The Image of Victory
VOLUME 170
NUMBER 1
JULY, 1942
85th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION
by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
THIS war presents a curious paradox: a curious division of minds precisely at the point at which the minds of men engaged in war are commonly united. Men engaged in war are commonly agreed on one thing at least, — the victory they mean to win. We are not altogether agreed on that point. We are determined that we shall win a victory. But what victory we do not altogether know. We have the will to victory. But the idea of victory, the conception of victory, eludes us.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not discussing the morale of the American people. The morale of the American people — whatever that ambiguous and patronizing word may mean — is excellent. If I have any knowledge of American opinion — and I think I have access to such knowledge as there is — the American people are consid-
The poet, says Plato, must assume the responsibility of the political man, and more than ever in time of war. This truth we see personified by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, one of our foremost poets and now Librarian of Congress. Chicago born and bred, a graduate of Yale and of the Harvard Law School, Mr. MacLeish turned aside from his legal career to write his poetry in the seclusion of Conway, Massachusetts. As one of the directors in the Office of War Information, his utterance has a strength and a vision, the direct culmination of his experience. This paper was presented as the Stearns Lecture at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
erably sounder in their opinions than most of those who worry about American opinion seem to think. They have resisted, over the past eighteen months, the efforts of powerful sections of the press to fool them with defeatist and divisionist propaganda of the noisiest and most expensive kind, and they can be trusted, I believe, to go on resisting defeatist and divisionist propaganda for a long time to come.
Neither, when I speak of a disagreement about the nature of American victory, the victory of the United Nations, do I have in mind the special cases, the sick souls, the defeated men. There is an insignificant minority of Americans, as there was also a minority of Frenchmen and Norwegians and Yugoslavs and Danes, who do not want an American victory — who fear the victory of a democratic people, in the long democratic revolution of which Henry Wallace has so movingly spoken, more than they fear a democratic defeat. We know what they are and why. In the mirror of France we know them very well. Their name is Laval and Doriot and Darlan. They need neither our consideration nor our very great concern: only our watchfulness and sharpened scorn.
What I am considering here is something much more important, both for now ami for the years after. What I have in mind is the honest apprehension, the loyal doubt, the understandable anxiety of those who are determined we shall win this war; who are willing, if need be, to die to help their people win it; but who are nevertheless unable to understand clearly, or to imagine precisely, what our victory in this war will be. Specifically, what I have in mind is the understandable confusion of a generation of young men who were brought up to believe that the last war, though won, was lost, and that the war in which we are now engaged is nothing but the last war fought again; who therefore and most reasonably ask each other and ask us what victory this war can truly win — what victory other than the negative, defensive victory we won before, or won and lost before, or only lost.
Copyright 1942, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.
2
Those who ask this question understand very well what defeat in this war would mean. Indeed it would be impossible for them not to understand. The evidence is before them everywhere they look — in the starvation and misery and death of Poland, in the death and starvation and slavery of Greece, in the French prisons at the first light when the volley rattles and the hostages chosen by lot, picked out of their cells by lot, and by lot lined up in the half-light, and by lot shot down, are murdered. What they do not understand is victory. Victory as the mere absence of defeat is something they do not wish to think about. They know that kind of victory and how it tastes. But victory as victory — victory as an affirmative thingthey cannot easily imagine. Victory as an affirmative thing means something won. A disarmed enemy is not something won: a disarmed enemy is merely something prevented. And so too of a world order to assure peace in the future: a world order to assure peace is also something prevented — in the future. These things are desirable. They are valuable. We should have secured them twenty years ago. But are they victory? Are they the sum and substance of the victory we mean to win?
It is an understandable question, and those who ask it have every reason to ask. They will not be answered by words which tell them that Nazism and all its works are evil. They know Nazism and all its works are evil and they mean to destroy both it and them. Neither will they be answered by talk about our cause — talk which says our cause is freedom and freedom is a cause worth fighting for in any country. They know very well that freedom is our cause. They know that freedom was never more clearly the cause of any people than it is ours: that despotism and tyranny were never more cynically avowed by any enemy than by the enemy which threatens us. They believe also that freedom is worth fighting for. They mean to fight for it. They mean to win also. But nevertheless they are not satisfied.
And they are right not to be satisfied.
