From the Easy Chair

World War II

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 164-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DH204

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DH204, World War II, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 316, June the first, 1994.

In this session John Upton, Otto Scott and I will discuss World War II and how it changed the world.

I have often commented on the fact that most of the people now living have been born since World War II. And if you go back to 1940 you find that the overwhelming majority of people have been born since then. So there are only a few of us comparatively speaking who know the world before the war. It was a very different world. Technologically, the world has advanced dramatically since World War II.

On the other hand, there have been major losses in the area of freedom. I the pre war world only a very limited number of wealthy people paid income taxes. Taxes, as a whole, were so limited that very few people were greatly excited by them. Our contact with the county, state and federal governments was very slight. It was an era of freedom. This does not mean there were not problems. We were a rougher, tougher and more pugnacious, more independent people in those days. And we were also a more Christian people. The interesting thing is that the Depression drove a great many people back to church and the crime rate dropped. We have a completely different era then and even more so if you go back before World War I it was a country with a very great amount of freedom.

So the world has changed dramatically, not for the better in the area of personal freedom and as far as the nature of the state is concerned. The areas that are better have been made better by Capitalism, by the inventiveness of men. And American ability has contributed greatly to that although it is beginning fade a bit.

Well, with that general introduction, Otto, would you like to go own with how the war changed the world?

[ Scott ] Yes. I left home in March, 1934 so what is that? This is 94 so that was 60 years ago. And I roamed across the country in the 30s, 34, well, 34 and 35. And I didn’t really begin to situate myself until 36, 37. In 39, of course, the war started in Europe. Now when I left in 34 most of the houses in the United States had outdoor toilets. And for most of the families were poor. Hamburger once week was considered pretty good. And chicken on high occasions was a big treat.

The working class was discernible at a distance. You could tell a working man from a middle class fellow because he had different clothes. He carried himself differently. He walked differently and he spoke differently. The classes were much more obvious. Twelve hundred dollars a year was a pretty good wage. Twenty five dollars a week was a good wage. Beyond that 35 was... 35 to 50 was... was better, of course, but 10,000 was success. Twenty thousand was very substantial. And, as Rush says, there was no income tax for the average person.

I remember it wasn’t until the late 30s I paid an income tax and then it was an inconsiderable amount. I have forgotten how much. And everybody said, “You must have been making a lot of money.” It was a rougher country. Fist fights were common. If there was a fellow who insulted you, you hit him. It was free in the sense of speech. You could say what you liked within ordinary limits, or, let’s say, within reasonable limits. Every... every crowd... every… every group had a... a... a nickname. The Irish in New York were Donkeys. And we had Pollacks. We had all kinds of names for all kinds of minorities. But there was not the hatred that there is today. It was done with humor. It wasn’t done to hurt. There was a feeling that we were all Americans. It was taken for granted that we were all Americans.

And to be an American is something I haven’t heard anyone describe himself as an American on television or in the movies for years. It is practically a vanished self identification. And the ... but the were several dark sides to the period that I matured in and that was the division which grew up between the generations in terms of apprenticeship and the ... the Depression wiped out an awful lot of jobs and where a young fellow before that could learn from older men in the job, there was just no jobs so therefore there wasn’t the same contact with older men. I went into newspapers so, therefore, I still had that. But the factories were shut. And there was ... it is almost like today where if there is a job opening advertised, 5000 people show up. And they re doing that again. And there were homeless then which we own have again. So when the paper tells me that things are doing so well, that our economy is improving and so forth, I look out the window and it doesn’t look that way to me. This looks more familiar to me. This looks like the Depression. There were lots of men on the box cars and hitchhiking and this and that. And it was, as Rush said, it was rougher.

I was knocked off a train in Arizona. There were several of us, seven or eight of us. The brakeman came along with an iron bar and made us jump. So we jumped. And we had to walk something like 20 miles through the sand to get back to town in the middle of summer. My face was so swollen from sunburn that I couldn't see.

