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-The Project Gutenberg eBook, Everyday Americans, by Henry Seidel Canby
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
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-
-
-
-
-Title: Everyday Americans
-
-
-Author: Henry Seidel Canby
-
-
-
-Release Date: August 31, 2020  [eBook #63090]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-
-***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVERYDAY AMERICANS***
-
-
-E-text prepared by David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading
-Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
-Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
-
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-
-Note: Images of the original pages are available through
-      Internet Archive. See
-      https://archive.org/details/everydayamerican01canb
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-Transcriber’s note:
-
-      Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
-
-
-
-
-
-EVERYDAY AMERICANS
-
-by
-
-HENRY SEIDEL CANBY
-
-Author of “College Sons and College Fathers,”
-“Our House,” “Education by
-Violence,” etc.
-
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-New York
-The Century Co.
-1920
-
-Copyright, 1919, 1920, by
-The Century Co.
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-This is emphatically not a war book; and yet the chapters that follow,
-in one sense, are the fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent
-reflections upon his own people by one returning to a familiar
-environment after active contact with English, Scottish, Irish, and
-French in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They are complementary,
-in a way, to a volume of essays which sprang from that experience and
-was published in 1919 under the title “Education by Violence.” But
-though representing in its inception the fresher view of familiar
-America of one returning from abroad, this book in its completed form
-is tendered as a modest attempt to depict an American type that was
-sharpened perhaps, but certainly not created by the war. The “old
-Americans” came to racial consciousness many years ago, although their
-sense of nationality has been immeasurably strengthened by the events
-of the last few years. It is no picture of all America, no survey of
-our complete social being that I attempt in the following pages; but
-rather a highly personal study of the typical, the everyday American
-mind, as it is manifested in the American of the old stock. It is a
-study of what that typical American product, the college and high
-school graduate, has become in the generation which must carry on after
-the war.
-
-  New Haven, Connecticut,
-    June 4, 1920.
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-CHAPTER                          PAGE
-
-    I THE AMERICAN MIND             3
-
-   II CONSERVATIVE AMERICA         29
-
-  III RADICAL AMERICA              61
-
-   IV AMERICAN IDEALISM            91
-
-    V RELIGION IN AMERICA         120
-
-   VI LITERATURE IN AMERICA       149
-
-  VII THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN      175
-
-
-
-
-EVERYDAY AMERICANS
-
-
-
-
-EVERYDAY AMERICANS
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I
-
-THE AMERICAN MIND
-
-
-In England there developed long ago, perhaps as far back as the days of
-Shakespeare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and democratic in his
-sympathies, a curious political animal called the radical-conservative.
-The radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once said, is a man who
-would have been a radical outright if radicals had not been dissenters;
-by which he clearly meant that the species agreed with radical
-principles, but objected to radicals because they did not have good
-manners, seldom played cricket, and never belonged to the best clubs.
-Therefore the radical-conservative stays in his own more congenial
-class while working for social justice toward all other classes. He is
-willing to vote with the conservative party in return for concessions
-in labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguarding of public health.
-
-Thence arises the curious circumstance, most mystifying to foreigners,
-that a good share of the really progressive legislation in Great
-Britain of the last half-century has been led by young gentlemen from
-Oxford and Cambridge who have no more intention of becoming part of the
-proletariate than of leaving off their collars and going without baths.
-Bismarck was an out-and-out conservative who for his own nefarious
-ends furthered what a Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory would
-call radical measures. But Lord Robert Cecil in our own day is a
-convinced aristocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who is more
-sincerely effective than many Liberals in various movements which we
-are accustomed to call reform.
-
-The conservative-liberal is quite a different animal and far commoner,
-far more familiar to Americans, even if they have never called him
-by that name. His habitat is America, and thanks to the populousness
-of this country, he is beginning to have a very important influence
-outside of his habitat. To define him is difficult, but for purposes of
-rough classification he may be said to be the man whose native liberal
-instincts have been crystallized by a combination of interesting
-circumstances--and sometimes petrified. He is the man who was born a
-liberal in a liberal country and intends to remain as he was born. He
-is the man who will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the Declaration
-of Independence against any later manifestation of the revolutionary
-spirit. He believes in conserving in unaltered purity the principles of
-life, government, and industry that his forefathers rightly believed
-to be liberal. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned policeman, a
-progressive who stands pat upon his progress, a conservative-liberal.
-I believe that he is our closest approximation to a typical American
-mind.
-
-Whether familiar or not, the effects of this political disease--for
-it is a disease, a hardening of the arteries of the mind--are easily
-observable all about us in the America of to-day. Indeed, we see them
-so frequently that they awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in
-any intellectual sense of the word. They are like our clear atmosphere,
-our mixture of races, our hurried steps--things we scarcely notice
-until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an outsider. I am so much a
-part of America that I find it difficult to detach myself from a mood
-that is mine in common with many other Americans. And yet, once one
-sees it plainly, the educated conservatism of liberal America becomes
-portentous, a unique political phenomenon.
-
-I think that this peculiarity of our political thinking first became
-evident to me on an ocean voyage in war-time. There were a score or
-so of Americans on board, members, most of them, of various government
-missions, picked business men, picked professional men, thoroughly
-intelligent, intensely practical, and entirely American. They were
-democratic, too, as we use the word in America; that is, good “mixers,”
-free from snobbery, and nothing new in action was alien to their
-sympathies. They could remold you a business or a legal practice in
-half an hour’s conversation; tear down an organization and build
-it up again between cigars. Their committee meetings went off like
-machine-guns, whereas the English officers and trade diplomats, when
-they got together, snarled themselves in set speeches and motions and
-took an afternoon to get anywhere. The English, indeed, seemed puzzled
-and a little dazed by the ease with which the Americans seized upon and
-put through reorganization of any kind. They seemed positively to leap
-at change, so long as basic ideas were not involved. “Nothing,” said
-an Indian colonel, “is sacred to them. They would scrap the empire and
-build a new one--on paper--at sixty miles an hour.”
-
-He was quite wrong. The system my countrymen lived by permitted change,
-urged change, up to a certain point. They would demolish a ten-story
-building to erect one of twenty or scrap thousands of machines in
-order to adopt a better process, but when it came to principles and
-institutions they were conservative. The founders of their social and
-political order had been almost a century ahead of the times. The
-instruments of life and of government they had provided had served with
-slight modifications for the free-moving America of the nineteenth
-century. It had been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, to
-realize the liberality and democracy possible under the Constitution,
-to work out the independence available for the common man in a rich and
-undeveloped country in which his political power guaranteed him every
-advantage that could be gained in a capitalistic system, including the
-acquisition of capital. It had been a splendid game, and our wits had
-been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, our prosperity fortified,
-our self-confidence enormously increased in playing it. Given our
-rules, we could play the game more resourcefully than any other people
-on earth. And they were wise rules, which provided for growth, but not
-for a different kind of contest. We were so sure that America stood for
-freedom, independence, and liberality in general that we could not take
-seriously people who did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that
-there might be an idea of democracy different from our own.
-
-Indeed, on board that ship, a curious experience came to all of us,
-Englishmen, Americans, and I, the humble observer, when in the course
-of argument or conference the theories of life upon which we were
-variously living came momentarily into view. The Americans, it was
-clear, were certain that they were the most progressive people in the
-world. This certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman Catholic;
-it gave them elasticity and daring. Being sure of their principles,
-so sure as to be almost unaware of them, they ignored precedents, and
-solved or dismissed problems with equal ease. They made plans for a
-league of nations, they approved of a temporary autocracy for the
-President, they put the labor question on a business basis, and so
-disposed of it; they were afraid of nothing but a failure to act and
-act quickly. Nevertheless, as they talked and worked with the English,
-it became increasingly evident that their road ended in a wall.
-
-There were walls on the English road, too--walls of caste thinking and
-social privilege that seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an office
-building. Our wall was invisible to most of us, and as a body we never
-tried to pass it at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas,
-beyond which, if we thought of it at all, presumably lay socialism,
-anarchy, chaos.
-
-Just that far the American mind, like some light tank, ran, surmounting
-everything, taking to the fields if the road was blocked, turning,
-backing, doing everything but stop; only to halt dead at the invisible
-barrier, and zigzag away again. By such a free-moving process within
-the limits of law we had scrambled across a continent in turbulent,
-individualistic exploitation, and yet had built a sound political
-system carefully and well. And there we had stopped, convinced that
-we had solved the problem of democracy and equal opportunity for all.
-This explains why America is twenty years behind the best of Europe in
-social and economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed reform more than
-we did). This is what it is to be a conservative-liberal.
-
-The Englishman is different. He is much more likely to be an obstinate
-Tory, blocking all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by
-a system as antiquated as feudalism; or if not a Tory, then an
-out-and-out radical eager for a legal revolution. But in either case he
-knows what different-minded men are thinking; and if there is a wall on
-his road, he looks over it. If he is a Tory, he understands radicalism
-and fights it because he prefers an inequality that favors him to a
-more logical system that might be personally disagreeable. If he is a
-radical, he understands Toryism. But the American conservative-liberal
-acknowledges no opinion except his own. He insists, in the words of a
-contemporary statesman, that the American system, as founded by our
-forefathers, is the best in the world, and he is not interested in
-others. There are a thousand proofs that it is not the best possible
-system even for America, and plenty of them are in print--proofs
-advanced by capitalists as well as labor leaders, by Catholics as well
-as socialists; but they do not trouble him, because he neither hears
-nor reads them. It is easier to call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik.
-
-This is the liberal-conservative mind that will not look beyond its own
-fixed principles and refuses to understand those who differ from it;
-that suffers a kind of paralysis when confronted by genuine radicalism.
-The American college undergraduate has it to perfection. Bubbling over
-with energy, ready for anything in the practical world of struggle
-or adventure, he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he has
-inherited as a girl of her reputation. He is armored against new
-thinking. The American business man fairly professes it. He speculates
-in material things with an abandon that makes a Frenchman pale; but new
-principles in the relations of trade to general welfare, questions of
-unearned increment, first bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him.
-
-And yet the college undergraduates, after hatching, and the American
-business man have made for us a very comfortable America, just now
-the safest place in the world to live in, the most prosperous country
-in the world, the most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way of doing
-things has its great advantages. America is its product, and the ranter
-who describes the United States as the home of super-capitalism, a sink
-of cheaply exploited labor, a dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity,
-does not seem to be able to persuade even himself that the United
-States is not the best of all countries for a permanent residence.
-
-And the great Americans of the past have nearly all been
-conservative-liberals. Washington was a great republican; he was also
-essentially an aristocrat in social and economic relations, who kept
-slaves and did not believe in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically,
-was the greatest of English-speaking democrats, but he let the
-privileged classes exploit the working-man and the soldier, partly in
-order to win the war, chiefly because problems of wages and unearned
-increments and economic privilege generally did not enter into his
-scheme of democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for the square deal
-in public and private life, but hesitated and at last turned back when
-it became evident that a deal that was completely square meant the
-overturning of social life as he knew and loved it in America.
-
-And these men we feel were right. Their duty was to make possible
-a good government and a stable society, and they worked not with
-theories only, but also with facts as they were. The Germans have
-argued that the first duty of the state is self-preservation, and that
-rights of individual men and other states may properly be crushed in
-order to preserve it. We have crushed the Germans and, one hopes,
-their philosophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of society to
-preserve itself. No one believes that universal suffrage for all,
-negroes included, would have been advisable in Washington’s day, when
-republicanism was still an experiment. No one believes, I fancy, that
-the minimum wage, the inheritance tax, and coöperative management
-should have had first place, or indeed any place, in the mind of the
-Lincoln of 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a socialist would have
-been as useful to the United States as Roosevelt the Progressive with
-a back-throw toward the ideals of the aristocratic state; as Roosevelt
-the conservative-liberal.
-
-But too great reliance on even a great tradition has its disadvantages.
-I know an American preparatory school that for many college generations
-has entered its students at a famous university with the highest of
-examination records, and a reputation for courtesy and cleanness of
-mind and soundness of body scarcely paralleled elsewhere. I have
-watched these boys with much interest, and I have seen them in
-surprising numbers gradually decline from their position of superiority
-as they faced the rapid changes of college life, as they settled into
-a new environment with different demands and more complex standards.
-They leaned too heavily upon their admirable schooling; they were too
-confident of the strength and worth of their tradition; they looked
-backward instead of forward, and stood still while less favored men
-went on. Their fault was the fault of American liberalism, which stands
-pat with Washington and Roosevelt and Lincoln.
-
-Perhaps the greatest teacher in nineteenth-century American
-universities was William Graham Sumner. In his day he was called a
-radical, and unsuccessful efforts were made to oust him from his
-professorship because of his advocacy of free trade. Now I hear him
-cited as a conservative by those who quote his support of individualism
-against socialism, his distrust of coöperation against the league of
-nations. His friends forget that an honest radical in one age would
-be an honest radical in another; and that the facts available having
-changed, it is certain that his opinions would change also, although
-just what he would advocate, just how decide, we cannot certainly know.
-Is it probable that Dante, the great advocate of imperial control in a
-particularistic medieval world, would have been a pro-German in 1914?
-The American liberal who proclaims himself of the party of Lincoln, and
-is content with that definition, might have an unpleasant shock if that
-great reader of the heart of the common man could resume his short-cut
-life.
-
-Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same disadvantages as inherited
-money: all the owner has to do is to learn how to keep it; in other
-words, to become a conservative. That is what is going on in America.
-While we were pioneers in liberty and individualism, wealth and
-opportunity and independence were showered upon us, and although wealth
-for the average man is harder to come by, and opportunity is more and
-more limited to the fortunate, and independence belongs only to good
-incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal keeps the pioneer’s
-optimism, and is satisfied to take ready-made a system that his
-ancestors wrought by painful and open-minded experiment. In practice he
-is still full of initiative and invention; in principle he can conceive
-of only one dispensation, the ideas of political democracy which were
-the radicalism of 1861 and 1840 and 1789 and 1776.
-
-Suppose that he could conceive of industrial democracy, of a system
-where every man began with an equal share of worldly privilege as he
-begins now with an equal share of worldly rights. Would he not work it
-out, with his still keen practicality, and test its value precisely as
-he tests a new factory method or an advertising scheme? But he cannot
-conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispensation. His liberalism turns
-conservative at the thought. It was different with political democracy
-and With religious toleration. The first cannot even now be said to be
-precisely a perfect system, and the second has left us perilously near
-to having no religion at all. Nevertheless, the liberal ancestor of our
-American never doubted that they were _his_ problems, to be worked out
-to some solution. He followed boldly where they led.
