation would fight it from now on, its prime objective the shattering of urban industrial morale—it happened to have been launched by Adolf Hitler.

Hutchins' position, like that of the other antiwar liberals and radicals, ultimately was untenable. He wanted Nazi Germany to lose and he wanted England to win. He was for aid to Britain. How much aid? And for how long? Should a man who wanted England to win and Germany to lose and who favored aid to England draw a line at, say, arming the vessels carrying that aid, at turning over to the destined recipient destroyers to convoy that aid, at extending that aid from socks to guns and planes and, ultimately, troops? How could an advocate of aid to England say, "This far, and no further?" But Hutchins made a repeated point—without being asked—of stating that he was not a pacifist.

So the nonpacifist objector had to argue, unpersuasively—and Hutch-ins did—that America would be worse off if it went in and won than if it stayed out; that Nazi Germany, having conquered Europe, and in time (with its allies) Asia and Africa, could not successfully attack the United

States. He had to argue—and did—that the United States would lose its values, its very form of government, if it fought. ("Our form of government will not survive participation in this war and our ideals will be unrecognizable by the time we have gone through the conflict.") He had to argue—and did—that the peace that would follow our victorious war would be a bad peace. ("Our practice of life and government is not enough better to justify the hope that after we have won the war for democracy we can write a democratic peace.") He would be tempted to argue—as Hutchins was, and as Hutchins did—that this war was Armageddon and that American neutrality was what Armageddon demanded. ("If we plunge into war we shall deprive the world of its last hope. We shall rob mankind of its last chance.")

The America First Committee was predominantly conservative, with a liberal strain reflecting its origin in a group of antiwar Yale undergraduates led by R. Douglas Stuart and Kingman Brewster, Jr. (The latter would one day be president of Yale and U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.) Its chairman was a moderate conservative, Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Wood was a general—"my favorite general," Hutchins called him—but a general long since retired whose military expertise was not persuasive against that of the active military leaders supporting the president.

Though its position was supported by the great majority of the American people, America First was never able to shake the stigma attached to it by the acceptance of extreme, and even unsavory, rightists and rabble rousers. In the academic, literary, and journalistic circles of the eastern seaboard, the committee suffered a steady and steadily mounting succession of attacks as—the classic obloquy of the times—appeasers. The liberals among its leaders kept begging Hutchins to join it, with a view to his becoming its national chairman. Hutchins continued to resist, though he wrote his friend Professor Philip Jessup of Columbia, in the spring of 1941, "I now wonder if I was right in not joining America First. Although I do not like some of them, like Henry Ford, I know absolutely nothing against General Wood or Douglas Stuart, the director. On the contrary, I admire them both . .. . The reason why I am drifting toward America First is that it is the only group that is working with real effect on the problem."^[13]

It was in this same letter that he made what seems to have been the strangest judgment of his life. "I recently spent an evening with Lindbergh," he wrote Jessup. "I regard him as the most misrepresenteand maligned individual I have ever known. Perhaps I'm blind, but I can see nothing wrong with him whatever." Like all men, Lindbergh did have

something wrong with him. Several things. He was Hutchins' "uneducated specialist" par excellence, who combined ignorance, political naiveté, and a legendary reputation, to a degree that came close to saddling his idolatrous countrymen with a Man on Horseback.

Lindbergh's five national radio addresses before Pearl Harbor, and his twelve packed platform speeches, identified him as the leader of the antiwar forces. Certainly President Roosevelt was afraid of him. With a view to clipping his wings or, alternatively, grounding him altogether, the always realistic, or cynical, Roosevelt let it be known, through a third party, that there was to be a new branch of the military, a separate air force parallel with the army and the navy, with its own cabinet secretary; the post was Lindbergh's if he would go along with the president's foreign policy. Lindbergh declined the carefully concealed—but well authenticated—offer, and the president then authorized an investigation of the unbending flyer's income tax returns (a low scheme which blew up in its contriver's face when Lindbergh called a press conference and revealed that to make sure that he was making no error of calculation prejudicial to the IRS he had always added 10 percent to his tax payments).

Anne Morrow Lindbergh tried in vain to dissuade her husband from making the public statement that ended his prewar influence: "The three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration." This—and more of the same—in a speech in Des Moines on September 11, 1941. The meeting was sponsored by America First (whose officials never saw any of Lindbergh's speeches in advance), and the national reaction effectively collapsed the committee's effectiveness at a time when the national debate had reached crisis heat and the allied fortunes of war were at their nadir. "It would be difficult," says Professor Wayne S. Cole in his America First: the Battle Against Intervention, 1940-41 , "to exaggerate the magnitude of the explosion which was set off by this speech. . . . Undoubtedly much of this uproar was due to genuine disapproval of Lindbergh's key statement regarding the Jews. Many may have denounced the speech publicly to protect themselves from any possible charge of anti-Semitism. But there can be no doubt that interventionists exploited this incident."^[14] Isolationists on the whole said nothing—what could they say?—while interventionists danced in the streets. "The voice is the voice of Lindbergh," said the San Francisco Chronicle , not untypically, "but the words are the words of Hitler." Mr. Roosevelt said—and needed to say—nothing.

