This is just an aside to the unfortunate person who may one day transcribe these rolls. I don’t want you to think that I have an amazing memory for the quotes I’m rattling off. I have extensive scrapbooks of speeches and press clips that I am often reviewing and even putting together while using the Dictaphone. My memory is good, but not that good.
Shortly after the convention, I resigned my job as Personal Aide to Vice President Henry A. Wallace. I am now the Personal Aide for Vice Presidential Candidate Henry A. Wallace.
I am reprising my role from the 1940 campaign. In fact, it was the 1940 campaign that earned me the position in the Vice President’s Office. Because of my logistics skills, from moving the field hospital in Spain to organizing farmers in Iowa, I was hired for the 1940 campaign. F.D.R. wanted H.A. to be the primary campaigner while he, F.D.R., remained aloof from the fray. The campaign was a driving and train tour all over the nation. H.A. would deliver a half-dozen speeches each day to enthusiastic crowds.
The goal of the 1944 campaign is to replicate this successful model.
However, I remember that the 1940 campaign had barely even started when we were almost torpedoed. Embarrassing letters that H.A. wrote to a bizarre guru, Nicholas Roerich, and his staff members were given to the Republicans.
Roerich is a Russian émigré, a painter, a peace activist, and a mystic. H.A. became friends with Roerich and corresponded about his religious beliefs.
H.A. does not hold the traditional religious beliefs of his Iowa neighbors.
Religion is the one of three areas, the others are his vegetarianism and tea totaling, where I don’t understand H.A. H.A. is a very evidence based man, he looks to science for the answers to earthly problems, but with religion he trusts his intuition. However, he does approach his search for the metaphysical world as he does for the physical world. Openness and experimentation. He is open to learning about and experiencing a variety of religious expressions, regardless of how odd the person presenting the idea, enter Roerich, is seen by the general public or how the general public might respond to the religious idea itself.
H.A.’s family were members of the United Presbyterian Church. But following his grandfather’s death – remember he was a minister and patriarch of the family – H.A. began his religious explorations. He read Ralph Waldo Emerson and his followers and H.A. embraced the idea that a divine spiritual force flowed through all living things. He also attended Roman Catholic services and enjoyed the mass for its traditional performance (I too enjoy the vestments and the incense – but their politics, especially in Spain, where the Church sided with the fascists – are completely unacceptable). H.A. studied séances, religious symbols and rituals, astrology, native and Asian religions, secret societies, and mysticism – items that the average Protestant Iowa farmer, and American, would find odd and even scary.
H.A. is formally a member of the Episcopal church; however, “Real religion” H.A. told me, had nothing to do with “church-going, or charity, or any other outward manifestation of what is popularly called religion.” Religion is a far more all encompassing power, “whereby man reaches out toward God in an effort to find the spiritual power to express here on earth in a practical way the divine potentialities in himself and his fellow beings.”
H.A. became so friendly with Roerich that he sent him on an expedition to Manchuria to collect seeds and plants for the Department of Agriculture. It was during this expedition that H.A. and Roerich parted as friends. Apparently, Roerich used the trip to promote himself rather than collecting specimens for the government.
H.A.’s publicity men prepared materials to counter the release of the Roerich letters, but if released, the letters would be very damaging.
Fortunately, F.D.R. and his skilled political fixers threatened to retaliate against the Republicans if the letters were released. Apparently, Wendell Willkie [1940 Republican nominee for president -A.S.] had a mistress [Irita Van Doren, the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune -A.S.]. However, everyone thought that H.A.’s religious peculiarities would be more damaging than exposing Willkie’s infidelities. A campaign staffer claimed that when hearing of the scandal, F.D.R. said, “We can handle sex, but we can’t handle religion.” Fortunately, a truce between the camps was established and the letters were withheld from the public.
F.D.R.’s fixers assure us that we have nothing to worry about for this election.
I personally have no use for religion. I just don’t buy it. Having seen first-hand the cruelty of man both here in the States and in Spain, if the divine runs through all living things, or is sitting up in heaven looking down at us, then it is doing a really crappy job of inspiring or encouraging tolerable behavior. There is no divinity in life, there is just life. There is no divine plan for life, we just follow our instincts for self-preservation and the continuation of our species. Sadly, many people, most of whom have strong religious convictions, follow their baser instincts and make life difficult and sometimes impossible for others.
I also have no use for the secular religions of the Market and History. Those adherents of laissez-faire capitalism, with its mystical and magical invisible hand that directs sellers and buyers, are no more rational than fundamentalist Bible-thumpers. These religionists think that if the Market is left undisturbed it will take us to an economic promised land. The same can be said of the adherents of Marx’s dialectial materialism where the inevitable forces of History will produce a communist classless society. The only inevitable thing is that all religions, even the secular ones, have authoritative priesthoods whose job it is to direct our lives. Since they are all false, I oppose all priesthoods. I want to direct my own life – but thank you very much for offering.
Okay, that was preachy. But just to end my sermon – No Gods, No Masters! Remember I’m still an anarchist. Just a closeted one.
© 2011 Ron Millar
© 2011 Ron Millar
