Timebends (45 page)

One's time is one's experience in it, and part of mine was Smedley D. Butler, a retired marine major general who came to Ann Arbor to deliver a lecture one day in 1935.

I went up to his hotel room to interview him for the
Daily.
He was a chesty little man who had had to stretch himself by an inch to make the marine height requirement and had climbed from private to one of the highest ranks in the corps by combining street toughness and intelligence. For several years he had led marine expeditions into Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras to put down rebellions against American-favored regimes, never questioning that like any policeman, he was preserving the peace for the good of the majority. But the time came when he was ordered to land a force on Mexico and was greeted on his arrival in port by a gentleman who represented the National City Bank in that country. The city, the general recalled, was quiet and peaceful as he drove through it seated beside the bank executive, who now led him into his inner office, where several other important men were waiting. Spread out on a table was a map of the country with areas marked off where oil was known to exist underground. The inhabitants, however, had refused to obey the government's orders to move off the land to make way for drilling equipment, and this, explained the banker, was contrary to law since the land had all been confiscated by the government under
its constitution. Moreover, organized bands were continuing to hold off government troops, and it was these armed guerrillas whom the marines were to suppress.

The general, foreseeing marine casualties, said that he would have to consult with the American embassy before he could agree, in effect, to start a war. But the American embassy was already represented in the room by a high official who said that the ambassador had the same view as the man from National City and would certainly give him the go-ahead.

Butler's lecture that evening was basically a repeat of what he had written: “I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests. … I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in. … I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.1 helped make Honduras ‘right' for American fruit companies in 1903.” But this naked use of his troops by the bank, jeopardizing American lives for private profit, finally turned him around totally.

He developed the idea of a constitutional amendment to prohibit any U.S. navy ship from sailing beyond the twelve-mile limit. It was a concise and absolute formula for a nonimperial and militarily isolated America. He sat facing me smoking his cigar, unsmiling, jut-jawed, straight in his chair. I knew even then that his dream was not possible, but I shared it with him. What he confirmed that afternoon was that the men of money were disposing of our lives.

Hill Auditorium was barely half filled for his speech. My
Daily
story ran with a picture of him and summarized the details of his pitch. I do not recall ever hearing of Major General Smedley Butler again, but I have often thought of him—especially in recent years, when I read of our ships once more lying off some Latin American coast and hear the piety and benevolence of our policies being declared yet again. And if the resistance to those policies has deepened in the intervening half-century, so have the complications of the reality involved. Now, unlike in 1935, Communism and the Soviet challenge have become the only issue, but the substance seems hardly to have changed—the poverty and misrule in Central America, the rebellion against it, and an American resolve that nothing fundamental ever change except to our liking.

Though Butler had no politics and was clearly no radical, the purity of his outrage that soldiers were being sacrificed for somebody's profit confirmed all the more that the world must evolve
beyond the dictates of privately held capital. As he was telling that simple story to his student audience in Hill Auditorium in 1935, the New York audiences at Odets's
Waiting for Lefty
were jumping to their feet with raised fists and throwing back the actors' cries of “Strike! Strike!” as though a strike of taxi drivers held some symbolic key to all freedom. Such were the times. And so, when fourteen years later Odets rose at the Waldorf Conference to proclaim “MONEEEY!” the source of Soviet-U.S. tensions, it may have been simplistic as political analysis, but to me it was a reminder that our consciences were not anywhere near as good as they had once been. How could they be, when by 1949 no one knew of a country that had freely voted a Communist regime into power and everyone knew that only recently the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which indeed had a large following, had nevertheless conducted a coup to overthrow the legitimate government of that democratic country.

The point is that for a time in the thirties a future still seemed to beckon upward, but with the war's end, the existence of the Bomb, and the deepening hatred between East and West, there seemed nothing left to look forward to but the next beat of one's heart. To believe in a political philosophy was like agreeing to have all one's teeth pulled out or a limb amputated or an eye removed, and for no tremendously sufficient reason. But there still had to be something better than this uncertainty. And so one tried to deny what one knew or suspected to be the facts, and instead of facts one spoke of refusing to lose hope.

Such was the psychological terrain surrounding a dinner to which Lillian Hellman had invited me about a year earlier, in order to meet two young Yugoslav United Nations delegates. She thought it would be a rare opportunity to get some inside dope about the recent expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Comintern, an event that had broken like a thunderclap upon the whole world. This was the first crack in the still-new postwar front of Communist border states created by the Russians, and it was such an astonishment that many still thought it a ruse of some kind, just as a few years later people would refuse to believe that the Chinese Communists had really broken with the Russians. The assumption on both pro- and anti-Soviet sides had been that all Communists were joined by a kind of blood bond to Stalin, a Lucifer in absolute control of his warlocks, who would go up in smoke should an anti-Russian thought so much as cross their servile minds. Instead, gut nationalism, a force all but read out of existence by both Marxist and capitalist rationalism, was now taking the stage.

I was surprised at the two delegates' youth—they could hardly have been thirty. With their square, unsmiling Slavic faces and their eagerness not to displease Lillian, they sat at her elegant table as though at some school exam, speaking carefully, never ragging Stalin or the Russians but mournfully regretting the necessity of Tito's declaration of independence from Russian tutelage. Their news was that the Soviets had been bleeding Yugoslavia white by literally absconding with machinery and anything else that could be carted off, and by forcing economic deals that were in every case to Yugoslavia's disadvantage and favorable to Russia. The theory, which Tito had finally branded a mere excuse and a fraud, was that in order to ensure the survival of socialism anywhere, it had first to be secured in Russia, the great protector.