And I spent several days in the railroad yards looking for the brakeman. I am glad I didn’t find him. I didn’t have good intentions, but the mood passed and I ... I missed him.

There were a lot of that sort... there was a lot of that sort of thing. The police were rough. There were beatings attendant upon arrest. And they persuaded confessions in that fashion. And yet I found that the average person was kind. There was a lot of help of one another. The movies cleaned up. They had gotten very racy I the 20s and the late 20s, but they ... they got almost religious in the 30s. And so did every day literature.

But fundamentally it was a country in which most of the people were what you might call decent and poor. And poverty as not considered proof of injustice in then system. It was taken for granted.

[ Upton ] I think the ... on the dark side, one of the biggest impact that I had seen in World War II is in the Balkans where we literally carved .... carved things up and parceled it out to different people and especially in Hungary and Romania there is a lot of hatred that still exists. And, Otto, I still remember something that you said I... I invited you to go to Romania with me and ... and you once said that you wouldn’t go there because of you... that you were ashamed.

[ Scott ] Well, we have watched those people go into captivity without raising our voice. In fact, we connived with Stalin to put them in captivity and, of course, before that they were pushed into enclaves with one another by the help of Woodrow Wilson. The Europe has no good reason to thank the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that happened in the 30s that I think was revelatory of what the country was like then was that a great many people being jobless lost their homes. And it was not unusual to know of houses where the old folks, still working, and two of the children had moved in so there would be three families under one roof and in most cases doing quite well together and quite happily.

I know of one instance of that having started up again. It will be interesting to see whether the family revives as it did then to take care of its own, because the biggest welfare agency in the United States in the 30s was the family. It took in its members. They worked together. In some instances it would be part time jobs for two or three under the roof and pulling it together in order to get by. The families did a remarkable job then and yet no one has ever written about that aspect of the 30s.

[ Scott ] No, they haven’t. But the are other aspects, too, in a similar vein. What the war did... own before the war, before we got into the war, of course, the Americans didn’t believe that we would. They didn’t think that we would be stupid enough to get into it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... a European war twice, because we didn’t get much out of the first one. And I remember that some of the boys of New Windsor, all Irish American that I knew from childhood onward called me and said they were coming down to New York and they wanted me to show them ... show them around. And they came down and I took them to the men’s bar at the Waldorf which isn't what it sounds like. The men’s bar at the Waldorf used to... it was a ... a fairly large room with tables like this small table for four and so forth. They served the whiskey with a tape alongside the side of the bottle that you scored. If you ordered whiskey and they would give you set ups, ice and mix and so forth. And they would charge you by how much you had taken out of the bottle at the end of the session. And nothing fancy. Very much down to earth, like a regular old New England style.

Well, this... they didn’t feel comfortable. They didn’t like the idea of being I the men’s bar in the Waldorf. So I took them over to third avenue which had the elevated in those days and had sawdust pits and that was more like it. That was it. And so we began to enjoy ourselves. And I was interested because I was with the United Press in the teletypes were cranking out information from Europe and I could see the war forces gathering. And I said, “What do you think about Europe? What do you think will happen in Europe?”

And they all looked at Eddie Leahy who was the leader. He was an athlete and so forth. And Eddie looked at me and said, “Who do you think will win the World Series, Otto?”

Well, he died over there. So he found out later that it wasn’t such a ridiculous thing. But he will always epitomize the American attitude toward the rest of the world in my eyes, because this is a country which doesn't believe that the rest of the world is real. Maybe it is because we are so large. And then, of course, the war did get us. So all these young guys who really had no great skill, they had to much experience with older men outside their family or any experience at all outside their family because in the 30s people didn’t... of they had a home they stuck, they stayed there. They didn’t travel much. Very few ever got out of the country. So they got into the armed services. And what do we have? We had 16 million in uniform. And that is when their schooling began. They... it was a collective education. They were collectivized in the army and most of them didn’t get overseas and most of them didn’t see combat. But they were in the army and they were disciplined and they were taught various skills. A lot of them were sent to school and after the war business schools arose on every side because the was the 52, 20. They were... the government gave them, what was it? Twenty dollars a week for 52 weeks or something like that so that you could go to school and the government paid for their tuition in these schools. So business schools appeared everywhere. And then, of course, there was a great rush of hiring. So they moved in to the corporate life. First the corporate army, then the corporate school and then the corporate life itself. And that is the period in which the Americans were organized and trained and disciplined and pushed into the mold in which they are in now. [18:10}

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, you are right that in those days most Americans never gave the rest of the world much thought. But it was because, first, most of them came from a foreign background and they were glad to be away from Europe.