-
-What has happened to the political and economic thinking of many an
-American much resembles what has happened to his religion. He learns
-at church a number of ethical principles which would make him very
-uneasy if put into practice. He learns the virtue of poverty, the duty
-of self-sacrifice, the necessity of love for his fellow-man. Now,
-saintly poverty has not become an ideal in America--certainly not in
-New York or Iowa or Atlantic City--nor is self-sacrifice common among
-corporations, or love a familiar attribute of the practice of law.
-Does the American therefore eschew the ethics of Christianity? On the
-contrary. Religion is accepted at its traditional value. The church
-grows richer and more influential--within limits. The plain man keeps
-all his respects for religion as an ideal; but he regards it precisely
-as an ideal, a formula beautiful in its perfection, not to be sullied
-by too close an application, not to be worked out into new terms to fit
-a new life.
-
-And that is just what the conservative-liberal does with the vigorous
-liberalism of his forefathers. He buries it in his garden, and expects
-to dig it up after many days, a bond with coupons attached. He has
-accepted it as the irrevocable word of Jehovah establishing the metes
-and bounds wherein he shall think. It is his creed; and like the creeds
-of the church, the further one gets from its origins, the greater the
-repugnance to change. He stands by the declaration of his forefathers;
-stands pat, and begs to be relieved of further abstract discussion.
-Business is pressing; controversy is bad for business; ideas are bad
-for business; change is bad for business: let well enough alone.
-
-But by all odds the most important fact as regards this
-conservative-liberal mind of which I have been writing remains to be
-stated, and that is its success, for it is now the prevailing mind
-in America. As our soldiers in France, though bearing Italian names,
-Irish names, Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet and uniform
-looked all, or nearly all, like the physical type we call American,
-so in this confusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, polylingual,
-built upon fragments of the empires of England and Spain and Russia
-and France, there is indubitably a mental type which we may call with
-some confidence American, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its
-instincts conservative.
-
-Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demonstrable that this American
-mental type is the most definite national entity to be found anywhere
-in the Western world. I know that this sounds paradoxical. We have
-heard much for several years now of the lack of homogeneity in America.
-We felt in 1914 our German-Americans cleave away from us (to be sure,
-they came back); we saw in 1918 and 1919 the radical socialist and the
-I. W. W. and the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms that were
-certainly not American as the ’nineties knew America. We began to
-realize that the immigrant changes his language more quickly than his
-_mores_, and frequently changes neither. All this is true. And yet, in
-spite of it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at things which
-we know so well in America comes nearer to being a definite national
-psychology that acts in expected fashions, has qualities that you can
-describe as I have been describing them, and characteristics common
-to all varieties of it, than either the “British mind” or the “French
-mind” of which we write glibly.
-
-For the British mind includes the Irish, which is as different from the
-English as a broncho from a dray-horse. It includes the Tory mind and
-the Liberal mind, which in England are as dissimilar as were Jefferson
-Davis and Abraham Lincoln. It includes, if we use it loosely, Sir
-Edward Carson and Mr. Asquith and H. G. Wells, each of whom represents
-a considerable British constituency. And they could no more think alike
-on any topic on the earth below or the heavens above than a Turk, a
-Greek, and a Jew. Certain fundamental attitudes would unite all three
-of these latter if they were civilized: they would all eat with knives
-and forks. And in the same fashion certain definite racial traits unite
-the Britons aforementioned. But the differences imposed by social caste
-or diverging political and social philosophies are far greater than
-anything to be found in everyday America, which latter I define as
-lying between the fringe of recent immigrants on the one hand and the
-excrescences of Boston intellectual aristocrats or New York radical
-intellectuals on the other.
-
-Is there a “French mind”? Intellectually and esthetically, perhaps
-yes. Politically and socially, to a less degree of uniformity than
-can be found in America. From the simple homogeneity of France, as
-we casuals see it, has crystallized out the aristocracy and much of
-the church, whose respective parties differ not merely as regards the
-policy of the Government, but are still opposed to that Government
-itself.
-
-The United States, far more heterogeneous in race, far less fixed
-in national character, threatened by its masses of aliens, who are
-in every sense unabsorbed, is yet much more homogeneous in its
-thinking. In America weekly magazines for men and women spread
-everywhere and through every class but the lowest, and so does this
-conservative-liberalism in politics and social life which I have tried
-to define. In Connecticut and Kansas and Arizona it is displayed
-in every conversation, as our best known national weekly (itself
-conservative-liberal) is displayed on every news-stand. Irrespective
-of racial or financial differences, everywhere in America, between
-the boundaries I have already indicated--the alien immigrant on one
-hand, the advanced intellectual on the other--nine out of ten of us
-are conservative-liberals; everywhere, indeed, throughout the American
-bourgeoisie, which with us includes skilled laborer and farmer,
-professional man and millionaire.
-
-And the mental habits of this contemporary American are of more than
-local importance. We who are just now so afraid of internationalism
-are more likely than any other single agency to bring it about. Our
-habits of travel, our traverse of class lines, our American way of
-doing things, are perhaps the nearest approximation of what the world
-seems likely to adopt as a modern habit if the old aristocracies break
-down everywhere, if easy transportation becomes general, if there is
-wide-spread education, if Bolshevism does not first turn our whole
-Western system upside down. Already in newspapers and books, in
-theaters and politics, in social intercourse and in forms of music and
-language, one sees all through Western Europe (and, they say, also
-in the East) the American mode creeping in, to be welcomed or cursed
-according to circumstances. And those great international levelers, the
-movies, are American in plot and scene and idea and manners from one
-end to the other of a film that stretches round the world.
-
-Thus the American mind is worth troubling about; and if politically,
-socially, economically the spirit that we and the foreigners call
-American has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is time to awake.
-In liberalism inheres our vitality, our initiative, our strength. Its
-stagnation, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves of freedom
-sweeping upward from the masses and on in broken and muddy torrents
-through the world are poignant dangers. We must open eyes; we must
-change our ground; we must fight the evil in the new revolution, but
-welcome the good. Our own revolution lies before the deluge; it is
-no longer enough to go on; it is not now the sufficing document of a
-political philosophy. We must not stop with Washington and Lincoln. We
-must go on where the conservative Washington and the radical Lincoln
-would lead if they were our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism
-is good, and Toryism or radicalism have their uses; but
-conservative-liberalism, preserved, desiccated, museum liberalism, long
-continued in, is death to the minds that maintain it.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II
-
-CONSERVATIVE AMERICA
-
-
-There is one experience that conservative-liberal America--bourgeois
-America, the pushing America that gets what it wants on this side of
-the ocean--possesses in common, and that is its education. We of the
-vast American middle class have all been to high school, or we have
-lived with high school graduates; we have all been to college, or we
-have worked with college graduates. Our education, when viewed with any
-detachment, is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given generation most of
-us have studied the same textbooks in mathematics and geography and
-history, read the same selections in literature, been inoculated with
-the same ethical principles from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a
-question as to what makes right or wrong, as the President did in his
-war messages, and we will respond with a universal roar, like factory
-whistles when a button is punched on some celebration day.
-
-This general American experience is largely responsible for the
-tenacity with which we of this generation blindly conserve the liberal
-principles of our ancestors, even while we keep them, like the tables
-of the ten commandments, safe from the rude touch of practical
-experience. Education such as ours seldom fails to influence men’s
-ways of thinking even when their actions pass beyond its control. The
-influence, however, is too often ineffectual, bloodless. That is a
-lesson we need to ponder in America.
-
-Education in these colonies in the eighteenth century was bent toward
-theology. All but the lower schools, if, indeed, they could be
-excepted, were contrived to find and to train the pastor, the minister
-to the people. For him those studies that influence opinion--history,
-ethics--were chiefly taught. For his purposes, the languages of the
-classics were chiefly studied. It was the pastor that emerged as
-prime product of academies and colleges. And therefore theology, that
-arduous intellectual exercise for which he prepared, set its mark upon
-all intellects down to the humblest. We wonder at the obsession with
-religious thinking that the letters and diaries of farmers, merchants,
-and lawyers of our eighteenth century display to the amazement of
-their very untheological descendants. We should rather wonder at the
-intellectual energy expended in wrestling with a difficult and abstract
-subject. They entered, as we of the twentieth-century bourgeois do not,
-into the field of scholarship; they partook of disputes that were as
-international as Christendom; and shared with the chosen ones for whom
-all this education was made, Jonathan Edwards and his co-professionals,
-an interest in problems far broader than their strip of Atlantic
-clearings. That the experience, whatever we may think of the value of
-the theology, was good for them does not, I think, permit of argument.
-There have never been abler Americans than at the end of the eighteenth
-century.
-
-But nineteenth-century America was a different world. Interest in
-theology abated for reasons that need not here be discussed. More and
-more the United States diverged intellectually from our colonial unity
-with Europe; our own problems engrossed us; and these were problems
-of material development, of local statecraft, of that elementary
-education which a democracy must necessarily take as its chief concern.
-What had been a professional training by which God’s ministers were
-to be selected became relatively unprofessional, a so-called “liberal
-education,” the object of which was to illumine and make pliable and
-broad the minds of laymen. The high purpose of the teacher was not
-now to choose the leaders of the spirit. It was rather to preserve
-in a new world of crude physical endeavor the arts and sciences that
-civilize the mind.
-
-American life in the nineteenth century had many of the characteristics
-that we are accustomed to associate with heroic barbarism. It had
-the same insecurity--insecurity of life on the border, insecurity of
-fortune where life was safe. It had the same frequency of hazardous
-toil against wild nature; the same accompaniments of cold and
-privation; the same vast and shadowy enterprises, usually collapsing;
-the same intensity of physical sensation; the same ardor of emotional
-experience in the spiritual realm. And always education mitigated
-extravagance, restrained excess, directed effort. Through education our
-ancestral Europe restrained and guided us. Education kept us white.
-
-But never, perhaps, has the divergence between life as it had to be
-lived and the civilities taught us in school been greater. Never
-has the ideal world, which, after all, it is the chief business of
-education to mirror, been more different from the facts of experience
-than in America. The ridiculous scientist of Cooper’s “Prairie” who
-mistakes his donkey for a new monster and thinks it more important
-to call the buffalo the bison than to eat when hungry of its hump,
-is a symbol of the contrast between what we learned and what we did
-in America. In the eighteenth century, education for most Americans
-was practical preparation for a knowledge of God’s ways with man. In
-the nineteenth it had become not a preparation for life so much as an
-antiseptic against the demoralizations of a purely material struggle
-to open up a continent. The results have been of grave political
-importance.
-
-For the divergence between theory and practice explains the curiously
-traditional character of our schooling as we knew it in youth, as our
-grandfathers knew it in youth. I am not now speaking of the wearisome
-controversies over Latin and Greek and classic English literature,
-the so-called traditional subjects which make up a large part of
-education. It is not the letter, but the spirit, that makes the thing
-taught traditional. And ever since democracy began, the teacher has
-had to be the priest and guardian of tradition in America. He has been
-an anxious parent stretching the coverlet of racial culture over the
-restless limbs of little immigrants. He has taught reading, writing,
-and arithmetic as a means of holding fast to our tradition. He has
-taught literature and history and “moral ethics” and “natural science”
-as the containers of that tradition. We have almost forgotten that for
-a time in the early nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that
-the frontier would become Indian rather than European in its culture.
-We see clearly now how possible it would have been for whole regions
-of the South to relapse into negro semi-barbarism. We may guess that
-save for the teacher and his grinding in of tradition the white races
-of North America might have slipped backward, as too clearly have the
-white races in many parts of Latin America.
-
-One element in this education by tradition was specially important.
-Liberalism, the principle upon which this republic was founded,
-education took up as soon as it dropped theology, if not earlier.
-American education became impregnated with liberalism, made liberalism
-its chief tradition. What we study in school and college stays by
-us, overlaid perhaps, scarcely vital any more, yet packed close to
-the roots of our conscious being. And the compost they gave us in
-America was liberalism. History enshrined the republican ideals of
-our founders and the democratic ideals of our nineteenth-century
-development. Sometimes it was taught in college classes with “sources”
-duly ticketed. Sometimes it trickled through commencement speeches
-or primers thumbed on back-row benches. The results were the same.
-In literature, whether English or American, the same ideas were
-predominant, or at least were made to seem so by careful selection.
-Democracy and the rights of man blow through the reading of the
-American school-boy, somewhat aridly it must be admitted; but still
-they blow. Civics and government and the social sciences in these
-latter days, as they are taught in America, advance the same standard.
-
-Not less definite and persuasive was the influence of the men who
-taught us. Many of them have been aristocratic in taste and in their
-misprision of the stupidities of the common man, but their text also
-was of liberalism and democracy whenever the subject or the occasion
-permitted. Even geography and spelling were presented as the means
-whereby the child of the laboring man had been given his chance to
-rise in the world and perhaps become President. Properly considered,
-the things we have been taught, the men who taught us, the very
-organization of our school and college system, have been one vast
-engine for shaping the minds of young America in the turn and mold of
-liberalism.
-
-But this liberalism, like most of our education, was highly
-traditional. Our subjects and the men who taught them looked
-prevailingly backward for inspiration, recalled us to the past, warned
-us of the future. The urge was always the old Roman one--preserve the
-piety of your ancestors. Preparation for new conditions, for a possible
-new liberty in industry or politics, for a possible new democracy in
-wealth, there was, we must confess, very little. We were linked to
-tradition; we were made profoundly and sincerely liberal, at least in
-our theories of life; we were implored to stand pat.
-
-And though education, as the art was practised here in America,
-has perhaps kept us liberal, it has certainly given to liberalism
-that faint shadow of unreality, that sacrosanctity which belongs to
-all traditional beliefs. It is the traditional quality of American
-education that more than any other single agency has petrified
-American liberalism.
-
-We plain Americans in our little red school-houses and our big brick
-high schools and our spreading universities have learned republicanism
-and the rights of man and the not-to-be-questioned opportunity of every
-person to go to the top of the ladder if he wished and were able. This
-we were taught explicitly and implicitly. And we believed these things
-because we were made to think that all right-thinking men everywhere
-believed them: and therefore we recited Gladstone and Lincoln and
-Toussaint L’Ouverture and passages from Carlyle’s “French Revolution”
-and Mrs. Browning on the freeing of Italy with confident hearts.
-Furthermore, we felt that these principles were sincere, because, no
-matter how poor or how stupid, we found educational opportunities
-opened on every side. There was no discrimination in the quantity of
-American education, and but little in its quality. Until we left the
-school or the campus, our liberal tradition fitted us like a garment.
-It never occurred to us that it might not always fit.
