The Pittsburgh Press (May 7, 1941)
MISS THOMPSON SPEAKS
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
The other day, Dorothy Thompson came to our town to make a speech. It was a good speech, as hers always are, although I thought it more persuasive than convincing.
Miss Thompson related the following incident:
Recently, I had a letter from a woman who wrote:
I did not bring up my son to die upon the battlefield.
With contemptuous vigor, Miss Thompson said, in these words:
I replied to that woman:
And, Madam, how do you plan for your son to die? With infantile paralysis, perhaps, or would it suit you better if he were carried off by tuberculosis or cancer? For he must die sometime, and the manner of our death is relatively unimportant.
This logic may impress many people, but I am sure it will not satisfy mothers. For Miss Thompson evades the real issue. Every woman knows that death is someday inevitable for her children, and she understands, with her mind at least, that the manner of death is of no particular consequence.
But she also knows that when her boy goes to a battlefield, his only purpose is not to die – his purpose is to kill. And no matter how clever the arguments presented to her may be, her instincts rebel, because he is asked to participate in actions which, from the cradle, she has taught him are evil. Thus both are caught in a moral dilemma wholly incompatible with other accepted codes of conduct.
Mothers know, too, and are outraged, that while society does everything in its power to eliminate other death-dealing scourges, protecting their children from infantile paralysis, tuberculosis and cancer, it has so far done very little even in placid intervals to destroy the plague of war.
As we look along the years, we see clearly that this country refused to share the responsibility for setting up international peace machinery, although many of us are eager to leap unprepared into international conflicts.
Our sons may have to die upon the battlefield. We may face an emergency which calls for the sacrifice. But make no mistake about this: The mothers of the United States will respond to their patriotic duty realizing full well that this war, like every other, was caused by the blundering of diplomats and the lust of greedy men.
Therefore they will continue to regard it as the foe of everything they believe in – decency, dignity, morality and Christianity – as a criminal waste of that which they produce – human life.