[ Scott ] That was their old {?} I am talking... you are talking about the older generation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I am talking about my generation and, really, your generation. We were ... you were practically born here.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I was born here.

[ Rushdoony ] But I was surrounded, as was everyone in my community, by the generation that had migrated. They were glad to be away from that world. The there was the feeling of how blessed it was—and I heard this more than once from older folks—that it wasn’t like Europe where another country could storm across the border. We had oceans on either side and it was only in 26 when Lindbergh made that flight which created a sensation from coast to coast. So there was a sense of remoteness as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

[ Scott ] Well, we were on the other side of the moon. Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And I can recall to this day very, very vividly when I graduated in June of 1938, got my bachelor’s at Berkeley and stayed on, one older man whom I had met who was there at Berkeley and Robert Gordon Sproul the president of the university gave an address which was really an interventionist speech calling upon us to get involved in Europe, to move against Hitler and against Mussolini and so on. And this man who hadn't been here more than a few months from France broke down and wept. He wept for this country. He said, “They don’t know what they are getting into when they get into Europe’s quarrels. It has destroyed generations of peoples there and if the United States gets involved in Europe, they are going to reap generations of sorrow.”

So no one understood him except myself because he had talked to me by the hour. But he thought the remoteness was a blessing that we did not fully appreciate. And we have changed that because we no longer have that feeling that our world is the United States and we have got to make sure that we keep our noses clean and make sure that our children get a good start in life.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, Europe is a lot closer in New York than in Berkeley.

[ Rushdoony ] But even then...

[ Scott ] And there was an awful lot of foreigners in New York.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] And we had the refugees that came pouring in. I remember in the east side, New York around Sutton Place you heard nothing but German, the German Jews.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you see, California at that time was largely made up of newcomers and immigrants and my home town, as far as I knew, when I went to high school there was one girl who came from an old American family. Pocahontas Vole was her name.

[ Scott ] Now that was a very special town.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] The town that I came from there was a lot of old families.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And most of the United States had old families. I mean this...

[ Rushdoony ] That is {?}

[ Scott ] ... wasn’t an empty country, you know.

[ Rushdoony ] That half did, but the new comers kept moving west. And here in the West...

[ Scott ] Well, this was your...

[ Rushdoony ] They were...

[ Scott ] ...unique experience to be in a town that was mostly immigrants.

[ Rushdoony ] The...

[ Scott ] But the United States was not mostly immigrants.

[ Rushdoony ] The valley towns of San Joaquin Valley were made up of immigrants.

[ Scott ] I came from an older town.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We had a revolutionary war cemetery.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But it wasn’t New York that was close to Europe because of immigrants because the immigrants were all over California.

[ Scott ] Well, now you are translating your personal experience to the whole country. But it wasn’t the whole country. Most of the country had been here quite a while.

[ Upton ] Well, you know, what was wrong with your friend Eddie’s point? In other words, you know, if I hear this word we live in a global... what is it called? A global community again I am going to puke. Why do ... should we care? Besides Christianizing outside the United States and trading ... what...

[ Scott ] You...

[ Upton ] What should we care about the world?

[ Scott ] At the time I asked Eddie that Mr. Roosevelt was maneuvering us into war. And Eddie thought it was a stupid thing to even notice. That is what is wrong with it.

[ Upton ] And was he wrong?

[ Scott ] Yes, he was wrong, because if he had been alert to what was going on we wouldn’t have been maneuvered so easily.