-
-Yet as soon as we moved out into America, crossing that bridge from
-theory to practice, from ideas to application, which in all countries
-is long and in new countries longest of all, strange contradiction
-began to be apparent. Republicanism, it appeared, worked out in
-practice, at least in our town, into boss control and domination by
-party leaders, acting usually for vested interests. The rights of man,
-we discovered, had a curious sound when discussed by labor-unions or
-the unemployed. Opportunities, it became clear, could not be freely
-offered to the man without capital unless we were prepared to change
-radically an industrial system which our common sense taught us was
-better--at least for us--than the visionary industrial democracies
-that radicals without business experience wished to set up. Were
-these precious ideals of ours merely buncombe, then, held only in
-theory, in practice to be disregarded? Or was democracy good as a
-half-way measure, but false as a general principle? Was our education a
-tradition to be reverenced--and disregarded?
-
-Not a few reached the indicated conclusion, though they kept, as a
-rule, their opinions to themselves. Perhaps as many swung to the other
-extreme, believed that only more democracy would cure us, and also kept
-out of print, for fear of being associated with radical aliens who
-held much the same opinions in politics and social affairs, but very
-different conceptions of cleanliness, morals, and polite conversation.
-These were our right and left wings merely. The great mass of us, the
-everyday Americans, took things as they were with a kind of shrewd
-childish good sense, and pushed ahead, being as democratic as was
-convenient in this unequal world, but taking no nonsense from people
-who would interfere with business in order to make us more so. And that
-is where we are now--at the end of the war, in the midst of a world
-revolution so great that no one knows whether it has just begun or is
-just ending.
-
-But a revolution drives men back upon their principles, makes them
-scan willingly or unwillingly the things they live by--the prejudices,
-enlightenments, interpretations, convictions that in the largest sense
-_are_ their education. And this is true not only of rapid revolutions,
-like the French and the Russian, but of slow ones, such as that
-revolution which has been slowly gathering headway in English-speaking
-countries for three decades or more, that revolution of social and
-industrial conditions now rapidly accelerating. And what have Americans
-thought of their education?
-
-I think they have found it a brake, a stabilizer, a deterrent alike
-from violent reaction and dangerous experiment. I think also that
-they have found it what it is--traditional. They have felt it as
-a taboo, good on Sundays, but on week-days not to be too closely
-regarded. Where it has preached restraint to the more radical,
-they have listened, but grown restless. Was it not John Bright who
-said that England would be ruined if the hours for labor should be
-shortened? Did not Cooper, who wrote the epic of frontier freedom,
-sharpen his pen to defend the unearned increment of the landlord?
-Where it speaks of liberty and equality to the more conservative, they
-have listened, but not taken it too seriously. After all, the world
-must be governed and dividends paid. While the rights of the citizen
-should be safeguarded, business is business nevertheless, and politics
-politics. The Declaration of Independence, they felt, should be kept in
-its place, which was the Fourth of July. Theory--by which they meant
-education--has little place in practical affairs. They were liberals
-of course, but plain and prosperous Americans first of all, and the
-latter, at least, they intended to remain.
-
-And thus, in its noble attempt to shape the minds of Americans to a
-similitude of their full-blooded ancestors who dared to be radical,
-American education itself has acquired the sanctity, the reverence, the
-ghostliness of the dead. Like the dead, it is most influential upon
-spirits sensitive to the past, and operates through love and veneration
-and mere habit rather than through immediate compulsion. Like them,
-it visits the minds of the living only in glimpses of the moon, and
-its influence, though wide-spread, is partial and easily forgotten in
-the noonday glare of active, practical life. Americans respect their
-education, but too seldom do they live by it.
-
-It is a good tradition, this American ideal of noble and sturdy
-liberalism. The only detraction to be made is precisely that the
-education which embodies it is felt to be merely traditional. But this
-is much the same as to say that last year’s hat is a good hat, the only
-trouble being that when we wear it we invariably remember that it is
-last year’s hat. And at least one unhappy consequence follows.
-
-American minds have been coddled in school and college for at least
-a generation. There are two kinds of mental coddling. The first
-belongs to the public schools, and is one of the defects of our
-educational system that we abuse privately and largely keep out of
-print. It is democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the failure to
-hold up standards, the willingness to let youth wobble upward, knowing
-little and that inaccurately, passing nothing well, graduating with
-an education that hits and misses like an old type-writer with a
-torn ribbon. America is full of “sloppy thinking,” of inaccuracy,
-of half-baked misinformation, of sentimentalism, especially
-sentimentalism, as a result of coddling by schools that cater to an
-easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per cent of a group of girls,
-graduates of the public schools, whose records I once examined, could
-do simple addition, only twenty-nine per cent simple multiplication
-correctly; a deplorable percentage had a very inaccurate knowledge of
-elementary American geography.
-
-A dozen causes are responsible for this condition, and among them, I
-suspect, one, which if not major, at least deserves careful pondering.
-The teacher and the taught have somehow drifted apart. His function
-in the large has been to teach an ideal, a tradition. He is content,
-he has to be content, with partial results. It is not for life as it
-is, it is for what life ought to be, that he is preparing even in
-arithmetic; he has allowed the faint unreality of a priestcraft to numb
-him. In the mind of the student a dim conception has entered, that this
-education--all education--is a garment merely, to be doffed for the
-struggle with realities. The will is dulled. Interest slackens.
-
-But it is in aristocratic coddling that the effects of our educational
-attitude gleam out to the least observant understanding. This is
-the coddling of the preparatory schools and the colleges, and it is
-more serious for it is a defect that cannot be explained away by
-the hundred difficulties that beset good teaching in a public-school
-system, nation-wide, and conducted for the young of every race in the
-American menagerie. The teaching in the best American preparatory
-schools and colleges is as careful and as conscientious as any in
-the world. That one gladly asserts. Indeed, an American boy in a
-good boarding-school is handled like a rare microbe in a research
-laboratory. He is ticketed; every instant of his time is planned and
-scrutinized; he is dieted with brain food, predigested, and weighed
-before application. I sometimes wonder if a moron could not be made
-into an Abraham Lincoln by such a system--if the system were sound.
-
-It is not sound. The boys and girls, especially the boys, are coddled
-for entrance examinations, coddled through freshman year, coddled
-oftentimes for graduation. And they too frequently go out into the
-world fireproof against anything but intellectual coddling. Such
-men and women can read only writing especially prepared for brains
-that will take only selected ideas, simply put. They can think only
-on simple lines, not too far extended. They can live happily only
-in a life where ideas never exceed the college sixty per cent of
-complexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic experience lies too
-far outside the range of their curriculum. A world where one reads the
-news and skips the editorials; goes to musical comedies, but omits
-the plays; looks at illustrated magazines, but seldom at books; talks
-business, sports, and politics, but never economics, social welfare,
-and statesmanship--that is the world for which we coddle the best of
-our youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by their own innate
-originality; more bear the marks to the grave.
-
-The process is simple, and one can see it in the English public
-schools (where it is being attacked vivaciously) quite as commonly as
-here. You take your boy out of his family and his world. You isolate
-him except for companionship with other nursery transplantings and
-teachers themselves isolated. And then you feed him, nay, you cram
-him, with good traditional education, filling up the odd hours with
-the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. Then you subject him to
-a special cramming and send him to college, where sometimes he breaks
-through the net of convention woven about him, and sees the real world
-as it should appear to the student before he becomes part of it; but
-more frequently wraps himself deep and more deeply in conventional
-opinion, conventional practice, until, the limbs of his intellect bound
-tightly, he stumbles into the outer world.
-
-And there, in the swirl and the vivid practicalities of American life,
-is the net loosened? I think not. I think rather that the youth learns
-to swim clumsily despite his encumbrances of lethargic thinking and
-tangled idealism. But if they are cut? If he goes on the sharp rocks
-of experience, finds that hardness, shrewdness, selfish individualism
-pay best in American life, what has he in his spirit to meet this
-disillusion? Of what use has been his education in the liberal,
-idealistic traditions of America? Of some use, undoubtedly, for habit,
-even a dull habit, is strong; but whether useful enough, whether
-powerful enough, to save America, to keep us “white” in the newer and
-more colloquial sense, the future will test and test quickly.
-
-Why do we coddle our aristocracy, who can pay for the best and most
-effective education? I think that the explanation again is to be
-sought in the traditionalism of American education. If our chief, our
-ultimate, duty to the boy that we teach is to make him an “American
-gentleman,” and if by this is meant that we are to instil the essence
-of the Americanism which made Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt, and
-let it go at that, and if all our education hovers about this central
-purpose--why, the stage is set for a problem play that may become
-tragedy or farce. It is not thinking we teach then so much as what has
-been taught. It is not life, but what has been lived; not American
-liberalism, but a conservatism that never has been characteristically
-American. The tradition is not at fault, nor the thought of the past,
-nor the lives of our ancestors; it is when all these things are taught
-as dead idealism unrelated to the facts of the present that they become
-merely traditional.
-
-And the boy and girl are not deceived. They take all that is given
-them--no youth in the world are so pliable, so receptive as ours--and
-retain and respect and cherish what they remember of it. But it is
-clear that for them it is tradition, it is unreal in comparison with
-their sports, their social aspirations. It will be unreal in comparison
-with their business and their politics and their household affairs. It
-will be a venerated tradition of liberal thinking for them of which
-they will be highly conservative. But it will not function in their
-lives--not more at least than the sixty per cent that they sought for
-in order to get that degree of bachelor of arts which certified that
-they were versed in the thought of their forefathers. And so they merge
-in the common American mind that I have called conservative-liberal.
-
-I know of no better proof of the truth of what I have just written than
-the history of our college undergraduates in war-time.
-
-Here is such a demonstration as comes only once in a generation. Of
-all unpreparedness, the unpreparedness of the undergraduate for war
-was apparently chief. He knew little about the war, its causes, its
-manifestations, for he is not an ardent reader of current events
-outside his college world, nor does he hear much of the talk of the
-market-place. He knew little about war. The R. O. T. C. had spread
-some ideas of drill and discipline and the technic of fighting; but he
-was neither drilled nor disciplined in 1917. And as for the training
-in accurate obedience and in exact thinking which war is supposed
-to demand, he simply did not have it, or so we thought. Nor had his
-particularistic fashion of following his own little contests to the
-exclusion of loyalties to the world outside, and his indifference to
-politics beyond fraternity elections, or economics beyond the cost of
-theater-tickets and beer, led us to assume a ready response to a great
-moral emergency in national affairs.
-
-We were utterly deceived. The response of the American undergraduate
-was immediate and magnificent. He crowded into the most dangerous
-military professions, and was eminent in the most difficult branches of
-organization and experiment. He did not, it is true, think very broadly
-about the war, but he thought intensely. He did not learn accuracy,
-steadiness, independence overnight, but he learned them. He was wholly
-admirable. And the women, who in ways not yet sufficiently celebrated
-made it possible for the country to stiffen to the crisis, were as
-eager to serve as the men.
-
-And the reason, I believe, was that for the time the education of the
-undergraduate ceased being traditional and became a moving force in his
-experience. The dim liberal idealism in which his mind had been moving
-for many years suddenly took on color and became fire. Every impulse
-of his mental training urged him to do just what was asked of him, to
-struggle for democracy, for justice, for a square deal; to believe in
-the rights of man and the permanence of right and the supremacy of a
-righteous idealism. And his habits of hard, earnest play, where rules
-were obeyed and victory went to the best player, also were the very
-stuff the world wanted, also transformed miraculously into the very
-apparatus of war. His traditional education, with its extra-curriculum
-of games that also were traditional in their neglect of the new and
-special qualities required for success in modern life, precisely
-fitted the clamorous need of the hour. And the undergraduate for a
-little while silenced his critics, amazed his friends, and was in many
-respects happier than in those years of peace when he was trying to
-bridge the gap between his education and life as it was being lived in
-America.
-
-And with peace he relapses--the American in general relapses into the
-old discontinuity. The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once
-more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. As long as the patriotism
-lit by the war and danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism
-bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. For peace means that we
-drop our ardors and face again the insistent reachings of the democracy
-for a greater share in wealth, for a greater control over productivity,
-for representation in industry as well as in politics. Peace means
-that we must face not war, with its romantic thrills and its common
-enemy, but the prosaic causes of war that hide among friends as well
-as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, self-denial, and
-humbleness of spirit, a struggle in which the Croix de Guerre is likely
-to be reproach and contumely.
-
-The break between our education and the life we are living again
-widens, and it is this break which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed
-alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily defensible; the
-hustling vigor of our life is also defensible. The trouble is that
-in ordinary times they fail somehow or another to connect. Education
-grows bloodless. Life becomes aimless or merely self-regarding. What we
-believe grows pallid and fades before it transmutes into what we do.
-Indeed, I would go further and say that Americans, and especially the
-graduates of universities, are somewhat weakened by their education.
-They go out into life with an enormous appetite for living and a set
-of ideals like a row of preserved vegetables canned and hermetically
-sealed for future contingencies. In 1917 and 1918 we opened some of
-those jars and found the contents good for a special emergency. But
-ordinarily the lids are tight, while we go about our business proud of
-our stores of education, but inwardly uncertain, like the housewife,
-as to whether or not those ideas that seemed so good when our teachers
-packed them away in the season of youth will not be sour to the taste
-of practical modernity.
-
-The clamor for vocational education is a protest against this
-ineffectiveness of the merely traditional. But the cure does not lie
-in such a medicining. Vocational education is well enough, and we
-need more of it, but training of the hands and of the brain to purely
-material accomplishments will never save liberalism in America. The
-strength of vocational education is that it looks forward and prepares
-for things as they are. Its weakness, when administered alone, is that
-it neglects the directing mind. In any large sense it is aimless, or,
-rather, it aims at successful slavery quite as much as at successful
-freedom. Liberal education also must look forward, must put its
-traditions to work, must germinate, and become alive in the mind of the
-American, and then teach him by old principles to attack new problems.
-
-We must either live by our education or live without it. The
-alternatives are desiccation and anarchy. If we live by it, education
-itself stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, adapts itself
-like an organism to environment. If we live without and beyond and in
-neglect of education, as many “practical” Americans have always done
-once they left school or college, education decays, and sooner or later
-the man decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration of busyness,
-which is the modern equivalent of barbarism.
-
-Once before, and far more seriously, a civilization was threatened
-because its education became merely traditional and ceased to function
-in practical life. The society of Appolinaris Sidonius in the fifth
-century, as Dill describes it, was faced with economic disruption, with
-hordes of aliens, with a rampant individualism that put the acquisition
-of a secure fortune above everything else. The leaders failed to lead.
