We were not a united people and were not mature enough, in war years, to face our disunion. When we become mature we will discover that unity means agreement as to purpose, consent as to methods, and willingness to function. All the parts of the motor car have to do their work, or the car will not run well; that is their unity; and our unity will bring every one of us jobs to do for which we have to prepare. We can remember Pearl Harbor with banners and diamond clasps, but until we forget Pearl Harbor and do the work which national unity requires of us, we will still be children playing a war game--and still persuading ourselves that we can't lose. _The Background of Disunion_ In the urgency of the moment no one asked how it happened that the United States were not a united people. No one wondered what had happened to us in the past twenty years to make religious and racial animosities, political heresy-hunts, and class hatreds so common that they were used not only by demagogues, but by men responsible to the nation. No one asked whether the unity we had always assumed was ever a real thing, not a politician's device, for use on national holidays only. And, when the disunion of the people's leaders began to be apparent, and the people began to be ill-at-ease--then they were told to remember Pearl Harbor, or that we were all united really, but were helping our country best by constructive criticism. The fatal circumstance of our disunity we dared not face. No one who _could_ unite the people was willing to work out the basis of unity--and everyone left it to the President, as if in the strain of battle, a general were compelled to orate to the troops. The President's work was to win over our enemies; it should not have been necessary for him to win us over, too. The situation is grave because we have no tradition of early defeat and ultimate victory; we have no habit of national feeling, so that when hardships fall on us we feel alone, and victimized. We do not know what "all being in the same boat" really signifies; we will, of course, pull together if we are shipwrecked; but the better way to win wars is to avoid shipwrecks, not to survive them. We cannot improvise a national unity; we can only capitalize on gusts of anger or jubilation, from day to day--these are the tactics of war propaganda, not its grand strategy. For our basic unity we have to go where it already exists, we have to uncover a great mother-lode of the true metal, where it has always been; we have to _remind_ ourselves of what we have been and are, so that our unity will come from within ourselves, and not be plastered on like a false front. For it is only the strength inside us that will win the war and create a livable world for us when we have won it.