Morale

AGAINST THIS TORRENT -- Edward Mead Earle-- Princeton ($ I).

THE AMERICAN CENTURY--Henry R.Luce--Farrar & Rinehart ($1).

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all." Last week the big debate went on, but these two small books cut through the stale, stalled arguments of isolation v. intervention to the real problem--the problem of U.S. power and morale. Hitler wrote that, for Nazis, morale comes before guns. Those who had watched the moral catastrophe of France knew that for democracies too morale is crucial.

Both these books are strong medicine for current U.S. hot & cold chills of fatalism, complacency, despondency, uncertainty, overconfidence. Economist-Historian Earle, in a brief outline of U.S. foreign policy, helps bring fuzzy notions of British-American relations into proper focus with the aid of a few forgotten historical facts. Publisher Luce asks Americans to live up to their responsibilities as citizens of the world's No. 1 power.

One of Author Earle's targets is the deadening and widely peddled notion that the U.S. was somehow swindled into fighting Britain's war for her in 1917 and is about to repeat the same mistake. In his scholarly, 73-page booklet, Scholar Earle sends readers back to their Federalist and writings of the Founding Fathers to show that almost from the beginning of the Republic, Britain has been fighting America's wars when she has not been safeguarding America's peace. The Fathers, Earle points out, were realists; they differed on many things, but not on the key role which Britain must play in U.S. grand strategy:

"Almost from the beginning it was recognized that our security depended not merely upon relative geographical remoteness, but equally upon the European balance of power, the maintenance of the British Navy. . . . Even Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase 'no entangling alliances' . . . was quite prepared if necessary that we should 'marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.' " We have never fought for Britain, says Earle, until Britain could no longer fight for us. Against This Torrent would be an important book if it did no more than start readers reading Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and John Jay.

The American Century (originally an editorial in LIFE) lights up for U.S. readers new horizons of their politically expanding universe. "In the field of national policy," says Luce, "the fundamental trouble with America has been, and is, that whereas their nation became in the 20th Century the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact. Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power --a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind." Luce calls on the U.S. to be as big as its opportunity, to assert that nationalism which is the virility of healthy nations. For "we are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization."

For Americans who are not too squeamish to learn from the enemy, Author Earle quotes a passage from Mein Kampf that U.S. readers might do well to memorize: "The question of regaining Germany's power is not, perhaps, How can we manufacture arms?, but, How can we produce that spirit which enables a people to bear arms? Once this spirit dominates a people, the will finds a thousand ways, each of which ends with arms!" For those who could not find this spirit, or found it repellent, Americans in their homelier days posed the alternatives in plain English: Root, hog, or die.

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