-“Their academic training only deepened and intensified the deadening
-conservatism of unassailable wealth.” “Faith in Rome had killed all
-faith in a wider future for humanity....” There was an “apparent
-inability to imagine, even in the presence of tremendous forces of
-disruption, that society should ever cease to move along the ancient
-lines.” Roman imperialism divorced itself from Roman thought and became
-a deadening tyranny. Roman thought divorced itself from Roman life and
-became an empty philosophy. And the sixth century and disaster followed.
-
-The historical analogy is imperfect. Our civilization is still vigorous
-where the Roman was tired and weak. No outer barbarians threaten us.
-Science safeguards us from economic breakdown.
-
-And yet, like the skeptic who does not believe in God, but refuses to
-take chances on his death-bed, I should not scoff at the parallel.
-Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism become an article of
-faith not an instrument of practice--all these are potential of decay,
-of explosion. We must look to our education. If it does not grip our
-life, we must change education. If life is not gripped, our life needs
-reforming. And the thing is so extraordinarily difficult that it is
-high time we ceased praising for a while the virtues of our forefathers
-or the wealth of our compatriots, and began the task. After all, it
-means no more than to teach the next generation not merely to preserve,
-but also to carry on, the traditions of America.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III
-
-RADICAL AMERICA
-
-
-It is with no intention to be paradoxical that I call America a radical
-nation. I know well by experience, sometimes galling, what an English
-labor leader or a French socialist thinks of America, as he understands
-it. A mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground of the bourgeoisie,
-the birthplace of trusts, where even the labor-unions are capitalistic.
-If the world is to be saved for democracy, he says, it will not be by
-America.
-
-I am not so sure. Being one of those who doubted whether the successful
-termination of the war would forever make safe democratic ideals, I
-feel at liberty to doubt whether the triumph of a European proletariate
-will give us what we want. It depends much upon what one means by
-democracy. And correspondingly, whether America is fundamentally
-radical or conservative depends much upon what one means by radicalism.
-If, like Louis XIV or Napoleon, I had a leash of writers and scholars
-at my command, I would have them produce nothing but definitions while
-these critical years of transition lasted. I would make them into an
-academy whose fiat in general definition would be as valid as the
-French Academy’s in the meaning of a word. I would make it a legal
-offense for two men to quarrel over socialism when one means communism
-and the other state control of the post-office. I would, like the
-early Quakers, require arbitration for all disputants, especially
-in politics, knowing that a clear head would quickly discover that
-arguers on democracy conceivably meant anything from a standard collar
-for every one to nationalization of women. But the good old days of
-literary dictatorship are past. The most a writer upon the mind of
-the everyday American can do is to endeavor honestly to make his own
-definitions as he goes; and I believe that American radicalism needs a
-good deal of defining.
-
-It is not the doctrines of Babeuf or Marx or Lenine that have made
-what seems to be the indigenous variety of American radicalism. Their
-beliefs, and especially those of Marx, have found acceptance here.
-There are moments in intellectual or industrial development when men’s
-minds become seeding-grounds for ideas blown from without. There were
-centuries when the mystical ideas of the Christian East were sown and
-rooted in the barbarian brains of the West. There were the years when
-the liberal ideas of the French Revolution were blown across Italy,
-Germany, and the Low Countries. And much that we call radical in
-America is simply foreign seed, growing vigorously in our soil, but not
-yet acclimated, as it is growing also in Russia and New Zealand. And
-much is not American in any sense, but rather the purely alien ideas
-of immigrants--individual men among us. It is not for nothing that
-Trotzky was here, and the Marxists, the syndicalists, the nihilists,
-and the communists of half Europe. We have been exposed to every germ
-of radicalism ever hatched in the Old World; yet neither the young
-professor, lecturing on the redistribution of wealth, nor the Russian
-stevedore, who in lower New York awaits the proletariate revolution,
-truly represents American radicalism. These are the ideas and these the
-men our restless youth are borrowing from, but they are not yet, they
-may never be, American.
-
-It is fortunately not yet difficult to separate foreign from indigenous
-radicalism. There is that in both our heredity and our environment
-which makes the American mind bad soil for the seed of foreign
-ideologies. They rain upon us, they germinate; but they do not make
-a crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; our New World has
-kept us too cheerfully busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned
-too low over this blessed America for discontent which leads to
-dreaming, oppression which makes revolt, to be common among us. We
-“old Americans,” at least of this generation, are poor material for
-Bolshevism; even as socialists we are never more than half convinced.
-Our radicalism has been of a different breed.
-
-Indeed, radicalism, like religion and sea-water, takes color from the
-atmosphere in which it is found. The French radical possesses the
-lucidity and the self-regarding spirit of the modern French mind. He
-lends ideas, but does not propagate them. The English radical seeks his
-ends by direct political action in good English fashion. And the native
-American has his own way also. That its essential quality of radicalism
-has often been overlooked, while the term has been bandied among
-soapbox orators and devotees of the bomb, is natural, but unfortunate
-for clear thinking.
-
-Our home-bred radicalism has been physical and moral, not intellectual.
-It has been a genuine attempt to tear down and rebuild, but it has not
-ordinarily been called radicalism, which term has been usually applied
-to radical thinking, to the intellectual radicalism of revolutionary
-organizations and protestants against the social order. Our effective
-radicals have been the leaders, not the opponents, of American
-society. They have been business men, philanthropists, educators, not
-strike-leaders, social workers, and philosophers.
-
-I talked recently to the head of a great manufacturing plant where
-technical skill both of hand and of brain was exercised upon wood and
-brass and steel. The modern world, according to his viewing (which
-was very obviously from the angle of business) is divided into two
-categories, executives and engineers. Executives are the men who
-organize and control. They are the ones chiefly rewarded. Engineers
-invent and carry out. They are the experts. It is the executives who
-lead; the experts supply ideas, work out methods, but follow.
-
-This statement may be disputable, and it is certainly a painfully
-narrow bed in which to tuck American life and American ideals.
-Nevertheless, it has at least one element of profound truth. In the
-world of physical endeavor and physical organization it is executive
-business men who have changed, broken up, reorganized, developed the
-material world of America. They have fearlessly scrapped the whole
-machinery of production, transportation, and trade as it existed in the
-last generation, and in many respects improved upon, or destroyed by
-competition, the parallel order in the Old World. They have been true
-radicals of the physical category, and their achievements have been as
-truly radicalism as the experiments of Lenine in government ownership.
-That it is a physical radicalism, dealing with material values chiefly
-and without reference to some of the greatest needs of the human
-spirit, does not mean that intellect of a high, if not the highest,
-order may not have been required for its successful accomplishment.
-
-Our other native radicals, the philanthropists and the educators,
-have also been chiefly executives. Their work has been inspired by
-the stored-up moral force of America, especially puritan America. But
-their great achievements, like those of the business men, have been in
-organization and development rather than in thought.
-
-In earlier generations our moral radicals were such men as Emerson
-and Whitman. To-day they are college presidents, organizers of
-junior high-school systems, or heads of the Rockefeller and Carnegie
-foundations--prime movers all of them in systems of educational or
-philanthropic practice that uplift millions at a turn of a jack-screw.
-And these men in any true sense of the word are radicals--so radical in
-their thorough-going attempts to transform society by making it more
-intelligent, healthier, more productive that all Europe is protesting
-or imitating them. Who is exercising a greater pressure for durable
-change upon the largest number, who is digging most strenuously about
-the roots of the old order, John Rockefeller, Jr. and his co-workers or
-Trotzky? It is not easy to say.
-
-This essay is not propaganda, and I am not particularly concerned
-as to whether or no the reader accepts my broadening of the term
-“radicalism.” Time may force him to do so, for no one can tell in
-a given age just what actions and what theories will lead to the
-tearing up of old institutions and the planting of a new order. Those
-absolutist kings, Philip Augustus and his successors, who crushed
-together the provinces of France, were, we see now, radicals, though
-power and privilege were their motives. I, however, am interested in
-men rather than in categories, and the philanthropist radicals, the
-business radicals, and the educational pioneers of America already
-interest the world strangely.
-
-What they are in essence is of course more important than the name we
-give them. And first of all I believe that in a genuine, if narrow,
-sense they have been idealistic; indeed, that their American idealism
-has made them radical. If America at present is actively, practically
-idealistic (something Europe and the world in general would like to
-have determined) it is due to them.
-
-Idealism is not a negative virtue. It is not mysticism. It is not
-meditation, though it may be its fruit. Whatever idealism may be in
-philosophical definition, in life it is the desire and the attempt
-to put into practice conceptions of what ought theoretically to be
-accomplished in this imperfect world; and the quality of the idealism
-depends upon the quality of the idealist.
-
-In this sense--a true sense for America, however inapplicable to the
-Middle Ages--who can doubt that such Americans as I have described are
-idealistic? Nowhere in the world are there more visible evidences of
-the desires of men wreaking themselves upon earth and stone and metal,
-upon customs and government and morals, than in this new continent.
-And these desires are predominantly for betterment, for perfection--a
-low perfection sometimes, it is true--for the “uplift,” physically,
-morally, intellectually of humanity.
-
-Of course the quality of American idealism is mixed. Beside the pure
-ambition of a St. Francis to make men brothers, beside the aspiring
-hope of the cathedral builders to make faith lovely to the eye, the
-ideal of a chain of five-and-ten cent stores, or a railroad system,
-or even a democratic method of education, is not a luminous, not a
-spiritual, idealism. But a working ideal for the benefit of the race it
-may be, and often is.
-
-The truth of this has not seemed obvious to Europeans or to most
-Americans. Our individualism has been so intense and often so
-self-seeking, our preoccupation since the Civil War so dominantly with
-matter rather than with mind or spirit, that it is easy for foreigners
-to call us mere money-grubbers. Yet no one who has ever talked with
-a “captain of industry” or the director of a great philanthropic
-enterprise feels doubt as to the unsoundness of this description.
-Unfair, narrow, material-minded we may have been, but our enterprises
-have had vision behind them, dreams, perhaps, imposed upon us by the
-circumstances of a new, raw, continent, by wealth for the seeking,
-by opportunities for the making, by vast battles with nature to be
-organized and won.
-
-Furthermore, behind and beneath all our striving, sets of moral ideas
-have been active. America has never been blasé or cynical. We have
-never relinquished the ethics of puritanism, which are the ethics
-of the Bible. Even the greedy capitalist has disgorged at last, and
-devoted his winnings to the improvement of the society he preyed upon.
-But most American capitalists have not been greedy. They themselves
-have been devoured by a consuming desire to accomplish, to build up,
-to put through. When they have broken laws, it is because the laws
-have held them back from what seemed to them necessary, inevitable
-development for the greater good of all--because, in a word, they were
-radical.
-
-One night in war-time, at a base port in Scotland far from our own
-environment and our native prejudices, I heard the self-told tale
-of an arch-enemy of American “interests,” a pugnacious man who had
-fought and won, with a price on his head, sent millionaires to jail,
-been calumniated, been trapped by infamous conspiracies, and escaped
-them--a man better hated, better loved than is the fortune of most of
-us. My other companion was another American, a young, but celebrated,
-preacher, a moralist of the breed of the Beechers and the Spurgeons.
-And the same question rose to our lips when the story was finished.
-These enemies, these magnates who had been jailed and defeated, and
-yet still fought and often successfully, were they mere self-seekers,
-rascals, by any fair definition? And neither of us was satisfied with
-that answer, nor was the hero of the story. Two of us at least agreed
-that it was rather a case of “enterprise” _versus_ “social justice,”
-of individualistic effort _versus_ the rights of a community. The zeal
-of the capitalists had burned in their hearts until they broke through
-morality in an effort to make good.
-
-But of course most of our American radicals have not been even
-illegal in their idealism. Their zeal has encountered only obstinacy,
-stupidity, and the intractable conservatism of ordinary life. These
-men have built up great industries that made life more facile, or
-extended great educational and health enterprises over States and
-beyond seas, with little harm to any man and much good to most, unless
-the source of the wealth expended be questioned, or the effect of a
-zealot’s ideas enforced upon millions.
-
-Indeed, if strength of purpose, if energy, if a burning desire to
-change, to better the minds, the bodies, or the tools of men, were all
-that could be asked of radicalism, then we might well rest content
-with the achievements of the American idealist-radical. But more has
-been asked of the reformer, even of the reformer of business methods,
-than energy and will. The radicalism I have described, based upon
-common sense and inspired by restless virility, has not always been
-adequate. The pioneering days are ended when a good shot could always
-get game, a strong arm always find plowlands. It is time to take
-thought. And if one compares the uprooting energy of Americans with
-the intellectual radicalism of Europe or with the new radicalism of
-the incoming American generation, a curious difference appears. Our
-old radicalism was perhaps healthier, certainly more productive of
-immediate betterment to those who profited by it; but it is harder to
-define, harder to follow into a probable future, because, when all is
-said, it is relatively aimless.
-
-Where do our vast business enterprises lead? Toward a greater
-production of this world’s goods, toward an accumulation of wealth
-in the hands of the sturdy organizers; but equally toward a vast
-corporate machine in which the individual man becomes a particle lost
-in the mass, toward a society which produces wealth without learning
-to distribute or employ it for the purposes of civilization. I do not
-say that this latter port is our destination. I say that our business
-leaders are steering a course which is just as likely to land us there
-as anywhere. Or, rather, they are stoking the engines and letting the
-rudder go free.
-
-And is our vast educational enterprise any more definitely aimed?
-Perhaps so, for the increase of intelligence is an end in itself.
-Nevertheless, for what, let us say, is the American high school
-preparing, a new social order, or the stabilization of the old one?
-When the aristocrats and the burghers of Europe began to be educated,
-they tore themselves apart in furious wars over religion. When the
-Western proletariate becomes educated, will it not tear our social
-fabric in class wars also? Are we educating for this or against it? For
-what kind of society are we educating? The socialist has his answer.
-Can American school boards say?
-
-And our organized philanthropists, combating hookworm, tuberculosis,
-lynching, child labor, liquor, slums, and preventable crime? The
-medieval church, hampered by its lack of science and the waywardness
-of its world, engaged in such a struggle, and from a thousand
-monasteries, built, like our modern foundations, upon the profits of
-exploitation, strove to uplift Europe. Its aim and end were clear: to
-practise charity that the souls of workers and donors might be saved;
-to clothe the naked and feed the hungry that love might be felt to
-govern the world. And the church succeeded in its measure until, on
-the somewhat specious plea that not love, but justice, was demanded,
-rapacious governments seized the capital of the ecclesiastical
-corporations and sold the abbeys for building stone and lead.