Hutchins had all along resisted the pleas of his friends in America First to join them. "You could almost make us respectable," Chester Bowles wrote.^[15] But Hutchins did not feel that he could avoid taking a position

on the Lindbergh imbroglio. In the Hutchins manner, he made no statement—and simply resigned (along with Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation ) publicly from the Committee against Intolerance when that organization of highly respected liberals attacked the fallen hero of the Des Moines speech as anti-Semitic. Although he greatly admired—and envied?—Lindbergh's unassailable independence and dogged disdain of censure, his extravagant esteem of the extremely limited technician remained, and remains, unsearchable. There is no record of the two or three talks the two men had in the months before Pearl Harbor, but thirty-five years after Des Moines Hutchins told a historian that the four persons he had worked with in developing his own position on the war were Benton, Bowles, Mayer—and Lindbergh. To the same careful interviewer, he said, still lamely after thirty-five years, that Lindbergh's statement "was not a timely remark."^[16]

Hutchins' attitude toward the headstrong hero had the avuncular quality of a teacher who is taken with the pigheaded persistence of a backward pupil. The two men maintained an intermittent correspondence for five or ten years after the war. Their letters were long (an unusual thing for Hutchins); and Lindbergh's, which he typed himself, were filled with positively pre-elementary questions. Hutchins patiently, painstakingly, and on the same wide-eyed level, argued with him, as often as not with tongue in cheek: "I am much encouraged by your suggestion that the important thing is the clarification of issues through discussion. I have come to this conclusion myself, even to the extent of deciding that this is the chief purpose of a university."^[17]

Hutchins, who professed disinterest in public office and quietly sought the highest one in 1940, was in all probability counted out as "unavailable" rather than politically obnoxious to the interventionist president who was choosing his running mate. For all of Ickes' and Hopkins' efforts, there is no hard evidence that Roosevelt—whose offers of high posts he had declined—gave Hutchins any consideration for the vice-presidential nomination.

The Supreme Court was, or may have been (or might have been), something else. Roosevelt filled the famous Cardozo and Brandeis vacancies with professors at Harvard and Yale, Felix Frankfurter in 1938 and William O. Douglas in 1939, both of them close friends and admirers of Hutchins.

When the conservative Justice McReynolds and the moderate Chief Justice Hughes retired in 1941, Hutchins' by then vociferous opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy precluded his appointment had it otherwise been contemplated. As the former dean of the Yale Law School, and as a

university president, he would have been acceptable "to the country." (Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, onetime dean of the Columbia Law School, was moved up into Hughes's seat.) He had supported Roosevelt's New Deal legislation and his foredoomed effort to reform, or "pack," the conservative Supreme Court. (He was a "loose" constructionist of a Constitution which was written before the modern corporate and technological world had come into being.) Five years earlier Robert Maynard Hutchins had had nowhere to go but up to the presidency or the chief justiceship; by 1941 he had nowhere to go.

There was no compelling reason why he shouldn't stay where he was. Though a probable majority of his senior faculty objected to his educational vagaries, and a faculty poll by the student newspaper in mid-1941 went two to one in favor of Roosevelt's "all aid short of war," there was no movement overt or covert to censure or get rid of Chicago's rapidly aging president on the basis of his antiwar activity. A few days before his June 1940 convocation address, "What Shall We Defend?" a campus mass meeting to arouse pro-allied sentiment presented some of his weightiest faculty members as interventionists (including Adler, who attacked the irrelevant issue of pacifism for its bad "moral thinking"); the somewhat fewer weighty colleagues who took Hutchins' position were much less loudly heard from. But Chicago was—in part because of its location—less inflammable than some of its sister institutions on the east and west coasts, and there was no personal break between Hutchins and any of his war-issue critics.

As for his trustees—Hutchins said they were "self-denying"—they were worried, as they had been ever since he'd taken office. The university's fiftieth anniversary celebration was taking place in the fall of 1941, and the celebration was the occasion (or vice versa) of the most ambitious endowment campaign in the institution's history. As Merriam and Ickes had already observed, some of the heaviest prospective donors, especially in the east, were interventionists. Middle western attitudes were divided, as Hutchins believed his board was. But isolationism was respectable in the Chicagoland of the reactionary, isolationist Tribune ; still, accustomed though they were to having to be self-denying as far as their rambunctious president was concerned, Chicago's trustees were men (always men) of caution and reserve who deplored public controversy and, indeed, any but flattering public notice. They did not know what their president's unusual activity on the national front would do to the fund-raising effort. But they knew better than to remonstrate with him, with one exception. Trustee Clarence B. Randall of the Inland Steel Corporation—it would have been worse than impolite to observe that Inland Steel was a "Jewish" concern—

was an active interventionist, and in a sharp letter to Hutchins took him to task for using the pulpit of the university chapel to deliver an antiwar lecture in the spring of 1941. "The chapel," wrote Randall, "is not a suitable forum for the discussion of controversial questions."^[18] Though Hutchins may have been on questionable ground—he had said (to a friend), "You can get away with murder under the sign of the cross"—he reminded Randall that president Angell of Yale had devoted his baccalaureate sermons to attacks on the New Deal, and added, "If a subject is important, it is likely to be controversial. I see no reason why university presidents should have to limit their chapel addresses to trivial topics."^[19]

