Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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The New Yorker's "Hiroshima": Tiffany Diamonds, Caribbean Cruises, and the Atomic Bomb / Christopher D. Craig

 

Abstract: This article explores the limitations of John Hersey's influential account of the effects of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. This is done by foregrounding the consumerist iconography of New Yorker advertisements, which ran alongside "Hiroshima" in August 1946, as a symbol of the contradictions of post-war liberalism.  Hersey’s journalistic ethic and aesthetic of "immediacy" runs up against a dominant discourse capable of framing even socially critical sentiment as but one more commodity.

 

-- Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

 

I

<1> On August 31, 1946, The New Yorker published John Hersey's "Hiroshima." In order to encourage its readership to reflect on the moral and political impact of the atomic bomb, the magazine declared, as Norman Cousins put it, a "moratorium in its regular publishing," setting aside its usual variety of essays, stories, poems, and cartoons (Shadows 305). But while it cleared out its entire editorial space for all 30,000 words of Hersey's text, it also included its normal assortment of advertisements. Ads for luxury ocean cruises, diamond jewelry, Fifth Avenue fashions, and a myriad of domestic products border the columns of "Hiroshima." The ads enclose much of the article and complicate its meaning. They suggest that Hersey's account of the bombing should be read through the lens of American consumer capitalism. The juxtaposition of the suffering, death, and destruction depicted in "Hiroshima" and the upper-middle class lifestyles represented in photographs and portraits of massive ocean liners cruising Caribbean-blue seas and sparkling diamond rings adorning women's delicate white fingers alludes to the relationship between the bomb and some of the priorities of American imperialism.

<2> On the one hand, as a piece of journalism, "Hiroshima" claims objectivity, manifested in and by its factual account of the lives of six survivors of the bombing and its direct literary style. According to widely accepted notions of the article, its truth-claims attempt to humanize the hated Japanese of wartime propaganda, along with the German Christians who aided them, and illuminate the extent of the bomb's destructive power. In the process, "Hiroshima" challenges the morality of the bombing by describing an apocalyptic world where many surviving Japanese civilians wander the ruins like zombies and the dead float bloated in rivers or lie strewn across roads congested with rubble. On the other hand, the ads collaborate with certain aspects of the magazine, as well as The New Yorker readers' actual lived experience, to legitimate the reality of the upper-middle class lifestyle which they represent. They happily suggest that privileged Americans have returned to a life of leisure and comfort, enjoying exclusive consumer products made available in large part by the war's end.

<3> From this perspective, the bomb becomes at once an occasion for regret and celebration, a symbol of betrayal and loyalty, the painful acknowledgment of the abuses of American military and scientific superiority and the comforting assurance of an American way of life that privileges wealth and good taste. However problematic these contradictions may seem, the magazine resolves them through a process Fredric Jameson calls "compensatory exchange" (287). By publishing "Hiroshima" along with its advertisements, the New Yorker arouses fear, anxiety, and guilt about the bomb, while it simultaneously directs those feelings toward consumer products which may alleviate them. It awakens within its early postwar readers "otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses" that it manages and defuses. Ideal readers are encouraged to exchange the gratifications offered in the advertisements and the products themselves – the utopian fantasy-promises of self-worth, love, and collective freedom – for their consent to passivity, their willingness to accept quietly the bombing as a necessary response to alleged threats to democracy and their own privileged lifestyles. These utopian gratifications allow readers to feel as though they have transcended the values consistent with the narrow limits of class privilege and assuage the unpleasant feelings engendered by "Hiroshima's" critical attitude toward the bomb.

<4> Thus even, indeed, especially, at the magazine's most socially conscious moment, its resolution to this contradiction collapses what Mary F. Corey eloquently calls "the possession of goods and the quality of goodness" (39). In the process, it contributes to a larger cultural narrative that legitimates and naturalizes the values associated with a socially conscious consumer society. At a moment when intellectuals and politicians were assuming unprecedented cultural leadership, many of them advocated for the development of a high-consumption economy in order to combat social inequality. "Consumption," argued the liberal Alvin Henson, "is the frontier of the future" (Brinkley, 98 & 108). By late 1946, the idea of a socially conscious consumer society was becoming hegemonic. Most Americans willingly participated in a form of consumer capitalism that liberals and conservatives claimed would provide full employment and assure social equality (Brinkley, 112). At the dawn of the atomic age, Thorstein Veblen's notion of conspicuous consumption took on ironic social significance. For an established liberal upper-middle class and a rapidly growing middle class, the wife's new Tiffany diamond not only symbolized one's wealth but also one's social care. In this atmosphere of commodified good will, to many of The New Yorker's liberal readers, encountering a critical account of the bombing of Hiroshima among advertisements for ocean liners, Fords, and single-malt Scotch Whiskey may have seemed as natural as discussing the dangers of Western Imperialism while lying on the sandy beaches of the Bahamas.

<5> Yet the magazine's resolutions to its antinomical impulses necessarily leave a trace of the contradictions it attempts to resolve, the telling excess of what Jameson calls its ideologeme, "the imaginary resolution of the objective contradictions to which it thus constitutes an active response" (118). This mark identifies the objective contradictions of an early postwar liberalism, the ideological narrative that allowed a liberal, privileged-class America to recuse itself from actively opposing the bomb without humiliation.

<6> In this essay, I demonstrate how the New Yorker boldly indicts the dropping of the atomic bomb, even as it simultaneously celebrates the U.S occupation of Japan. This complex liberal position on the bombing emerges as a socio-political need to resolve the contradiction between the violent expression of American Imperialism and the spread of democracy and freedom. The Truman administration pitched the bombing of Hiroshima as the necessary military action to end the war and save American lives. But even before the publication of the New Yorker's "Hiroshima" issue, progressive critics like Norman Cousins and P.M.S. Blackett suggested a less humanitarian motivation, calling the bomb a "diplomatic weapon." They argued that it was intended to discourage Russian expansion around the world and provide America with the means to rise to global power. As I will argue, The New Yorker denies this position by publishing "Hiroshima" – an article that subtly defends the bombing even as it opposes it – along with its advertisements – whose wide range of products symbolizes freedom of choice and confirms the benefits of living in a democratic society – in order to offer readers a hopeful resolution to the bomb's devastation.

