The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener
On the other hand, at a formative period in my life I was involved with a fine boys’ school which had as its motto a wonderful passage from Saint Paul that I must have either recited or heard others recite at least a hundred times:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Only a man of experience, judgment and conviction could have summarized so well the task of a young man as he faces life, and for that passage alone I can forgive Paul the other extravagances, which I find objectionable, because those words have been a kind of lantern to me, especially when I was alone in distant places and in alien cultures. Of his famous dicta I took as my permanent touchstone whatsoever things are pure. I tried to live a pure life by not worshiping false gods, or satisfying myself with sham, or seeking cheap goals. I tried always to engage in tasks that had some significance and to associate with people who were trying to accomplish worthy ends.
To adopt a less lofty tone, substitute for pure the word clean or simple. I have taken major steps and sacrificed much to lead a simple life, cleansed of extravagances in either action or thought. It was inevitable, I suppose, that with the basic attitude derived from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, I would become a Quaker.
Like many young men who have biblical names, I was interested in what my patron saint had to say about things, and even today it seems providential that in the first chapter of the General Epistle of James he seemed to speak specifically to me and provided me with all the moral instruction I would need:
For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.… Pure religion … is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
How passing strange that James should have spoken to me in a few sentences that summarized the philosophy of both the saint and the follower. I have never analyzed the Christian life beyond that simple passage and can, for that reason, be termed a man who tried to be a Christian pragmatist or, in present-day terms, a liberal humanist. The words of Paul and James, each a saint, were admirable beacons for a young man who was not.
In philosophy I responded to Plato’s austere approach but failed to recognize the moral grandeur of Socrates. Aristotle repelled me, for I have watched his authoritarian dicta utilized to justify reactionary movements in life and art. In my analysis of society I relied upon Rousseau, Adam Smith and Karl Marx and found none wholly to my taste. For some reason I have never been able to explain fully, I fell under the spell of the English economist David Ricardo, offspring of Dutch Jews who emigrated to England and attained wide social acceptance. I was impressed by his quantity theory of money, which I misinterpreted as meaning that there was in the economic society at any given time a fixed quantity of circulating money, which had to be divided among owners of money, owners of land and workingmen, and that if one of the three gained an unfair advantage or proportion of the wealth, it could only be at the expense of the other two. As I looked about me at home, in England and on the Continent I saw only confirmation of this theory, overlooking the fact that Ricardo also dealt with the more serious problem of how a government could, by its monetary policy, actually increase the quantity of money so that all could share in a larger whole.
Finding evidence in the American depressions of 1873, 1893 and 1929 that Ricardo’s supposed theories were correct, I realized that if any government operated on the quantity theory of money as I understood it, grave penalties would be placed on all workingmen and women. What was required, I clearly saw, was a more flexible system of monetary control, and I realized that I would have been an agrarian agitator in 1873 and a William Jennings Bryan supporter in the 1890s.
In the dark days of 1930 a college friend and I proceeded rather far in drafting a short book giving the college graduate’s view of what changes might be advisable in the wake of the 1929 crash. Peter Nehemkis, my coauthor, was a brilliant fellow, far more sophisticated than I, and later he became a lawyer of distinction, but I was better grounded in the facts of American life at various levels than he.
We put together a strong outline, which was his work mostly, with much telling material to prove our contentions, which was my contribution. We believed that available wealth should be distributed more equitably (his idea) in order to make more money available to the working classes (our idea) so that they could buy more of the nation’s goods (my idea). We also felt that quotas in American colleges, especially in law and medicine, were destructive of democracy and a brake on economic progress (his idea). We wrote two sample chapters, and when they were finished I arranged an appointment in New York with the one man we thought might understand what we were attempting. At that time I was a Republican and Peter a Democrat, but we saw no hope whatever in the two major parties, so my Saturday-morning meeting was with Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate for president. He was generous with his time and attentive to our summaries of the national situation. It must have sounded incredibly naive, but when he started asking me about specifics, and I could inform him about working and living conditions as I had seen them in various parts of the nation, he paid attention and said: ‘You have a sharp eye. Go back and tell your colleague to go ahead with this. I think we could find you a publisher.’
Alas, Nehemkis had to attend principally to his law studies, and without his philosophical guidance I floundered around. When word came that I had won a traveling scholarship for Europe, I was left with the doleful task of informing Mr. Thomas that both Peter and I would be incommunicado for some years. I remember the great Socialist as a gentle, understanding man; I had met him for only about three hours, but he taught me much in that short span and I often wished in later years that I could have served as his amanuensis or political aide of some sort, for his ideas ignited fires in my mind and I would have profited from such an arrangement.