They have proposed to themselves an end and they mean to attain that end, but they cannot conceive it. They feel themselves moving at an uncontrollable speed and by their own will, their own effort, toward an end, a goal, they cannot in any way imagine. They intend to gain a victory — but what victory? What will it mean to them? What will it mean to any man? The misery, the economic dislocation, the inane prosperity followed by the meaningless hunger of the victory we won before? Or something else? And, if so, what else? Land? Islands? They cannot imagine the usefulness of land or islands. Empire? It is difficult to talk these days of empires. They think of victory in the future: they think of empires in the past. They have no patience with those who talk of empires or of islands now. They wish to know how they are to imagine their victory in terms they can believe in and understand.
It is this that people mean when they ask their leaders to tell them what we are fighting for. They do not mean that they wish to be told why we are fighting. They know very well why we are fighting. They always knew the why of this fighting even when the appeasers and the isolationists and the opportunists and the plain moral cowards were telling them they need never fight — that the fighting was no concern of theirs. Neither do they mean that they wish to be told what we are fighting against. They have had no doubt what we were lighting against from the first shot of the first gun in Poland. Some of them knew before that, in Spain and in other countries. What they mean is precisely what they say: they wish to know what we are fighting for — what we propose to bring to pass by our fighting. Now that we are engaged in this war; now that we are engaged against enemies we know and for reasons we understand; now that we are engaged in this war and intend to fight this war — what do we propose to win from it and by it?
3
It is an understandable question but it is, nevertheless, a curious question — a question which reflects the doubtful and still confusing experiences of the last twenty-five years and particularly of the years which followed the last war. Even the young men who ask this question most, and who most have right to ask it, speak out of the confusion and bewilderment of that experience. They have the sense of change in their bones and in their blood, but they have in their heads the shadows and the disappointments of their fathers’ years. They trust themselves but not their time, and therefore they question their time. They are right, I think, to question it. But I doubt that the answer they are looking for is as far off as they sometimes think.
Certainly it is not as far off as the answers they are sometimes given would lead them to believe. And for this reason: that the answers they are given are, for the most part, answers not as to the meaning of their victory but as to the structure of the world their victory will make possible. The answers, in other words, are answers about that far-off unreal country called the “post-war world” — the world the economists and the statesmen and the technicians will construct out of the rubble of the pre-war world when the victory is won. But it is not this, I think, the young men wish to know. They are not concerned, most of them, — they are not concerned yet, — with the economy or the international organization of the world which will follow their victory. They wish to know — certainly they wish to know - whether they will return to tramp the streets for jobs as their fathers did. They wish to know whether they will have to fight their war a second time in their forties and their fifties as their fathers, they believe, are now obliged to fight a second time the war they won. But before they come to those things — before they come to the economic order or the international controls — they wish to understand what their victory itself will be. They wish to see the shape of their victory as the Greeks, who made shapes of victory out of stone, once saw it. They wish to believe in their victory as itself a creative and accomplishing thing.
I do not think it is impossible for them to see this or believe in it. On the contrary, it would seem to me that the answer they require is already in their mouths. If they will trust themselves, if they will trust their own sense of the changing time, if they will look ahead and not back, they will give themselves their answer. For if anything about this war is certain, it is this: that those who win this war will win the future of the world.
They wall win it not in some metaphorical or poetic sense, but in the most precise and practical meaning of the term. They will win the future of the world to such an extent that they will be able to change not its governments only, but its geography, its actual shape and meaning in men’s minds. And they will win it not for now, not for a generation, but, if they have the courage and the will, for all the future men can now foresee. Whatever the Nazis may say about Lebensraum, whatever their Far Eastern accomplices may say about Greater-Asia Coprosperity Spheres, whatever our own imperialists may say about a new imperium, it is not for continents or islands or for seas between them that this war is fought. This war is fought on the one side to dominate, on the Other side to liberate, an age — a new age, an age which every man who lets his eyes look forward can now see.
The sense of the new age, the new world, has troubled men for generations. They have had the sense of the future in them a long time, Change after change in the machinery of their lives has thrown their minds forward. For the most part they have been deceived. The changes have proved, for the most part, to be changes on the surface only; changes of convenience or of habit; water out of a tap instead of water out of a well; power out of a steam kettle instead of power out of a mule; light from a wire instead of light from wax. But the sense of the future has haunted them nevertheless. And now the sense of the future has come true. They see before them — those who have eyes to see — a world so different, different in so clear a sense, that they have no choice but to accept its difference.
