Lee J. Levinger

“ To those of us who served with the United States Army overseas, religious unity, coöperation between denominations, is more than a far-off ideal. We know under what circumstances and to what extent it is feasible, and just how it deepens and broadens the religious spirit in both chaplain and soldier. We have passed beyond the mutual tolerance of the older liberalism to the mutual helpfulness of the newer devoutness. Our common ground is no longer the irreducible minimum of doctrines which we share; it is the practical maximum of service which we can render together. ”

“ The nation is formed by a synthesis of its sub-groups; and the nation, in turn, enters into a wider synthesis to form the nascent but still growing conception of mankind. The mind of the many groups of Americans yield up their purposes, when called upon, for the greater unity—greater not only in size, but in richness, variety and tradition—that constitutes the mind of America. The future will mark the growing unity in diversity of the American group mind ”

“ The lonely soldier longed for Judaism as the religion of home just as under fire he longed for comfort from the living God. And the military approval of all religions on the same plane, the recognition by the non-Jewish authorities of his festivals and his services, gave Judaism a standing in his eyes which it had lacked when only the older people of his own family ever paid much attention to religion. Thus Judaism as an institution, as the religion of home, had a great place in the heart of the soldier in France. ”

“ The study of intolerance takes us at once out of the field of individual psychology into the newer and less cultivated field of social psychology, the mind of the group. For intolerance is characteristically an attribute of groups. Intolerance is the white against the black; the Christian against the Jew, the Frenchman against the German—always one group lined up against another. Intolerance nestles in the individual mind simply because every individual of us is a member of a nation, a religion, a race, and has the typical prejudices of his own people. ”

“ But the young men, no longer soldiers, need us as badly now, while we, the churches and the synagogues, need them more than ever, with their new experience and their new-found manhood. What they need and what we need, too, is that we learn to coöperate on a common platform of action for their benefit now. If we want them, if we want to be at one with them, we must have a social program, a liberal attitude to life and especially to its most immediate economic problems, a willingness to sink differences of opinion that we may meet for practical effort and genuine progress. ”

“ We know we have morality, said he, when duty and pleasure are opposed, and the man obeys the voice of duty. Similarly, we can say: we know that we have group mind and purpose when the pleasure of the individual is opposed to the will of the group, and the individual gives up his purpose for that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier or the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor, then we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is acting only as a member of the greater whole. ”

“ Still, at one time it was by no means uncommon to meet men just out of the hospital who had received neither mail nor pay for three months, or to find a man who had been shifted so often from one unit to another that his pay was six months in arrears. When we remember the little money at hand for any purpose whatever, when we bear in mind the loneliness of these boys so far from home, loved ones, even from common sights and familiar speech, we can imagine what a deprivation such troubles brought, and how deeply they effected morale. ”

“ Every nation has some crowd characteristics, is interested in its own welfare, not in that of its colonies, or its competitors, or the human race. Patriotism is as dogmatic as is religion. Every state, every city has its local loyalty, which magnifies its advantages and conceals its disadvantages, and especially cries down its rival state or city. Even the scientist, the student of social conditions, is apt to speak of higher and lower cultures, or higher and lower races—meaning always that his culture is higher and the Chinese lower, or the Anglo-Saxon is higher and the Italian lower. ”

“ I have seen men with trades selling fruit from push-carts because there was no other work at hand. I have seen a jobless boy, honestly trying to make a little money by selling trinkets in the street and driven away by a patriotic store-keeper, who felt that he had done his duty by buying Liberty Bonds and need not bother about the man who had fought his battles for him. The soldier who cannot return to civil life is a rare exception, but he is an exception caused in an unstable youth by our military or our industrial system. ”

“ But the easy and natural way for such an international group mind is by conflict with a still different outside group. The white races would easily attain unity if there were a real race conflict against the colored races of the world; differences between French and German, between Russian and American, would be swallowed up in a day. Unity of the entire human race would come instantly if we were invaded from Mars. The slogans of our earth-wide unity would be the defense of our beloved planet and the common descent of all human beings. ”

“ When one reads the accounts of citations for the D. S. C. and Medal of Honor, one wonders that human beings could do such things. And when we who were at the front recall the utter democracy of those days, how salutes and formality of every kind were forgotten while only leadership based on personality could prevail, we realize anew the emphasis of the soldier on modesty and his resentment of the attitude of many a civilian and even a few military men in patronizing him either as a common soldier or as a miserable sinner. ”

