Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid
I first read this amazing book for the first time more that 30 years ago.
Since then I have read and reviewed more than 500 five-star books. I only review books worthy of a five star rating.
Eric Sevareid is unquestionably a stand alone gifted writer, thinker, and analytical intellectual. Rereading his sensational masterpiece was again an enlightening and rewarding experience worthy of more than five stars.
EXCERPTS:
I suspect I had a deeper and truer intuition for what would come to the world than I have today. And it seems to me my youthful judgments on the individual movers and shakers have held up well. By no means did I foresee every development; not the quick reemergence of Japan as an economic power; not the rapidity with which the Chinese Communists conquered that immensity of people; not the strange paralysis of Britain which I had implicitly assumed would lead Europe into a new way of life. But my sense of the innate strength of the culture of the individual in its historic basin, the West, seems justified now. Ed Murrow had speculated, as the lights came on again in London, that the British would be critically torn between the Russian way and the Western way, but I could not believe that, even then. It was the Germans at the heart of Europe whom I did not trust. This was partly a matter of the stomach as it was with so many Americans who saw and smelled the horrors, and partly the feeling that there was, indeed, a special knot in their spirit, a simmering self-hatred. For years afterwards I could not visit Germany and feel at ease. But in the spring of 1975 I traveled to Bonn to talk with Willy Brandt, the chancellor who had dropped to his knees before the monument to the slaughtered Jews of Warsaw.
He was the authentic “good German” I had known among the neighbors in my boyhood village. I found a freshness, a guiltlessness, even a rich humor in the new, young generation of Germans. I felt at ease among them. I believed in them, because there is a certain duty to believe, but the tiny remaining doubt will not go away.
We did very much to give Europe another chance, to push Japan and Germany and Italy off in new directions. We have touched a great many other places with economic modernity and their ordinary people are not the worse for this, and many are better. No great power ever tried harder or more generously and it does not matter so much in the long run that much of the effort was for private gain. I had been correct in my wartime guess that our most forceful extensions into the world would be those of military America and business America, not those of the evangelical minded. Military America made the greater blunders because business is flexible enough to take and to give, to advance and retreat. It does not want people’s souls, as do the intellectuals; it does not want their obedience as...
John Kennedy pledged that we, with their cooperation, would lift the load of poverty from Latin America’s people in ten years’ time, yet we have not lifted it from the people of Harlem, New York, nor from the Puerto Ricans, our intimate wards. I have come to agree with George Kennan: “To many this view may seem to smack of cynicism and reaction,” he said. “I cannot share these doubts. Whatever is realistic in concept and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are cannot be illiberal.”
We were not born to be imperialists; we never learned the style, and the time for this is gone. We understand the concept of citizen, not that of subject. There is only one true imperium now, that of the Soviet Union.
I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a classless society; later, I watched at first hand its manifestations in several countries. It occurred to me then that what men wanted was Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways of all the West and Middle West. I was to hear the intelligentsia of eastern America, of England and France, speak often of our Middle West with a certain contempt, with a joke in their minds. They contemned its tightness, its dullness, its bedrock of intolerance. They have much to learn, these gentlemen. For we had, in those severely limited places, an intolerance also of snobbery, of callousness, of crookedness, of men who kicked other men around. The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.
They had no other standard by which to measure except the past. And what had the past been? It had been sod huts, a diet of potatoes and gruel. It had been the hot winds in summer that shriveled the crops, and the blizzards of winter that killed the cattle, that brought the pneumonia and influenza that killed their women and children, while the stricken men turned the pages of a home medical guide and waited for the doctor who lived twenty miles away. It had been the gnarled men who sweated beside a kerosene lamp to learn the grammar of their new country’s language. It had been the handing on from neighbor to neighbor of a few volumes of the classics, a few eastern newspapers three months old. It had been the one-room schoolhouse in a corner of my grandfather’s homestead, where a “bright” aunt could occasionally be prevailed upon to teach the rudiments to tired boys and girls, who had risen before dawn to lug the slops because the family could not afford a hired man.
They came together in villages and put paint on the boards of their houses. They planted green trees, made a park as best they could. They put their money together and hired for their children teachers who knew a little more. They sent some sons away to come back with the knowledge of medicine and the law. They built hospitals and colleges. The colleges were not Harvard nor Oxford, but they saw that the right books were there. They thought they had done well. Who, in his present comfort and easy knowledge, is now to sneer? They were of the men who built America; they are now of the men who keep America. They are America.