[ Rushdoony ] Even then it was only by virtually a secret declaration of war that we finally got Japan to attack us. Without an attack we never would have gone to war.

[ Scott ] That is true. The people didn’t want to go war.

[ Rushdoony ] They didn’t believe that Roosevelt would dare put us into war. It never occurred to them that it would come the way it did.

[ Scott ] We never dreamed the Japanese would attack us.

[ Upton ] So how could... how should we... how should we look at it today? What ... what should... what should we tell our children coming up about the rest of the world?

[ Scott ] We should tell our children to pay attention to the world, because we are part of the world. And that... a global society is not a phrase that I like, but I ... we ... this same ocean that laps up on the shores here laps up on the shores of Asia and on the shores of Europe and we should never forget it. I mean, we are simply not on our own planet. We don’t own this planet. I think the Russians and the Americans are alike in this. We have got a great big continent and we think that is all there is to the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the problem today is we are dealing with such dishonesty. I was reading a rather long article about China and how China is qualifying at one point after another to receive aid because its industries are now open and are increasingly owned by foreigners. But this is a myth. We know it is a myth. What they do to meet our qualifications is to send some men to Macau, give them enough to meet the American qualification of foreign ownership, 25 percent, so the Chinese government will have this dummy office in Macau and it will qualify that Chinese, totally Chinese owned corporation as partly foreign owned. And, in fact, the White House is playing games knowing what it is doing and is deceiving the people.

Vice President Gore and two or three others, highly placed in Washington, were drinking beer the other day and were shone on a newsreel Chinese beer that is coming over because it meets our qualifications of foreign owned production. And what can you do in a world with that kind of dishonesty going on wholesale in Washington?

[ Scott ] Well, ok. Let’s go back to the 30s. We still had tariffs. We had high tariffs. We didn’t have the income tax. It didn’t pay for our government. We still owned our homes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There was no land tax.

[ Rushdoony ] And you could get a good home in California for 2500.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] A very nice.

[ Scott ] That was a... that would be a very good home.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] A very good home.

[ Upton ] So what is wrong with going back to that? What do we need the rest of the world for?

[ Scott ] We don’t. We don’t particularly need it. But we should keep our eye on them. We should know what it is all about.

[ Rushdoony ] It would be nice for a change to have a president who is more concerned with us than China and Somalia.

[ Scott ] Have you heard an American president praise this country in recent decades?

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] I am saying decades?

[ Rushdoony ] No. We have not.

[ Scott ] Have you ever heard of any leader of any other country in the world praising the United States of the help it has given?

[ Rushdoony ] No. We haven’t had a president who has respected us since Calvin Coolidge and he is abused for what he was.

[ Scott ] Well, they make fun of Calvin Coolidge. They made... first of all, they desecrated the grave and the memory of Harding who was a good president his day. Then they made fun of Calvin Coolidge who was a genuine scholar, who translated books from the Latin into English and who wrote his own speeches.

[ Rushdoony ] The last president to do so.

[ Scott ] Now Mr. Roosevelt made a great many errors and in many ways was a shallow man, but there was one thing for which I will always give him credit and that is that he provided you with a feeling that there was a captain on the bridge of he ship.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We haven’t had that feeling in a president since.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Johnson in his History of Modern Times, I thought gave Calvin Coolidge his due appreciation.

[ Scott ] He is the only one.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Harding also. Now they gave us a balanced budget.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They got rid of the national debt.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Mr. Hoover inherited a very good situation when he came in. The Democrats blamed him for a world wide depression and that is the first time that a president of the United States was really mocked and traduced and charged, propagandized into impotence while was I office.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They specialize in this.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, in those days, of course, I was in California which had a very low population and when I went back east at one point all of the boys I met wanted to know if we still had Indian raids here in California. But your experiences in New York, in New York City and in Newburgh, what was it like there? Was it like California where nobody locked their doors?

[ Scott ] Absolutely. My grandparents would put a note on the door when they went out saying, “Key under mat.” And in New York City itself the poor people slept on the fire escapes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In the summer.

[ Rushdoony ] I remember.