<7> As other critics have pointed out, in the face of violent racism toward the Japanese, "Hiroshima" humanizes the victims and survivors of the bombing. Covering a year in the lives of six of those survivors, the article charts the progress of Mrs. Nakamura, Mr. Tanimoto, Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, and Dr. Sasaki, as they go from being bewildered members of a defeated nation to prosperous citizens of a new country. In the process, it compels its readership to follow these men and women as they recover from their various wounds and losses. Along the way, each survivor becomes a quirky individual with thoughts and feelings, representing a complex cross-section of Japan's rich culture and society. Through the stories of these people, Hersey hopes to bring the full effects of the bombing to his American readership: while the U.S. has been involved in a bloody war with the Japanese military, the people who have paid the ultimate price for that war are everyday civilians, people, Hersey emphasizes, not unlike his own readers. At a moment when popular references to the bombing glorified America's military might, "Hiroshima" attempted to raise the consciousness of American citizens by asking them to consider the loss of humanity created by the bomb. Those who died and suffered from the bombing were not nameless, faceless numbers but people's mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Their loss and suffering, Hersey implies, should be treated with respect and sorrow, not celebration and joy.

<8> But as liberal ideology which expresses a complex position on the bombing, Hersey's "Hiroshima" is also the site of struggle, the location of competing definitions of reality, where various narratives attempt to establish dominant meaning. These narratives battle each other, along with the actual event itself, in order to gain discursive control over the magazine's account of the bombing. By establishing what Jameson calls "strategies of containment" – the repression of certain textual impulses in favor of advancing others – the article imposes structural limitations on meaning in order to manage its competing tendencies. Failing to achieve full closure, however, it "leaks" information that reveals its ostensible unity and marks "the limits of [its] specific ideological consciousness" (47).

<9> In fact, "Hiroshima" describes a ghastly world of horrors, a dystopian wasteland, where the "rank on rank of the burned and the bleeding" shuffle mindlessly among the dead (31); yet it also imagines a world of hope, an expression of what Jameson would call its "Utopian dimension," the celebration of "the renewal of the social order and its salvation . . . from unworthy leadership" ("Reification" 140). According to "Hiroshima," the bomb has irrevocably altered Japanese society and culture, killing a hundred thousand Japanese and afflicting and poisoning tens-of-thousands more with radiation. But in its wake lies the opportunity for a new beginning, one that includes life in a reformed, democratic society, free of the limitations imposed by an imperial, arguably fascist, government and full of the bounties of a free-market economy. The article's representations of the violent consequences of the blast may implicitly serve as an indictment of the Truman Administration's decision to drop the bomb. But its celebration of the occupation prohibits it from interrogating the motivations for that decision beyond Truman's own claims that he needed to end the war. Unlike Cousins, for example, who, two months prior to the publication of "Hiroshima," argued that the bombings had been unnecessary because they symbolized America's attempt to "checkmate Russian expansion" in Asia (June 46, 5-7), "Hiroshima" remains silent on the bomb's use as a so-called "diplomatic weapon." As a result, it ultimately conspires, however unwittingly, with Truman Administration propagandists, whose rebuttals to the article not only allowed them to defend the bombing persuasively but also to elide the bomb's status as a vehicle for the expansion of U.S. imperialism and America's rise to global power.

<10> That "Hiroshima" opposes the bombing but supports the occupation may not seem surprising. After all, World War II was a popular war. The evil Nazi regime and the fanatical Japanese empire represented a collective enemy intent on advancing fascism, totalitarianism, racism, and unimaginable brutality around the world. In contrast to these countries, the United States saw itself, as Secretary of Navy, Ralph Bard once said, "as a great humanitarian nation" (Sherwin 223). It was fighting to preserve and establish liberty, the noblest American principle of all, in Europe, the Far East and all over the globe. After the war, the Truman Administration pitched the occupation as a U.S. effort to liberate a defeated people from its wicked government, to remake Japan, as Monica Braw notes, "in the image of the Americans" (145), in order to assure the peace and promote democracy.

<11> The bomb, however, had tarnished America's image as a "humanitarian nation;" hence, Hersey's support of the occupation seems somewhat problematic. America had claimed that its newly gained global power would assure world peace. But didn't the bomb make it difficult to accept this claim? Hadn't the bomb, a weapon capable of unprecedented violence, killing in a flash as many civilians as it had taken the Nazis months to murder in their gas chambers, been the means by which America threatened the rest of the world – in particular the Soviet Bloc – and secured its global power? It was painfully obvious to several of Hersey's contemporaries, men like Cousins, Wilfred Burchett, and P.M.S Blackett, who also opposed the bombing, that the United States had used the bomb as the means to deter Russian expansion. What kept "Hiroshima," a text clearly invested in interrogating the bomb's "terrible implications," from arriving at the same conclusions?

<12> The tensions that result from the article's account of the bombing derive from what "Hiroshima" says as well as what it cannot say. The impossibility of accounting for the entirety of the event leaves gaps in the article in which powerful silences reside. They manifest themselves in nearly every aspect of "Hiroshima," including its one-word title, which mystifies the article's content even as it makes a claim to totality. [1] Faced with the challenge of finding a language for arguably the most inexplicable single act of violence in the world's history, Hersey, as Alan Nadel notes, shuns "the generalized perspective that tends to diminish suffering on the human scale" (58). Avoiding abstract representations of the bombing, Hersey recounts the experiences of six survivors of the blast almost entirely from their point of view. This approach allows him to humanize the victims and survivors of the bomb. As the courageous Mr. Tanimoto remarks while dragging grotesquely injured victims from a damaged boat in the Kyo River, "these are human beings" (28).

<13> In an interview with Michael Yavenditti, Hersey claims that after touring Hiroshima in preparation for his article, he left with a "sense of revulsion toward the weapon, a compassion for its victims, and a deliberately understated admiration for the survivors as fellow human beings" (292). In order to convey these sentiments, he chose a tight, understated literary style which he believed would heighten rather than diminish the emotional impact of both his article and the bomb. "The flat style was deliberate," Hersey wrote, "and I still think it was right to adopt it . . . a high literary manner, or show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator; I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader's experience would be as direct as possible" (Boyer 208). Claiming to be concerned only with connecting his readers to the immediate experiences of the bomb's victims and survivors, Hersey "did not wish" to write as "a propagandist or polemicist or spokesman for groups interested in atomic energy" (Yavenditti 291); he simply wanted to tell his survivor's stories.

