To America's Conscience: Sirs:
Enclosed please find a letter I received from my son stationed somewhere overseas. . . . This letter already has proved its worth in the plant where I am employed. After the employes of our plant read this letter, the sale of bonds went over the 90% mark and we were awarded the Treasury's flag.
M. MERSON Allentown, Pa.
Dear Dad:
What is going on there? Yesterday, my July 13 issue of TIME arrived. Today, as I read it, it makes me sick and bitter, and fills my mind with unanswerable questions. The drive for scrap rubber is a "disappointing failure"; the sale of war bonds is $200,000,000 per month below Government expectations; aggressive war must wait until after the November elections; steel laborers seek a dollar-a-day increase in wages.
What kind of a game is this that is being played in those United States? Is that our invincible, our proud country ? While all over the world men are being shot to pieces, other men—the steel, the aluminum, the textile, the rubber workers—are quibbling about dollars, and Washington is still activated by politicians.
Where is that common sense of which we Americans were once so proud? So they want a raise because the cost of living has risen; but isn't it evident to even the most selfish that any increase in consumer purchasing power must necessarily add still more to that cost of living? Or maybe the true fact underlying this "greatest" war effort is the very simple fact that everyone is out to get whatever he can from this unprecedented opportunity. With the aspects of inflation clearly in view, our selfish, bigoted "patriots" are willing to risk chaos and defeat—yes, defeat —because they won't believe there is a war in progress that might engulf them; they argue over something that in reality does not exist.
But those smug, complacent people are playing with human lives! The trickle of beautiful planes comes over and we look up and say to each other: "Just think of what a thousand, five thousand of them could do." You don't feel that; we do. The seamen whose ships have been blown from under them talk of the useless waste because helpless boats are not convoyed. You haven't spoken to such men, I have. The stunned, half-dead sailors adrift for weeks on a raft—you haven't seen them, I have. And "little steel" asks for an increase in wages.
Where is the conscience of America? Must another generation of young men suffer the same disillusionment as the previous generation did? Having been born in 1916, the last war is real to me only in what I have read and heard, and in what you have told me. ...
And all the while, the young gallant sailors and marines and soldiers are dying in the Pacific, and in Ireland the boys wait with the realization that they may be next. And we in the outposts who feel guilty because we are so far from the actual fighting, we sit and rot in stinking, malarial jungles and have time to think—and my mind becomes corroded with what I read. Those boys who are about to die, those who may be maimed, those who may live a lingering death with tropical disease, they ask so little. They will fight for you if you but give them the weapons. They will die so that you may have pretty homes and happy families, but don't let them lose faith.