4
Most of us thought of the airplane in the years between the wars as a new gadget, — an automobile which flew. We had been confused by a long list of inventions, each more spectacular than the last, of which the airplane was the latest. Even when this war began, we did not understand its meaning. We told each other that after the war there would be thousands of planes as there were millions of cars after the last war, and everyone would have his own. The plane was simply another gadget in a gadget universe, a new convenience. We do not think that now. We know now that the plane is capable of altering the geography of our world — and therefore the history of our world. We know that the world which the airplane dominates will be a different world from the world which went before. We see before us, in other words, - or we can see it if we look, — an age new in its essential possibilities and therefore a new age.
The ages of human history are not created by mechanical inventiveness, but there have been, in the history of our race, mechanical inventions which have changed the possibilities, and thus the minds, and thus, for better or for worse, the men. Landlocked men thought of the earth as a huge island surrounded by an unknown, undiscoverable sea. Seafaring men, as they extended their laborious mastery of the water, attempted to think of the earth as a globe but succeeded only in imagining it as a belt of traversable water and inhabitable land fenced off between the two inpenetrable polar caps of ice and fog and cold — a globe in theory, but in fact a globe-encircling river with temperate or tropic shores. That the mastery of the air will fix a different image in men’s minds, — an image which will father a new age, — no one who knows the meaning of that mastery can doubt — no one who knows what voyages men and planes have made already in this war: the long flights of the ferrying command, the bombing thrusts at unbelievable objectives, the regular runs from continent to continent.
Indeed the image is already forming. To men of my generation, born in a seafaring world, the port of Murmansk lies east across the Atlantic and on east around the Scandinavian peninsula, thousands of sea miles. But Murmansk, to the flyers, is a bare eleven hundred miles north across the polar ice cap from Greenland. To us Greenland is farther east than New York City and therefore farther than New York from Tokyo. To the airmen, New York to Tokyo is seven thousand miles; Greenland to Tokyo around the pole five thousand. To us the straight line from La Guardia Field to Foynes in Ireland is north of east, straight out across the Atlantic. To them the shortest line, but not the straightest, — for no distances along the globe are straight,—curves north along the edge of Newfoundland, along the curv ing of the earth, and on around.
No one can doubt that the world which mastery of the air creates will be a different world. But the nature of that world — its human character — is still uncertain. And it is that nature which the outcome of this war will fix. One or the other, the Nazi image of the airmen’s earth or ours, will be imposed upon the world that follows. We know them both: the Nazi image because the Nazis have spelled it out for us a hundred times; our own because already we begin to see its outlines. We can guess even now what the image of the airmen’s earth will be if free men make it. If those who have the mastery of the air are free men and imagine for themselves as free men what their world could be, their world will be the full completed globe — the final image men have moved toward for so long and never reached.
5
Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive the world as one: a single sphere, a globe having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airmen’s earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory. Already, under the compulsions of the war, a generation of young men has come to think in terms of globes. It is with strings on globes, not rulers on navigating charts, that the officers of the ferrying command plot out their distances, and it is always with the curving of the earth in mind that the young pilots of the bombing commands imagine to themselves their flights. The obstacles which limited the earth to men in ships are not obstacles to men in planes. Cold to the airmen is no barrier: they find it everywhere and occupy it in all climates. Ice to the airmen is no wall: they cross it easily as land or water. Distance is no hindrance. The limited voyages of even the greatest ships were voyages across a seeming-level sea. The great flights of the bomber planes and the ferry planes of this war are flights around the earth, not across it. The famous clipper which was caught by the war in Australian waters and made its way west to New York: the two ships which flew into Moscow with the Hopkins mission and returned, one east and one west, to meet on an American airfield — the men who flew these ships were men who had the sense of the roundness of the earth as no men could have had it before the air was mastered.