<14> Hersey's claim to provide his readers with an account of the bombing that avoids mediation suggests that historical events exist outside representation. There is no denying that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we cannot comprehend these events outside of language. Our recognition and interpretation of them necessarily requires representation. As Jameson famously notes: "History is only accessible to us in narrative form" (Political Unconscious 20). Hersey's attempt to escape the necessity to mediate the bombing of Hiroshima may simply reflect a belief in the transparency of plain language. But the article's aesthetic qualities nevertheless represent an editorial choice that instructs readers to experience "Hiroshima" as "reality."

<15> Moreover, to deny the political aspects of the bomb is itself a political gesture. Jameson argues that any attempt to distinguish cultural texts that are overtly political from those that are not "becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life" (PU 20). Given his subject matter, Hersey's "wish" is as impossible to achieve as it is dangerous. His emphasis on only six survivors of the blast reifies notions of the autonomy of the individual and separates the victims and survivors from the very historical forces that have given rise to their suffering. Hersey's attempt to remove the bombing from its history "confirms," as Jameson notes, "the structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between . . . history . . . and the ‘individual'" (PU 20). This is not to say, of course, that "Hiroshima" refuses to acknowledge America's involvement in the bombing or that the bomb's devastating affects do not reach beyond the scope of the survivors themselves. Rather, it is to suggest that Hersey's approach to the bombing isolates the blast from America's imperialist project. Its focus on the individual frees American imperialism from its own bloody history and prepares its readers to confront the bombing as the result of war rather than the culmination of a long and continuing history of aggression and domination.

<16> In fact, according to a study of reader responses, Hersey's limited account of the bombing allowed many readers to "affirm their humane sentiments and . . . examine their consciences," without ever questioning the bomb's most troubling aspects (Yavenditti 295-99). "I had never thought of the people in the bombed cities as individuals," one reader wrote. "God Bless and keep the editors who showed such courage and cared so much for humanity and civilization," wrote another. A response from the Catholic journal America exclaimed:

Despite miles of print, and endless reels of photographs . . . it is this New Yorker report which most shudderingly brings home to the reader the utter horror of the atom bomb . . . One curse of the modern world is that individuals are becoming . . . mere faceless ciphers (Boyer 209).

Perhaps summarizing the feelings of most of these readers, the president of the Book of the Month Club noted: "We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more importance at this moment to the human race." That "Hiroshima" had this affect on readers may partly explain the article's phenomenal, unprecedented success. Newsstand issues of the magazine sold out immediately. Within two weeks of publication secondhand copies of the issue went for $18 a piece. Albert Einstein attempted to order 1,000 copies (he was told none were available). The American Broadcasting Company and the BBC performed readings of the article over the air. Most major newspapers ran favorable, even glowing reviews. And in November of that year, the article was published as book (Boyer 206; Corey 26; Yagoda 192).

<17> Of course, the remarkable response to "Hiroshima" included more than readers eager to express their gratitude to Hersey and the magazine. Hersey's account of the blast also inspired many readers to condemn America for its use of the bomb: "I am bitterly humiliated," wrote one reader, "that my country should have been the one to first (or at all) invoke this method of warfare" (Yavenditti 294). It was impossible for readers to encounter the repeated descriptions of radiation victims as they vomited blood, their pus-infected wounds refusing to heal, and their badly burned skin which "slipped off in huge glove like pieces" (28), without considering the source of the bomb. Moreover, many readers expressed anxiety about "the whole miserable business." They reported, as one reader did, a "feeling of being uncomfortably ill-at-ease" (Yavenditti 294-95), perhaps sensing rather than grasping some of the more subtle aspects of Hersey's article.

<18> While Hersey's vividly grotesque images of the victims may have angered and frustrated many of his readers, provoking guilt and shame, his representation of the bomb's devastation of the city was even more deeply disturbing. Hersey's account of the blast may have "diminished," as Nadel argues, "the scale of the event" (58); but through the experiences of its six survivors, "Hiroshima" also stresses the notion that the bomb did more than maim and murder most of the city's population: it also annihilated the city, and along with its government buildings, temples, homes, and hospitals, particular aspects of the Japanese value system. In the world immediately after the bomb, survivors can no longer rely on the traditional assumptions and expectations which result from the expression of these values to guide them through their everyday lives. According to "Hiroshima," Japanese society as the survivors once knew it is gone forever, just like the city itself.

<19> This must have been a rather sobering thought to liberal Americans already racked with guilt about the bombing and anxiously awaiting some kind of atomic retribution. To compound their anxiety, many of the subjects with whom Hersey chose to make this point "enjoy greater status, higher income, and more education than the average Hiroshima resident" (Yavenditti 291). By accounting for the lives of victims and survivors who possess a range of socio-cultural and economic characteristics strikingly similar to the magazine's readership, "Hiroshima" reminds readers of the conditions of their own lives. However unconsciously, it links the primary interests and concerns of the magazine – the legitimation of upper middle class distinction and superiority – to an American act of war that demonstrates the vulnerability of class-based privilege in the face of the bomb.

<20> Consider Mr. Tanaka, for example. An extremely wealthy, retired business executive "famous for giving his money away," he expects that his wealth and fame will provide for him excellent medical treatment. Seriously injured, he anticipates that "all the doctors of Hiroshima [will] come to him." When no one arrives, he angrily sets out to look for help, going "from private hospital to private hospital," only to find that "all [are] in ruins" (40-41). In a community where private health services no longer exist, Mr. Tanaka's wealth suddenly has no currency. The confirmation of its value vanishes with the destruction of the private hospitals designed to privilege it. Heavily conditioned to rely on particular responses to his wealth, Mr. Tanaka does not know what to do next. In the end, his wealth betrays him and he dies both in spite of as well as because of it.

<21> In the process of revealing this betrayal, "Hiroshima" exposes the manner in which individual wealth necessarily relies on the existence of the collective public infrastructure that it creates in order to assert its power. Hersey makes this point in order to stress the bomb's ability to alter radically the survivors' relationships to their environment, each other, and their own physical, emotional, and psychological states. In the immediate wake of the bomb, Hersey suggests, there exists a kind of social leveling, in which the destruction of the city's infrastructure creates a commonality of confusion and suffering among the survivors.