On the whole, the self-denying board held its uneasy peace and abode uncomfortably in the hope that rich and poor donors would not be turned away by Hutchins' unfortunate conduct. They weren't. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of the interventionist Rockefellers, was the principal speaker at the culminating banquet of the fiftieth anniversary celebration. The endowment drive went over the top, and Hutchins was able to address the gathered alumni in late September 1941 in a self-congratulatory, as well as congratulatory, frame of mind, speaking of the university in his most graceful mode—and between the lines getting a word in on salvation through war.

There are two—at least two—ways of explaining the exceptional absence of anger at Hutchins' antiwar stand on the part of faculty, trustees, donors, and alumni. It may have been that the interventionists among them were admiring of him as an educator and administrator, were congenial to his social views, taken with him personally, and could forgive him (or at least tolerate) his extracurricular crusade as an isolationist. The perhaps likelier explanation was that they sensed that when the chips were down—whatever that might mean—he would go along with them and with the country. Why otherwise would he keep saying, "I am not a pacifist?" Why otherwise would he call for military preparedness? He was known to his admirers as a safe man at bottom, a team player, for all his academic high jinks, and even to his detractors as a constitutionalist, a rules player. He had signaled his dependability in a number of ways. In 1940 a defense council was formed to provide for the impact on the university's organization and finances and to plan with the government the war tasks it could do. "As a result of this planning," the university's publicity office announced at the same time, "many scientific projects designed by the government were under way long before war was declared." In some quarters it was known officially, in others unofficially, that Chicago administrators and faculty representatives had been dispatched to Washington in 1941 to engage government officials in considering the

kinds of projects the university would be best suited to undertake; on one such mission, Vice-president Benton returned from the capital to report (more significantly than he could have known) that the government's scientific advisers were convinced that Chicago's progress in nuclear physics was uniquely advanced and its personnel in that area uniquely qualified. Ten days before Pearl Harbor, President Hutchins announced that the university's status in the natural sciences put it in a position of leadership in defense work.

More visibly significant was the Institute of Military Studies, established on the campus in October 1940 by Arthur L. H. Rubin, the all-round New Yorker of independent wealth who lived with the Mortimer Adlers and served as executive secretary of Hutchins' controversial Committee on the Liberal Arts at the university. The non-credit-course military institute was open to faculty, students, and the general (male, of course) public. Privately equipped, its students, many of them gray, many more of them portly, drilled with wooden guns and used pickup trucks as tanks. The five-dollar registration fee paid for a specially designed military cap. With volunteer civilians as instructors, the institute offered instruction in drill, manual of arms, elementary rifle marksmanship, elementary tactics and tactical exercise, mapping, bayonet and hand grenade drill, and other fundamentals. Its counterpart had appeared around the country during the preparedness campaign of 1915-16; and the professional military, now as then, had no use for it or interest in it. But before it was disbanded in 1942 it had "trained" some four thousand high-spirited, if otherwise unserviceable, enrollees. It was precisely the kind of vocationalism that Hutchins deplored as a hokey imitation of the real thing (and in this case an emotional jag). He took an especially dim view of its ecstatic leaders, Rubin (who went to the War Department after Pearl Harbor) and the economist and one-time pacifist Paul H. Douglas (who at fifty became a marine when war was declared, was wounded in the Pacific, and returned to become a Chicago alderman and ultimately an eminently liberal U.S. senator from Illinois). But the Institute for Military Studies had the formal support of the central administration of the university, and the head of the central administration was a one-man army opposing war.

This nonpacifist, propreparedness isolationist should certainly have lost friends among the extreme interventionists. But he didn't. His closest friend, over a lifetime, was Thornton Wilder. A biographer of Wilder says that the friendship really ended in 1941: "[Wilder] regarded Hitler as a virtual incarnation of the devil. . . . [He] saw Western civilization at bay, the barbarian at the gates. . . . He was terribly dismayed when on January 23, 1941, Robert Hutchins made a nationally broadcast address advocat-

ing American neutrality and warning his countryman against involvement in the European conflict. . . . Thus Wilder's adulation of Hutchins, at the end of a quarter century, fizzled out at this moment when Hutchins dug his political grave. . . . After January 1941, Wilder would speak privately about Hutchins, with a baleful shake of his head, as a man who, out of some kind of self-indulgence, had failed to fulfill his great potential."^[20]

In 1974—thirty-three years after his "adulation of Hutchins fizzled out"—I had the opportunity to speak with Wilder, whom I'd known at Chicago. He spoke "privately" with the same adulation with which he had been writing letters in the intervening years. The two men had maintained their close correspondence but hadn't seen each other in ten years or more. Wilder had really withdrawn from circulation. But now Hutchins was ill, and Wilder complained that he "couldn't get Bob to complain." I said that I hoped he would be able to get to California some time to see Bob, and Wilder said, "I don't have to look at Bob to see him. I see him all the time."

