In 1858 William H. Seward minted a round, shiny phrase. He described the difference between Northern wage labor and Southern slave labor as an "irrepressible conflict." Later, Seward's friends explained that he had not meant that war was inevitable, much" less that it was desirable. Abraham Lincoln profoundly believed that war was undesirable, and hoped that it was avoidable, when he came into the Presidency and put Seward in his Cabinet. But Seward's phrase had caught on. Hotheads on both sides used it. By the time the shooting started, civil war was indeed "irrepressible."
Last week the possibility of World War III was more & more in the horrified world's public eye. That there were those who looked upon war between the democratic, capitalist U.S. and authoritarian, Communist Russia as "inevitable" was no longer news. The news was the extraordinary number of spokesmen in both countries who, admitting the profound differences between them, insisted that war was repressible.
A Suspicion? A Guess? Henry Wallace, of course, found nothing "irreconcilable in our aims and purposes. Those who so proclaim are wittingly or unwittingly looking for war, and that, in my opinion, is criminal." Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish told a radio audience: "The basis for the suspicion [toward Russia] is nothing more substantial than suspicion."
Radiorator Raymond Swing pointed out the difficulties of organizing a world with only two—or at the most three—great powers, then said: "A phrase is going the rounds that there can be no lasting cooperation between two systems so fundamentally different as the Russian system and our own. It is stated solemnly as a cosmic law. But so far it is only a guess. No intellectually honest man can say it is more. What experience we have points the other way. We got along with Imperial Russia. . . ."
The Foreign Policy Association's Vera Micheles Dean, returning from San Francisco, reflected: "The most disquieting development at the conference was the tendency to believe that a conflict between the United States and Russia is becoming inevitable. . . . There is no fundamental reason why the two countries should not find a workable basis for postwar cooperation."
Fourteen Yale faculty members wrote the New York Times that knowledge and better understanding in both nations would keep the peace. Conservative Columnist David Lawrence wrote: "Despite outer appearances . . . there are reasons for believing that the unity of the two countries . . . has not been disturbed and will not be. In the next few months [U.S.Russian relations] will tend to clarify and undergo substantial improvement."
A group of Congressmen started a campaign of frankness to improve relations with Russia. They asked Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew: "Has the United States, through some tacit understanding, or through day-to-day working relations, become . . . part of an Anglo-American front against the Soviet Union?" Grew said no, adding that there was no part of the world where U.S. and Russian interests were in basic conflict.