<22> One of the men to whom Mr. Tanaka would have appealed for help, for example, is Dr. Fujii, the "prosperous, hedonistic . . . proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution: a private, single-doctor hospital." Located on the bank of the Kyo river, Dr. Fujii's hospital contains "all sorts of modern equipment: an X-ray machine, diathermy apparatus, and a fine tiled laboratory" (19). In the months leading up to the bombing, Dr. Fujii had "been relatively idle." His wife and children safely tucked away in the Japanese countryside in the event of a U.S. air attack, he does not mind his repose. At fifty, he is "healthy, convivial, and calm, and . . . pleased to pass the evenings drinking whiskey with friends, always sensibly, and for the sake of conversation" (20). A highly successful, wealthy man of respected profession, who contributes to the health of the community, a business and property owner at ease with leisure and proper society, Dr. Fujii represents one of the most distinguished members of the community.

<23> On the morning of the bombing, he accompanies a visitor to the train station and then returns to his apartment in the hospital to eat his breakfast and enjoy reading the paper on the porch. A few moments later, he notices a brilliant flash. Simultaneously, he is thrown from his porch into the river as pieces of his valued hospital fall all around him. "Squeezed tightly by two timbers in a V across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks – held upright, so that he could not move, with his head miraculously above the water and his torso and his legs in it," Dr. Fujii, who is painfully injured, floats among "a mad assortment of splintered lumber and materials for the relief of pain" (20). The irony of Dr. Fujii's position, nearly squeezed to death by a portion of the building which has significantly contributed to his livelihood, and floating injured among his medical supplies for the relief of pain, emphasizes the futility, if not hostility, of material goods in the face of the bomb's destructive power. In this moment of crisis, trapped in the rising river, fearing he will drown, his possessions, or what is left of them, assault and mock him. They symbolize a betrayal. Rather than constitute the means by which he defines himself and makes his living, they strip him of his professional identity. Unable to perform as a doctor as a result of his injures and without the supplies to treat the wounded even if he could, Dr. Fujii is reduced to one of the severely wounded, just another survivor fighting for his life.

<24> This situation connects him to an entire community of survivors, many with whom he has had nothing in common and no social contact whatsoever. Across town, Mrs. Nakamura, "the tailor's widow," finds her sewing machine, her only means of survival (a point the Hersey makes repeatedly), in a well in front of what had once been her house. Asking her brother-in-law to retrieve it, she imagines her life as a seamstress once more, only to find, "to her dismay, that it [is] all rusted and useless" (52). No longer the "symbol of her livelihood," Mrs. Nakamura's sewing machine stands as the corroded sign that marks the end of her career and the beginning of a life of extreme financial hardship. Suffering the same essential fate as the two prestigious men, Mrs. Nakamura serves as a foil to Mr. Tanaka and Dr. Fujii, demonstrating that those in power fare no better than those of less fortunate means.

<25> In fact, according to "Hiroshima," the bomb and its obliterating capabilities render the particularities of a privileged lifestyle irrelevant. It explodes notions of privilege and distinction by emphasizing the bomb's violent ability to reduce humanity to its most primal posture. Literally blown back to the Stone Age, the survivors face the prospect of lives without pleasure. Collectively resigned under their present conditions, many of them indulge "an irresistible atavistic urge" (24) to hide among the remaining foliage in what had once been a private, exclusive park. In this shredded landscape, the citizens of Hiroshima, rich and poor, lie together, among the dead and the dying, many naked and badly burned, vomiting or passing blood, waiting for help that in those first few days was not to come.

<26> To an educated, American middle and upper-middle class, many of whom were just becoming reacquainted with the spoils of America's postwar bounty, Hersey's vision of Hiroshima rendered the bomb as both a threat to its sense of security and, conversely, the means by which it would stay secure. It pulled readers between a sense of uneasy gratitude for the privileged conditions of their own lives and a screaming fear that they would soon suffer the same fate as the Japanese. The combination of these paradoxical feelings produced in many readers doubts about Truman's decision to drop the bomb, while it also engendered a need to be reassured about America's military might and the nation's commitment to securing world peace.

<27> Proponents of the bomb who responded to Hersey's article – or at least responded to the public concerns about the bomb to which "Hiroshima" contributed significantly – exploited these feelings. In well-timed articles, M.I.T president, Karl T. Compton, and former Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, acknowledged that many educated, liberal Americans had their doubts about the necessity to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But they cautioned readers to consider the complicated "facts" of the bombings before forming sentimental attitudes toward the Japanese and hostility toward the Truman administration. Both writers suggested that in the end Americans were safer and more secure as a result of the bombings. As citizens of a compassionate nation, they could rest easy that America's priority was to assure peace and spread democracy throughout the world.

<28> Stimson was particularly thorough on this account. He had devised a plan on how to best address the concerns of American liberals before he published "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb." In a letter to President Truman outlining the intent of the article, for example, he explains:

The criticisms which it [the article] has been intended to answer as far as possible were made mainly by Chicago scientists, some of whom had been connected with the development of the project. The article has also been intended to satisfy the doubts of that rather difficult class of community which will have charge of the education of the next generation, namely educators and historians (Stimson Papers 760).

Anticipating the moral outrage that many educated liberals would express once they began to learn of the bomb's devastation, Stimson wanted to write an article that would complicate the reader's response to the horrific depictions of suffering and death contained in Hersey's article.

<29> Indeed, Corey reads Stimson's essay as a direct response to Hersey's article. She claims that "Hersey's piece had done much to bolster [the] doubts" of the educated liberals to whom Stimson refers (36). Many connected to the bomb would have agreed with Corey. In a letter to Harvey H. Bundy, Stimson's close aide, dated September, 23, 1946, one month after the publication of "Hiroshima," James Conant, a Manhattan Project Scientist, complained that criticisms about the bomb had been "increasing in recent days." His concerns, he implied, were connected to intellectuals who were expressing sympathy for the victims of the bombing:

This type of sentimentalism . . . is bound to have a great deal of influence on the next generation. The type of person who goes into teaching, particularly school teaching, will be influenced a great deal by the type of argument. We are in danger of repeating the fallacy which occurred after World War I [when] it became accepted doctrine among a group of so-called intellectuals who taught in our schools and colleges that the United States made a great error in entering World War I (Bernstein 166).