[ Scott ] They put a mattress on the escape and they slept on Central Park, because it was cooler there. There was a lot of night life. I remember going to Billy Rose’s Copacabana and to all the nigh clubs of the district of the period later on, the Cotton Club and listened to Bo Jangles. That is Bill Robinson. And I remember that was in the later 30s. He told a joke. He was a great tap dancer, you know. And he tap danced up his little step ladder and tap danced down the other side while he was telling the joke. And he said that this fellow from Harlem was driving to Florida and he went through a red light in the town called Keep on Going, Georgia. And the cop stopped him right away and said, “Did you see that you went through that red light?” And he said, “Why, yes, I did.” And he said, “I thought I was doing the right thing.” He said, “What do you mean going through a red light?” He said, “Well, I saw the white lady going through the green light and I thought the red light as for us colored folks.”

And I have remembered it all these years, that stupid little story, you know. But there was a great deal of humor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now there was no such thing as a serial murder or a serial murderer that we knew about. And I covered crime in the 30s and I knew members of the mafia. And they kept pretty... they kept their business pretty much to the transactions amongst themselves. There was nothing of the ... it was an unwritten rule not to give the details of a crime when you wrote up the story, because it would inspire imitations. The forbidden book section of the New York Public Library, I remember when I was given my press credentials in New York, I said, “What good are they?” And the fellow said, “Well, you can go into the forbidden book section.” So I flew over there right away, because pornography was very expensive and very rare and I expected to find it in that section. But instead there were the medieval books on torture. That was the forbidden area, because lunatics would go in and tear these things out of the books and go and do it. And it was sadism that was the danger, not sex.

[ Rushdoony ] And now we encourage it on television and the films and in literature. It was during the war that I was in New York in connection with my missionary work and I stayed at a mission house in the heart of the immigrant and poorest area, absolutely safe. I wandered around some of the supposedly worst parts of New York until midnight visiting after hours the old used book stores.

[ Scott ] On 14th Street.

[ Rushdoony ] And you were safe anywhere.

[ Scott ] Yeah. It... it... it was a city that never slept.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now I haven’t seen the like excepting Berlin when I was there in the 60s. That was awake all night long. London in the 90s is not safe anymore so you can’t go everywhere in London at night, because of the strange Caribbean immigrants that they have. They have muggings...

[ Rushdoony ] And Moslems.

[ Scott ] Yes and Muslims. But I remember that I went back to New York at one point. Most of the time I didn't ship out of New York, but I did get back into New York during the war at one... one point. And I went out at night and then some time about one or two in the morning I got a cab and said, “Take me to Dickie Wells’” which used to be an after hours night club in Harlem which almost all white clientele. And he turned around and said, “How long have you been away?” I said, “Well, a couple of years.” He said, “Well, we don't go there anymore.” I said, “Why not?” He says, “It is not safe.” And I was shocked. The idea that any part of the city was unsafe was totally foreign before the war.

[ Rushdoony ] I spoke once... this was after the war before things changed at a conference and I had to leave a day early to catch my plane and the driver was told that since he was leaving early... I forget for what purpose, leave me at this man’s home. And I said, “Well, how will I get in?” He said, “Oh, it won’t be locked.” And here he was about 150 miles or so away and I was going to that city to catch a plane and he called and arranged for somebody to pick me up from the house later, but I just walked in. Can you imagine that happening today? Not in many places.

[ Scott ] Well, can you imagine that in the 30s nobody had a résumé?

