Speak Out!

During a six-month coast-to-coast tour of twenty-five states to mobilize attendance at a peace conference scheduled for Chicago on June 1, 1951, Arthur Kahn kept a diary, which he subsequently published under the title Speak Out America Wants Peace. Since his sponsoring organization the American Peace Crusade could not afford to pay his expenses, he made his way by selling copies of his recently published book Betrayal: The American Occupation of Germany, a summary of his experiences as a wartime Office of Strategic Services operative and after VE Day as an peripatetic intelligence investigator and then as Chief Editor of Intelligence for the Information Control Division of Military Government. The first part of Speak Out describes a peace pilgrimage to Washington by some 2,500 people from all over the United States, seeking a negotiated end to the Korean War and actions to alleviate economic hardships in the country. In the remainder of his trip he spoke with Americans of every walk of life-trade unionists, businessmen, clergymen, farmers, intellectuals, teachers and students-people of all ages and of all races and political opinions. To his own surprise he discovered widespread unease among people about the Korean War as well as about the atmosphere of McCarthy-ite repression stifling expression of popular discontent.