A Christmas Letter from Snohomish, Washingtons legendary JOHN PATRIC to my wife Jaymes grandma in 1940: NOTE: THIS IS GOOD. WORTH THE READ To Mrs. Irving McCready, Snohomish, Washington (Mailed with 3 individual, half-cent stamps by the way) AN EARLY HOLIDAY GREETING IN 1940 FROM JOHN PATRIC The sending of Christmas cards must be a pleasant chore even for those of you I envy most-you who live in small towns and who may talk to most of your friends whenever you choose. I cannot. For ten years Ive been a homeless tramp. Were I to give a party, ask the people I like best, and send boats and busses and airplanes for them-something Ive dreamed of-it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Christmas cards have been my poor substitute. Some of you have been getting them from me for many years. Youve had birchbark cards from Canada; youve had tiny watercolors from Japan; youve had penny postcards from a Texas town where I went without meals to buy them; youve had lousy poems I wrote and printed myself; youve had feather-adorned folders from Germany; marked Drucksache to save a few pfennigs; youve had photographs of an older tramp than I who looks as I may look someday; youve had sheets of proof paper from Washington, D. C.; youve had postcard photos of a Christmas dinner in Hungary that was lovely in more ways than one. Sometimes Ive been flattered and told that my Christmas cards-always so strange and so different have become a tradition I must not abandon. So, as long as I have money to buy them, or lacking it, the hands to make them myself, Ill continue them. But this year, with so much at stake in November, Im using my Christmas card money to try to help Mr. Willkies election. Please note again the second paragraph of this letter. Some of you will remember those cards, and the postmarks they bore. You may remember other postmarks from personal cards Ive written to you from Manchukuo, from Mexico, from Morocco, or from the frontiers of a Russia I could not enter with my camera. Youll remember postcards from every state in my own America. Some of you who know me best will say: Patrics off again-he gets more anti-New Deal all the time. And that is true. I am bitter toward Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for he is slowly destroying, it seems to me, the things that made my country the greatest land on earth. Consider again those postmarks. Among them were Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Norway-happy little countries once. Represented were Czechoslovakia that perished as a nation, Finland which did not, and poor old China, which became a Republic only in our own time. Represented were England, fighting now for her life, and three of those countries where the rule of Government over Men is absolute-Italy, Germany, and Japan. Those are the nations whose rulers, hungry for more men to rule, have just signed a treaty directed against our own United States. My postmarks say nothing about my judgement. Nor can I. The postmarks say only one thing: Patric, whos been there, must have seen something. And having indeed seen many things, I believe that the policy of the Roosevelt administration, taken as a whole, has carried us far toward the worst of the things so observable in these totalitarian lands. They arent strong lands, really. Theyre all weak lands-pitifully weak. Theyre weak lands made strong in the sense that a ragged wreck of a dope fiend, waving the pistol that is his only possession, is stronger while he has that pistol than is the man who runs the blacksmith shop. The strength of these United States has been that it owned the blacksmith shop, not the gun. Well get the gun, whoever is President, But if only we can keep the blacksmith shop, too! If we can keep it, and the freedom to run it, in years to come we shall be a richer and stronger land with more freedom than ever before. I wish I could show you, or describe to you, or send you pictures of some of the things Ive seen-of the miserable way of life of the people in countries where the Government runs every-everything. I wish I could make you see how little initiative there is, how much coercion is necessary to make people do anything, how many things of daily necessity are taxed at double or triple or even quadruple their honest prices to raise the money necessary to run the topheavy Governments of those countries. I couldnt write about it while I worked for the Geographic, for that is a magazine of friendship and good will, and these things are too horrible for its pages. When a Japanese, an Italian, or a German emigrated to America, what happened? He become more prosperous than he was in his homeland, and sometimes even more prosperous than we, for his habits of hard work, so necessary in the old country where the Government took from him everything except a bare living, were too strong to drop at once. Before I started wandering, the expression standard of living meant little to me. It means plenty to me now, for Ive seen the difference between the way free men live and the way men live when they have given up their freedom for something else. We acquired a high standard of living because business could work for us, and us alone, to provide us with more and more of lifes good things at lower and lower prices. It had to do that to prosper. Business works much harder, and keeps longer hours, in Japan and Italy and Germany than it does here. But the Japanese, the Italians, and the Germans-bright people all-have less than we do principally because they must work mostly for their rulers. As I see it now, Mr. Roosevelt believes that the American Government, led by him and the yes-men around him, can do everything better than a free people can. In other words, he believes that the bureaucratic ways of countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, where the Government is master of the people, are better ways than ours, where the Government has been the servant of free men. Mr. Roosevelt, in the golden radio voice that contrasts so with the plain one of Mr. Willkie, may deplore the ways of the Dictators. Nevertheless, he has been copying those ways, one after another, for seven years. The New Deal is not new to the Old World. And it seems to me he may be intending to copy them in still other ways we dont yet know about. And when I say that Roosevelt is going the way of the Dictators, I say it thoughtfully, after having roamed long in the lands of these Dictators, and after having observed their ways for myself. Years ago in Salt Lake I had a chat with Franklin Roosevelt; I once had lunch with Benito Mussolini. They are fellows you instinctively trust. Ive never met Adolf Hitler, but he must be like that, too, or he wouldnt have been elected the first three times. I hope youll work all you can for Mr. Willkie, and for the American way of life in which he believes. If hes elected, Ill send you another Christmas card in December. If hes defeated, I just wont have the heart. Sincerely, John Patric (signed) *** Despite my funny-sounding fb name, Im a real person. -john t kartak
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 05:04:37 +0000