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] You walked in and applied for the job and if you didn’t work out you would be fired. And you would go somewhere else and get another job. Even when jobs were scarce.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I applied for a job at United Press and the fellow who interviewed me, the man who interviewed me said, “What school of journalism did you go to?” And I said, “I didn’t go.” He said, “You didn’t go to a school of journalism?” I said, “No.” He said, “You see those men sitting out there?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Every one went to a school of journalism. What makes you think that you are qualified for this job?” I said, “Well, I can do the work. I have had the experience.” Well, he said, “We will try you out on an assignment.” And that is still the way, you know, you are hired as a writer on a newspaper. They try you on an assignment. So I knew I had it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No résumé.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] We discussed this when I was 21 which was before the war. Three or four of us who had had... we all had some international experience and we compared our situation with fellows our age in Europe and we said, “Those poor bastards,” because in Europe your record began when you went to kindergarten and it followed you, together with the comments of all your teachers in every grade and every school and every job and you had this was your dossier. Whereas in the United States nobody asked you anything, just can you do the work. And we were free. You are not free anymore, because...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... because now we have got a dossier that the cop can pull up on his computer.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I recall something in the mid depression. This man who had a fair sized market. If you went and applied for a job he would usually give an order before he talked to you to one of the girls. And then he would say, “Excuse me. I have something I have to take care of.” And the he would take off. But he would keep an eye on the person. Would you just step in and help they girl? Because what he had asked her to do would be a little difficult. If you did he would come out and tell you what your hours were. Now that sort of thing is no longer possible.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] He could also fire you in five minutes.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. You didn’t... being fired.... I have... I have forgotten the number of jobs I have had. I really couldn't tell you. If I was forced to, I couldn’t. But understand that people who apply for a government job today are given lengthy forms in which they have areas where you are supposed to fill out what you did and where you lived every month of your life. There is no way I could have ever done that.

[ Upton ] When... when did the concept of a redeemer nation come into play?

[ Rushdoony ] There... there is a book by that title, as you may know. The whole idea has been overblown. First of all, when the colonists came over their concept of the country then the colonies was that they were to be like a city set on a hill, to give their light to all the world. So they set... so they saw themselves as having a Christian mission. They had a post millennial faith and they felt that having started free of a lot of the handicaps of Europe, they could function more effectively as a redeemer nation. However, by the 1830s that vision had given way and the purely personal interpretation of the faith, pietistic, had come into being. And a few writers to promote the American imperialistic thoughts they had, particularly at the time of the Spanish American War, did promote the idea of the United States as having a world mission. And some of the media were very partial to it. The Hearts papers picked it up, but as far as being a popular thing that, I think, is questionable.

Most of the people were glad to be out from the old country, glad to be part of this country and would prefer t that they not get involved in that sort of thing. It first appeared in the Mexican War. And there were those who wanted the ... all of Mexico added to the United States as separate states and they wanted to see it develop in terms of American culture, but most were uninterested. They simply wanted to secure American freedom for expansion in that area and to dispute Mexico’s claim to the once Spanish departments which were not a part of Mexico, but in dependent departments under Spain. Texas was never under Mexico. California, Arizona, New Mexico, the Spanish Empire had different departments. Mexico was one among a number.

[ Scott ] There was, though, up until World War II a sense that Europe as the cradle of the West and that higher learning really came from there. And to a great extent it was true. I mean it is... don’t forget. This started out as a colony and remained colonial. It didn’t recognize that it was a colonial power, but it was a colonial power even in its independence because it was like ... it was like Oz, the Mexican writer said, he said, “I am not Spanish, but I was raised in the culture of Spain.” And this was not an English country, but it was raised in the culture of England.

That was sort of tacitly acknowledged, but not openly.

[ Rushdoony ] We were very British as a country until the time of Andrew Jackson. The men from Jonathan Edwards and others of his time and before him on for a few generations were learned me who were fully aware of all the scientific development, the philosophical development, the theological trends in Europe and were very well read. But with Jackson’s presidency, the common man, so to speak, came into his own and he was contemptuous of Europe. He was proud of America in a brash, bragging sort of way. And you had the development of the native American movement so that a great many became given to this idea that being an American was being something new in history and we are very proud of it.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true, but there was also the other lingered. My father thought the United States was very much imitative of England when he saw this country. And yet there was ... it was a lot of patriotism and it was accepted. Now I read in the paper that a school district in Florida has decided to instruct its students, public school, that this country is... has a culture that is superior to all others and there are very strong efforts against it, because they figure that is ... that is not true.

