Where does the world go from here? A 1948 perspective

This article is taken from the McCook Daily Gazette, January 29, 1948, and I am going to only share what I have room for. The McCook Executives Club featured a speaker, Dr. Beryl D. Orris, a famed psychiatrist and lecturer, to a “record-breaking crowd in the Keystone banquet room”. Dr. Orris’s speech, “Where Does The World Go From Here”, was prefaced with the statement that the question could not be answered until it is determined, “where is it now?”

Where it is now was an appropriate question in 1948. World War II was finally ended, the United States had dropped the first atomic bombs, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, on Japan; the Cold War loomed ahead. To think that anyone in McCook, Nebraska, let alone the McCook Executives Club, would bring in a psychiatrist as a speaker is to me, mind boggling, but they did, and here is part of what he had to say:

“Americanism, he said, can be tested in a person- if you use words in your vocabulary such as bohunk, wop, spic, mick, polack and dago, you are not considered a true American.”

Continuing: “Speaking to the group in a manner which he termed ‘blunt’, Orris explained why he thought so many people claiming to be true Americans are NOT.”

“True patriotism is not talked about, but lived, he said. It is very disturbing to me because everyone has a favorite anti-some-thing. The only way to get over the anti-attitude is to develop a pro attitude-a pro-American.”

“As a psychiatrist, a student of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, Orris said another fault of American people was that they ‘Don’t Think’. When people do think, he said, it has reached the point where they aren’t doing anything but reshuffling their prejudices.”

Having spent the last seven months in Europe, Orris commented on America’s possible role in the rebuilding of that continent: “In Europe, the phrase, American way of life, is misunderstood. You do not use that term or ‘democracy’ too freely because the people fear American imperialism-that we will come in and superimpose the American way of life on them. He blamed the misconception of the term on American films, American tourists, and American GI’s-the latter of which are sometimes bad, but just the same as their fathers in the first war.”

“Now those young people (of Europe) are weighing the two ways of life and deliberating the advantages of the two-totalitarianism and democracy. At the moment their choice seems to be totalitarianism.” (This seems strange to me since the closest synonym for it is dictatorship or tyranny and I watched those documentaries of European cities welcoming the US troops after being liberated from Hitler (dictator), but then we also signed treaties giving Stalin (dictator) a good portion of Europe.)

To close, Dr. Orris said: “We must help the people to help themselves and to ‘Where Does The World Go From Here?’, he answered: ‘Straight ahead. There does not have to be any war. If the everyday peoples ran their own affairs and the government, there would be no wars or poverty. They must prevent their theory of life from becoming ‘shaky’ for no theory is valid unless it can be translated into action.”

Dr. Orris was apparently a sought after speaker, at one other such gathering he added this note: “Fifth columnists and saboteurs are not destroying bridges and munition plants as in the last war, but are creating moral sabotage behind the cloak of patriotism. They are Americans who protest they are 100% Americans. They put group against group and try to weaken us that way.”

As my note to that final thought, he was not talking about any particular group on either side of the questions we are dealing with today, he was talking about no one being able to set a middle ground with someone they disagree with and the media talking heads who accentuate the disagreements and fail to report all the findings to get better ratings. Both sides are guilty.

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