-
-Our great organizations are more efficient than the church, because
-they are more scientific. Whether they are more successful depends
-upon one’s estimate of success. The modern man, for whom they care,
-is a cleaner, brighter, more long-lived person than his medieval
-ancestor. He is probably better material for civilization, because, if
-more vulgarized, he is more intelligent. That he is happier is not
-so certain. The church inspired a confidence (not always justified)
-in the friendliness of destiny which the Rockefeller Foundation has
-so far failed to equal. Nevertheless, scientific philanthropy, though
-it promises less, achieves what it does promise more thoroughly
-and without those terrible by-products of the ecclesiastical
-system--servility, pauperism, bigotry, and superstition. But what is
-its aim?
-
-With little more regard to the source of their wealth than the church,
-the philanthropies of to-day have far less regard for the final results
-of their benefactions. As with the educators, it is enough for them, so
-to speak, to improve the breed. The apparent philosophy behind their
-program is that when the proletariate is bathed, educated, and made
-healthy, it will be civilized, and therefore competent to take over the
-world (including universities and steel mills, railroads and hospitals)
-and run it. But the executives of these great organizations would
-probably protest against this reading of their expectations almost as
-quickly as the donors of the funds; certainly they show no readiness to
-meet the proletariate half-way on its upward path. Clearly, you cannot
-wash, teach, and invigorate society without powerfully affecting the
-whole social fabric. The feeble experiments of the nineteenth century
-in universal education have already proved that. Some transformation
-the great endowments of our age are laboring to bring about. For the
-creating of a new race they have a plan, but not for its salvation,
-even on this side of heaven. Indeed, as the German experience shows,
-they may even become instruments by which the common man is made
-a mere tool firmly grasped by the hand of authority. Common sense
-alone governs them. Their vision is bent upon the immediate, not the
-ultimate, future.
-
-A little vague these criticisms may seem to the practical mind; and
-vague, when philosophically considered, are the aims of American
-radicalism. Very different, indeed, they are from the clean-cut
-programs of the European radical. There is little vagueness in
-socialism, little vagueness in syndicalism, the very opposite of
-vagueness, despite the efforts of the American press, in Bolshevism.
-In all these systems the past is condemned, the present reconstructed,
-and the future made visible with a lucidity that betrays their origin
-in efforts of the pure reason. That, of course, is the difficulty--at
-least to American and most British intelligences. The aim of Bolshevism
-is so definite as to be almost mathematical. Society as a whole is
-considered economically, and a program deduced that will fill the most
-mouths with the least labor. To be sure, stomach-filling is not the
-sole purpose of Lenine and his followers. They argue, and with more
-right than our easy-going bourgeois civilization is willing to concede,
-that idleness, unrest, and crime are more often the result than the
-cause of poverty. Nevertheless, the type radical of the European
-variety does unquestionably rest his case upon the premise that man
-is merely a tool-using animal. Ask a Bolshevik where civilization is
-going, and he will answer you with ease and explicitness. Ask the
-average American, and he will either reply in vague platitudes or deny
-both knowledge and responsibility. Of the two men he is less likely to
-be wrong.
-
-And note well that our domesticated socialists and intelligentzia,
-though far more inclined to consider the human factor than the
-Bolsheviki, have the same advantage of clarity of aim, and the same
-tendency to confuse ideas with facts. Common sense--not the highest
-virtue, not the virtue which will save our souls, or even our bodies,
-in a crisis like war or a turmoil of the spirit--is often lacking in
-the socialist. Good humor--again not a quality that wins heaven’s
-gates, but a saving grace, nevertheless--is noticeably absent from
-the columns of our radical weeklies. An admirable service they are
-rendering in clarifying the American mind, in forcing it, or some of
-it, to face issues, to think things through, to be intelligent as
-well as sensible; but the logical rigidity of their program inhibits
-that sense of proportion which recognizes the _Falstaffs_ and the
-_Micawbers_ of this world, smiles sometimes over miscarriages of
-idealism, sympathizes with feeble, humorous man, does not always scold.
-
-And yet the American who dislikes scolding should beware of
-superciliousness. It is much easier for genial folks to chide the
-critics with programs than to be critical of themselves. The normal
-American is a product of American education, with its insistence upon
-liberal progress, upon acceleration toward the vaguest of goals. It has
-not taught him to be critical of others in any thorough-going fashion,
-it has not taught him to be critical of himself. The confidence that
-has carried our business to a maximum, that has flung our schools
-broadcast, and swept our philanthropies over the world, spelled
-differently is self-assurance. Nothing disturbs us so much as to be
-told to stop and think. Nothing angers the business world so much as
-legislation that “halts business.” Nothing infuriates an educational
-organizer more than to question the quality, not the quantity, of his
-product. We have seen clearly what we wished to do with iron and coal
-and food. We have felt, in education and philanthropy, sure of our
-moral bases. Our energy has been concentrated on going ahead. To be
-radical intellectually, to think it all out in terms of a possible
-relation of labor and capital, of a possible education, of a possible
-society for the future--that has not appealed to us. We have shunned
-philosophical programs by instinct, and wilfully built for to-day
-instead of tomorrow. The American radical has done too little thinking;
-the European, perhaps too much.
-
-But the infection of thought is spreading. I do not believe that the
-youths who will make the coming generation--the youths that fought the
-war--are going to be radicals in the sense that I have called European.
-If the ideas of Marx and Lenine ever take root in America, it will be
-because social injustice such as we have not yet been cursed with makes
-a soil for them. If they take root, they transform in the growing, like
-foreign plants in California weather. But the new generation is not
-like the old. It is more sensitive to the winds of doctrine. It is less
-empirical, less optimistic, less self-assured.
-
-Already one can divide into two classes the undergraduates as one
-finds them in American colleges. The smaller group their elders would
-call radical. But they are not socialists, not anarchists, not even
-consistently liberal. More truly, they are critics of things as they
-are. Their minds are restless; they are ever seeking for definitions,
-for solutions, for a cause to enroll under. They are restless under
-the push of common sense America that drives them into activity without
-explanation. They are painfully aware of the difference between their
-ideas and the conditions of life in modern society, and are determined
-to test one by the other. Their native idealism has become intellectual.
-
-The other group is far larger, but, if less restless, is no more
-static. Most of its members are indifferent to the new ideas
-scintillating all over the world, if indeed they are not ignorant of
-them. Nevertheless, their faith in society as it was is curiously
-weak. If few of them are likely to become socialists, few also will be
-inspired by the physical and moral idealism of their fathers. The naïve
-enthusiasm of those fathers for “movements,” “ideals,” “progress” is
-not (unless I miss my guess) common among them. They are not likely
-to overturn America a second time in order to make great fortunes;
-philanthropy does not interest them; education as a missionary
-endeavor does not seem to attract them. Their moral foundations are
-less solid than in old days; their energies less boundless; aimless
-endeavor for the sake of doing something is no longer a lure. Either
-they will find a program of their own to excite them, or stand pat upon
-the fortune they expect to inherit. If their future is to be narrowed
-to a choice between pleasure and mere productivity, why, then these
-men would rather run motor-cars than make them. There is a very real
-danger that rather than hustle for the sake of hustling, they will
-prefer to “lie down” on their job. And thanks to the homogeneity of the
-current American mind, this analysis, if it is true at all, is true of
-thousands.
-
-The American radical in the future, I take it, will still be idealist,
-but not Bolshevik. That generalization from the needs of poverty is
-at the same time too material to suit his temper, which is still
-fundamentally moral, and too rash economically to sit with his
-practical common sense. He will remain an idealist; but a sharpening
-of his intellect will give teeth to his idealism, and the practical
-common sense he will carry over from the days when his kind were
-pioneers in a new world will steady him. What he will want is not yet
-clear, except that it will certainly not be the world of Marx or the
-kaiser (himself in many respects a radical). What he will do I cannot
-venture to guess. But if one dare not prophesy, one may at least hope.
-
-And my hope is that a principle now visibly at work among many
-Americans may guide him also. Principles, if they are sound, have a
-way of making themselves felt through the padding of mental habit and
-convention, like knobs in a chair-seat.
-
-The principle I have in mind is merely this: that a man’s character
-and the ideas upon which, so to speak, he operates must be appraised
-separately. Tenacity of will, honesty of spirit, tenderness of
-heart--such elements of character make a man neither conservative nor
-radical, but they cannot be left out of political accounting.
-
-And my hope is that the new generation is going to be forced toward
-such a weighing and discrimination of character and policies. Their
-mental padding has worn thin in war-time. The moral conventions that we
-have accepted almost unhesitatingly here in America no longer protect
-the youth with certainty from the shrewd blows of rationalism or
-superstition.
-
-Therefore ideas and character are both likely to be more closely
-inspected in the days that are coming. The conservative minded, as
-in the past, will emphasize character; and as that is a much better
-platform to stand on than mere obstinacy or self-interest, they will
-presumably be better conservatives, provided that the intellectual
-unrest of the times forces them to think. The radicals will search for
-ideas that may transform the future, and if the abundance of ideas in
-relation to the paucity of accomplishment causes them to put a higher
-value upon character, why, so much for the better radicalism.
-
-No future in the history of the world has been so interesting as is the
-immediate future of America. Our next great political leader, who may
-be conservative, but is probably radical, is now in college or has but
-lately been graduated--unless, indeed, he has just been admitted to
-a labor-union. And he is studying, one hopes, the men who dealt most
-heavily in character, the amiable McKinley, the fiercely instinctive
-Roosevelt; he is studying the careers of the men who have been
-dominated chiefly by ideas, the moral idealist Wilson, the ruthless
-thinker Lenine. He is learning, one hopes, when and why each and all
-failed, each and all in their measure succeeded. Whether he profits,
-and we profit, from their experience, time alone will discover.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV
-
-AMERICAN IDEALISM
-
-
-Is American idealism a virtue, a disease, or an illusion? The question
-cannot be answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry with which
-Tennyson threatened the flower in the crannied wall--what man is, and
-what God is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can be made ready
-for answering. The writer, and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer
-to it; and that is better than the inner feeling of many an American
-just now, who, weary of five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly
-believes that American idealism is first of all a nuisance.
-
-Yet it was never so easy to make a case for the virtue of idealism as
-in retrospect of the years 1914-18. What many have never grasped in
-the confusion of the times is that exactly the same idealistic prime
-motive made us join hearts from the first with Great Britain and
-France, kept us out of war for two years and a half, and brought us
-in on that April of 1917. There is always a complex of motives behind
-every war, but there is also, with few exceptions, a _primum mobile_,
-and with us it was the distrust, the fear, the hatred that were the
-reactions of our idealism against arbitrary violence. The invasion of
-Belgium settled our will for Belgium and her allies. Our distrust of
-war, especially European war, as a means by which we could bring about
-justice and peace, kept us out of the struggle despite clamorous, and
-perhaps far-sighted, minorities. Our final conviction that violence was
-a fire loose in the world, which must be stamped out, drove us from
-easy neutrality into war. And if in the last of these three stages
-dread of the future and the need of immediate self-defense had their
-large part, they did no more than sharpen the angle of our resolve.
-Idealism kept us out of war, and idealism drove us into it.
-
-The fume and spume of idealism is oratory, sermonizing, talk about
-morality, duty, patriotism, rights, and noble purposes. All such
-gushing rhetoric is no more the thing itself than foam is the ocean.
-But, like smoke, there is seldom much of it without cause. Men and
-women who were abroad in 1918 must reflect curiously on the, shall
-we say, wearisome prevalence of the moralistic, idealistic note in
-American speech and writing in contrast to its restraint and frequent
-absence in France and England. When an Englishman orated upon the war
-to stop war he was usually talking for American consumption. This does
-not mean that Great Britain and France were sordid, we sincere; on the
-contrary, it is proof of a tincture of the sentimental in our idealism,
-to which I shall later return. But it is additional testimony to the
-quantity and the popularity of American idealism in those months. The
-tone of the press at that crucial time was evidence of the tone of
-the people that read and responded. And while many a sounding speech
-and impassioned editorial are now, as one reads them, a little faded,
-faintly absurd, like tattered war posters on a rural bill-board, yet no
-one can doubt the flood of patriotic idealism that created them, few
-will doubt that our war idealism was a virtue in 1914-1918.
-
-It seemed a virtue then, but was it not already diseased? When we
-entered the war, the vast majority of Americans publicly and privately
-committed themselves to certain general principles, and, whatever
-else they fought for, believed that they were fighting for them. A
-square deal all around was one, the consent of the governed to their
-government was another, a third was the substitution, at all costs, of
-justice for violence in the ruling of the world. We all assented to
-these principles, most of us assumed them voluntarily as an article
-of faith, and the average man took them as seriously as he is able to
-take abstractions. Peace came, the armistice, the stages of the treaty.
-Nothing could be clearer or more to be expected than that sometimes in
-spirit, often in detail, and most seriously in ultimate purpose, the
-treaty in scores of instances ran counter to the faiths we had accepted
-and made commonplaces of speech and thinking.
-
-I am neither criticizing nor justifying the treaty and its included
-covenant. No one, I suppose, but a sentimental optimist could
-have expected a work of logical art in exact conformity with the
-principles and conditions of a new epoch that has scarcely begun, no
-one at least who had ever read history, or studied the politics of
-Sonnino, Clemenceau, and the Unionist party. It was bound to have
-inconsistencies; to reflect as many views as there were strong minds
-in the conference, to be experimental, to be a compromise. This is not
-what is astonishing; it is the attitude of the typical American mind
-toward the treaty negotiations.
-
-In the winter and spring of 1919, while the world was burning, while
-the principles we had shouted for were at last in actual settlement,
-this enormous American idealism slept, forgot its fine phrases,
-forgot its pledges to see the thing through, was bored because some
-Americans felt that it was our duty to see the thing through. We are an
-uncritical nation despite our occasional vehemence of criticism, but
-we have never been so uncritical of major issues as in 1919, when the
-terms of world settlement were of acute interest to all but Americans.
-We are an easy-going nation, but we have never been so easy-going as
-in 1919, when not one man in a thousand as much as read the abstract
-of the treaty to see whether the things he had said he fought for were
-safeguarded in it. The only real fire-spitting fervor struck out in
-this country since the armistice has been in defense of our right to
-let Europe stew in her own juice, and our privilege to tell general
-principles to go hang. And this is an emotion almost too narrow to be
-attributed, even by the generous minded, to idealism.
-
-One answers, of course, that such a decline from overheated virtue
-into indifferentism is only human nature at its old tricks, the
-collapse after the New Year’s resolution, the weariness of being too
-good, symptoms, in short, of content with having “licked the Hun,”
-and a desire to get back to work. And the reply is, of course this is
-true. But Europe is not thus functioning. There has been a striking
-contrast in the years since the war between British and American
-attitudes toward treaty negotiations. In England, exhausted by war as
-we never were, deep in the lassitude of rest after struggle, men and
-women have leaped into criticism and defense of the ideals embodied
-in the settlement. Peace has seemed to them as vital a battle-ground
-of ideas as war. By and large, the plodding mass of us who make money
-and public opinion have been cold to the contest, uninterested. The
-press of Great Britain has fiercely attacked and fiercely defended
-the morale of the treaty; ours has reported it with little real
-criticism and little interest except where the league was concerned.
