"Never has American prestige..been lower" [QUAGMIRE ALERT]

"The troops returning home are worried. "We've lost the peace," men tell you. "We can't make it stick." . . . Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. . . . Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. . . . Instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction we came in full of evasions and apologies. . . . A great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease. The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met."

The first winter of peace holds Europe in a deathly grip of cold, hunger and hopelessness. In the words of the London Sunday Observer: “Europe is threatened by a catastrophe this winter which has no precedent since the Black Death of 1348.”

These are still more than 25,000,000 homeless people milling about Europe. In Warsaw nearly 1,000,000 live in holes in the ground. Six million building were destroyed in Russia. Rumania has her worst drought of 50 years, and in Greece fuel supplies are terribly low because the Nazis, during their occupation, decimated the forests. In Italy the wheat harvest, which was a meager 3,450,000 tons in 1944, fell to an unendurable 1,304,000 tons in 1945. In France, food consumption per day averages 1,800 calories as compared with 3,000 calories in the U.S.

Germany is sinking even below the level of the countries she victimized. The German people are still better clothed than most of Europe because during the war they took the best of Europe’s clothing. But their food supply is below subsistence level. In the American zone they beg for the privilege of scraping U.S. army garbage cans. Infant mortality is already so high that a Berlin Quaker, quoted in the British press, predicted. “No child born in Germany in 1945 will survive. Only half the children aged less than 3 years will survive.”

On Germany, which plunged the Continent into its misery, falls the blame for its own plight and the plight of all Europe. But if this winter proves worse even than the war years, blame will fall on the victor nations. Some Europeans blame Russia for callousness to misery in eastern Europe. But some also blame America because they expected so much more from her. On the following pages the distinguished novelist John Dos Passos, who has been abroad as LIFE correspondent, reports on Europe’s suffering and what it means for America.

"Interesting in that LIFE hired Dos Passos, a firebrand Communist in the 30s and perhaps at this period also. (But he became a staunch conservative and a friend of National Review in later years.)" ~ T'wit

Something must have happened that caused him to become emotionally mature (grow up) (As in: "A conservative is a liberal who was mugged"). Hahaha

Here are some other comments excerpted from the link below:

So Hitler should have won? I don't get it.

Substitute "Saddam" for "Hitler" and "Iraqis" for "Europeans".......didn't I just read that headline last week?

Posted by: Portia at October 17, 2003 10:20 AM
This is incredible. At first I thought it was a parody, similar to others I've seen inserting Germany or Japan in place of Iraq into the defeatist hand wringing we've seen so much of in the press. From my limited knowledge of Dos Passos (reading his USA trilogy) my recollection is that he was decidedly on the left end of the political spectrum, so his pessimism here is to be expected. What a great find. Mark Twain (I think) said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This sure looks like a rerun to me.

Posted by: Dan at October 17, 2003 11:09 AM
Dos Passos was more like the Norman Mailer of his day. He was an over-the-hill leftist writer in 1946. He's best known for his modernist USA trilogy. I don't know - I only got halfway through The 42nd Parallel before giving up out of a combination of boredom, distraction and an overdue notice from the library.

Posted by: Mitch H. at October 17, 2003 11:12 AM
John Dos Passos was a highly respected novelist of that time (and to some extent still is). His politics are difficult to categorize, other than to say that in general he moved from left to right over the course of a lifetime. Of course being a great novelist has nothing to do with being a great reporter, and it seems that here he lets his experiences after World War I get in the way of clear analysis. He recalls that the post-WWI Europe was a better place than the (at the time) current post-war Europe, which no doubt it was as most cities were intact. The task of rebuilding Europe after WWII was enormous, and nothing like it had ever been tried before. Dos Passos had no perspective on the situation, he only thought he did.

Posted by: Tom Veal at October 17, 2003 11:19 AM
From article one:

"They [antecedent is an undefined 'people'] tell us that our mechanical de-nazification policy in Germany is producing results opposite to those we planned."

This makes me think of criticisms today that the policy of de-Ba'ath-ification is wrong-headed. ...

Posted by: Greg V. at October 17, 2003 11:20 AM
John Dos Passos was a leftist radical commie. Some things never change. It was called communist propaganda in it's day. Now is called "progressive". ...

Posted by: jim rose at October 17, 2003 11:30 AM
I have to admit that I don't actually know much abut Dos Passos in his later life. What I've read of his novels were to the left of Trotsky, but those were written in the early 30s.

Posted by: Mitch H. at October 17, 2003 11:51 AM
Great find, and there are probably many more articles like this from that ear.
On first blush the "a great many Europeans feel" line seems simply a euphemism for "John Dos Passos feels." But it turns out that Dos Passos was an ardent anti-fascist, so it is unlikely that he actually believed that the Marshall Plan, de-nazification and post-war reconstruction were worse than Hitler. More likely this is simply Dos Passos, a literate intellectual, unconsciously digesting and regurgitating the life work of leftist, pro-Soviet college professors in the West. Likewise, today's media types unconsciously echo the tenured "higher education" establishment, despite their lengthy record of being dead wrong.
Articles such as this one, however, remind us of the past and help us see through the nonsense and stay on course.
One day our children will be flying into Baghdad Internation Airport on business or pleasure trips as they now routinely fly to Berlin or Tokyo - and occupying their time on the flight reading (like a bad deja vu) magazine articles influenced by the same always-get-it-wrong college professors. If it were not so sad it would be funny.

Posted by: Sergio at October 17, 2003 11:57 AM
The author, the late novelist John Dos Passos, was a leftist (although I think he later changed his thinking). Look him up.

Lefties would have liked nothing better than for us to cut and run in Europe because it would have made life easier for Stalin. So Dos Passos' politics gave him a conflict of interest.

Posted by: J Bowen at October 17, 2003 11:59 AM
John Dos Passos has a reputation as a great post-modernist novelist, but was basically a dyed-in-the-wool pinko when his famous (and insufferably boring) trilogy "USA" was published. I had to study him in my American and African American Studies mini-minor at college, under a Robert Fisk impersonater of a professor (Why I indulged in such masochism is a worrying reflection on my personality).

His books highlighted the struggles of the union worker "proletariat" facing the evil heartless capitalist "bourgeois". He was anti-fascist, just like Stalin ; i.e. opposing one great evil only to support another is nothing to be proud of.

As you can see, history will judge him over time to be just another lefty loon, as soon as the draft-dodging former-hippy baby-boomer English Professors of today retire.

Excerpted comments snipped. Click here to read more:

http://www.jessicaswell.com/MT/archives/000872.html

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