He didn't get to look at Bob again. On December 7, 1975, Thornton Wilder was dead. A year before he died, his last book appeared, Theophilus North . It was the closest Wilder would come to writing an autobiography. It was dedicated to Robert Maynard Hutchins, who spoke at his memorial service at Yale and said: "For sixty years he was my teacher. His pedagogical methods were irresistible. They were deep personal concern and laughter. When I was ill or suffering from any misfortune, the letters were faster and funnier, but the lessons were not missing. . . He was the best of teachers . . . the kindest of friends."^[21]

If Wilder was the closest friend of his youth, Laird Bell of Chicago was perhaps the closest friend of his middle life—and his lawyer, and, as chairman of the Chicago board of trustees, his boss. Bell was not only a member of the city's leading law firm, he was a formidable figure in the corporate world (for example, chairman of the board of Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company and, for example, an overseer of Harvard). He was also, in 1940 and 1941, the head of the Chicago chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies—the city's foremost interventionist, as Hutchins was its foremost noninterventionist. A decade after this confrontation Board Chairman Bell announced the anonymous endowment of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship at the university; a decade later Robert Maynard Hutchins, called back to the university to preside over the dedication of the Laird Bell Quadrangle, revealed that the anonymous donor of the Hutchins professorship had been Laird Bell.

But Bell was an even-tempered man and Wilder was an affectionate man; and Harold Ickes was neither. The Old Curmudgeon was a ravening

anti-isolationist and a boiling supporter of all aid short of war. He supported Roosevelt worshipfully and, in his conversation with his friend Professor Merriam, voiced his deep disappointment in Hutchins' policy of "appeasement"; as a Chicago alumnus he had been a great admirer of Hutchins the civil libertarian and defender of academic freedom. But the last time the two men saw each other was the occasion they conspired at the Democratic convention of 1940 to advance one another's candidacy for the vice-presidential nomination. And then, on December 26, 1950, the former warmonger wrote to the former appeaser:

Dear Bob,

I have seen by the newspapers that you are about to resign from the University . . . and that you will be going to Pasadena to work for the Ford Foundation. I am glad that this important foundation is to have the benefit of your services, but I regret that Chicago will lose you. We need such leadership in this country today as you have been supplying. . . Jane and I would love it if we could see you before you move west. . . .

And the appeaser replied to the warmonger:

Dear Harold:

. . . You have always been very generous to me and this occasion is no exception. I think of you and Jane often and only wish that our paths could manage to cross once in a while. . . . Do give my love to Jane. If I come to Washington, I will not fail to see you.

What these friends, who remained friends, had in common was that they were all gentiles. It could not have been expected that the Jews in his circle—trustees and donors among them—would forgive and forget all that easily. But they did. In a few cases he and they were lost to each other for the duration, but only in a few. And even in those few cases the separation was more in sorrow than in anger. None of his Jewish friends for a moment identified Hutchins with the right-wing extremists—and outright fascists—who cluttered around the isolationist movement. Jews had always been greatly drawn to him—and he to them. (I once asked him why it was that some of his best friends were rich and influential Jews. "Because," he said, "I feel sorry for oppressed people.") His university appointments and associations were disproportionately Jewish. His intimacy with Felix Frankfurter went back to his Yale days. There was one exception—a costly one—to this continuity of Jewish friendships.

John Gunther tells the story in his biography of Albert Lasker, the multimillionaire advertising man and University of Chicago board member. "Hutchins, like Lasker, was vigorous, enlivening, and original. The two

men took to one another at once, and spent a dozen years in warm association. . . . Hutchins had the habit of getting up every morning at 5:30 A.M. , and he liked to go to bed early at night. Sleep was, however, difficult for him if Lasker was in a conversational mood, because the older man would call him at all hours of the night, posing innumerable questions and soliciting advice. . . . 'Should Edward'—Lasker's collegiate son—'have polo ponies?' Hutchins replied, 'Certainly' and rang off. . . .^[22]

"In the spring of 1942 Lasker resigned from the board of trustees of the University of Chicago. There were two reasons for this severance, which caused him much pain. First, he had turned full-wheel on international affairs [and] became . . . an ardent interventionist . . . even though this meant an irrevocable break with some of his oldest acquaintances, like Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck and Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. . . .

