Plea from the past

A call for spiritual strength in 1940 offers a lesson for today's appeasers | Joe Loconte

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

To get a sense of how far, and for how long, liberal elites have strayed from America's bedrock moral and religious propositions, find a copy of Fortune magazine, circa 1940. An editorial in January of that year—the year of the Nazi Blitzkrieg in Europe—complained of a "declining emphasis on spiritual values."

Yes, the editors of this icon of free-market capitalism lamented a drift away from the transcendent truths that helped bring American democracy into being. Even more remarkable, Fortune's lay prophets directed their anger at the nation's religious leadership. "We are asked to turn to the Church for our enlightenment," they wrote, "but when we do so we find that the voice of the Church today is the echo our own voices."

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March 13, 2010, Vol. 25, No. 5

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