-Their universities have supplied men and parties to fight through the
-principles for which we fought; ours have been intent upon how much
-scholastic credit should be given returned soldiers and who should
-get an honorary degree. They forced an easy-going premier to stand
-for a victory that was more than conquest; we grudged our President
-the attempt to carry through in Paris what in 1917 we were all agreed
-upon; let our dislike of his methods outweigh our deep interest in his
-ends. If it had not been for the great issue of the League of Nations,
-which, forcing Americans to act, forced them to remember (some with
-difficulty) what they had believed in and what they had learned in
-1917 of the dangers of selfish aloofness from world problems, if it
-had not been for the fight over the league, the politics of 1919 would
-have been as local, as trivial, as wearisome, as in the year after a
-Presidential election. Some scholar in the next decade will place side
-by side the files of a New York daily in its moral-idealistic stage
-of 1917 and its cynical back-to-business mood of 1919; will compare
-the fantastic pledges never again to trade with Germany, which were
-circulating in 1918, with the export statistics of 1919; will marvel,
-and perhaps draw conclusions.
-
-And one wonders, meeting everywhere an interest in world affairs that
-seems dying, a national morale that is forgetting its moral impulses, a
-hatred of the professional idealist, a weariness of general principles,
-and a cynical distrust of ideas--one wonders whether this flaming
-American idealism so-called was not even in 1918 flushed with disease,
-a virtue already dying.
-
-Were we indeed ever really idealistic? Consider the case of the
-ablest of our manufacturers, who, when the emotional fit was on him,
-proposed to increase the production of idealism until every American
-home should own an ideal of the latest model. He gives the order, draws
-the checks, and, naïvely surprised at the discovery that you cannot
-make ideals without understanding them, hangs up philosophy, and goes
-back to the motor business. Consider the case of our radical papers who
-fought our entrance into a war where American ideals were not properly
-safeguarded, and then preferred to risk a treaty without the League
-of Nations, to a league which, though it expressed American idealism,
-was not perfect by their judging. Consider the flaming desire to make
-the universe and one’s home safe for democracy, in contrast with the
-current contempt for the ideals of industrial democracy. Perforce one
-wonders whether American idealism, healthy or diseased, is not a mere
-emotion, easily roused, never lasting; whether, as a valuable part of
-our national character, it is not an illusion.
-
-So much needs to be said by way of charge and speculation in order
-to clear the air. If I write with some excitement, it is no more
-than the sight of the tumble from great-worded, great deeded 1918
-to the indifferent, self-regarding, and a little cynical present
-may account for. Certainly in our national past idealism has not
-been an illusion, although it was often emotional. Nor, in sober
-fact, do I doubt the essential idealism of the normal American mind,
-especially that American mind which inherits the optimism and the
-liberal instincts of our forefathers. I am merely curious as to the
-exact nature of that idealism as it exists, and plays strange tricks,
-to-day. It seems to be a quality more resembling energy than a moral
-characteristic like virtue or vice. It seems, as one thinks over these
-recent manifestations, to be a blend of physical virility and nervous
-sensitiveness, good or bad, active or inactive, according to the
-condition and environment of the patient. Stir him, and it becomes
-active, beneficent, altruistic. Stir him further, and it may become
-sentimental, with symptoms of hysteria. Relax the pressure, and it
-drops into desuetude. These are the habits of American idealism, and
-I doubt whether more can be said of them except by way of further
-description. But there must be some thoughts, some ideas behind to
-account for these vagaries. There must be reasons why Americans
-idealize more readily than other nations, and why, just now at least,
-they so easily tire of their idealizing.
-
-Neither the scope of these pages nor my knowledge permits me to trace
-the history of American thinking and feeling, to say, as the historians
-some day must, what elements came from Europe, what modifications are
-due to pioneer environment, racial mixture, and centuries of unchecked
-material development. But tentatively, and with all modesty, one may
-at least seek for light. I find that two great figures of our national
-youth and the ways of thinking they represented most help me to
-understand the strengths and the weaknesses of American idealism, help
-to an understanding of the phenomena of 1917-20.
-
-The first is Jonathan Edwards, theologian of international importance,
-leader of the great spiritual revival of mid-eighteenth century New
-England, missionary to the Indians, president of Princeton, author of
-works so widely read that even now no farm-house garret in New England
-but will yield a sermon or two, a treatise on original sin, or his
-epochal essay on the freedom of the will.
-
-Alas for human reputation! This tireless thinker, whose logic built
-up in entirety an impregnable argument worthy of Aquinas, is now
-chiefly remembered as a preacher of infant damnation and a thunderer of
-hell-fire over frightened Northampton congregations. But, as all wiser
-critics know, the influence of a great mind is distinct and often
-different from its reputation. What it does, works on and on after
-death, transmuting, transforming; what it was in popular repute, soon
-becomes legend and supposed historical fact. Compare the reputation
-of Machiavelli with his achievements and influence as described in
-Macaulay’s famous essay.
-
-In actual achievement Edwards, whose mind was of unusual lucidity and
-endurance, crystallized for Americans the Calvinistic ethics of life
-which were the backbone of Puritan civilization. Man, by the unarguable
-might of God, is born with a will whose nature may be either bad or
-good. Henceforth his reason is free, his choice is free, within the
-limits that his character permits. It becomes therefore supremely
-important that he shall choose and reason virtuously, for there is no
-way to be sure that he has a good will, that he is among the “elect”
-except by virtuous action leading to a sense of salvation. Thus in
-every condition of life, without excuse or palliation, the Christian
-must daily, hourly strive to _prove_ that he is one of the elect of
-God, saved from hell-fire by the character God has given him. Good
-intentions count for nothing. Good works, if unaccompanied by the sense
-of spiritual salvation, count for nothing. God, Himself blameless, has
-willed sin and sinful men. It is for us to prove that we are not among
-the damned.
-
-That the system is incredible most moderns now believe; that it is
-logical, more logical perhaps than any later attempt to justify the
-ways of God to man, the student must admit. My desire is naturally not
-to argue, but to emphasize, what can never be too much emphasized, the
-effect of such thinking upon the intellectual life of America. It was
-believed in powerfully and well understood by perhaps a majority of one
-formative generation. Later it was not believed in so powerfully, and
-it was but little understood, especially outside of New England. But
-a conviction of the infinite necessity of willing the right became a
-mental habit in American morality that persists and becomes a trait and
-a chief factor, as any reader may see, in so-called American idealism.
-
-Benjamin Franklin was almost the exact contemporary of Jonathan
-Edwards, but he had the inestimable advantage of living longer and
-seeing more; two continents and two ages, in fact, were his familiars,
-and learned from him as well as taught him. Franklin, it is clear, was
-strongly influenced by that French eighteenth century which he loved,
-with its praise of reason and its trust in common sense. But he was
-even more a product of the new America. America, as Edwards and Cotton
-Mather saw it, was an experiment in godliness. When the Puritan scheme
-should have proved its efficacy by an abnormal increase in the number
-of earthly saints, the colonies would have served their chief end, and
-would, so Mather thought, decline. The hell-breathing vehemence of
-Edwards was chiefly due to his fear that the scheme was failing. He
-was fighting a spiritual decline.
-
-But Franklin was a member of the worldly, not the spiritual, body of
-America; he was a citizen of a country visibly growing in wealth and
-population. He looked outward, not inward; forward, not backward.
-Like Edwards, he hated sin; but sin for him was not sin because it
-was forbidden, but forbidden because it was sin. Franklin’s was a
-practical morality, which was cut to fit life, not to compress it. His
-firm character and the clarity of his reason kept his morals high.
-His ethics were admirable, but they were based upon the principle
-that honesty is the best policy, not upon the fear of God. To be
-“reasonable” was his highest good. “So convenient it is to be a
-reasonable creature,” he remarks whimsically, “since it enables one to
-find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” As long
-as one is a Franklin, with the will to virtue, honesty, industry, and
-thrift that is bred from a good inheritance, in a new and developing
-country, such ethics make for idealism. No one was more idealistic in
-his day than the practical Franklin, who wished to form a league of
-virtue of all nations to be governed by rules, and supported by the
-reason of virtuous mankind.
-
-And here is another palpable strain of Americanism, differing from
-that necessity which Edwards trumpeted, but, like it, a stiffener
-of idealistic impulses. Here one places the love of a square deal,
-the desire to do what is right because it is “fair,” the sense of
-the reasonableness of justice that freed the slaves, gave Cuba
-self-government, determined our policy toward the Philippines, and was
-horror-struck by the invasion of Belgium. It is the idealism of good
-common sense, and together with the mental habit of willing the right
-has been a main cause of American idealism.
-
-Both of these American characteristics are operative to-day. Both are
-now factors and dangerous factors in our idealism, for the strong will
-of the Calvinists to do right has become erratic and perverted, and the
-common sense of Franklin’s school has degenerated. Here, as I shall
-endeavor to show, are two chief causes for the vagaries of the American
-mind in the years that ended the war.
-
-The mental discipline which the Puritans learned from the fear of
-a wrathful God remained a discipline long after it had lost its
-theological basis, and is responsible in no small measure for the
-disciplined will of nineteenth-century America to succeed in material
-endeavors as well as in philanthropic or moral purpose. But, divorced
-from the belief in a speedy damnation which had given it cause, it
-was bound to become, and it did become, a mere mental habit, a kind
-of aimless necessity of being virtuous. Bolted no longer to a belief
-in a revengeful God who demanded virtue, loosed, like an engine from
-its flywheel, this ancestral sense of necessity whirled on by its
-own momentum. It became will without thinking behind it, which was
-driven by material circumstance instead of religious belief. It became
-a restless energy whose aim, as a foreign observer has said, seemed
-to be “mere acceleration.” It became unreasonable, often absurd,
-sometimes hysterical. I find its manifestations in the insistence that
-America must always be described as sweet, lovely, and virtuous in
-disregard of the facts, in our “boosting” of prosperity and success
-by proclaiming them. I find them in the determination to be good and
-happy and prosperous immediately and without regard to circumstance
-which has created the American magazine story and brought about
-national prohibition by constitutional amendment. This hand-me-down
-will is responsible for much progress, good and bad, in America; it is
-also responsible for American sentimentalism. It has been a driving
-force in our idealism; but because it is not so much reasoned purpose
-as a mental habit inherited, it has run wild, become hysterical and
-erratic. It led us to propose to reform the world and to advertise
-our intention before our brains were ready for the task. It makes our
-idealism feverish and uncertain.
-
-As for Franklin’s rule of common sense, it has become a positive
-deterrent to idealism. His idea of conduct reasonably shaped according
-to the needs of environment was, and is to-day, the most solid trait
-of Americans. It is the ethics of modern business, and American
-business has become, and for a little while yet will remain, the
-fundamental America. Nevertheless, every candid observer will admit,
-no matter how great his faith in the future of his country, that the
-reasonable good sense of the Franklin tradition suffered a progressive
-dilution or degeneration throughout the nineteenth century. Rational
-ethics became for the most of us materialistic rationalism, still
-reasonable, still ethical in its way, still backed and restrained
-by common sense (our profiteers have also been philanthropists),
-but an enemy, nevertheless, to all idealism that could not be made
-from steel, brick, rubber, or oil. We have been too reasonable to be
-sordid; too materialistic to remain in the best sense reasonable. Far
-from advocating a league of the virtues, our business common sense
-has been fighting a League of Nations. The contrast between our moral
-code and our business code has already been overwritten in muck-raking
-literature. Nevertheless, despite exaggeration, it exists. Our national
-life is dual. We can stand on our moral foot and our business foot, but
-usually we alternate. In 1918 we rested entirely on one; in 1919 we
-swung with relief to the other. Franklin’s rule of common sense as a
-stimulus to idealism has broken down.
-
-What reasonable sense of proportion I myself possess as a descendant
-of the compatriots of Franklin urges me to protest instantly that all
-this is not to be taken as a picture of contemporary America. Rather
-it is a plucking out merely of two strains of experience that all
-must recognize. But these are perilously interwoven in our national
-character. They affect the validity of our idealism.
-
-The hysterical will drives us into professions of virtue we cannot make
-good. It drove us to “boost” the war; and then, being a restless energy
-sprung from habit rather than from conviction, left us exhausted in
-spirit and cynical in mind when the moral profits were ready for the
-gathering. It stirred a passion for the League of Nations, rights of
-small countries, democracy, justice, and the rest, and then collapsed
-like the second day of “clean-up” week. It set the will going and left
-the brain unmoved.
-
-And our common sense, diluted through millions, obsessed by the
-problems of manufacture and construction, is in ever greater danger
-of losing that basis of character and enlightened reason that alone
-can make common sense anything but common. It dreads ideas, distrusts
-theories, is made uncomfortable by altruism that extends beyond the
-home. As a nation, we have not degenerated, for our virile energy, our
-will, our adaptiveness are all as strong as ever, stronger perhaps
-than elsewhere in the world. But, as compared with Franklin’s, our
-common sense has lost character. It pulled back in the great moral
-and intellectual problems of the war; it did not lead. As manifested
-in the present struggle over international policies, it falls below
-the ethical standards of the nation, whether you tap it in clubs and
-offices or in Congress. In a time of crisis it rallies to encounter
-material problems and is invaluable; but morally and intellectually its
-vision is short, its endurance weak.
-
-The trouble with the American reformer, as has often been said, is that
-he has more energy than reason; and this is because he incarnates the
-instinctive, irrational will of which I have been writing. The trouble
-with the American materialist is that he has kept his common sense
-while losing his vision.
-
-Both, in short, lack an adequate spiritual and moral basis; and so does
-the American idealism that is functioning nobly, but so irregularly,
-to-day. With an irresponsible will driving it forward and a
-matter-of-fact common sense holding it back, it suffers too frequently
-from the weakness of all qualities that spring from custom rather than
-from conviction. Its leafage has spread; its roots have contracted.
-
-I am not so unhumorous as to propose that the remedy is once again to
-believe in Jonathan Edwards’s God and infant damnation; but we must
-go deeper than habit and tradition for the springs of our action. Not
-since the Civil War have we as a nation explored our souls, sought the
-channels of our being, tested our ultimate faith. This war has been no
-test. Its issues were clear. They appealed to principles that we held
-firmly because we had inherited them. It was easier to go in than to
-stay out. Even our material prosperity, apparently, stood to gain, not
-to lose, by entering the conflict. We made the right choice, but it
-was not hard to make it. To be idealistic was easy.
