Those senators who devoted last July and August to defending the defenselessness of this country were motivated chiefly by the traditional American fear and hatred of centralized power. There is no blinking the fact that war, or even persuasive rumor of war, requires a concentration of power in the President which is one hundred per cent inconsistent with the democratic tradition. Yet in at least three cases we have endured an almost regal centralization of power—in the early constitutional period under Washington, and in the wars waged under Lincoln and Wilson—and in none of these cases did the temporary dictatorship in itself impair the democratic tradition. It is axiomatic, as recognized in the Constitution, that democratic nations must sometimes use undemocratic methods to protect their democracy and in the present instance, it is possible that even as we pass under highly centralized authority in some respects, yet in other respects this force can be partially offset by decentralizing tendencies. As one result of war those who have long cried out for the splitting up of cities and the physical concentration of great industrial plants are likely to see some of their hopes fulfilled. And out of the consequent decentralization of population, along with an awakening understanding of our traditions, it may be that local democracy, which is the only sound basis for national democracy, will take a new lease on life.
The most evident force for decentralization of population is military necessity under the conditions of modern aerial warfare. As the reports of the bombings of foreign cities come closer to our own fears and calculations we shall recognize increasingly that, both as industrial producers and as individuals with lives and children’s lives we value, we must decentralize or die. We read how cannily Hitler has decentralized many of his manufacturing plants over wide areas, so that a hit at any one point will leave the rest of the factory unimpaired, and now, spreading the plants over the countryside, he has put many of the buildings under bona fide hills, with the great chimneys camouflaged as trees. We read that England is doing the same thing with its airplane factories, and how widely scattered hangars concreted into the hills in twos and threes are replacing the former great air-fields. We learn that our- own government and our private manufacturers are planning to apply these lessons of the belligerents. Additions to existing plants are to be placed miles, perhaps states, away from the parent factories. New munitions plants are to be scattered over the countryside, far not only from the coasts but from cities as well. Even without the war menace, hundreds of manufacturing plants have of recent years been waking up to the wastefulness, in most industries, of huge, centralized factories. Combine these with the new munition plants now called for, and the thousands of other new plants manufacturing necessities of war that are not technically munitions, and you will get millions of people who, by the bare requirement of their employment, will be led out of the anonymity of cities into smaller communities where the individual is the unit of democratic, social existence, and life occurs in responsible, personal terms.
Perhaps even greater than the industrial exodus from cities will be the personal exodus, in quest of comparative safety for oneself and one’s family. Not only has London become a childless city, but hundreds of thousands of grown-up people have slipped out to refuges in the countryside that “won’t be worth a bomb”. This sense of panic under the threat from the air is already perceptible on this side of the water. Unestimated thousands of city men are looking for work in the country or in small towns. As the threat to us increases, the “flight from the city” will increase in proportion. Irrespective of rustic sentimentality, millions of city people are going to learn that the earth after all is composed of hills, soil, lakes, rivers and air, not buildings, pavements, squares, subways and carbon monoxide. Many, learning these things for the first time, are going to prefer their new environment to the old one. Not all of the evacuated English children will return to London or their other cities. In proportion to the acuteness and duration of our own emergency, many of our own urban emigres will settle for good in old rural communities, or will organize new ones of their own. Having first left the city in search of jobs or to save their skins, they will learn that in the long run the countryside is the natural habitat of man.
Beside the military force for decentralization, there is a powerful economic force working in the same direction. In view of the business dislocation that some men believe we must suffer one of these years, irrespective of the immediate outcome of the military war, the vital virtues of the beet and the carrot are being grasped anew by millions of minds. The old family cow is reassuming a sacredness she has not enjoyed since the days of the Pharaohs. Those with any possible means of realizing such a dream are turning their thoughts from the city to the country and a little plot of land. In view of the possibility of the permanent loss of world markets and the necessity of readjusting to a wholly internal economy, here, in addition to the voice of physical safety from bombing, is another voice, the old American voice of subsistence and self-sufficiency, whispering to all of us, “Decentralize or die.”
Beside the military and economic forces, there is abroad an increasing social or spiritual force, indirectly associated with the threat of war, which is turning men’s eyes back to the small town and the land. We are coming once more into times that try men’s souls, and for the first time in twenty years most men and women are pausing to think, and are awakening to demand something of life other than material aggrandizement. There is of course such a thing as the congenital and incorrigible city mouse and when he sits up and considers his soul he knows that above all things he must have noise in his ears, dust in his fur, and carbon monoxide in his lungs. But most native Americans, and plenty of immigrants, are at heart country mice who came to the metropolis from the land or from small towns. They are in the city, not to live, but to get something—money, power. When it comes to applying that money or power, or just to live, with or without the money or power, most of them are susceptible to a nostalgia involving the blue sky and the old small town society. And these are times when we are all listening to our basic nostalgias, our most deep-rooted hungers. When the scramble and the shouting is over, we are wondering if the place where we can really live, in terms of values we instinctively believe in, is not back on the old front porch, or even up in the cow-shed at chore time. Tonight millions of women are turning on their radios to escape boredom, and more than half of those millions know in their hearts that they would better escape boredom back home in Wallapoosa sewing for the Red Cross or baking for the church social. Tonight millions of men are writhing in worry between the upper millstone of their employing corporation and the lower millstone of their union, and more than half of those men know in their hearts that they would be better satisfied back in their home towns, enjoying a small but assured subsistence, sitting this evening in the corner store arguing about the roads, or the School Board, or the new slate of town officers for fall election.
