Evening star., 1943-12-27
The American TEMPER

In his Christmas eve address
President Roosevelt deplored the ex-
istence Of a tendency" among us to
assume quick ending of the war.
Just prior to that highly placed but
anonymous Government official de-
scribed 1t as something much worse
than tendency" The American
people. he said. were dangerously
complacent; they needed to be
shocked and jolted out of the feeling
that there was any easy road to vic
tory: and they should come to real
lie that within three months after
the start of the impending European
invasion. our armed forces may suf-
fer triple the number of casualties
they have suffered since Pearl
Harbor up to now.
This Is strong talk and it is un-
derstandable in view of the activities
of those self-seeking pressure groups
whose irresponsible drives for higher
wages. more profits and unrestrained
price rises give at least the surface
impression that the country is OBJ
liviouS of the war. The Nation needs
coal to fight. 1t needs steel to fight.
It needs the all-out effort of the
railroads to fight without such
goods and services, Americans on the
firing line are seriously handicapped,
and in some cases even gravely en-
dangered, for campaigns must be
held up when supplies are delayed,
and battles and lives can be lost
when essential equipment fails to
arrive on time and in sufficient
quantity. Yet we have seen strikes,
and are now hearing threats of
strikes, in the very fields upon which
our armed forces so greatly depend,
and to this extent the highly placed
but anonymous Government official
seems wholly right when he calls us
a dangerously complacent people.
Once that is said. however, it must
be added that there Is more than
little reason to doubt that COM
placency" is quite the right word to
describe the general American tenn
per. 1t is a strange temper, a baf-
fling temper, temper which seems.
in a sense. to be self-contradictory.
For with our armed forces scheduled
to total 100000 men, there is
hardly one of us-including the
millions represented by the pressure
groups-who has not some kinsman
on the battle line or headed that
way. Great numbers Of us may have
high hopes that the battles ahead
will not be too costly, we may be
confident, we may wish for the best,
but that does not mean a giddy
failure to realize how serious the
war is. Self-seeking activities on
large scale argue contrariwise, to be
sure. but deeper down, among the
millions and millions whose sons.
brothers, fathers, lovers and best
friends are in battle dress. there is
an aWareness that initiates against
complacency-an unspoken anxiety
that has come to dwell in every cor
ner of the land
How then account for the pres
sure groups? The question is one
for the psychologists. Perhaps one
reason for the contradiction is that
the American home front has never
felt the direct physical impact Of
the war. Perhaps we are suffering
from some mental astigmatism,
some blind spot, some alteration in
our thought processes hiding the
connection we should see between
what happens on the battlefelds
abroad and what happens here. But
whatever may be the explanation, it
is still a fact that vast numbers of
our people must know the serious
ness of the war since they have
given their best-loved to it, and
when the bitter test comes in 1914.
they can be counted upon to face up
tn If with fortitl1de