Then, in a letter to McGeorge Bundy (Stimson's ghost writer and Harvey's son), dated November 30, 1946, Conant urges the younger Bundy to have Stimson publish his article in "a magazine of national circulation, presumably Harper's, with some notice to the press when the magazine appeared on the newsstands." According to Conant, Stimson's essay "would do a great deal to correct certain misunderstandings now current in the American public" (Stimson Papers 729). Similarly, Harper's board chairperson, Cass Canfield, assured Stimson that his essay would "be extremely valuable in clearing up doubts and misunderstandings regarding the use of the bomb," especially since it "reaches a substantial portion of the educated public" (Stimson Papers 743).

<30> Indeed, whereas Hersey's article challenges Truman's decision to drop the bomb, Stimson's essay demonstrates persuasively the necessity of the bomb to end the war and save, as Stimson puts it, "over a million casualties . . . to American forces alone" (Shadows 204). According to Stimson, there were only two options regarding America's approach to Japan: drop the bomb or fight it out on the ground. Attempting to put the horror of the bomb in its "proper" context, Stimson outlines his "understanding of the events which led up to the attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, and the Japanese decision to surrender, on August 10" (197). He provides documents and journal entries intended to prove that the U.S had completely thought out and understood the consequences of the bombing on Japan (information that Conant suggested would be "very much worth recording and highly important" to the success of the essay). "The bomb," Stimson claims, "served exactly the purpose we intended" (209). Moreover, he characterizes Truman, his administration, and the scientific community involved in developing the bomb, as compassionate, resourceful, and responsible participants in a long, bloody war that America did not initiate but that it intended to end. The "terrible responsibility" of creating an atomic weapon and its "catastrophic potentialities" fell heavy on their shoulders. "But we were at war," Stimson says, "and the work must be done."

<31> Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Stimson's article is the personal manner in which he addresses the bomb. Just as Hersey chose to humanize its victims, Stimson humanizes the bombing's perpetrators. Offering his own experience as testimony to the bomb's necessity, he writes:

My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in armies which I had helped to raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on fair estimate, were open to us I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose of saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face (210).

Projecting a kind of avuncular warmth for the troops, Stimson takes personal responsibility for "saving lives" rather than taking them. He challenges his readers to put themselves in his place and asks them to bear the weight of his part in the decision and then decide whether the bombing was necessary. Striking a pose of troubled compassion, Stimson says that looking "back over the last five years of my service as Secretary of War, I see too many stern and heartrending decisions to be willing to pretend that war is anything else than what it is." "The face of war," he claims, "is the face of death; death is the inevitable part of every order that a wartime leader gives" (210). In Stimson's able hands, the suffering of the victims of the atomic attacks depicted in Hersey's article becomes the burden of the President and his advisers, the moral weight they must bear in order to save the troops and assure peace in the world.

<32> Stimson's essay attempts to pull readers away from Japan and its two devastated cities, asking them to look homeward, where their conscientious leaders have thoroughly considered and weighed the price of the bomb. In the process, it speaks to the public's need for moral assurance. But this celebration of American leadership also intends to relieve public fear about the potential for atomic retribution. Implied in Stimson's essay is the notion that with the bomb America controls its own destiny. At this point, no other nation had nuclear capabilities. But fears about retaliation were rampant. As Paul Boyer has shown, in the weeks and months following the attacks, radio newscasters, newspaper columnists, cartoonists, theologians, scientists, and numerous social commentators all worried, as the NBC newscaster, H.K. Kaltenborn did, that the United States had created a "Frankenstein." In the passage of a "little time," Kaltenborn told The Nation, "an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us" (Boyer, 5). Stimson wants to assure his readers that the responsibility of their leaders and America's new global power will preserve their safety. The threat of a nuclear attack, so long as America understands the magnitude of its responsibility and maintains its power, is unlikely. According to Stimson, America will defend peace because, simply put, "there is no other choice" (210).

<33> As a response to "Hiroshima," Stimson's essay did not need to confront the diplomacy behind the decision to bomb Japan, primarily because Hersey's article did not confront it either. Thus, even as "Hiroshima" opposed the bombing, it participated, however indirectly, in the development of a growing national discourse that refused to consider U.S. motivations for the bombing outside of the war itself. On the one hand, with the exception of a few progressives like Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, who dismissed "Hiroshima" as irrelevant, claiming, without proving, that it failed to represent the horror of the bombing adequately, most of the article's critics accused Hersey and The New Yorker of publishing liberal propaganda designed to "confuse the American public" (Yavenditti 295). They saw Hersey's humanitarian approach as an attempt to elicit sympathy for a vicious enemy which had received everything that it deserved. As one university professor wrote: "You [the New Yorker] and Hersey have, I fear, brought a large segment of high minded Americans to the mourners' bench where they are practically groveling in a welter of conviction of sin . . . This Hersey-Atbomb stuff [sic]," the professor claimed, might provoke the kind of disarmament movement which had "crippled America's defenses before the war" (Yavenditti 295). On the other hand, whatever guilt, anger, or sympathy "Hiroshima" may have elicited from its readers, it nevertheless limited the terms of debate and contributed to a moment in which the bomb's status as a vehicle for the expansion of U.S. imperialism was completely absorbed by its reputation as the troubling means to the war's end. From this perspective, the article's opposition to the bombing did more to obscure the Truman administration's agenda than reveal it.

<34> That agenda, of course, is the source of much historical debate. As numerous World War II historians confirm, Japan probably would have surrendered even if the bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, as early as 1946, the U.S. Bombing Survey, in its report, Japan's Struggle to End the War, concluded: "certainly prior to December 31, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated" (Alperovitz 6). More importantly, it seems as though the United States knew that Japan was likely to surrender before it dropped the bombs (Alperovitz, Takaki, Zinn). Having long broken enemy cable codes, the U.S. learned that the Japanese Emperor himself had contacted the Soviets in order to broker a peace settlement. Gar Alperovitz notes that "in his private journal, Truman bluntly characterized this message as the ‘telegram from [the] Jap Emperor asking for peace'" (7). That Japan did not surrender is a complicated and seemingly contradictory matter. [2] What seems clear, however, is that the U.S. ignored all opportunities to end the war with Japan prior to its fateful attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

<35> The reasons offered for this decision vary. But many historians argue that the decision to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities reached beyond the war with Japan and extended to larger concerns about Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe and Asia. Behind closed doors, Truman and his advisers linked the bombings to strategies of containing Russian expansion. As Alperovitz argues:

Modern research findings clearly indicate that from April 1945 on, top American officials calculated that using the atomic bomb would enormously bolster U.S diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in negotiations over post-war Europe and the Far East. The atomic bomb was not, in fact, initially brought to Truman's attention because of its relationship to the war against Japan, but because of its likely impact on diplomacy (Shadows, 15).