Whatever may have happened to Mr. Willkie by the time this is published, there is no doubt that he struck a dominant chord in the hearts of millions of Americans when he said that the foundations of our life and political institutions still lay in our villages and farms. If the hour glass of population flow is ready to turn, it is likely that the turn will come in these days of war tension. In spiritual as well as material terms, it will seem to many of us that we must decentralize or die.
To that leaven of thoughtful Americans who still understand the basis and meaning of democracy, there will occur another reason for decentralization which is the most profound and ultimately the most potent of all. For three or four centuries the democratic idea has been rising slowly in the Occident against the old monarchical one. The struggle which even yet is only beginning in Europe, and is bound to reach us in ideational and economic, if not in military terms, represents the greatest monarchical reaction against the democratic trend since the suppression of the European revolutions of 1848. The question now squarely before us is whether we are not going to suffer, within the next decade or two, a prolonged reaction against democratic government. North America holds the strongest defenses against such a historical tragedy. If, in spite of the powerful urban, financial, industrial, and recently political centralization of the last two generations, we still have a dominant devotion to the democratic idea, and the moral strength to die for that devotion if need be, the reaction can be confined to Europe, and may even be defeated there.
Americans who stop to consider these things must recognize two elements which are basic in our democratic tradition and without which it probably never would have dominated the country. One is the democracy of the small community, the only democracy that can be counted on to work under all circumstances, for the numbers involved are small enough so that every voter actually knows the candidate he is supporting. The other basic element is the secure ownership by most families or communities of enough of the means of production to provide themselves with a basic subsistence in time of need. Before the Civil War this ownership was in terms of the farms which most families then owned and where everybody could be at least well fed. That basic ownership no longer exists for the majority of the people, and in its original terms will never exist again. But there is no reason why it can not exist in new terms under which science will make a little land produce what big farms did before, and modern gadgets with cheap electric power will take the place of the family of tall sons and industrious women-folk in the old homestead. If the basic idea of subsistence can be implanted anew in family, or even in community terms, we need have no fear for our institutions. The man who is part of a small unit, able to support itself with moderate industry, is at the roots of democracy. On the foundation of his economic independence he will be politically independent, and responsibly independent. The city man and the employee of the corporation, on the other hand, can not be really independent. Both are subject to centralized control from some remote authority in whose decisions they have little or no voice. Unconsciously, the half of our population which is now long
accustomed to such remote control is a force for Hitler. Already these people are accustomed to live in dependence on some centralized power, whether of politics, industry, or labor, which is more or less in control of the sources of their bread and butter. If most of these people can not be restored to economic independence, they will not long value a more or less empty political independence. If one boss does not provide for them as they think they should be provided for, they will simply seek another boss. It will not occur to them that they might take care of themselves. And even if it does occur to them, they will not be able to find the means to do so under present circumstances.
As we come more and more to understand the significance of the titanic struggle now beginning in Europe, we shall examine more closely the meaning of that democracy we propose to defend. Increasingly we shall come to appreciate that if it is to repulse the onslaught of the coming years it must be restored to its economic basis in largely self-sufficient individuals, families and communities. It is only from these, its traditional entrenchments, that it will be able to survive the struggle of the next few decades, the struggle whose military features will be only the expression of the deeper, ideational and economic conflict. Increasingly we shall look back to the land and the village, not only personally for ourselves, but philosophically for the nation. In spite of the high centralization necessary for military defense, we shall look more and more toward a decentralized America after the military emergency is over. Even while we submit physically to military centralization, we shall become more and more decentralized ideationally, more and more eager to restore the necessary economic basis of the political democracy we are defending. The forthcoming distribution of much of the city population over the countryside will be the first step in that restoration. After the immediate crisis is over, the means of making the decentralization permanent and universal will provide the domestic issues for the political campaigns of the next generation or two. Today, about half of our people have abandoned real democracy in favor of the pursuit of urban wealth. But not all of these people have forgotten the independence of their fathers. In these days they will remember it with increasing zeal. And they can have it again if they will fight for it now, and vote for it consistently tomorrow.
In pointing out these present forces for decentralization I am not pretending that, added together, they represent a force equal to the immediate necessity of military centralization of power. But in accepting this unwelcome necessity, we shall come to appreciate and value our traditions and form of government more profoundly than we would have done, had we not been called on to defend them with our lives. Even while we submit our bodies and our fortunes to regimentation, we shall become increasingly aware that we are submitting in order to guarantee to ourselves a greater freedom, a greater individual self-sufficiency, in the victorious future. And when the victory is won, and tyranny has once more withdrawn from our horizons, we shall require our politicians to set up the means for restoring that freedom and self-sufficiency, against the power of both centralized industry and centralized government. If we do not submit at once to military centralization, tyrannical reaction will conquer the world, including America. But in submitting we must understand that we are fighting for the principles of decentralization. Else we shall be beaten even in victory, and all our efforts will be in vain.