“ It has driven the Jew into intolerance in his turn. His intolerance has never expressed itself in terms of persecution or violence, very seldom in terms of hatred. The intolerance of the Jew became, in self-defense, a pride in the Chosen People of God, in his ancient lineage, in his family loyalty, in his glorious tradition. He then emphasized the fact of difference from other peoples, just as they did, and the Jew looked down on the rude, ignorant heathens just as the Christian despised the uncouth alien Jew. Intolerance has one virtue—it makes for loyalty to your own. ”

“ Pride in one's division meant also pride in one's state; pride in the United States Army meant pride in the United States. Self-sacrifice, devotion, heroism,—all these were profound lessons for any man, young or old, a lesson which American democracy can profitably utilize in the daily humdrum of American life.
It was surprising how constantly our expectations were disappointed by the actual facts of the men in the service. Most books and articles since the war and all of those before the war were written on a theoretical basis, and every one approached the facts with a theoretical view. ”

“ Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert, energetic, loyal and reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by primal instinct a Jew, indelibly marked by persecution, with no deep national attachment, a stranger to the emotion of patriotism as the Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no quarrel with him, no hatred of him, no thought of persecuting him. As Protestants are unavailable for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews are unavailable for membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan. ”

“ We do not need a new form of Judaism any more than we need a new type of government in America. We are confronted by the demand to adapt Americanism and Judaism to the changing demands of a changing era, to find among the temporary and evanescent elements in both those things which have permanent usefulness for any demand and any era. We need ideals of the past, indeed, but only such ideals as have survived the past, as apply fully to the present, as will aid in building up a future of promise and achievement for the Jew. Judaism is on trial to-day. ”

“ But when a half million negroes migrate from the southern to the northern states in a few years, coming family by family, as the opportunity affords, yet with a steady tendency of drift, is that a group mind or the accidental agreement of many individuals? Is it mind or minds? And the same problem is present in a declaration of war, or the victory of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of clothes. When does the group act and when the individual members? When do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each? ”

“ The soldier had a mixed feeling toward battle. The shock of conflict is exciting and exerts a sort of fascination. But the excitement was short while the danger was omnipresent and the work could never be escaped. The soldier regarded war as a sort of deadly game, where the contest called forth every energy and the stakes were life itself. But battle contains another factor—a compound of work and discomfort. War is nine parts sordid labor to one of glorious action. It was mixed with cooties, mud, sleeping in the rain, marching all night and lying down under artillery fire. ”

“ Tolerance is the one thing that can possibly wipe out the evils of hatred, warfare, and confusion, the age-old enemies of the progress of the race. When men and women learn tolerance for each other’s race, nationality, religion, and general attitudes, then they will be able to understand one another, and eventually to work with one another, even to love one another. Without that tolerance, we can never understand people of different race or religion or nationality, because we never even stop to look at them fairly and honestly. ”

“ In France, however, one is struck chiefly by the profusion and arrangement of trees. They are everywhere, alone or in clumps, and of all kinds, with often a formal row of poplars or a little wood of beeches to make the sky-line more impressive. In northern France the houses and barns are all of stone, peaked and windowless, with gardens that seem bent on contrasting as strongly as possible with the grayness of the walls. It seems as though tiny villages are every few feet, and always with a church steeple in the middle. ”

“ But even if this intolerance toward the black race were justified by facts after we whites entertained it on natural instinctive grounds, why then should we give directly opposite reasons for our dislike of the Japanese? For the Japanese is called by his very enemies shrewd, industrious and saving. If the lazy negro is our inferior, then the hustling Japanese should be our superior. The fact is that neither race is inferior in a way that can be proved—but both are different, and every group is naturally intolerant of the group that is different from itself. ”

“ Especially we who were at the front felt this in the first flush of our coöperation, our mutual interest and our mutual helpfulness. After you have stood beside a man in the stress of front-line work, have shared a blanket with him, have seen him suffer like a hero or die like a martyr, his origin, his family and his faith become less important than the manhood of the man himself. More than once I have said, talking to soldier audiences of Jewish or of mixed faith: "After this war no man can knowingly call the Jew a coward again. ”

“ If these general principles of intolerance are true, we can apply them at once to the peculiar situation of the Jew—everywhere at home, yet everywhere the creature of prejudice; not so very different from the other white nations among whom he lives, yet always distinct from them and always the target of intolerance. Every movement of bigotry, aristocracy, militarism, junkerism in every land makes anti-semitism one of its cardinal shouting-cries, from the emigrés of Russia to the royalist anti-Dreyfusards of France. ”