According to Ronald Takaki, the bombings were intended to "impress" the Soviets with America's military might. In one of many examples, Takaki cites a conversation between Secretary of State, James Byrnes and Manhattan Project scientist, Leo Szilard, in which Szilard claims: "Mr. Byrnes did not agree that it was necessary to use the bomb . . . against Japan in order to win the war." Rather he wanted to drop it in order to make "Russia more manageable" (62). Two months later at the Potsdam conference, after the bomb had been tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Byrnes advised Truman that a "combat display of the weapon against Japan might be used to bully Russia into submission, and that the bomb ‘might well put us into a position to dictate our own terms at the end of war'" (Takaki 62). Indeed, while the U.S may have hoped that the bombings would inspire fear in the Russians, it also used them in order to thwart a Soviet invasion of Japan. [3] A Japanese surrender to the U.S alone ensured that America would play the primary role in the peace settlement of Asia (Zinn, 17). As a result, it would be in position to control the economic development of Japan without Russian interference and establish market democracies throughout the region. As P.M.S. Blackett argued in 1948: "so, in truth, we conclude that the dropping of the atomic bomb was not so much the last act of the second world war [sic], as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia" (87).

<36> Of course, Blackett would not have known about Truman's backdoor politics. But his observation demonstrates that his intuitions were right about Truman's reasons for using the bomb. Along with the insight of Cousins and several others in early 1946, Blackett's comment suggests that some of those who opposed the bombing understood the extent of the bomb's implications. But for much of Hersey's New Yorker readership, to connect the bomb to an American imperial project would have been to confront the privileges that result from it. For an educated, liberal class of Americans, this may have seemed a tall order. Sure, readers could express outrage at the violent affects of the bomb, allowing themselves to feel guilt and shame over the terrible suffering of the Japanese. They may have even been quietly grateful for their own safety and still publicly criticized the Truman administration for its lack of humanitarianism, believing that it was their democratic right and patriotic duty to do so. But to look beyond their immediate feelings may have required them to link the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to an aggressive American imperialism that provided them with material comfort at the expense of others. If the "spread of democracy" meant the annihilation of cultures and innocent people, how could the magazine's liberal readers feel good about the privilege that resulted from it?

<37> "Hiroshima" provided an answer for them. The same humanitarianism that allowed it to oppose the bombing also allowed it to celebrate the occupation: it saw the occupation as the liberation of the Japanese people from a tyrannical government. According to "Hiroshima," the American occupation of Japan reestablishes the city's social order and provides citizens like Dr. Fujii the opportunity to enjoy once again the privilege of their status, with one crucial difference: under the Americans, "Japan," as Mr. Tanimoto explains in a letter to an American friend, has "started her new way" (46).

<38> What this means to Hersey's characters seems to depend on their station in life. One survivor expresses displeasure, even hatred, at the sight of the American forces; another mocks American military censorship. But those closest to The New Yorker's readership, survivors from what we might call the upper-middle class, as well as those like Mr. Tanimoto, a Methodist Reverend and American assimilationist even before the war had ended, resume their lives, possessing a sense of relief and easy acceptance of the Americans' presence. Dr. Fujii, for example, finds happiness in his relationship with the Americans:

For ten days after the flood, Dr, Fujii lived in the peasant's house on the mountain above the Ota. Then he heard about a vacant private clinic in Kaitaichi, a suburb to the east of Hiroshima. He bought it at once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in English, in honor of the conquerors.

M. Fujii M.D.
Medical & Venereal

Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built a strong practice, and he was delighted in the evenings, to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom he lavished whiskey and practiced English (58).

Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Tanimoto, who "had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia," speaks "excellent English," and dresses "in American clothes" (2), claims that he, like many others, after hearing the Emperor ask for a collective "calm spirit" during the occupation, looks forward to "making [a] whole-hearted sacrifice for the everlasting peace of the world" (46).

<39> Optimistic expressions like these introduce a shift in both the mood and narrative approach in "Hiroshima." Although Hersey continues to look at the bombing through the eyes of his six survivors, he also includes more intrusive narration that complicates and at time contradicts the observations of some of the survivors and the article's own reading of the bombing. Likewise, as he describes the effects of radiation on Dr. Sasaki's patients, as well as Mrs. Nakamura, Miss Sasaki, and anonymous others, he also provides moments in which his characters look toward the future, the existence of which, only weeks before, had been seriously in question.

<40> The most manipulative example of this approach comes, perhaps, at the article's very end, when Hersey offers the homework assignment of a grade-school child, Toshio, written a few weeks before the bomb's first anniversary as testimony to the ultimate effects of the bombing. Toshio's matter-of-fact, episodic prose recounts the event as "an exhilarating adventure," as Hersey suggests (68):

The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister's sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram . . . We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw a reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki's mother was wounded and Murakami's mother, alas, was dead (68).

Toshio's last sentence emphasizes the fragmenting of families as a result of the bomb. But his essay also offers a multitude of hopeful possibilities for him as well as Japan. The fact that he is in a position to reflect on the blast implies a sense of safety and stability. Hersey claims that we can never know "what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the bombing in Hiroshima" (68) and that may be true. But Toshio's assignment places him at a school, established by the Americans, where he is being taught and socialized in the ways of his new life and country and encouraged to confront his fears about the past. That his teacher requires him to write about the bombing signifies an emphasis on the importance of addressing the event, an approach American readers would have more commonly associated with American schools than Japanese (however incorrectly), where an imperial government was thought to have crammed children's minds with extremely patriotic propaganda and taught them to "maintain due order in the relations of superior and inferior" races (Steiner 206). [4]

<41> Here Hersey links the hope of Japan's future to the end of its controlling and undemocratic past. In fact, throughout the final section of the article, "Panic Grass and Feverfew," Hersey looks at the chilling affects of Japan's Imperial system on the Japanese and offers an implicit comparison to the "American way of life." Once again relying on a letter from Mr. Tanimoto, Hersey allows the good Reverend to recount the blind, extreme patriotism that seems to have united many of the victims on the evening after the bombing more than the catastrophe itself (Nadel 65). Tanimoto tells of a father and son trapped under the rubble of a two story blazing building who decide to give "Banzai to [their] Emperor." The son, inspired by their chanting, emerges from the rubble to save his father. Later, the father recalls that he felt "calm and bright and peaceful spirit in my heart, when I chanted Banzai to Tenno." "What a fortunate that we are Japanese!" [sic] he exclaims, "it was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor" (66). Another person claims: "I have lost my home, my family, and at last my-self bitterly injured. But now I have gotten my mind to dedicate what I have and to complete the war for our country's sake" (66). Finally, Tanimoto tells of a group of thirteen-year-old girls, crushed by a fence, who begin to sing Kimi gay yo, Japan's national anthem, as they die from the weight of the fence. The letter ends with a haunting conclusion: "Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for the Emperor's sake" (67).