"All this, naturally, served to bring him into conflict with Hutchins [who] held views which Lasker, a whole-hogger if ever there was one, could not countenance, and Albert felt so deeply that Hutchins was wrong that he considered that he had no recourse but to resign his trusteeship at the University.

"However, there was a second issue. The spark which set off the explosion was something else. In March 1942, the Saturday Evening Post published an article called 'The Case Against the Jew' by Milton Mayer, a part-time employee of the University who was one of Hutchins' best friends. Mayer had done good work for the University. But his Post article (with which the University was not involved in any way) made Lasker angry, because he thought it was anti-Semitic—although Mayer was, of course, a Jew—and would give succor to anti-Semites everywhere at a time when Jews the world over were suffering the most painful, dangerous persecution in their history. Certainly Mayer's article, whatever it said, came out at a most unpropitious moment. What angered Lasker particularly was the title."^[23]

Lasker demanded that Hutchins fire Mayer. Hutchins said he didn't see how he could do that, since Mayer was a half-time employee of the university and the article had apparently been written on the other half of his time. Lasker decided to leave the board. Hutchins tried his best to make him change his mind, but Lasker refused and resigned as a trustee on June 11, 1942. In his letter of resignation, which was nine pages long, Lasker wrote: "When a trustee differs from the president of a university, the trustee should resign." "I thought the sentence would end the other way," said Hutchins afterward.

Then Lasker went after the Post . He summoned its chief executives to

New York: they came running. He threatened to withdraw all Lord and Thomas advertising from the magazine, forced it to print a retraction and an apology, and forced it to agree never to print Mayer again and to have a leading Jew write a rebuttal. (Failing to interest a leading Jew in the assignment, the Post settled for Wendell Willkie.)

Lasker was reported to be one of the ten richest men in America. He was not only exorbitantly rich, and lavish, and generous, he was exorbitantly philanthropic; he had given the University of Chicago immense amounts of money, beginning with a million dollars in 1928 for medical research; and this was even before Hutchins became president.

The financial loss to the university as a result of the break was simply incalculable. Lasker's eccentric distribution of his largesse, had Hutchins held on to him, might well have focused on the university. Hutchins neither held on to him nor did he come hurriedly—unlike the Post executives—when the outraged Croesus summoned him and ordered him to fire Mayer. Hutchins had the sole responsibility for Lasker's cutoff of the university; the author of the Post article, though he did fill-in teaching in the Hutchins-Adler Great Books courses, was covered by neither tenure nor contract; Hutchins could have fired him on the instant. He could have—but didn't. The buck stopped there. He scaped no goats, stalked no horses, hoisted no lightning rods or weather vanes. He exaggerated a little when he said (as he often did) that the life of a university president consisted entirely of shameful compromise.

Hutchins and Lasker saw each other less and less as the years went on. On one occasion, some years after the war, the two old friends found themselves seated next to one another at a dinner party. The now elderly Lasker turned to Hutchins and said, "Do you remember an article about Jews in the Saturday Evening Post during the war?" "Vaguely," said Hutchins. "You know," said Lasker, "my son-in-law gave it to me to read the other day. It wasn't a bad article. But the title was unfortunate." "Wasn't it," said Hutchins.

Lasker had been fanatical, as, in their separate fashions, had been Ickes and Wilder. It was almost impossible for Jews not to be fanatical and only a little less so for liberals and humanitarians. Fanaticism had been the order—or disorder—of the day. In the spring of 1940 Hutchins' old friend Alexander Woollcott "shook his finger in my face and said, 'The day after France falls, Hitler will be at the Panama Canal.'" Interventionism was a passionate cause, sweeping people with it in the name of humanity; anti-interventionism was essentially a bloodless affair, calling people to consider distant causes and still more distant consequences. In his running correspondence with Thornton Wilder, Hutchins wrote, after his January 23,

1941, speech, "America and the War": "I made it because I thought Mr. Roosevelt and a lot of my other friends were getting awfully light-hearted and even irresponsible about going into battle. . . . I got mad, too, about Mr. Roosevelt's message to Congress, where he appropriated all the idealism of the world for what the Chicago Tribune calls the War Party."^[24]

In mid-1941 Hutchins wrote his friend Cyrus McCormick: "If Mr. Roosevelt had never talked about the Four Freedoms, I probably should never have said anything about the war. I can understand going to war. I can understand going to war to protect yourself; I cannot understand war as a missionary enterprise, particularly when the missionary hasn't very much of a faith and isn't very sure of what he has."

The Roosevelt rhetoric simply was (as Hutchins so often said when friends suggested a phrase or an anecdote for his speeches) too rich for his blood. It wasn't reasonable. It wasn't rational. The rational animal had no choice but to reject it and attack it—rationally.

