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PARTISAN REVIEW
accept the strangers' will, their nerve failed at last; men lost then
some vital contact with the core of their being. Life became
meaningless.
America too identifies morale with the fight for personal
autonomy. Industrialists fight against the regulations of govern·
ment--even after they have admitted that they profited from them.
Labor fights to have a hand in the hiring hall and in policy. States
fight for state rights. We all of us fight against Hitler's threat of
world domination. Whether these fights are waged with words
and wire-pulling in our own country or with bombs against the
Axis, we approve of not pulling our punches. Internal conflicts
which in another nation would mean the nadir of morale are in
the United States a healthy routine matter. The hysterical calumny
opponents heap upon one another in a political campaign is a big
biannual cursing bout; in our society it is not a sign of a febrile
condition. We believe in cursing. It proves our nerve.
We Americans lose our nerve whenever we admit we are
trapped. We lose it in the mind and body of the man who tramped
the pavement in the Depression fruitlessly looking for a job until
he became at last an unemployable, reconciled to living without
hope upon relief. We lose it in the person of the farmer who sells
off his cows and quits struggling. We lose it in unhappy marriages
where the husband or the wife, o:t: both of them, decide that they
are trapped in a hated relationship. We lose it in the professions
when men feel caged by circumstance in teaching or in business
or in the law and spend their lives day-dreaming of some other
profession that was denied to them. Any improvement of morale
in America is first and foremost a program that convinces Ameri·
cans that there is still a meaning in effort, that the strength and
training and human relations they've got now, this minute, can
be put to some use. We want to be at work. We want our work
to have some meaning. Then we can put up with all kinds of
disruption of our personal lives, with bad housing, with incom·
parable monotony of the assembly line. Our bodies and our emo–
tions are employed; when they are, we feel that we belong to our
American civilization. We are strong.
Failure of nerve among American intellectuals is all of a
piece with this pattern that runs through the rest of American life.
The intellectual defeatist, too, cries out that we are trapped,
that