<42> Set against American notions of patriotism – to live and die for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the four freedoms, and the promise of class mobility – the idea of dying for an Emperor, a single man, who, as the American public saw it, stood for tyrannical rule, must have seemed preposterous to an early postwar readership which claimed to privilege values and principles over political personalities and positions. [5] According to most propaganda at the time, the Japanese were ruthless killers, "demons, savages, subhumans, and beasts," as Takaki puts it (73), following a leader who encouraged the torture and death of millions of people. Hersey's sympathetic look at the Japanese destroys some of the racist, de-humanizing impressions Americans had of them; it identifies them as victims of an authoritarian ruler rather than blood-thirsty henchmen. Thus, their blind devotion to the Emperor underscores the horrors of the Japanese imperial government rather than the Japanese themselves and separates them from the ideological and militaristic forces that had led them to fight to the death.

<43> By the end, the article implies that America has liberated the Japanese from their ugly past. Its criticism of the bombing indicts the means to that end but it never questions the end itself. Below its indignation of the bombing, lies a sense of gratitude for the American liberators. Just as it had ostensibly freed the Europeans from the Nazi killing machine, the U.S. has freed the Japanese from their militaristic government, which, like Germany and Italy, had subordinated the rights of the individual to the overall "good" of the state. It provides the Japanese with an opportunity to live in a democratic society, where the notion of "imperial will" reflects only the lies of the government which imposed it. [6] In the final section of the article, as the survivors set and pursue individual goals, despite the trauma they have suffered, readers are encouraged to feel good about them. They convert to Catholicism, as Miss Sasaki does. They take classes and get married. For some, their freedom provides an opportunity to express their hatred of the Americans, criticizing, as Dr. Sasaki does, the bombing and suggesting that perhaps Truman should be tried as a war criminal. Others, like Dr. Fujii, oppose Dr. Sasaki's position, arguing that no rules exist in total war. But whether readers agree with one side or the other, they are led to understand that in the disagreement of a community ravaged by war there emerges the bud of democratic freedom.

<44> This aspect of "Hiroshima" allows readers to look beyond the immediate affects of the blast, however troubling they may be, by offering them a hopeful resolution to the bomb's devastation. From this perspective, the article not only conflicts with the magazine's advertisements but also agrees with them. Its emphasis on the benefits of a democratic society is reflected in the ads, whose representation of a wide range of products confirms the multitude of consumer options offered by a free-market economy and symbolizes freedom of choice. Through this relationship, the article is linked to the ads in a seductive yet mystifying manner: just as "Hiroshima" both suggests and disables the link between American imperialism and the bomb, some of the ads conjure yet elide the violent imperial history that has provided for the development and availability of the products they promote.

<45> An ad for Grace Line Ocean Cruises, for example, claims that the Ocean Liner provides "swift, modern" service among Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific ports and ports of the pacific coast of South America, Central America, Mexico, as well as between New York and Venezuela, the Netherlands, the West Indies, and Colombia. "American luxury returns to the seas," the ad proclaims. Grace Line Cruises offer "passengers every facility, comfort, relaxation, and recreation." The colorful image of the cruise ship steaming along clear-blue waters seems innocent and inviting, promoting a time-honored vacation option that upper-middle class Americans were eager to re-embrace. But it also elides the gruesome history of subjugation and exploitation orchestrated by the United States in the Caribbean, South and Central America, and the Pacific. To name but a few aggressive acts, the U.S. had literally seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, purchased the Virgin Islands from the Dutch (who had colonized the islands and with whom the American colonies had originally been involved in the slave trade), and fought a "brutal war," as Howard Zinn puts it, to subjugate the Filipinos (408). Its so-called "interventions" in Cuba, Columbia, and Haiti, as well as other Caribbean and South and Central American countries, had allowed it to establish ports in and strong economic ties to these nations. By offering these destinations as places of comfort and relaxation in glossy, colorful portraits, in which handsome families enjoy their stay and the native population welcomes their arrival, ads like this one wipe up the blood that was spilled in order to offer such romantic vacations in the first place. They replace the violence inherent in the establishment of these commodities with notions of happiness and privileged well-being.

<46> A Tiffany & Co advertisement that features a diamond bracelet at $8500 and its matching brooch for $3750 (prohibitively expensive commodities in 1946) contributes to the magazine's representation of a happy, privileged upper-middle class life. The sparkling images of the bracelet and brooch, as well as the diamond rings that surround them, are alluring and seductive. They reflect notions of love, romance, wealth and good taste. Women who wear Tiffany diamonds wear the best. The diamonds signify a woman's elevated place in society and her respected and perhaps pampered position in the home. But they also represent a history of American and European exploitation in Africa. As a continent of extraordinary resources, Africa had long been pillaged by American and European corporations for its diamonds (as well as its people). Along with this looting came the harsh treatment of the indigenous population, many of whom were forced to work in the mines as severely underpaid laborers or outright slaves. The horrors of these endeavors are well documented. They stand as testimony to America's insatiable hunger for the resources that it cannot find on its own soil. Ads like this one deny this history. They absorb the violence of diamond mining and replace it with the images of smiling women strutting confidently down Fifth Avenue on their way to a luncheon or social event, decked in glimmering diamonds and the latest fashions.

