Hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. He has tried to turn dissent into disunion--and he has been helped by some of the most loyal and patriotic Americans almost as much as he has been helped by bundists. We have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of human action in which difference is vital with the areas in which difference is a mortal danger. The moment we saw the direction of Hitler's drive, which was to magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more we were at odds. The results were serious enough. No policy governing production had been accepted by industry; No policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that it was operating smoothly; No great stock of vital raw materials was laid up; No great stock of vital war machinery had been created; No keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an integrated part of American thought; No awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an integrated part of military and naval thought. To this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had brought us--but it had, none the less, failed. For the purpose of disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter the war. What we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a source of strength. It is the counterpart of the great scientific methods of exploration, comparison, proof. Our dissents mean that we continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this "dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the error of _change before production_ which stalled our aircraft program of 1917 was not repeated.) _Why We Can't Use Hitler_