PROCLAIM LIBERTY!

ALSO by GILBERT SELDES

On Related Subjects

Your Money and Your Life
Mainland
The Years of the Locust
Against Revolution
The Stammering Century
The Seven Living Arts
The United States and the War (London, 1917)
This is America (Moving Picture)

AND

The Movies Come From America
The Movies and the Talkies
The Future of Drinking
The Wings of the Eagle
Lysistrata (A Modern Version)

Proclaim

LIBERTY!

By

GILBERT SELDES

Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them....

Leviticus xxv, 10.

THE GREYSTONE PRESS
NEW YORK

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

To the Children
who will have
to live in the world
we are making

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Contents

PROCLAIM LIBERTY!

CHAPTER I

Total Victory

The peril we are in today is this:

For the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong enough to destroy us.

This book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies—where it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. It is not about munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of America, what it has been and is and will be. And since character is destiny, this book is about the destiny of America.

The next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. With the best of motives, and the worst results, Americans for months after December 7, 1941, said that Pearl Harbor was a costly blessing because it united all Americans and made us understand why the war was inevitable. A fifty-mile bus trip outside of New York—perhaps even a subway ride within its borders—would have proved both of these statements blandly and dangerously false. American unity could not be made in Japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those of our enemies.

What follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist. For some twenty years I have observed the sources of American unity and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future of American liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children will live in the world we are now creating. I am therefore not writing