<47> The themes of happiness and well-being expressed in these ads demonstrate how the magazine attempts to legitimate and naturalize the values and interests of the upper-middle class, as it mystifies the acquisitive and potentially violent priorities of consumer capitalism. The magazine's repeated images of accomplished men and women lying on cruise ship decks sipping champagne or fashionable New Yorkers enjoying High Tea, draped in diamonds and emeralds, establish a "magical" link, as Raymond Williams puts it, between the commodities the models wear and enjoy and the ideas that these products convey about the people who purchase them. Over time, readers come to identify the commodities advertised in The New Yorker as a "kind of language" (McCracken 68) that signifies the wealth, sophistication, and exquisite taste of their consumers, rather than the powerful association between the products they purchase and the historical forces that have facilitated their development and availability. By purchasing some of these commodities, upper-middle class readers can associate themselves with these characteristics. As a result, they see themselves reflected in the pages of the magazine, which, in turn, legitimates the image they have constructed of themselves through their consumption.

<48> In this respect, the New Yorker's "Hiroshima" issue is no different than any other issue (with the exception of 1941-44, when the magazine's ability to advertise elite products had been limited as a result of serious supply shortages). That is to say that there is no contradiction between the article and the ads, as some critics have argued. While "Hiroshima" expresses the violence the ads deny, both sever the link between American privilege and U.S. imperialism. As a result, The New Yorker appears blind to the ultimate cost of its account of the bombing: its own compatibility with the promulgation of the violence that it claims to oppose. It may have offered literally millions of postwar readers a compelling account of the blast and encouraged them to look beyond racist, anti-Japanese propaganda to see the bomb's victims as human beings. It may have also inspired many of them to question the necessity of the attack. But in the process, it left readers with a sense that America's desire for commodified comfort posed no threat to other people or other nations. Many readers who wrote into the magazine felt guilty about the effects of the bomb. But none of them seemed to consider the privilege of their guilt. Instead, they looked on in horror at the events of Hiroshima without ever looking too closely at their own lifestyles for evidence of the violence they ostensibly condemned.

 

Works Cited

Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. New York: Penguin Books, 1965.

---. "Historians Reassess: Did We Need to Drop the Bomb?" Hiroshima's Shadows. Connecticut: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1998

Blackett, P.M.S. "The Decision to Use the Bombs. Hiroshima's Shadows. Eds. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Connecticut: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1998.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Braw, Monica. The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan. New York: East Gate Books, 1991.

Brinkley, Allan. "The New Deal and the Idea of the State." The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Corey, Mary F. The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Compton, Karl, T. "If the Bomb Had Not Been Used." Atlantic Monthly. December, 1946.

Cousins, Norman. "The Literary of Survival." Hiroshima's Shadows. Connecticut: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1998.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Eds and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Howell Smith. New York: International, 1971.

Lifton, Robert Jay and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995.

Hall, Stuart. "Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.'" People's History and

Social Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. ed. Raphael Samuel.

---. "The Rediscovery of Ideology: The Return of the Repressed in Media Studies." Culture, Society, and the Media. eds. Michael Gurevitch et al. London: Routledge, 1982.

Hersey, John. "Hiroshima." The New Yorker. August 31, 1946.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005

---. The Political Unconscious. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981.

---. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." The Jameson Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

Macdonald, Dwight. "Hersey's ‘Hiroshima.'" Politics October, 1946.

---. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957

Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

McCarthy, Mary. "The New Yorker's Hiroshima." Politics. October, 1946.

McCraken, Ellen. Decoding Women's Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973.

Steiner, Kurt. "The Occupation and the Reform of the Japanese Civil Code." Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation. Eds. Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

Van Staaveren, Jacob. An American in Japan, 1945-1948: A Civilian View of the Occupation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994.

Stimson, Henry, L. "The Decision to Use the Bomb." Harpers, February, 1947.

---. Stimson Papers. Courtesy of Martin Sherwin, Tufts University

Takaki, Ronald. Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little Brown, 1995.

Ward, Robert E. "Presurrender Planning: Treatment of the Emperor and Constitutional Changes." Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation. Eds. Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

Yagoda, Ben. About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made. New York: De Caprio Press, 2000.

Yavenditti, Michael. "John Hersey and the American Conscience." Hiroshima's Shadows. Connecticut: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1998.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

---. Postwar America. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1973

 

Notes

[1] Hersey had originally planned to submit the article in four parts using the title "Some Events at Hiroshima." But after William Shawn had read the draft, he and Hersey, along with Editor-in Chief, Harold Ross, decide to publish the article in its entirety under the title "Hiroshima." [^]

[2] Gar Alperovitz, Martin Sherwin, Ronald Takaki, Howard Zinn, and a number of other historians provide compelling and convincing evidence that Truman and Byrnes withdrew from its Potsdam Proclamation – which defined the terms of Japan's surrender before the bombings – the paragraph that would have assured the Emperor his right to remain on the throne after a Japanese capitulation. Because of the war-crimes trials in Germany, the Emperor, as well as Japan itself, which worshipped the Emperor as though he were a deity, feared that he would be tried and hung. Consequently, the proclamation was rejected by the Japanese at the Potsdam conference. Perhaps what is most interesting about the omission of this paragraph is that Truman and Byrnes decided to omit it only after they had received word that the tests at Alamogordo had gone well. [^]

[3] Only days before the bombings, the U.S. had counted on the Soviets to declare war on Japan and mount an attack in order to either assure victory in an invasion of the Japanese mainland or to coerce a Japanese surrender. After the bomb had been tested, however, Truman quickly changed his mind. As Alperovitz notes, "Once the bomb was proven to work, the President reversed course entirely and attempted to stall a Red Army attack." "A week after the Alamogordo tests," Alperovitz claims, "Churchill observed that ‘it is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.'" [^]

[4] Of course, America's judgmental perspectives on the Japanese school system elide America's own racially segregated and prejudiced system. Moreover, according to Jacob Van Staaveren, an American "civil and information education officer" in the Yamanashi Prefecture during the occupation, the imposed American educational system, which claimed to offer "new freedoms" to the children of Japan, also restricted some traditional teaching materials while it banned others. In many school districts these restrictions and bans caused some schools to close for considerable lengths of time, since teachers did not know how to instruct their students (48). [^]

[5] Most evidence suggests, however, that the murderous reign of the Japanese was the result of the Japanese military which had taken almost complete control of the country in the 1930s. [^]

[6] During the time in which Hersey visited Hiroshima, the U.S. government had not decided what to do with the Emperor. General Macarthur was in favor of keeping him on as a figure head through which the U.S could democratize the country. He agreed with a U.S. policy document that stated that keeping the Emperor in faux-power, maintaining the "Japanese political machinery," would allow American to "obtain . . . and further . . . [its] objectives" (Ward 15). [^]

 

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