If we win this war — if we and the free peoples united with us win this war — the image of the age which now is opening will be this image of a global earth, a completed sphere. But if the Nazis win, the image will be very different. The air-earth as the Nazis see it is not the earth swept forward to the final and completed sphere, but the earth thrown backward to the ancient landlocked island of the centuries before the seas were opened. The official Nazi architects of this official Nazi air-earth are the Nazi geopoliticians— the professors and the generals of the Haushofer school of generals and geographers. To the Nazi geopoliticians, the true picture of the world is not the picture of a globe, but of a “world island" with a “heart land” at its center. The “heart land” is Germany. The “world island” is the vast land-linked mass of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Around this island are the seven seas. And anchored off the island shores in tributary dependence to the iron Main are all the other continents and islands of the earth — the Americas, Australia, Greenland, all the rest. From the Nazi “heart land,” air power will dominate the “world island.” From the shores of the “world island,” air power will dominate the seas — as air power dominated the seas off Malaya and the Pacific archipelagos. Across the seas the threat of air power will hold the tributary continents and islands in subjection. It is not, I assure you, a dream. It is a geography. It is a geography which has worked in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Southwest Pacific and which the Nazis mean shall work for the whole earth.
If the Nazis win, in other words, the new age of air power will be the old landlocked age of mythological men, and the image of the airmen’s earth will be the image of the central island and the encircling sea. It is curious to recall, in this context, that there was some talk and more writing a year or two ago about the Nazi New Order as an order new not in name only but in truth - an order so new, so revolutionary, that, it had the future in it like a wave. It is curious to remember that some who loved the air and knew the air accepted for themselves and even taught this theory. For surely, whatever else the Nazi New Order may be, — and there are millions of living and halfliving and no longer living Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Poles, Norwegians who could tell us what it is, — whatever else the Nazi New Order may be, it is not the new order of the airmen’s age. It is indeed the precise oopposite of that order: the denial and suppression and destruction of that order — a denial and suppression so complete and so brutal that a man might wonder whether the Nazis had not fought this war precisely for that purpose, precisely to use the mastery of the air as an instrument to abort the promise of that mastery; promise that to them was threat.
6
It is against this Nazi New Order of death, and new revelation of old ignorance, that this war is fought. But not against them only. Those who think it is — those who think of this war as a negative, defensive war; those who question what our victory in this war can be — have not considered very carefully the nature of the time we live in: the opening, eventful nature of this time. They have not considered that there lies ahead of us, by every certainty, an opening age, and that that age belongs by right of its own logic to the free - to us and to all free men. They have not realized that in preventing our enemies from conquering that age and distorting that age we must conquer it ourselves; that in driving out and forever forbidding those who would have seized the future, we will seize it; that in destroying by force of arms the suppressive and tyrannical image the Nazis would have stamped upon it, we must inevitably stamp an image of our own. So far indeed is it from being true that the nature of our victory is difficult to name, that no man who considers what the struggle truly is can fail to name it. We who win this war will win the right and power to impose upon the opening age the free man’s image of the earth we live in. We who win this war will win the future. The future which will follow from this war belongs to us.
Neither mastery of the air nor power in the air nor the airmen’s global image of the earth can make, alone, the world we hope to live in. There are no panaceas and no cures, and the future of any people is a continuation of its past - a hope shackled by history. Nevertheless we know, all of us, the power of images in our lives and in the lives of nations. We know that those who think their world a free place of free movement, of free commerce both in men and words, are already free men, whatever limitations are put upon their freedom by brutality or force. We know also that those who do not think of their world in this way, who accept another image of their world, are slaves however they hold themselves, or however they move in apparent freedom from one place to another. We know therefore what it means to win this war.
For hundreds of years, thousands of years, the sea was the great symbol of freedom, and men struggled in many wars over many centuries to keep it so. To be free was to go on the sea waters. There was no man, said the ancient Saxon poet, but “longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.” It was the same with the Greeks and with all ancient peoples. The sea was freedom. The sea was the great symbol of freedom. Men, once they had built ships and learned the winds, would fare forth on the water. They would go and come freely; trade back and forth; exchange cloth and grain and iron; exchange words; exchange beliefs; discover new continents. For two thousand, three thousand years it was the opening endless sea which men followed for their freedom.
Now there is a new element upon which men can fare forth. Men have mastered the air. And the question now — the question, whether we so intend or not, on which this terrible war is fought — is whether the air will be a new symbol and a new practice of an even greater freedom, or whether it will not; whether the air will be to the sea what the sea was to the locked land, or whether it will not; whether the air will be an instrument of freedom such as men have never dared to dream of or an instrument of slavery such as men had never thought to feel — an instrument of slavery by which a single nation can enslave the earth and hold the earth in slavery without the hope or possibility of rebellion and revolt.
To win this war for freedom is not to win a doubtful victory. To win this war for freedom is to win the greatest triumph any nation, any people, ever won.