My going to Europe in the fall of 1931 had profound consequences, one negative, the other wildly productive. Because I was absent from the United States during the worst two years of the depression, its full force never quite hit me, although an aftermath, as I shall explain later, did allow me at least belatedly to appreciate its horror. I therefore missed the traumatic experiences that produced powerful writing by those who remained at home in the midst of the crisis, and I have always regretted that loss.
However, my political experiences in Europe came in a parallel context: I witnessed the hellish despair and hopelessness, which led to the dole, in industrial Scottish cities like Glasgow and Dundee, where dank nights and gray, rainy afternoons seemed perpetual. At a boardinghouse in London I met a brilliant Afrikaner student who assumed that because I had come from a former British colony I would be as strongly anti-British as he. Disgusted that I did not agree with all his charges against the English, he conducted for my benefit an advanced seminar on conditions in his country, about which I had previously known little. He was an ardent Dutch patriot and assured me that sooner or later his Afrikaners would kick the English out and take control of the country. In later years I observed that a great deal of what he predicted came true.
At about the same time I met in Amsterdam a group of Javanese students who told me in the same impassioned tones that they would one day evict their present Dutch landowners from the Netherlands East Indies, another part of the world about which I knew nothing. They told me I must read a certain book about their land. I supposed that it would be some fiery tract written in bad Dutch or worse English detailing the wrongs Europeans had done to corrupt an idyllic tropi
My Javanese friends were a brilliant lot, all being educated in the Netherlands, a nation they professed to hate, and their conversations with me were both revealing and exciting. Each of them spoke three or four languages, which put me at a sore disadvantage, but since all but one knew English, we conversed easily. I was impressed by the intensity of their political opposition to the Netherlands, but I was also pleased to note that they liked things Dutch, for they told me that if I wanted to understand the Dutch soul I should read a novel that had recently been translated into English, Old People and the Things That Pass, by Louis Couperus, and I profited just as much from this as I did from Havelaar.
But mostly I took away from these friends an appreciation of the deep passions that motivated young people of all colonial nations who were plotting to wrest their homelands away from European control. I saw that the Javanese-Dutch agitation in Java was going to be quite different from the Afrikaner-English struggle in South Africa because the latter was between two European-derived civilizations, whereas the former involved two civilizations that were vastly different—an Asiatic society of great antiquity and a modern industrial European state. My experience with these two anticolonial struggles in their incipient stages made me believe that continued confrontation was inescapable, and that neither the Afrikaners in South Africa nor the Javanese in the Netherlands Indies had any chance whatever of prevailing. And when I later met Indian students who told me that they would one day win their independence from Great Britain and young Filipinos who spoke of their determination to be free of the United States, I supposed that their aspirations too were chimerical.
But from taking part in such conversations in various cities in Europe I made myself into something of an expert on at least the discussion of colonialism, and as I grew older and better informed I began to understand the currents sweeping the modern world and was not surprised when colonialism collapsed worldwide.
But in those fateful years of 1931–33 I was being slowly exposed to darker and more ominous forces abroad in Europe and later the entire world: fascism and communism.
In an attempt to indoctrinate young men like me, Mussolini’s government in Rome inaugurated a most clever tactic: it offered students throughout Europe railroad passes at unbelievably low rates from wherever they were studying to eight different Italian cities. With your ticket, however, came a printed cardboard form containing eight blank circles corresponding to the eight cities, each of which had to be stamped with a different official stamp, not merely in the cities but in cultural exhibits in each depicting the glories of Italian history and the accomplishments of the present fascist government. If you didn’t visit the eight exhibitions and get your cardboard stamped, your return railroad ticket would not be valid.
It was a typical bit of Mussolini’s self-aggrandizement, and on me, at least, it worked, for although I was interested mainly in Italian painting, I also found, somewhat against my will, that I was absorbing a good deal of fascist propaganda in the form of glorious exhibits showing the richness of Mussolini’s accomplishments. That year Italy’s principal foreign foe was neither France nor Ethiopia but Yugoslavia and the poster attacks against her were so virulent and so ably buttressed by historical exhibits proving her perfidy that to this day I can visualize brutal Yugoslavia attacking guiltless Italy. This is the result of Mussolini’s devilishly adroit propaganda campaign asserting that the contested city of Trieste was joined to Italy by the Adriatic Sea but separated from Yugoslavia by impenetrable mountains. I have never seen geography used more effectively as a political tool.
But the accidental fallout of this gift trip to Italy was a chance experience that not even Mussolini could have predicted or arranged. When I took one of the authorized side trips to Lago de Garda, one of my favorite spots in the world, I left the lake boat at Riva, the attractive town at the north end that serves as an entrance point to the mountains nearby, and as I started into the lower hills I joined a group of German students who had availed themselves of the same kind of travel pass I was using. We spent three days together that changed my life because even at that early date they were followers of Adolf Hitler, a leader I had not heard of before, and the passion they displayed when speaking of what Germany was going to achieve under his inspiration alerted me for the first time to the demonic force that was about to sweep over Europe. These six or seven students were young gods, handsome, intelligent, dedicated and strong—although I had always been a good walker, especially where endurance rather than speed was required, they outdistanced me so easily and so constantly that one or two had to lag behind out of mere decency to keep me company.