“ Our division was then in the British area on the Somme sector, and at the time of our arrival they had just come out of the great victory at the Hindenburg Line.
Our first ruined city was Peronne, which will never leave my memory. The feeling of a ruined town is absolutely indescribable, for how can one imagine a town with neither houses nor people, where the very streets have often been destroyed? This situation contradicts our very definition of a town, for a town is made of streets, houses and people; no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its actual experience. ”

“ Yet the group mind must include the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they relinquish their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose ideas are their ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent at least, their consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary speech, to recognize that a man acts now personally, again as a churchman, a citizen, or a committee member, it should be possible to accept this fact as a part of our theory and to embody it as one phase of the theory itself. The individual and the group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists without the other ”

“ In the Civil War ten thousand Jewish soldiers of whom we to-day possess the records served in the Union and Confederate armies. Each generation of immigrants has been most eager to learn the English language and American ways, to take advantage to the full of American liberty [219] and opportunity, to make a home for their families in a free land and to help that land maintain its freedom. The World War was for the Jews, as for all Americans, simply the culmination, bringing out most strongly the high lights in American life. ”

“ The qualification is: the group never acts except through its constituent individuals, any more than the mind acts without its brain cells and bodily organs. The difference between the act of all and the act of each is not a complete disjunction but a difference of emphasis, of interpretation, of purpose. When the army marches, every soldier goes ahead; when the nation elects its president, the millions of voters cast their ballots; when the church adopts a creed or reforms its ritual, the many believers experience a change in their faith and their hope. ”

“ It included digging, and the soldier found no more romance in digging in at the front than in digging a ditch at home, except that under fire he dug considerably faster. War involved carrying a pack, and that became speedily the pet hatred of the enlisted man. As the prisoner dreads the cell in which he is confined, so the infantryman feels toward his pack clinging with its eighty-odd pounds as he trudges along the weary roads. War is a glorious memory now, but it was neither glorious nor pleasant to live through. ”

“ And in the same way loyalty to the cause of humanity need not mean, cannot mean disloyalty to the cause of the nation, which is so great and important a part of the human race. But, on the other hand, the patriotic American does not hate Illinois because he has moved to Indiana. Love of one’s own state persists without the hatred and intolerance of the other state, just because the two are members of the American nation, and the inclusive loyalty makes the other loyalties less bitter and less contentious against each other. ”

“ Only a small minority of our men were equipped, either in knowledge or in attitude, to take advantage of the opportunities offered. Museums meant comparatively little to them, mediæval cathedrals not much more, Roman walls or ruins nothing at all. Scenery did not mean as much as some of us thought it should, forgetting that scenery looks entirely different to a man who rides past it and another who walks through it. Altogether, knowledge of France, England and Germany made, on the whole, not for a greater appreciation of foreign lands, but instead for a great appreciation of America. ”

“ It was equally important for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come. Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was the product of the birth and development of the group mind of the nation. It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state laws, of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group, even those who were themselves refugees from persecution) , and the adoption of a national standard to which every state, every church and every sect should bring its sacrifice. ”

“ They did what we all considered impossible because they had the morale of good fighting men. They bore the ever-present danger of bursting shells and the sniper's bullet with boyish daring and constant success. They labored harder than any worker in civilian life, sleeping in the rain, marching, carrying their heavy rifles and packs made mercifully light for the occasion, digging in the clinging clay of the Somme valley. ”

“ Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems general agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief, perhaps the only difference historically pointed out between the mind of one man and of a group of men is that the man has a brain and a nervous system, while the group has neither, but operates apparently through the brains and nervous systems of its members. But in their functioning, in their activities, the mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. ”

“ Army life was opposed directly to the whole tenor of democracy, the régime where men control themselves, where they work through ambition and desire for success, and where they strive to accumulate property of their own, at the same time respecting the law and the property of others. Army life meant a break in the lives of millions of young Americans, an interruption of the steady development of their characters and habits, a reversal of their tendencies and a postponement of their ambitions. ”

“ To the person who knows Jewish life, broken into so many conflicting theories and different cultural and economic groups, the whole viewpoint is too ridiculous to require disproof. It is merely another sign that the modern conception of social and economic process is very new indeed and has made little headway into the group mind. Every world process from the World War to the fall of the German mark, from immodest clothing to vapid popular songs, must be blamed on a person or race. ”