The Pittsburgh Press (October 31, 1941)
Fight for what?
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Sometimes it looks as if we were arming to fight windmills.The person naive enough to believe everything he hears and reads is forced to the conclusion that we’re hellbent for fascism, whatever happens.
Interventionists charge isolationists with Nazi motives. They contend Lindbergh, Wheeler, Nye and others are working to condition the nation to fascist thought, so that, comes the revolution Hitler can take over.
But wait – don’t be too hasty! Isolationists also charge interventionists with precisely the same motives. What, they shout, will be the results of meddling in European affairs? It will all end in some form of fascism at home.
The person who reads both sides of the argument longs to cry out:
For what do we fight?
For democracy, of course, comes the reply – and it is always the same. Yet scores of our leaders who urge us to defend democracy say, almost in the same breath, that a move toward some new economic form is inevitable. Talk to businessmen, to politicians, to professors, and while they speak of democracy in reverent tones, you’ll hear the customary hedging when practical questions are put. It is an apologetic sort of attitude, as if we must not be so childish as to think that the principles for which we fight can be made to work when the fighting is over.
There are multiple examples of the same subterfuge. Im a recent article, “The World We Want To Live In,” Will Durant says we must become reconciled to a greater measure of state capitalism, with centralized government and curtailment of liberty. Even Douglas Miller, of You Can’t Do Business With Hitler fame, warns that:
…the world will become one of regulated economic life.
On every side, influential men are saying that in the United States, this New World our fathers made, we must soon accept Old World governmental patterns. If that be true, our foreign policy doesn’t make sense to an old-fashioned American citizen.