“It is the rule that when one has one’s money invested in a machine, one does not wish to see the machine stand idle; the idleness of the machine means economic ruin.”
Wendell Berry spoke in 1968 about the invention of the atomic bomb and its use in warfare. Why make it if you are not going to use it?
On August 31, Berry, a Kentucky writer, poet, environmentalist, and farmer, passed away at the age of 92. He was a staunch advocate for peace, speaking and writing on the ills of the military complex, especially in the post-atomic bomb era.
Berry delivered a speech at the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft at the University of Kentucky on February 10, 1968. Titled “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” he later published it as an essay in his book “The Long-Legged House.”
“The ultimate madness, of course, is that in order to destroy our enemies we are willing to build at great expense… weapons whose use would inevitably destroy not only our enemies but ourselves and the world,” Berry stated in his speech.
Berry had his own experience with military education. In an interview published in “The New Yorker,” Berry noted his formative years and why war and peace mattered to him so much. When he was fourteen, his parents sent him to the Millersburg Military Institute (MMI) to give a little more discipline to Berry and his unruly brother, John.
Berry’s 1952 senior yearbook shows him as a young man in an orderly cadet’s dress uniform. He is neatly groomed, his hair cropped closely. Berry excelled academically and graduated in 1952, having served as editor-in-chief of the “Communicadet,” the school’s newspaper. He also made the honor roll from 1949 to 1951, and was president of the Wilsonian Literary Society, reaching state-level competitions in public speaking in 1951.
According to Berry, the military school pushed rule-following over having sympathy and intelligence.
“The highest aim of the school was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football,” Berry wrote. “I was once struck by one of the teachers for using a dictionary (not an authorized textbook) during study hall.”
After his four years at MMI, he favored personal intellect over blind obedience.
After Berry completed college and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Italy and France, he turned to writing and teaching for a living. His editor, Jack Shoemaker, said that Berry’s books were popular with free-thinking people concerned about the environment and the civil-rights movement.
Fellow writer Wallace Stegner told Berry, “Your books seem conservative. They are actually profoundly revolutionary.”
Berry’s time at the Millersburg Military Institute must have contributed to those revolutionary thoughts.
“One of the ugliest characteristics of modern warfare is its almost exclusive dependence on the young… to teach killing to men too young to have fully understood what it might mean to live, much less to kill or to die,” Berry told his audience at UK in 1968.
At that speech, he also spoke of the global fear of the atomic bomb. “The atomic bomb – that ‘unthinkable’ weapon that we claim to shrink from using – was, in fact, used by us before it had in any meaningful sense ever been heard of,” he said.
Berry feared that the more nuclear nations would become mired in war, the closer they would be to using the bomb again.
One of the most profound statements that Berry made in that 1968 speech was how unwilling our society is to create peace.
“Our world is a failure of imagination… we spend seventy percent of our revenue on weapons – and so prove beyond doubt that we cannot imagine a better solution than violence,” he said.
If that seventy percent was spent on peace, Berry imagined what our world would be like today and for those who are to inherit it.
Berry made it clear what people can do to institute change. “I am deeply moved that today’s meeting is taking place here in my State of Kentucky, for it means that the principle of thoughtful criticism and dissent, so indispensable to democracy, is alive here and may grow to be yet more alive.”
He believed that peaceful protests, coupled with charity and brotherhood, offer a more powerful response to violence.
“In promoting the cause of public peace, we should not neglect the equally difficult task of making ourselves peaceable,” Berry said.
Considering Berry’s recent death, the 1968 speech speaks to how he lived his life and how he wrote. For peace to prevail, we need to find peace within ourselves and show mercy toward each other as well as the world we live in.
Finally, Berry shows that there is room to grow. Through this speech and his writing, his legacy lives on for future generations.
Andrew Dickson is a Army retiree with 23 years in service and serves as the Military History Consultant at the Kentucky Historical Society.