-
-I do not believe that our inheritance either of virtuous will or of
-practical common sense will serve us long without renewal. The first
-is vehement in propaganda, prohibition, and hysteric excess, but
-flags when a load of stern duty, national or international, is put
-upon it. The second has no end and aim but the making of a prosperous
-America where the grubber and the grabber have much and others
-little. It is useful, nay, indispensable, to the economic state, but
-beyond economics--and so much is beyond economics!--there is little
-health in it. If our idealism is to remain as robust as our material
-prosperity, it must gain what Franklin would have described as a basis
-of enlightened reason, or suffer what Edwards would have called a
-conversion--and, preferably, both.
-
-Samuel’s mother was a fine, but somewhat rigorous, woman who brought
-him up in the conviction that he had to do right (by which she meant
-being honest and moral, and going to church on Sundays) or shame
-would come upon him. His father was a man whose “word was as good as
-his bond.” He taught his boy that working hard and saving money were
-probably the most important things in life, and that if you paid your
-bills, were true to your word, and kept an eye upon shifty neighbors,
-you were sure to be happy and successful.
-
-At the age of fifty the father died from hardening of the arteries,
-the result of too few vacations, and the mother became a rather morose
-member of the W. C. T. U. Samuel found himself now possessed of half a
-million dollars and a prosperous shoe factory.
-
-As for the factory, he discovered within a year that since the death
-of his father its success had been due to a new system of piece work,
-which “speeded up” the worker and gave the profits to the proprietor.
-But there seemed no way of changing the system without ruining
-the business. As for his wealth, it brought him new and pleasing
-associates who were more polished and intelligent than he, and whose
-life was so much more cheerful, instructive, and interesting than his
-early experience that he could only wish to be like them; especially
-when he saw that they were far better citizens than his father, who,
-to tell the truth, lived very much for his own narrow interests. And
-yet their ideas of pleasure and even of morality were quite different
-from what he had been led to suppose were the only proper principles on
-which to conduct one’s life, and they never went to church. He wanted
-to be honest, he wanted to be good; but neither how to be honest in his
-factory nor how to be good and yet a “good fellow” were explained by
-the teachings of his youth.
-
-For an unhappy year or two he tried to act like his father, believe
-as his mother, and be like his neighbors. In addition, in order to
-satisfy a somewhat uneasy conscience, he prepared to enter politics on
-a platform of straight Americanism and the full dinner-pail. Then in
-one eventful week his workmen struck for an eight-hour day and shop
-committees, his mother announced her intention of bequeathing her share
-of the estate to the Anti-tobacco League, his best girl refused to
-marry him unless he should become an Episcopalian, and he was invited
-by the local boss to subscribe to a “slush” fund or give up politics.
-
-Samuel went to the Maine woods to catch trout and think over the
-situation. What he did finally is not told in the story. What he
-decided is, however, of some significance. For, brooding over a dark
-pool in the spruces, he concluded that each generation must search
-out the foundations for its own morality, and determine for itself
-the worth and power of the ideals it proclaims. And so perhaps will
-America.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V
-
-RELIGION IN AMERICA
-
-
-The rarest experience in America is a discussion of morals. You can
-hear morals preached about, but that is not a discussion. You can read
-about morals in arguments disguised as essays, but these seldom cause
-discussion. Fully a third of successful American plays and stories turn
-upon a moral axiom, but one that we accept without argument, like rain
-in April and the August drouth. One hears very little real discussion
-of moral questions here because “old Americans,” at least, agree in
-their moral standards as remarkably as did the Victorians.
-
-In this respect we are, indeed, still Victorians, though in others
-already a century beyond them. Some of us may (or did) get drunk,
-but we do not believe in hard drinking; not even the saloon-keepers
-believed in hard drinking. Some of us make license of our liberty in
-sex relations; but the public disapproval of promiscuity is, to fall
-into the current phrase, nation wide. Some of us steal in a large and
-generous fashion, taking from him who hath not business ability for the
-benefit of him who hath shrewdness and its fruits. But if these actions
-can be described in terms of theft or misappropriation, every one will
-agree that they are wicked, even stock-holders and profiteers. You
-cannot get up a decent argument on moral questions in America, because,
-as with small boys in war-time, no one will take the unpopular side.
-The ethics of America are as definite as a code.
-
-This accepted and not unlofty moral code, with its extension to justice
-and the rights of individuals, is the force behind our idealism that
-has made it an international factor to be reckoned with from the days
-of Jeffersonian ideology to our own. Like the dissenters’ vote in
-England, it is a dangerous force to oppose. Despite occasional hysteria
-and sentimentalism, despite its frequent betrayals by an unlovely
-common sense, it is strong because it has the momentum of tradition
-and the tenacity of prejudice. Of its worth I am American enough to
-be convinced. Of its intelligence one cannot be so certain. But what
-really concerns all lovers of our hard-built civilization is how
-durable under stress is this moral idealism, under such stress as the
-approaching change in our social order is sure to bring to morals and
-morale, as well as to railroad stocks and the Constitution.
-
-Indeed, the inner fire, the spirit, is not easily discoverable in this
-American idealism with its moral causes. Historically, it is easy to
-explain it; habit has carried it on, and common sense must usually
-approve a moral investment that has been profitable; but, nevertheless,
-it is hard to see a continuing _raison d’être_ for such idealism in
-America. It seems, as I have suggested in an earlier chapter, to lack
-a definable spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, its
-dangers, raise constantly the question as to the status of religion in
-America.
-
-I remember hearing Graham Wallas--who will not be suspected of bias
-in this matter--remark that England would not pass out of clouds and
-darkness until she had made for herself a new and felt interpretation
-of religion. America, founded by a curious partnership of the religious
-instinct and economic need and brought up on the moral and material
-profits of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in need of a
-fundamental spiritual readjustment. Every socialist and communist,
-every corporation president and ex-Secretary, every professional
-intellectual and amateur prophet, is declaring his mind on the one
-thing needful to save the world and America. I do not know why we,
-whose profession it is to teach, whose duty it is to interpret and to
-sympathize with every motion of the American mind, should hesitate
-to speak out also in this matter. It is, I think, demonstrable that
-America needs religion as much as steel and automobiles, as much as a
-better distribution of wealth and cheaper bread and meat.
-
-The status of religion in America has been as peculiar as the status
-of politics. Our religious attitudes have been profoundly affected and
-from early periods by the separation of church and state. Struggle
-against a vested institution, dissent from traditional power,
-conciliation with sacred authority, have been burning points in the
-modern history of Europe. They have made great literature in England
-from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold and Swinburne. Our first
-battle against the tyrannical in tradition wherever found was won in
-the Revolution; our second, in the defeat of the Federalist party in
-1800.
-
-In those contests we were freed, perhaps too early and too easily, from
-the menace of the church as a function of government. Since then we
-have been, and we still are, freer than the European to seek religion
-wherever it may be found. Our great religious literature is creative,
-not protestant. Woolman of the Quakers was a seeker; Emerson, in
-greater measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for Americans, and,
-like Woolman, fanning their moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau
-were searchers for a new morality; Whitman and William James, in their
-fashion, searchers also.
-
-Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a century later than Matthew
-Arnold. Fed from almost identical intellectual sources, he is the
-liberated mind seeking new allegiances, Arnold, the rebel not yet free.
-And in general American religion, without reference to its quality, has
-had, like American politics, a status some generations ahead of the
-rest of the world. Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were prophets
-for Europe. The independent sects of America, none established, all
-respectable, and the free seekers after new truth which sprang from
-them, seem to have prefigured a condition that is common in a world
-growing democratic.
-
-In truth, we old Americans, who with all our faults still best
-represent America, gained freedom of conscience at the expense of
-shattering the ideal of a church universal. Religion for us came in
-general to be a personal matter because the church, separated from the
-state, lost the visible authority that made it easy--or necessary--to
-trust to an institution the responsibility for one’s soul. We felt, as
-was to be expected, the need of new authority, new sanctions for our
-religion. And we were free, freer than others, to seek and to find a
-religion for democracy. What has been the result?
-
-The results in bourgeois America, which goes to the theater, wears
-the commonly advertised collars, sends its children to college, and
-keeps out of the slums and the police-court, are clearly visible and
-highly significant. Four classes, interlocking, but distinct enough
-for definition, may be readily described; and though they do not
-include the recent immigrant or the fire-new sophists of radicalism,
-the strongest brains, the most characteristic emotions, and the best
-character in America belong there with the mass of the mediocre
-undistinguished who are public opinion and the ultimate America.
-
-There are, first, the militant advance-guards of our idealism, the
-ethical enthusiasts who carry on the moral fervor of America. They
-range, like colors of the spectrum, from the rarer violet of the
-philosophical moralists, inheritors of the New England ethics or the
-Virginia ideology, through the solid blue of the organizers of great
-movements in social reform, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists
-and the Anti-tobacco League. I do not mean to be flippant. The irony,
-if there is irony, is bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so various
-an army all certain that by stopping this and beginning that the world
-can be saved.
-
-It is their certainty that makes them impressive--the same certainty
-which drove our colonials toward republican government and our pioneers
-to the conquest of a wilderness. Sneers at their banner, “Progress,”
-satisfy none but the reactionary. Progress where? Who knows. Progress
-for whom? It is hard to tell. But only the man who honestly believes
-in civilization for the benefit of the few can doubt the advance that
-has been made. I should have preferred the twelfth century to the
-twentieth if I could have lived in the right Benedictine monastery or
-been a count in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Elizabethan age
-more than my own if I could have voyaged--in the cabin--with Raleigh,
-been Shakespeare’s patron, or possessed a manor neither too near nor
-too far from London. I still think that life in a good English college,
-with a taste for letters and the proper port, is superior to any mental
-or physical luxury we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside
-from the point. Provençal poetry and perfect social intercourse, high
-adventure, the intellectual life in an appropriate physical setting,
-and even good port, may come again somewhere on the line along which
-our progress is marching. In the meantime, though the war has been
-a cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusiasms of the age have
-made the opportunities of the average man for most good things in life
-better, have made him, in the most accurate sense of the word, not
-nobler, but more civilized, and particularly in America, where the fire
-of opportunity was first set burning.
-
-The moral enthusiasts whose religion has been transformed into ethical
-idealism are safe from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, the
-tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have already reformed out of the
-brighter parts of the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty are to
-follow. We can well afford to risk their mistakes and their excesses,
-their blind trust in works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere
-energy of will to make the world better. But what lies behind this
-will? What keeps it from decaying? For these men are seldom religious
-in the sense that their reforming zeal springs from a deep spiritual
-need. A part of their energy is moral habit; a part is exactly
-identical with the energy that builds up a great industrial plant in
-order to satisfy a craving for laudable action. If the certainty that
-the community must be bettered, can be bettered, should slacken, where
-would it find revival? In faith, hope, and charity? But can hope endure
-and charity be permanent without faith? And what is their faith?
-
-The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, I suppose, as that which
-supported the Stoics or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth
-century. They believe in the perfectability of man and the pragmatic
-value of right-doing. This, for a strong man, may be enough; but it is
-not a religion. It is questionable whether it would stand adversity.
-It was not shaken in the war, but it is shaking now. If the enthusiasm
-of the reformers should be spent or exhausted, they would have little
-to fall back upon. Their idealism has already shown signs of hysteria,
-spots of sentimentalism, evidences of a basis in habit and impulse as
-much as in deep spiritual conviction.
-
-It has become almost a commonplace to say that the spiritual seekers,
-the second of our observable classes--more numerous, I believe, in
-America than elsewhere in the white world since the seventeenth
-century--are products of reaction against the dry moral will that
-seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet their importance has
-not always been grasped. Commercial America has not only been the home
-of the greatest of modern philanthropies, but also the source of the
-only powerful religious sect created in the nineteenth century, as
-well as one of the few new strains in idealistic philosophy. They are
-not happy in our commercialism or content with ethical reform, those
-more sensitive spirits whose numbers and weight in bourgeois America
-are evident whenever an emotional crisis arrives. And the freedom from
-ecclesiastical restraint which was won for them by their ancestors has
-left them free to construct new religions.
-
-But as it was the earnestness of the moral enthusiasts that seemed more
-valuable than any reason they had for goodness, so it is the spiritual
-craving of American seekers that is more impressive than anything they
-have found. I do not undervalue the hopeful idealism of Emerson or the
-strong protest of the Christian Scientists against surrender to petty
-worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may generalize in so vast a matter,
-the seekers of spirituality have been singularly out of harmony with
-the needs of a democracy. They have found religions that solace the
-optimistic temperament when it has been duly intellectualized; they
-have found medicine for the ills of prosperous people; but the breadth
-and often the depth of appeal that must characterize a religion for
-all men they have missed or failed to seek. The Friends, later called
-Quakers, began with the will that all the world should become Friends;
-it was only in later stages that they regarded themselves as a peculiar
-people with whom only those fitted by temperament should join. But it
-is with such an exclusiveness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate
-religion commence. One can prophesy in advance who will or will not
-be Christian Scientists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spiritual
-adventure exhausts itself in emotional vagaries, or rises into regions
-of pure mysticism where, no matter how noble or how satisfying it may
-be for individual persons, we shall never find the religion for a
-democracy.
-
-The third group is again a result of that early freeing of America
-from ecclesiastical control; but its members are those whom such
-unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, if I may call them by
-that name without offense intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose
-modern craving for the sanctions of religion leads them back into
-dependence upon the old rites, the old theologies, the old authority,
-which many, indeed, never have left. They, in our history, are the
-Federalists of religion.
-
-And, like the seekers, they, also, have put restrictions of temperament
-upon their faith. For many Americans of the old stock the breach with
-authority made by the Reformation is permanent. They could not go back
-without an intellectual debasement that would be degradation, not
-humility. For many others the scientific revolution of the nineteenth
-century has still further unfitted minds for harmony with the forms and
-pressures of the ecclesiastical past. Sheer scientific materialism as
-an explanation of God and the universe has broken down. The need for
-religion emerges from the controversy more palpitating than before.
-Nevertheless, the science of theology has suffered from the science of
-inductive research. Tradition carries many a man to the door of past
-beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, and he longs to enter. But his
-way is barred. He leans upon and loves the past. He cannot enter it.
-The traditionalist, to give him a better and more lovely name, has
-been a bringer of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help has been
-partial only. He is a chaplain attendant upon the regiments of his own
-faith.
-
-But by far the most significant product of our precocious religiosity
-in America and our early emancipation from ecclesiastical control
-has been indifferentism--that American indifferentism which has
-been easy because of our willingness to be responsible for our own
-evils, wide-spread because of our necessary obsession with material
-development, defensible in our century of good luck and the easy
-optimism that accompanies it.