And attack it he did. Mr. Roosevelt had told the country that the war was being fought for "a world founded on freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear." America had been called upon to support the moral order and "the supremacy of human rights everywhere." Did we (Hutchins wanted to know) have freedom of speech and worship here? "We have freedom to say what everybody else is saying and freedom of worship if we do not take our religion too seriously. But teachers who do not conform to the established canons of social thought lose their jobs. People who are called 'radicals' have mysterious difficulties in renting halls. Labor organizers sometimes get beaten up and ridden out of town on a rail." What were we to say of freedom from want and freedom from fear? "Think of these things and then think of the share-croppers, the Okies, the Negroes, the slumdwellers, downtrodden and oppressed for gain. . . . They hardly know they are living in a moral order or in a democracy where justice and human rights are supreme. . . .

"As for democracy, we know that millions of men and women are disenfranchised in this country because of their race, color, or condition of economic servitude. . . . The aims of a democratic community are moral. United by devotion to law, equality, and justice, the democratic community works together for the happiness of all its citizens. I leave to you the cision whether we have yet achieved a democratic community in the United States."

The country had made "some notable advances in the long march toward justice, freedom, and democracy" and was far ahead of most of the world. "But we Americans have only the faintest glimmering of what war is like. This war, if we enter it, will make the last one look like a stroll in

the park. . . . For a generation, perhaps for a hundred years, we shall not be able to struggle back to where we were. In fact the changes that total war will bring may mean that we shall never be able to struggle back. Education will cease. Its place will be taken by vocational and military training. The effort to establish a democratic community will stop. We shall think no more of justice, the moral order, and the supremacy of human rights. We shall have hope no longer."^[25]

So the sable litany proceeded, laced freely with unanswerable facts and extravagant predictions. "If the United States is to proceed through total war to total victory over totalitarian states, it will have to become totalitarian, too." "If we enter this war, we shall lose what we have of the four freedoms."

His tactics were scary, but they weren't scare tactics. The hyperbole everywhere rose measurably after Congress on March 8, 1941, passed the crucial Lend-Lease Act, Resolution 1776 by Senate and House majorities of 60-31 and 317-71 respectively, and the country was committed to all-out aid—with no more "short of war" provisos—while the Gallup poll showed 83 percent of the American people against entering the war, a higher percentage than a year earlier. (On the other hand, a majority said they favored aiding Britain at the risk of war.)

Hutchins, too, wanted to "aid Britain, and stay out of the war" (and never did confront the implicit contradiction in those two policies). He, too, wanted the country to defend itself, to "bend every energy to the construction of an adequate navy and air force and the training of an adequate army . . . adequate for defense against any power or combination of powers"^[26] (and never did confront the implicit contradiction of that surrender to the policy of the armed-to-the-teeth garrison state and the simultaneous pursuit of the four freedoms at home to achieve "total victory over poverty, disease, ignorance, and injustice"—and at the same time "make this country a refuge for those who will not live without liberty").

This was America's destiny, to show the world "a nation which understands, values, and practices the four freedoms." This was America's destiny, to create a civilization "in which people will not suffer so much that they will trade their liberties for the pitiful security which the tyrant offers. The war to create this civilization is our war. We must take advantage of every day we have left to build a democracy which will command the faith of our people, and, which, by the light of our example, will restore the democratic faith to the people of the world. America has been called the arsenal of democracy. It has been called the larder of democracy. Let us make it the home of democracy."^[27]

He was an uncommon scold calling upon his countrymen to bend their every energy to pursue the rapidly receding objectives of the New Deal. He was pleading with them not to run away from their destiny because it was a hard one. The country had not begun to solve its problems, and he somehow seemed to suggest his hopelessness that—war or no war—it would. A strong pessimistic strain ran through his exhortatory discourse.

He had been pessimistic at Yale in 1921. He would be as much of a pessimist forty years later when as the speaker at a dinner in honor of Justice Hugo L. Black in 1961 he said, "Only if we can tear ourselves loose from our prejudices, from our ideology, from slogans, only if we can take a fresh look at the world and exercise the same kind of intelligence, character, and inventiveness that the Founding Fathers showed can we hope to revive, reconstruct, and preserve the political community."^[28]

In the decades between those two occasions he had not become any sunnier. In the decades between those two occasions he had often quoted William the Silent—or Charles the Bold, he could never remember which—as having said, "It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere."

