Books › Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941 › scan 1
Scan 1
Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941
38 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1An editorial for the writers (and readers) of America.
3The Sixth Column
5Copyright, 1941, by the Saturday Review Co., Inc.
6Reprinted by courtesy of the publisher.
8We quote from a leaflet published by the National Conference of Christians and Jews:
10Who Are We of the United States?
11"We of the United States are:
12One-third of a million, Indian
13One-third of a million, Oriental, Filipino, and Mexican.
1460 million, Anglo-Saxon; 10 million, Irish
1515 million, Teutonic; 9 million, Slavic
165 million, Italian; 4 million, Scandinavian
172 million, French; 13 million, Negro
181 million each, Finn, Lithuanian, Greek
19In addition, we are:
202 million, Anglican Episcopalian
2140 million, Evangelical Protestant
221 million, Greek Catholic
234½ million, Jew
24Two-thirds of a million, Mormon
25One-tenth of a million, Quaker
2622 million, Roman Catholic
27One-half million, Christian Scientist."
29What an extraordinary invitation to racial and religious intolerance! What a magnificent opportunity to put racial and religious intolerance where it belongs—on the dump heap of prejudices destroyed by common sense! For no American can read this table of statistics without realizing that racial and religious intolerance in the United States is dynamite—guaranteed, if it explodes, to blow up everyone. If you do not know the American history of intolerance, read it, and you will learn that, from the beginning, this country has always had to combat intolerance, and that our success in achieving a workable unity has been absolutely conditioned by victory, again and again and often by the narrowest margin, in a struggle to hold down a tide of prejudice, that always rises once more, that has been thrown back, and will be thrown back once more, because, if it washes over us, we can no longer function as a nation. It makes little difference which intolerance is uppermost, or whether the cause is fear or economic jealousy or morbid pride or sick self-distrust; the result will always be the same. Father Coughlin cannot attack the Jewish minority without arousing anti-Catholicism. Where the Negro is most oppressed, other prejudices flourish like narcotic weeds. If the bell of intolerance tolls for one, it tolls for all.
31The record of American writers in attacking the rank superstitions preying upon American unity is excellent. But the time has come for them to adopt new tactics. We have heard so much of the sufferings of the Jew, the Negro, the Indian, the Balkan steel worker, the poor white, that we grow callous—and, what is more dangerous, defeatist. The sufferings, the injustices, are real. But they are always depicted as the sufferings of minorities. What about the majorities?
33Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, with their tools of research, are not the first to discover that intolerance, in the long run, is as destructive for the intolerant as for his victim. Anti-Semitism may be an injury to the Semite, but it is a disease for the anti-Semite. As Erskine Caldwell (and many another) has powerfully shown, the violent determination in certain communities to hold the Negro down and back has had appalling results for the whites, who, in the attempt to save white supremacy, have become decadent and slipped far below the level of white populations elsewhere. In a country made up of such elements as the table above describes, it should be clear that the Catholic, Jew, Protestant, the "old American," Greek, German, Serb, or Negro, who lets his religious or racial prejudices go uncontrolled, is taking slow poison—maybe not so slow. But is it clear?
35We doubt it, and urge the creative American writer, and his partner, the creative American reader, to cultivate this field for the imagination in which subtler dangers lurk than in Uncle Tom's cabin or the wayside camp of the migrant laborer. This great theme for America, of what happens to minds diseased by prejudice, of what happens to a complex country that lets fanatics and the too human ignorant slash at leg and arm and liver and heart in order to stop a headache, this great theme is not one on which books can be written to order. If written to order they will not be read. It is not necessary to order them; they will write themselves once the American imagination becomes aware of the dramatic danger which threatens our majorities. In this battle against the new Know Nothings, the ammunition will come from the social scientists, who have plenty in stock; but if the country is to realize what the Sixth Column in our midst is blindly trying to accomplish, it must be made to see and feel a crisis—and that is a job for literature.
37Henry Seidel Canby
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.