Hands Off!

An American tries to tell Roosevelt that the war would be bad

Twaddle: A Story in Pictures by James Schlecker

I’ll get the context out of the way. This pamphlet, illustrated with linoleum cuts, published in 1940, is interesting not because of its contents, nor because of what it means, in any noticeable way. It’s not interesting in style, nor enjoyable to leaf through.

What this little book teaches us is that people don’t change, that nothing is ever new, and that what was once will arrive again.

The subject of this book, published in in 1940, is the Second World War — war as fought by many other countries but not, at least not then, by the United States. The author-artist is anti-war, or he would call himself anti-war. But he is not really opposed to war. He’s opposed, if only for the moment, to his country’s being involved. To the war involving him.

It’s cheating to quote too much of Schlecker’s prefatory open letter, in which he tells President Roosevelt what he thinks about him. I’m meant — and you’re meant, too, reader — to look at the pictures. They’re meant to tell the story. But I can’t help but take look at the author’s statement of intent.

The book, Schlecker says, is titled Twaddle because that’s what he claims Franklin Roosevelt said of a question he was asked about the war.

Schlecker’s point, broadly put, is that America is in a rough enough situation as it is — with high unemployment, general iniquity, and so much more to be done.

It’s what everyone says at any time. There’s no money for your priorities, be they national defence or anything else, when there has been no progress on my priorities — whatever they may be.

Because all the evil problems of labouring and getting ill and dying remain, we can do nothing else but try and fail to ameliorate our own suffering. It’s what a majority of all people no doubt believe.

Schlecker also writes, as no doubt very many believe today, that spending on defence is wasted money — that it directly takes from the mouths of the poor and especially the unemployed. Of course, the war that was to come solved America’s unemployment problems and ended with the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world. But these are details.

He wasn’t to know it.

And here, Schlecker tells the president, the young of today need to be given jobs and futures — permitted to devote their muscles to the country — not left in pieces, smashed like tomato puree, on the battlefields of Europe.

We won’t enter a war on the behalf of the European imperialists and capitalists, Schlecker says. We won’t pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire. He concludes with the communist slogan ‘The Yanks are NOT Coming.’

All of this is arguable. People argue it every day in our own age. What’s less arguable is what Schlecker says next.

There’s no point spending money on arms, he says, because we know your game, Roosevelt. We know the truth, and we know that no one will ever attack the United States.

No one will ever attack us, Schlecker wrote in 1940, and so every penny spent on guns and tanks and armies is just plain, common theft from the working man and from the unemployed.

That America would be attacked by Japan less than two years later — and that Hitler’s Germany would, completely of its own volition, join the war against America days later — was impossible to imagine, absurd even to entertain.

History makes fools of us all.

I suppose I should also say something about the pictures. It’s good enough. Monochrome, heavy blocks of black, rather like the European wordless novels of the period. We have pictures of the youth playing baseball, graduating from school or university. And then we have the hard truth of life: the crying mother, the ‘no help wanted’ signs, the dole queues. A march on Washington, some political agitation, Roosevelt’s lying face, an outstretched hand.

If this book teaches us anything, it’s that activism never changes.

The youth, generally summed up by someone else rather than speaking for themselves, are always demanding something. Generally, they want all the world’s problems to be solved and are indigent that someone didn’t think of that before they came of age.

Especially around the subject of war, most people think violence is bad and not being involved is good. Self-defence for people like that is like death: it might be inevitable, but it’s better never to think about it. Until you’re forced by circumstances.

People in the twenty-first century (particularly Americans) complain about how much of an ordeal it is to ‘live through history.’

As if they have it especially bad.

As if they don’t mostly watch bad things happen to other people on their phones.

It’s interesting to think that those who lived a similarly sheltered life in 1940 — again Americans, relatively wealthy by world standards, divorced from the reality of killing and dying, feeling a bit nervous about it all finally reaching them — had a similar sense that when someone else was blown to pieces by a 500 pound bomb, it was the Americans who really suffered.

It was them, the Americans, that the war was really about.