The emotionalism from which Hutchins recoiled was sweeping everything before it. In his post-Lend-Lease address in March—delivered as a university chapel sermon but broadcast nationwide—he used the title, "The Proposition Is Peace," borrowing the expression from Edmund Burke's address against war with the American colonies: "Judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its reason to recommend it. . . . The proposition is peace." And so Hutchins reasoned in a time of mounting frenzy, throwing himself against most of his fellow academics, his fellow humanitarians, his fellow writers and speakers. "Mr. Roosevelt tells us we are to save the 'democracies.' The democracies are, presumably, England, China, Greece, and possibly Turkey. Turkey is a dictatorship. Greece is a dictatorship. China is a dictatorship. As to England, in 1928 Mr. Anthony Eden, now Foreign Secretary, speaking in behalf of a bill extending the suffrage, felt it necessary to say to the House of Commons, 'We have not got democratic government in this country today; we never have had it and I venture to suggest to honorable Members opposite that we never shall have it.' There can be no doubt that the people of this country prefer the government of Britain to the governments of its allies or its enemies. . . . But we cannot use the word democracy to describe every country that is or may be at war with the Axis. If Russia is attacked by Germany"—as it was a few months later—"will she be welcomed into the choir of the democracies?"

The proposition had nothing but reason to recommend it, and the rational animal, addressing himself to rational animals, could not restrain his penchant for the reasoned ironic. If the British, the Chinese, and the Greeks were indeed our allies, "it is immoral for us to let them die for us while we sit safely at home. We should have been in the war from the start. We should fight now." Mr. Roosevelt had said, "We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nation-hood." Did this statement imply the restoration of prewar boundaries in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Memel, Danzig, Poland, France, China, and Rumania? Was this undertaking to be worldwide? If so, how were we to induce Russia to restore the prewar boundaries of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Poland? And what were we to do about the countries which were victims of aggression before 1939? Was everybody who stole anything before that date to keep it, and everybody who stole anything after it to give it up? What were we to do about Hong Kong, the Malay States, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, Africa, and, above all, India? Besides his commitment to national self-determination Mr. Roosevelt had made only one statement on the course the country was to pursue after the war: "There never has been, there isn't now, and there never will be any race of people fit to serve as masters over their fellow-men." If that was so, how could a postwar America tolerate "the mastery of the whites over their yellow, brown, and black fellow-men throughout the world?" "The British propose to defeat the Axis. What they propose to do then they do not say. They have repeatedly refused to say"—this with reference to India's unabating struggle for independence. "If we go to war, what are we going to war for?"^[29]

As he had listened closely to Lindbergh and found a modicum of sense in the aviator's position—and said so—so he insisted, almost alone among the antiwar speakers, in giving his gallant due, in full measure, to the isolationist's devil: "I have supported Mr. Roosevelt since he first went to the White House. I have never questioned his integrity or his good will. But under the pressure of great responsibilities, in the heat of controversy, in the international game of bluff, the President's speeches and recommendations are committing us to obligations abroad which we cannot perform. The effort to perform them will prevent the achievement of the aims for which the President stands at home. . . . With the President's desire to see freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear flourish everywhere we must all agree. Millions of Americans have supported the President because they felt that he wanted to achieve these four freedoms for America. Others"—dealing the fat cat interventionists a rational blow—"who now long to carry these blessings to the

rest of the world, were not conspicuous on the firing line when Mr. Roosevelt called them, eight years ago, to do battle for the four freedoms at home."^[30]

Rationality demanded a fair shake for the racist Lindbergh, for the bellicose Roosevelt, and for the execrable villain of the entire piece. Knowing that no rational animal could call him an admirer of Adolf Hitler, but that many an irrationalized animal would, the frigid crusader against his own country's consuming materialism recalled that the Nazi leader had written in Mein Kampf that Greece would be remembered for its philosophy, Rome for its law, medieval Europe for its cathedrals, and the modern world for its department stores. "Hitler was right"—this in a nationwide broadcast in 1941—"in holding before the German people an ideal higher than comfort. He knew he could not give them that. He offered them instead a vision of national grandeur and 'racial' supremacy. These are false gods. Since they are false, they will fail in the end. But Hitler was half right. He was right in what he condemned, and wrong in what he offered in its place . . . a new order based on slavery and degradation."^[31]

Hitler was half right . It was the wrong time and the wrong place—America in 1941, and a broadcast of the regular Sunday morning sermon in the university chapel at that. It was the wrong time and the wrong place to say that Hitler was half right or so much as an iota right. It was the rational animal's refusal to stoop to exploitation of the hatred of the Nazi leader. But the rational animal doggedly clung to his reasoning, and, as the national frenzy mounted, Hutchins of Chicago stood ever more clearly for a less and less frequently displayed evenhandedness. At the end of November 1941, Hutchins told Mayer that he was thinking of writing an article for the conservative, antiwar Saturday Evening Post entitled, "Where Hitler Is Right."

Rationality might carry a man just that far in an irrational world—and destroy him. Millions of magazine readers might, and at that point likely would, react with extreme excitement to that kind of headline and not bother to read the article, concluding that such an article, whatever its actual import, would give aid and comfort to the forces of the enemy of mankind in America and elsewhere. "Where Hitler Is Right," indeed.