In those Italian hills that summer we had a continuing seminar, each hour of which enlightened me with new facts about Germany, Europe and the world. I had never thought much about Jews except that they were among the finest people in the world, an opinion I had acquired at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. A private Christian college of the highest academic standing, it observed, as was typical at the time, a quota system that allowed only one Jewish boy and one Jewish girl to enroll in each class. The competition for those two spots was so intense that each year we received only the very ablest high school seniors in America. Since my years in the school enabled me to know seven different classes, three ahead of me, three behind, I had known fourteen Jewish classmates and they were, like my coauthor Nehemkis, the brightest, handsomest, richest and best-dressed kids in the college. The Jewish girls were so attractive that scores of Gentile boys wanted to date them, nor did the Jewish boys have trouble getting dates, for they were far more sophisticated than us Pennsylvania farm yokels. There had been only one Jew in my hometown and he was liked by most of us.
I therefore had a completely favorable opinion of Jews, and it was startling to hear about the nefarious acts they were reported to be guilty of not only in Germany and Italy but in the rest of Europe. The young Germans spoke with fire about their plans to eliminate Jewish misbehavior ‘once and for all.’ They were so intense in their hatred of those they called ‘enemies of the state’ that I deemed it best not to inform them that my experiences with Jews had been quite different.
Curiously, I was not much interested at that time in the antics of their leader, Adolf Hitler, for with my limited knowledge I did not see him as either a long-term threat or even a politician who might attain temporary power, but it was obvious that my hiking companions had an entirely different interpretation of what he might become. They did not, so far as I can recall, ever use the title Führer (leader), but they obviously idolized him as such.
The Germans continued on into Austria, leaving me behind in Italy. I had immense respect for their hiking ability—they knew what physical discipline was—and for their broad intelligence; they were superior young men and the first of their breed that I had met. Was I intuitively afraid of them or their inflammatory message? Not at all. I considered them no more than German versions of Peter Nehemkis and me, young students trying to understand their society and the moves it should make in the future. As we parted I waved good-bye and thought no more about the subjects they had thrust upon me.
But in the next academic year in Scotland I met an exchange student from a university in Munich who had a much more serious interpretation of what was happening in Germany. Herr Ludenberg, as I shall call him, was entirely different from my godlike Alpine associates at Lago de Garda: he was short and fat and came from the lower middle class. Most important, he was quietly introspective while they had been arrogantly activist, and even today it seems a miracle to me that this quite ordinary German of twenty-two with no apparent intellectual brilliance should have seen so clearly in the winter of 1933 the major steps his country was about to take
As we began our talks, which covered a long period of time and never became concentrated into direct questions and answers, he told me that several events were inevitable: ‘This man, Hitler, will attain supreme power. The army and the big industrialists will see to that. Very quickly he will achieve a union with Austria, because the Austrians will insist on it. Both the Polish border and the one with France will have to be adjusted in our favor, maybe with Czechoslovakia, too.’
‘But won’t that make the other powers unite against what he’s doing?’
‘I don’t think they will, because he won’t do it all at once. No big gulps, just little nips, here and there.’
‘Do you see war in Europe?’
‘No. France and England will never unite against us. Impossible.’
‘Then you think Hitler will have his way? Pretty much as he pleases?’
‘Yes. But I also think that when he gets his way and solidifies the German people and gives them their proper border, he’ll be satisfied, and the new day can begin.’ I remember that as he said these words for the first time his little eyes, sunk deep in his chubby face, glowed with excitement, but what he said next is what I remember best: ‘He’s put it all down in a book just now translated into English. It’s called My Struggle. You ought to read it.’
I did not—that is, not until ten years later, when I was in uniform in the South Pacific and then it was too late to do me much good. Herr Ludenberg in his quiet way continued with his efforts to educate me, and he did a splendid job. He was not, of course, concentrating on me; his major efforts to explain the new Germany were directed at British students, with whom he was on the most congenial terms. He was a brilliant debater and his mild personal appearance allowed him to make subtle points without arousing antagonism. He was fiercely convinced that Great Britain’s destiny lay with Germany and not with either France or the United States, but I got the impression that whereas he knew a great deal about France, having traveled there for several summers, he knew no more about my country than I knew about his. From several things I was told he said—he never said them openly to me—I judged that he had a rather poor opinion of the United States, and he believed that once his man Hitler got started, the numerous Germans in the States would rally to his support, especially if he had succeeded in making an alliance with England.