But tonight the ulterior point they wished Lillian to understand was that Yugoslavia had not become anti-Soviet. It was simply a desperate case of national survival, and they hoped the day would come when they could once again stand with the Soviets side by side, but as equals, not as a sort of colony.

Asking very few questions, Lillian listened with uncustomary silence and seemed almost inanimate in her cloud of cigarette smoke. Emotionally, she must have been as impressed with these men as I was; they were not middle-class intellectuals disappointed by practical socialist discipline but former guerrillas who had fought the Nazis in the mountains. As they spoke, a flame bent and sputtered and threatened to be extinguished. They were reporting the breakup of what had been advertised as a comity of states that for a thousand years had been warring upon one another but had finally joined on a socialist basis in mutual aid and peaceful development. Such had been the dream rising out of the worst war in the history of Europe, and here were these two young veterans describing Russian behavior no different from that of the British imperium in exploited Malaya or India. And besides being Yugoslavs first and Communists second, they were implying that nationalism—that bogey of the left and traditional home of the right—was not only appropriate in a Red but also the last defense of small peoples against rapacious great powers, of which the Soviet Union was plainly one. In short, the old Adam was back, and running the world quite as it had been run before the war, nothing learned, nothing really changed. The futility of it all was crushing. And unacceptable. That a socialist state could so exploit a sister socialist state, especially the heroically anti-Nazi Yugoslavs, was an unconscionably outrageous proposition.

Any profound commitment tends to lift itself toward the sub
lime, and Russia's unimaginable sacrifices in the war still seemed to outbalance charges of ruthlessness toward dissidents and rumors of anti-Semitism. It turned out that even Orwell, with all his animus toward the Soviets, had no idea of the gulag—neither its vast extent nor the hellishness of its atrocities—and that he too had been giving Stalin some degree of credit.

Nevertheless it was impossible to dismiss these two young men, who, having finished their story, were looking to Lillian for her reaction. In their ill-fitting suits too tight for their squat, muscled frames, with their wrinkled shirt collars and ruddy faces, they seemed like dressed-up peasants supplicating a great lady in this richly furnished East Side living room. And I too looked to Lillian, wondering at the same time why her reaction should seem so tremendously important to them. I had been to France and Italy a year earlier and for the first time had witnessed the Europeans' rather amazing reverential respect for writers in the political arena, but for purely political men like these to be placing so much store in what Lillian Hellman thought of their policy still seemed very odd.

We were now seated facing her on her couch as she toyed with her glass, her lioness head tilted up in stubborn deliberation. For me, some ten years her junior, she had a certain mystique born of her unique flash as a southern American noblewoman who at the same time espoused pro-Soviet positions. She ran a kind of salon through which what could be called the significant world passed—everybody from leftist lawyers and labor leaders and Marxist theoreticians like Leo Huberman to her companion Dashiell Hammett to great surgeons, famous psychiatrists, statesmen, UN diplomats, wealthy businessmen, writers of all sorts, Hollywood producers and screenwriters, and of course the Broadway professionals, her peers. I was never quite at my ease there, I suppose partly because it was still difficult for me to relax with people of distinction, for there was inevitably a kind of ranking in the air that tended to disturb concentration upon whatever the subject was at the moment; one felt the depressing obligation to shine with a clever remark or some rare story, preferably of life beyond or beneath this rarefied social level. Confronted with high style, I tended to clam up and look rugged in defense against the sheer competitive self-awareness of it all.

But tonight it was a whole other story as the cold air of the Yugoslav mountains blew through the uncustomarily empty living room, with its tall velour drapes and carved moldings, the silver
mementoes on the gleaming rosewood side tables, the photo of a younger Lillian on the piano staring loftily into space, her long hair brushing her shoulders. On the couch sipping her drink as the delegates' story came to its end was a Lillian subdued as I had not seen her before; she always had a sharp rejoinder, a cackling laugh, a brutally frank appraisal in her endless war against humbugs. People, she seemed to feel, almost always knew more than they let on, and life was less a mystery than a matter of willful self-deception in order to evade responsibility. Her task in life, then, was to confront people with what they already knew but hadn't the courage to come out with. And she was impatient of the unconscious as an excuse, just as she was of all innocence, the very scent of which made her pounce. Which is not to say that she could not see the ridiculous in herself, but it was most often from a particular quadrant; she saw herself sometimes as a rather poetical and unknowledgeable young girl who had been forced to assume an out-sized authority she really did not feel she possessed. Forced, that is, by other people, mostly weak men who lacked courage and willpower, but also some empty-headed, coquettish women whose cowardice compelled her to grab the tiller and defiantly steer the ship away from the rocks of untruth. In these more fragile, feminine moods she seemed to call out for a leader, a master, like a wayward filly that gallops up to a trainer's hand and stops, only to fly off when it is touched. But she would quickly return from such affectation of girlish naivete and even laugh at her attempt to escape from herself, the self that in the end could not resist claiming some exemplary role of leadership, if not domination.

As the Yugoslavs waited, she turned to me with a questioning look in which I thought I saw for the first time her helplessness to reply. But for me it was her opinion that mattered, not mine—what did I know about the Balkans or high policy except what I read in the papers? It was she who was on the inside.

I have only one memory of the delegates' exit; they both had exactly the same gray felt hats, probably bought in New York together, which they were both unthinkingly crushing in their hands as they bowed endlessly at the door, their eyes full of uncertainty. Back in the living room after they had left, Lillian insisted we have one more drink. We did not speak as she poured. Then she sat down again on the couch and with a load of portentous doubt clogging her voice asked, “You believe them?”