478
PARTISAN REVIEW
Socialist press; they have begun to criticise the present Administration
and to build up Willkie; and
Life
has published its famous "Open Letter
to the People of England" demanding that England make it clear she
is not fighting to preserve her Empire.
Until Willkie delivered his report on his trip, one possible explanation
for his liberal actions of the past year was that Roosevelt was grooming
him either to succeed Hull as Secretary of State or to succeed himself in
the White House in 1944. This may have been true, but Willkie's report
on his world travels, with its caustic revelations of the inadequacy of
American aid to Russia and China, its criticism of "our goveniment's
wishy·washy attitude towards the problems of India," its demand for a
Pacific Charter, its attack on the State Department's policies and repre·
sentatives, its denunciation of censorship, and its suggestion that "the
whip lash of public opinion" be applied to "men with great power" who
"like to live free of criticism," i.e., to Roosevelt-all this means that
Willkie has decided his political future lies not in cooperating with
Roosevelt but rather in opposing him
from
t~ left~in
fact, in playing
the same role vis-a-vis Roosevelt today that Roosevelt himself played
before Pearl Harbor vis-a-vis the conservative, business-as-usual isola–
tionists. As a short-range maneuver, Willkie's break was masterly: it
put Roosevelt in the comic predicament of either defending his war policies
by taking issue,
as a conservative,
with Willkie's liberalistic criticisms,
or else of failing to reply to the challenge. He chose the second alternative.
From a longer perspective, the Luce-Willkie a,dventure is extremely
hazardous. They seem to have in mind a postwar world
in
which the
old colonial imperialism will disappear, opening a free field to this
country, as the most powerfully industrialized, to exploit the world market
by relatively peaceful trading methods such as England used in the first
half of the nineteenth century. The rise of independent nations in China,
India and the Near East would stimulate the industrialization of those
regions and provide rich markets for American goods. The underlying
assumption is that there is still a future for liberal capitalism, and that
these Asiatic revolutions can be contained within bourgeois limits, so
that the rise of bourgeois national states in Europe in the last century
will be paralleled in this century by a cycle of Asiatic bourgeois national
revolutions, and with the same invigo.rating effects on the world market.
The difficulty, if not the impossibility, of this program today is
shown in the explosive nature of the materials Luce-Willkie must use to
build their new world. They understand that the first step is the breaking
o{ the British stranglehold on India, so that the native bourgeoisie behind
Gandhi can begin to develop that country's rich resources. They also
understand that Chiang Kai Chek is their man ·in China. But the masses
who follow Gandhi and the socialistic Nehru may just as easily flow in
a,
collectivist direction, once British rule is shattered, as in a bourgeois
one; and the Chinese Communists have shown at least as great a capacity
