This scathing address delivered by Dr. Jordan at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the National Industrial Conference Board, 16 May 1946, one year after the end of World War II.
He writes:
Today it is hard for anyone to forget the want, waste and woe, and the wreckage of the world’s hope of reconstruction, reconversion and peace that have come with the ruthless struggle for power and plunder abroad and at home which has followed the end of the war only a few months ago. And it will be harder, I feel sure, two weeks from now, to forget the sacrifice of those million American sons and brothers who fell or suffered for something other than all this on the battlefields of that war.
Whatever we may say to those sons and brothers of ours on Memorial Day, if we are candid with ourselves we must admit that in the deepest sense we have lost this war more utterly than we lost the last one, in terms of the moral and economic issues by which we justified it. The American people gained a glorious victory on the field of battle and on the production front, but they must know in their hearts today that they have suffered humiliating defeat in the field of ideas and ideals, and now stand in greater danger of losing their freedom than they did five years ago.
