NOT IF I CAN HELP IT: Martha Gellhorn, Relentless Antifascist
Need some inspiration for your daily resistance to the assault on facts, reason, civil rights, the environment, rule of law?
Consider the life and work of journalist Martha Gellhorn. Born in St. Louis in 1908, Gellhorn spent seven decades railing against poverty, ignorance, corruption, and violence, on behalf of democracy. In 1987, she wrote, “The evils of the time change but are never in short supply and would go unchallenged unless there were conscientious people to say: not if I can help it.”
Her strategy was straightforward. Gellhorn believed that vocal, demanding citizenship was the only effective response to fascism, with its outrageous schemes to hoard power and deny freedoms. She took her role to be that of a super-charged citizen, using her privilege and her platform in prestigious magazines like Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, and The Atlantic “to make an angry sound against injustice.” Witness to much of World War II, she lost faith that those sounds would fix anything, but remained sure that making the noise was nonetheless necessary and vital.
A Paris-based journalist at 26 years old in 1933, Gellhorn visited Berlin with a delegation of young peace activists. One week with the Hitler Youth killed her pacifism stone dead. In 1937, she made her way to Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War, and found her own lifelong inspiration in the Republic and the International Brigades, the first to take up arms against Hitler and Mussolini and their proxy, Franco. She wrote beautiful dispatches about civilians under siege, and the courage of young soldiers who sacrificed themselves for democracy.
In Prague in the aftermath of the 1938 Munich agreement, she came late to a useless press conference with the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. To the mortification of her fellow journalists, Gellhorn approached him and pounded the table, insisting he do something to help the Sudeten refugees. With his blessing, and overstepping all protocol, she pretended to be an American diplomat and arranged a meeting for him with the Czech Prime Minister. They asked for a two week moratorium to arrange safe haven for the refugees. The bid failed, but Gellhorn never stopped demanding better effort from the officials she met.
She was tough on ordinary citizens too. Later that year, she toured munitions plants in England, talking to workers about the dangers of Nazism and the prospect of war. No one was alarmed, no one was afraid of the Luftwaffe or invasion, no one thought it necessary to fight for the Czechs. Each day she began as a reporter and ended as a fulminating Cassandra, trying to convince everyone she met that war with Germany was inevitable and they would need to step up. She was dismissed as a warmonger, come to stir up trouble, and she in turn blasted the English as obtuse and obstinate. By war’s end, Gellhorn was so impressed by English courage and resolve that she bought a house in London, and made her home base there for most of her life.
She was the only female correspondent to land (illegally) on the beach at Normandy. She covered the assault on Monte Cassino, the Battle of the Bulge, the invasion of Germany, and the liberation of Dachau, all without papers because the Army barred women from covering combat.
She well understood that fascists cultivate disgust with government so citizens disengage, stop demanding accountability, stop voting. Citizenship is hard work. “To feel useless or helpless is the way most people feel, when faced with great public acts, and it is a bad way to feel but also an excuse. If you can do nothing to change events or rescue your fellowmen, you’re free to live your own life, and living one’s own life is always more pleasant than the exhausted scrabbling role of a responsible citizen.”
The anti-Vietnam War movement saved Gellhorn from despair when that war threatened to overturn her pride in the American role in World War II. Looking back from 1987, she wrote, “I would feel isolated with my shame if I were not sure that I belong, among millions of Americans, to a perennial minority of the nation. The obstinate bleeding hearts will never agree that might makes right, and know that if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless.” Now, she could point to a majority of Americans with broad consensus positions on defense, reproductive rights, gun control, healthcare, immigration, and voting rights—but living under minority rule.
She captured the present short-sighted partisan ruthlessness perfectly, “Power corrupts, an old truism, but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power schemes become unstuck in time, at cruel cost to others; then the powerful put their stupid important heads together and invent the next similar schemes. A Saigon doctor, a poor man serving the poor, understood more about the real world than the power men in the White House. ‘All people are the same everywhere. They know what is justice and what is injustice.’” Continually shocked by selfish, fearful leaders who sowed injustice, Gellhorn never stopped fighting.
She reported on US support for the brutal regime in El Salvador in 1983, the American invasion of Panama in 1990, and the murder of Brazilian street children in 1996, at age 85. She opposed the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and advocated for environmental protection. In her 80s, she mentored a dozen young reporters, and a prize for investigative journalism is named for her.
Gellhorn’s wisdom and authority flow from her experience as a witness and survivor, and her inspiring strength and longevity. We can all raise a toast (she drank Scotch on ice) and take a page, or every page, from Martha Gellhorn’s outspoken, agitated, unrelenting antifascist playbook.