[ Rushdoony ] Headed by a teacher in that school who is a Hindu.

[ Scott ] That is great. That is great. But after the war... now we are talking about the changes of World War II, after the war we came out of World War II with a head as large as pumpkin. All the sudden American know how, a dumb phrase which I never heard of before, replacing the word knowledge, suddenly appeared. And we were... we no longer had anything to learn from Europe or any other part of the world. We were going to teach the world. That is what the world... the victory in World War II meant to us. We put the English down in the course of the war. We took over the conduct of the war and, you know, the D Day celebration that they are talking about is, I think, somewhat ironic, because D Day was planned down to the last ship by General Morgan of the English Army. And Mr. Eisenhower or General Eisenhower was given his choice of two days to choose based on the weather reports or predictions on which day we would invade. And he chose the day.

I have never seen General Morgan’s name mentioned in an American publication. And I don't expect it to be mentioned throughout this whole D Day celebration.

And we stopped learning from other countries and it has gotten to such an extent now we won’t even take a medicine that has been proven in western Europe. We have to reprove it here.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that marked the post World War I era was a bitter reaction against Wilson and what he had done so we became isolationist. We began to stress our country and our independence of European quarrels. Well, after World War II there was a very strong sentiment in the same direction. And if it had not been for the radical dishonesty and fraud perpetrated by the Eisenhower Republicans, Taft would have been the nominee and probably the president.

[ Scott ] He would have been a good one.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He would have separated us from the internationalism that has since prevailed and it was only by dishonesty that we were put in this present course.

[ Scott ] Well, Taft was the only one who had had the courage and the intelligence...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... to rise up against the Nuremburg Trials.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He said it is a violation of every principle of justice and it will set the precedent that will endanger us in the future.

[ Rushdoony ] He was one of the greatest me of this century in the United States and you never hear of him.

[ Scott ] They buried him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He...

[ Rushdoony ] I am not even sure there has been a biography of him. There may have been and I haven’t heard of it.

[ Scott ] I don’t believe there has. And now that you bring it up, it would be a wonderful thing to do.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Upton ] So what... what is it that buries a man like Taft would...?

[ Scott ] The press, the media.

[ Upton ] But in theological terms, I mean, is it the fact that we want to control ...

[ Rushdoony ] I think the theological decline that had set in was such that ... and I was familiar with the theolodic... the theological press of the day. It was very hostile to Taft. There was something inherently selfish, they felt, about a man who would not press forward to put the United States at the leadership of a united world. So theologically the churches had declined to the point that they did not see the issues.

In both wars the churches were very, very weak. They bought all the anti German propaganda about the rapes and little children’s hands being cut off in World War I and they bought the internationalism in World War II.

[ Scott ] It was more than that, Rush. They bought... first of all, Roosevelt and his crowd were anti colonial, because they were raised that way. And, you know, we all were, given this... the red coats were the enemy of the United States. Up until 1927 our war games for the navy were against the British navy. And our whole national history has been one of struggle against Great Britain and being anti colonial. But the... to be anti colonial was one thing. Another thing was that it was really western Europe that had the colonies. And so it turned out to be anti white, that white people should not rule colored races, that that was something that was inherently unjust. And that was an extension of Wilson, which came about in the middle of World War II.

Now we went in the war in the first place to beat the Japanese and the Germans and somewhere after we got in it became a war for a better world. And they never spelled out what the better world was going to be. So the whole purpose of the war was changed from a war against the Germans and the Japanese to a war for a new Socialist world.

Now this is still the way it is. Right now, for instance, on D Day I think 50 years after D Day we should have invited the Germans to join because they were there. And we have had 50 years of peace. Now how long is this nonsense going to go on? I think it is dishonorable to have kept the Germans out of this particular recollection.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is nearing an end. Do you have any last observations, John?

[ Upton ] No, it is just interesting being the rose between two thorns here.

[ Scott ] It is a really big rose. More like a cabbage.

[ Upton ] And just listening to you both such a wealth of experience and it was a pleasure to be here.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, any last comments?

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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