Time of Peace

Ben Ames Williams

I did not read this book; I read the beginning and skimmed a few other pieces of it.  I shall proceed to talk about it’s total worth and value without regard for the whole truth.

First, some neat quotations Mr. Williams made his characters say.  Then, why I did not bother to read the 600-page book (it is exactly 600 pages).

Quotations

On laws

Mark believed that when otherwise good citizens regularly disobeyed a law, the law should be repealed.  Respect for the law was the foundation of the state; but the law must deserve respect.  If bad laws were made, then the public disobeyed them, and respect for the law was undermined.  No one respected laws as such nowadays.  Tony had observed on his first automobile ride that if you saw a policeman you must slow down.  That was true because every man who drove an automobile regularly broke some law, and it was left to the discretion of the officer to arrest or not as he chose.  You were governed by men, not by laws; and if you faced prosecution for law-breaking, your friendship with the enforcing officer or with his superiors might save you.

Automobiles and overzealous legislators had brought about the lawless mind among men.  The prohipition law aggravated it.  This world in which Tony was passing from boyhood into adolescence was one in which good citizens regularly broke bad laws.

Page 18.

Hitler’s 1930 cry that Heads Will Roll

The author quoted the following, and while I haven’t found this exact newspaper article on the internet, I have found references to such a speech that fits in date and content:

The Fascist chieftain declared passionately: ‘Whenever my party by legal means shall have seized power, there will be constituted a new German Supreme Court.  November, 1918, will then find its expiation, and heads will roll.’

(See Hitler’s rhetoric.)

Page 25.

War brings Propaganda, slavery of the mind

As a result of his talk with Crocker, Mark was persuaded that Tony’s young manhood might see war again let loose upon the world— by Hitler or some other.  That would be hideous enough; and yet was not the thing most to be feared that blind confusion of mind, that passive acceptance of lies, that sheeplike willingness to be led by the nose which had characterized the years 1914 to 1917?  The threat to Tony’s life was dark and terrible; but even worse was the threat to Tony’s capacity for clear thinking.  If a man, by choice or not, died for a couse he understood and loved, why, men had gladly died for such causes from the beginning and would again.  But Mark was unwilling that Tony should be led blindly into the chaos that might be ahead.  He determined that if it was in his power to do so, he would teach his son to see straight, to think for himself, to form an independent judgment untainted by the infection in other minds all about him.  There had been talk enough since the last war of the Allied propaganda which had bemused the American mind.  Men—men in high places—had frankly admitted that to accomplish what seemed to them good, to lead the United States into the war, they had lied.  If another war came, that machinery of lies would again be set in motion; but it seemed to Mark that there could be no slavery so depraved as the slavery of the mind, no submission so abject as that which permitted a few men to persuade millions that they thought thus and so.

Page 36.

bemuse

to cause to be bewildered

“When I was a boy, we had none of the so-called modern conveniences.  I’ve seen the first interurban traction lines come—and go—and I’ve seen the first coming of the telephone, and of running water, and of electric lights and automobiles and moving pictures and radio.  For peopel of my age or older there’s nothing new in this, but for you it may be worth remembering.  You’re probably wondering how we ever got along without them?  Well, we got along without them very well.”

“Did people drive around in carriages?”

“Or walked,” Mark assured him; and he said reflecively: “I sometimes think we were better off.  There weren’t so many things we worried about getting and keeping.  Today, advertising has made us all feel that there are certain things we can’t do without; but I tell you, Tony, there are a lot of things we can do without and never miss them.nbsp; There are so many things we never wanted till someone told us how wonderful they were.  We’re a nation of salesmen, but I sometimes think we’d be a lot happier if we never let anyone sell us anything, if we just bought things as we found we needed them.  Our manufacturers spend more of their energy persuading us that we want what they make than they do in making what we want.”

Page 45 to 46 (note: all double quotation marks here were single in the book).

Evaluation

I didn’t find it worth reading: the story did not grip me and I finally decided it had little value as history.  I realized early, and managed to accept, that it would cover the period between the wars with only brief mentions of the Great Depression.  When perhaps the third brief mention had a plantation owner (“Uncle Long”) planning to “make a crop when they all seemed to agree that he would lose money by doing so”:

“Why, sonny, I’ve got right around seven hundred darkies here on the plantation, and if I don’t make a crop they don’t eat, and they’d scatter like dead leaves on a windy day, so I’d never get them back again.  If every white man in the South quit raising cotton, there’d be millions of darkies starving, begging on the streets.  We have to do it, whether we make or lose.”

Page 41.

In no way was any comment put in by anyone that this was the same economic logic as slavery, that is, the position of blacks in the South remained much the same as during slavery, even in this ‘humane’ sense.  Since it was no longer slavery, however, I want to know how many plantation owners let their workers scatter and starve; the economics of extreme-inequality capitalism is that you let workers starve when they lack work, and so when you do have work for them they are willing to work for less than ever.

The unmitigated richest-five-percent-of-the-population point of view continued in a page I read toward the end of the book (In a letter Tony sends home from college):

It makes the crowd here pretty sore to read about the strikes all over the country.  Sik or seven million working days were lost last month by strikes, and a lot of them were defense work.  Why doesn’t President Roosevelt do something about it, Dad?  He could draft every man in essential jobs and then tell them they’ll either work–on army pay, the same as other fellows their age in the army are getting–or go to jail.  I don’t see what right a fellow has to claim exemption from the draft because he’s working in an airplane fectory, and then refuse to work.  Of course we’re not really at war, and that makes a difference; but if we were, a man that refuses duty in a factory where he’s working on some defense job ought to get it just as hard as a soldier who refuses duty.  And that ought to go for the bosses, too, from foremen up to the president of the company.  The Government gives its orders to capital, and it ought to give its orders to management and labor too.

Page 545.

He goes on to disparage “Ma Perkins” for not letting anyone “say Boo! to labor.”  I’ll admit that the last part I quoted mitigates the anti-labor edge, and so must mute my criticism; still, the money was flowing from the government to the owners of the business, workers simply wanted something closer to their fair share.  It is ironic that Tony, whom Mark wanted to fortify against war propaganda, has bought into the illogical (and falsely premised) ‘war is the only thing that matters; therefore, labor must give up everything (but capital does not).’  As it happened, when war came unions did not strike, while business owners reaped huge war-time profits.  And despite the fact that the rich would stay apoplectic throughout his stay in office, Roosevelt never gave orders to capital (‘Give me your capital’) in the same way labor was ordered to give its labor, as done in the draft if nowhere else.

I have to say there is some wonderful highminded stuff on page 588 on this being labor’s world, and how it took power in democracy (being obviously the majority, I’ve almost never seen this fact pointed out) but was crushed by dictators in Germany and Italy.  Also, while Mark professes to dislike Roosevelt, he is arguing Roosevelt’s case to a friend who hates Roosevelt, pointing out something that I didn’t know: the president was trying to prepare the public for the war in a speech as early as 1935 (‘trouble is coming’) and 1937.  So maybe I was much too dismissive.  Still, the viewpoints expressed seem to come exclusively from the top 5 percent (at most 10 percent).  With the widespread prosperity (widespread thanks to labor unions) after the war this view became representative of a much larger proportion of the population in the U.S., but as a history of the time, it must be taken as even more selective than most.

Williams, Ben Ames.  Time of Peace: September 26, 1930—December 7, 1941.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942.

This book is in the Maurice Institute Library collection.

Book read (that is, the part read at all) circa early 2002.

Review written from 2002 February 25 to 2002 May 6.