T.HE PEOPLE'S CENTURY
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Hitlerism can again be planted and allowed to grow," said Presi–
dent Roosevelt on May 27, 1941. But this is precisely the kind of
post-war world that seems to be materializing.
1.
In stirring phrases, Wallace pictures the war as "a fight be–
tween a free world and a slave world," the latest (and, by implica–
tion, the final) milestone on "the millenia! and revolutionary march
of the common man towards freedom," whose previous milestones
include the Great French Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revo–
lution. "The people are on the march toward even fuller freedom
than the most fortunate peoples of the world have hitherto enjoyed.
No Nazi counter-revolutionist will stop it. ... The people's revolu–
tion is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot pre–
vail against it. They cannot prevail, for on the side of the people
is the Lord."
This encouraging view of the future is possible to Wallace
because his is a Victorian optimism of progress, based on a belief
in the automatic beneficence of industrialization plus popular edu–
cation. (It is analagous to the faith of some contemporary fol–
lowers of Marx in collectivised property as a guarantor of social
progress.) "Down the years," Wallace writes, "the people of the
United States have moved steadily forward in the practice of
democracy. Through universal education, they can now read and
write and form opinions of their own.... Everywhere, reading
and writing are accompanied by industrial progress, and indus–
trial progress sooner or later brings a strong labor movement."
That universal literacy, with all media of communication in
the hands of the dominant class, has become a means of
preventing
people from having "opinions of their own"-this is no clearer to
Wallace today than it was to Herbert Spencer in the last century.
Nor is there any place in his cosmology for the two great historical
developments of our time: the degeneration of the Russian Revolu–
tion and the rise of Nazism. For the industrialization of Russia
and the education of its masses have been accompanied by a
con–
traction
of the area of political freedom, and Hitler came to power
in the most industrialized and best-educated country in Europe
(also with the strongest labor movement). Wallace avoids these
objections by asserting that "in the process" of abolishing illiteracy
"Russia's appreciation of freedom was tremendously increased,"
