14
PARTISAN REVIEW
was fought" and which were partly responsible for the conditions
that fascism has since battened on. Mr. MacLeish is never in the
mood for investigations. At the slightest mention of them, he
retreats to a region of dim wonder, sanctimony, and surmise, and
takes his language with him. Moreover, critical skepticism breeds
"this distrust not only of the tags, not only of the slogans, but of
the words themselves" and so leads to the conclusion "that not only
the war and the war issues but
all
issues, all moral issues, were
false-were fraudulent-were intended to deceive.m
9
Yet it is remarkable that when
The Modern Monthly
staged
a questionnaire on the war issue in its June 1935 issue, Mr. Mac·
Leish himself
~xpressed
a skepticism concerning all wars-even
those wars against "evils worse than war"-that leaves little to be
desired:
The· whole history of wars of liberation, of violent revolu–
tions-even of the usual dishonest imperialistic war-proves that
there are conditions, real or imagined, which men find unendur–
able and to which they prefer, or can be induced to prefer, the
miseries of war. But the danger of an anti-war program built
upon that
a~ission,
historically sound though it may be, is
nevertheless obvious. For it is precisely these deepest human
emotions to which the propaganda machinery always .addresses
itself in time of war ... of
any
war. The last war against Ger–
many was fought, you will recall, to make the world safe for
democracy. The next war against Germany might very well be
fought ... to make the world safe against Nazism. Wit& war in
the offing the realistic and skeptical journal is not read: the
newspapers echo ,the common cry: the propaganda machine
whirls up the dust of its own choosing.
If
enough peoplt> believe
that a certain type of war might be justifiable then the War
Department will see that they get that kind of war-in print.
The kind of war they lwve gotten in fact they will discover for
themselves some years afterwards.
80
Having directed this preliminary douche of ice-water against the
war-hysteria which military crises hreed, Mr. MacLeish gave his
answers to the questionnaire. To its second and third
questio~s
(Will your decision [about America's part in the next war] be
altered if Soviet Russia is an ally of the United States in a war
with
I
apan?
and
Would a prospective victory by Hitler over most
of Europe move you to urge United States participation in opposi·