The article was never written. Pearl Harbor put an end to all that and more. It put an end to the crystal-ball expertise on all sides. Everything that had been said—in the preceding two years and almost everything had been said, one way or another—was now put to the test, including Robert Maynard Hutchins' remarkably bald predictions of the consequences of the country's going to war and winning it—"the United States will have to

become totalitarian"—"the sacrifice of millions of our youth"—"we shall have hope no longer."

On balance, his blackly pessimistic, and largely unqualified, predictions turned out to be altogether wrong or overdrawn. "Suppose that by some miracle we were to defeat the totalitarian powers without becoming one ourselves, would we be prepared, even then, to write a just and durable peace? We don't know what to do with ourselves. What shall we do with the Germans, Italians, and Japanese? What shall we do with the British and the Chinese? Are we to fight them to make them see things our way? What shall we do with Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece? Are we to restore the status quo which contributed to this war and simply hope that it will work next time? Until we know what to do with ourselves we can hardly venture to set the whole world right."

He was right—but who wasn't?—in asserting almost gleefully after the Germans turned on Russia that "alliance between Great Britain and Russia makes it clear that this is a war and not a crusade. Great Britain can not expect Russian tyranny to cooperate in the establishment of the four freedoms." But none of the most abysmal horrors he foretold was consummated with the restoration of the peace—or in the next half-century. Very far from it. True, the four freedoms could not be said to have flourished anywhere in the postwar decades (except in the one limited respect, in a few societies, of increased opportunity for minorities and women). One of President Roosevelt's asserted war aims was realized (without respect to American influence): for better or for worse, national self-determination spread through Africa and southern Asia. But freedom of speech and worship were circumscribed; want continued unabated; and fear grew pandemic as the nuclear destruction of the habitable planet loomed ever larger. Still, the antiwar campaigners of 1941 would be hard put fifty years later—though the book was not yet closed—to contend that the program of the New Deal at home was dead and buried. It fell failing after the war (just as Truman's Fair Deal and Johnson's Great Society would in large measure succumb successively to Korea and Vietnam), but the America of the 1980s was not an America that could be said to "have hope no longer."

Hutchins' extravagant polemics, wildly wide of the mark as they proved to be, were no further from the eventual reality than the ecstasies of his opponents. Neither a just nor a durable peace was written. Injustice extended its sway through eastern Europe and simply changed hands in

Africa and southeast Asia as the victorious and defeated powers alike lost their empires; and five years after Mr. Truman proclaimed, in the wake of Hiroshima, that "there must never be another war," the United States was at war in Korea. Neither the isolationists nor the interventionists proved to have a monopoly on being dead wrong within a decade of their prognostications.

How could the rational animal have gone so far out on a limb? How could he have let himself descend to so irrational a level? In one sense it was characteristic of him to speak with overweening certitude. He had been doing it most of his life. But most of his life he had known what he was talking about, and a great deal more than most of his opponents, on the subject to which he addressed himself, namely, education.

But in 1941 he was making cathedratic pronouncements on the life-and-death issue of world war in which his competence was derived from his genius for quick apprehension of the unfamiliar. His public activity during those months—no other college or university president appeared anywhere nearly as prominently in the great debate—was decidedly uncharacteristic of the man who had been the most conscientious and self-confined of educational administrators and had, what was more, achieved a considerable national reputation as a pleader for the evenhanded dialogue of inquiring minds.

There may have been two good explanations, if not justifications, for his having gone to such rhetorical extremes on the war issue. First, he had taken a lonely position. Hutchins had distanced himself completely from organized support. Not only did he dissociate himself, as he said in an early address, from "all Nazis, Fascists, Communists, and appeasers"; he dissociated himself from the true-blue isolationists, "from those who want us to stay out of war to save our own skins and our own property." He was, on the contrary, a true-blue interventionist opposing war: "National selfishness should not determine national policy." He stood alone, in the antiwar position least likely to draw or hold the interest of a substantial following. It was a position that might well push a man to overstatement.

But there was, perhaps, a better explanation than that for the recklessness that so clearly contradicted the close reasoning with which he habitually confronted his opponents in academic controversy. Beneath the frigid isolationist was the passionate moralist. Behind the thinking man's facade was the true believer not in rightness but in righteousness, who saw himself fighting the eternal rearguard action against the forces of evil and the false prophets of sweet deceits like the four freedoms. The glories of war—and of the peace that would follow it—were simply too rich for his blood. He had been brought up, he once said, on the Old Testament

prophets. His favorite castigation was Jeremiah's, who said that his people were "wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge."

Neither did the eminent intellectual call his countrymen to an intellectual revolution but rather, again and again, in season and out, to a "moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution." He took occasion more than once in the great debate to crib Jacques Maritain's solemn maxim, "If we would change the face of the earth, we must first change our own hearts." Robert Maynard Hutchins called his countrymen to "build a new moral order for America . . . a new conception of security . . . a new conception of sacrifice."

It would pass, as peace would pass and war would overcome; he would be a university president again, doing what a university president does. But for a few months of his life he was a missionary, the whole world his mission.