-
-Here lies the group by all odds the largest, and certainly worthy of
-the most anxious study. Here belongs the mass of everyday Americans
-upon whom rests the outcome of the immediate future. What lies
-beneath the seeming religious indifference of the American who is not
-ritualist, reformer, or seeker for spiritual consolation, who is, in
-short, the average American of office, mill, and law-court? That is the
-crux of the problem.
-
-Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of the age, and fashions are
-always delusive. In a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, like
-a day of south wind in July, are soggy, unillumined, one despairs of
-one’s America. The human product of too much selling and buying has
-never been attractive; our half-education and the semi-intelligence
-that accompanies it have but defined the ill features, like careful
-breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel principle of primitive
-Christianity that lowliness and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If
-you followed these men home, saw their minds freed from the pressure
-of competition and out of the atmosphere of distrust, would your
-opinion alter? Are their religious instincts hidden by the mask of
-American commercialism, inactive merely because suppressed by custom
-and fashion? Are they lying fallow? Or are they like seed too long
-dormant and decaying?
-
-If only we knew by what ingenious statistics these men might be
-classified, prophecy would not be difficult. If only we knew how many
-have become mere traffickers in bodily comfort, sensualists in fact,
-whatever they may be in name. If only we knew how many in their hearts
-were dumb seekers for some spiritual satisfactions that would raise
-the heart in adversity, lift the mind above the necessity for safety,
-pleasure, success, so that all might be pursued, all enjoyed, without
-flatness and disillusion. But no answer is ready; for there has been no
-test of the latent religion of America.
-
-It is true that in the mass of American indifferentism the suppressed
-religious instinct exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional
-enthusiasm for high things whether in war or in peace. It shows itself,
-or rather its suppression, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard places.
-It touches with melancholy many a typical American face in which one
-would expect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We struggle with
-our religious emotions in youth, suppress them in the middle years; in
-old age, deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment us. Old age is
-proverbially restless in America.
-
-Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how much religion is latent in
-our democracy has not come yet; nor have our moral enthusiasms, our
-spiritual adventures, our reachings for tradition, been in our day
-really tested for the spirit behind them. There is reason to believe
-that the time is approaching. In a normal evolution of the bourgeois
-society that has made America, some clear revelation must have come
-of the religious spirit that as a race and a nation we are developing.
-Doubtless we would slowly have found our way to an expression more
-true to our nature than any of the partial modes so far allowed us.
-But there will be no normal, or at least no slow, evolution in the
-religious emotions of the old Americans. A factor from without, a
-sudden emergency, calls for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual
-assets. All, in every class, who are responsible for the American
-inheritance of ideals and morale and character are challenged, but
-especially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the conflict between
-spirit and matter can stay neutral no longer.
-
-Bourgeois America, which means most of America, is, as every one sees,
-on the verge of a revolution like the political-social revolution
-of 1800. For a century we have pursued economics, and now economics
-is pursuing us. A new class is coming to the front, and yet that,
-perhaps, is of minor importance in America, where money and a little
-education extinguish distinctions between classes in two decades. What
-is coming with more significance is a new social system, wherein a new
-control of industry and a more equitable distribution of the products
-thereof is to be substituted for competitive individualism. Many are
-skeptical of the proposed practices by which this revolution is to be
-accomplished; few now doubt that its theory is correct and will some
-day be demonstrated.
-
-But there has never been a revolution of any kind in world history
-that did not bring with it a revolution of all that tradition had
-established and custom made familiar. And this revolution, peaceful or
-otherwise, that is upon us differs from earlier examples in that its
-economic nature is clearly distinguished and, therefore, its challenge
-to all that we term esthetic, cultural, spiritual, religious, doubly
-sharp and direct. Food, clothing, and recreation, not religious or
-political liberty, are its legitimate, but also its only expressed,
-objects. If it gains these at the expense of the soul--of what we all
-understand by the soul in the ancient warning, “What is a man profited,
-if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”--if it gains
-material welfare and material welfare only, it will fail; and if it
-fails, we all go down with it.
-
-In western Europe, one guesses, the struggle between a socialism always
-threatening to become purely materialistic and our own imperfect order
-will be differently conducted. There, and, especially in France and
-Great Britain, church organizations are powerful politically, socially,
-and in their grip upon the popular imagination. They will sharpen the
-conflict and confuse the issues, making the struggle seem to resemble
-many earlier combats between church and anti-church. But in bourgeois
-America no such easy and fallacious division will be possible. Here
-the question as to whether the new order is to satisfy the religious
-and moral, as well as the economic, needs of society will rest
-squarely upon the individual person. No church can speak for America,
-for no church ever has held or ever can hold Americans together. The
-responsibility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be personal. It
-will come to the question of how much religion is possessed by the
-normal American. When he is aroused by a struggle that sweeps into far
-wider questions than the tariff or the income tax, when his method
-of working, his method of living, his method of thinking, are all
-challenged by a new and militant social order, more dormant idealism,
-more latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be aroused than one
-would ever have suspected in that shrewd and easy-going face in the
-Pullman smoker. Will religion be aroused also?
-
-It is essential that we should bring about a better distribution of
-wealth; that we should give every child the equal opportunity that
-Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the vague, but magnificent,
-phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Democracy cannot be said to
-have been tried until we have made an economic democracy, and we are
-too far on the road of democratic experiment to stop half-way. But it
-is even more essential that we should carry on into the new community
-our moral enthusiasm, our ideals, and also that reverence for the
-shaping power, and love for its manifestations that lie behind them,
-and constitute the religious emotion which I shall not here attempt
-otherwise to define. Many fear that the nice taste, the trained mind,
-which have been borne upon the crest of civilization, will go down
-in the welter of indistinguishable breakers. There is little danger
-of this, since already it is the intellectuals who direct, and will
-direct, the new movement; and the professional man stands to gain as
-much as the laborer by a peaceful revolution. But in a socialistic
-world, built on the recovery of the unearned increment, standardized
-by wages, whose _raison d’être_ is the distribution of wealth, it is
-the religious instinct, with all that its free development implies for
-democracy, that is in the gravest danger. If we all become relatively
-rich--and this is an idea of the earthly paradise that socialism
-undoubtedly encourages--how many will crawl through the eye of the
-needle?
-
-The labor party is not immediately responsible for the saving or
-the freeing of the religious instinct. Its first objectives are the
-comforts and material opportunities of civilization; and until these
-are reached we have no right to expect religious leadership from
-the proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the old American,
-the bourgeois American. He has inherited the spiritual tradition of
-his ancestors; he has profited by emancipation from superstition
-and institutional tyranny; he has lived in a comfortable world with
-opportunities to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts
-and education. He is not going to be crushed or driven out of his
-inheritance; there are too many of him, and he too closely resembles
-in everything but habit of life the proletariat that is rising. Upon
-this American rests the burden of spiritualizing as well as educating
-his new masters--upon the moral enthusiasts, the traditionalists, the
-seekers, most of all. It is such a task as the church faced in the dark
-ages, when barbarians had to be not only spiritualized, but civilized
-as well. It is a lesser task, for our new invaders are not barbarians,
-and their leaders are intellectually the equal of ours. Whether the
-outlook for success is greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the
-enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our will that man should make
-more than a market of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the
-great wills of earlier centuries?
-
-No one can answer; but of this we can be assured, that the solution
-rests in American indifferentism. If the commercial American is as
-material as he looks, if common sense is his only good, if his idealism
-is merely inherited habit, if he responds to two impulses only,
-restlessness and sentimentality, then he will go over to socialism
-in its most mechanical phase and, instead of saving the new party,
-he will ruin it. Potentially the most ardent supporters of a purely
-materialistic socialism, in which the individual person counts for
-nothing aside from his appetites, are precisely the “practical”
-business men who now curse the new order most loudly because it
-threatens their accumulations. For them it is civil war between seekers
-for the dollar; and civil war is always the bitterest, and the soonest
-healed. Such men have been our leaders. Is the army behind them?
-
-I think that the rank and file of bourgeois America are less concerned
-with wealth and the struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think that
-they are not so much dazzled by millions as in the ’nineties; more
-anxious for simplicity of heart, which spells content, and worthiness
-of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one would guess from Wall
-Street or Broadway or public life in the Middle West. I think
-that, while distrusting the economic paradise of the more material
-socialists, they are closer in sympathy to a thoughtful laborer than
-to a cynical capitalist. If the religious instinct among them emerges
-as a disgust for petty emotions, as a passionate interest in humanity,
-as a willingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for a fuller
-life more generously shared, if the religion of our democracy finds
-no more expression than this, the crisis will pass. If even thus far
-indifferentism should yield to active spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie
-would cease being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the triumph of
-the proletariate, since, if there was anything good in our old stock,
-we could convert them to it.
-
-But if the American has lost his religious instincts, if behind
-his practical common sense and his vigorous idealism and his eager
-experiments in spirituality there is nothing but a restless energy
-working upon the momentum of convictions long dead, then let the new
-Americans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out.
-
-With all humbleness, with a full realization of the trivialities of
-hustle and bustle in which we have sunk our religion, with concern for
-our escape from easy-going optimism and skeptical content, I, for one,
-feel too sure of the depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the
-fundamental religiosity of the American character at its truest, to
-admit for a moment that conclusion of despair.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI
-
-LITERATURE IN AMERICA
-
-  “Fix’t in sublimest thought behold them rise
-  World after world unfolding to their eyes,
-  Lead, light, allure them thro’ the total plan
-  And give new guidance to the paths of man.”
-
-
-These were the modest aspirations for American genius, and especially
-American literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, the once famous
-author, in his “Columbiad” of 1807.
-
-It was not a democratic literature, as we understand the term, that
-Barlow, and hundreds of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped
-and expected to see arise in the new republic. It was not a literature
-that would interpret the homely, though vigorous, personality of a new
-nation. Nothing so concrete and so commonplace as this would have
-raised their ardor to such a pitch. The excitable critics of that
-day were concerned with the absolute, the ideal, and the abstract.
-Liberty, not equality, had at last found a dwelling-place, and the
-free spirit of man was to expand in an illimitable continent as never
-before, and create the poetry of freedom and the epic of liberated
-mankind. But their vast expectations were based upon a misconception
-and surrounded by fallacies. They have not been realized; and this is
-one reason for the prevailing idea that literary America has been a
-disappointment, that the life of the mind in America has lagged behind
-its opportunities, that we are a backward race in literature and the
-arts. We seem children to-day beside the dreams of our ancestors.
-
-It is easy enough to see now that a race which had to construct a
-nation in a continent in large part scarcely habitable was not ready
-to sing the epic of freedom. Freedom had been won, but whether it
-would be possible to possess and enjoy it depended not upon lyrical
-interpretation, but upon statecraft, the broadax, toil, transportation,
-and the rifle. And when the pioneering days were over, political
-freedom, freedom of conscience and the individual man, belonged as
-truly to other great nations who were equally entitled to create the
-literature of the free mind. To expect the ideals of liberty to appear
-in American literature was legitimate, but to look for a great poetic
-outburst in nineteenth-century America just because this republic first
-established a new political order was no more reasonable than to demand
-a new style in architecture from the erectors of the first capitol in
-the trans-Alleghany wilderness.
-
-What should have been asked of us, at least after the defeat of the
-Federalist party had made certain, what before was only probable, that
-America would become a democracy, was a literature which should express
-the ideals pervading our particular brand of democratic life, a
-literature which should describe a society in which social distinctions
-were elastic, opportunity was superabundant, and, for the first time
-in the modern world, the common people become more powerful than the
-uncommon. A democratic literature could rightly have been expected from
-America. But such a literature would never have been termed “sublimest
-thought” by our early enthusiasts. It would have to suffer from the
-tawdriness of the masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. It
-would have to be more prose than poetry, for American life outwardly
-was prosaic except upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous
-there. It would have to struggle upward like a flapping heron, not soar
-like the eagle of our dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in
-most periods of the republic, few literary dreamers even wished that
-America should become a democracy.
-
-In many respects we got, and got very soon, such a literature, and
-much of it has endured. The prose or poetry that took upon itself
-to let the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally gone into
-oblivion, and with reason; it is either crude and blatant, or solemn
-and hackneyed pretentiousness, like Barlow’s “Columbiad” and much
-of Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan.” The “less enraptured” strains of
-Irving and Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and Bret Harte, in which
-the hopes, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a
-nascent civilization were expressed in prose as well as poetry, and in
-humor more frequently than in epic grandeur, have had a thousand times
-more virility. They have sprung from a social and esthetic need, not
-a romantic conception, and though not an epoch-making celebration of
-freedom finally brought to earth, they have been a solid contribution
-to the literature of the world and a beginning of the literature of the
-American democracy.
-
-The real issue of course was not Freedom and Liberty and the other
-capitalizations of the abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real
-question is whether American literature has met its proper, not its
-assumed, specifications. If one considers the past, the answer inclines
-toward the affirmative.
-
-There have been two chief strains in American literature, not always
-distinct, but in origin different. In the first belong those writers
-whose dominant purpose has been to appeal to the best in the many; and
-by the best I mean the finest or the deepest emotions, and by the many
-I mean the accessible minds of the democracy. Emerson belongs primarily
-here, and Hawthorne, and, though he would have denied it, Whitman.
-Henry James in his earlier stories is a lovable example; and when he
-pursued his magical art into realms where only the trained appreciation
-could follow, Mrs. Wharton put on the mantle. In the second have been
-the more numerous writers whose chief purpose, not always a conscious
-one, has been to touch and interest and arouse not so much the best
-as the commonest, the most universal emotions. Cooper is the most
-excellent example of great writing in this group. Mark Twain when not
-misanthropic, Bret Harte in all moods, Whittier and Longfellow, Riley
-and 0. Henry, and a host of the less distinguished, also belong there.
-
-But far more important than this division in purpose, which, after
-all, is hard to make and harder still to keep, is the fact, if one may
-speak of high esthetic matters in a biological fashion, of constant
-cross-fertilization between these strains, and especially in the men we
-call great. Americans who felt impelled to write of the ideal best have
-not forgotten the needs of a nation slowly moving toward democracy.
-Those who wrote to amuse and interest the populace have felt in a
-curious fashion their responsibility for what they considered American
-ideals. Tribute has been paid by both sides, though each in its own
-fashion, to democracy; and this makes an unexpected congruity between
-appeals to the best and satisfactions for the many, between Emerson
-and popular fiction. The scholar presents his idealistic optimism
-as an attempt to explain where the eager swarm ought to be winging.
-The story-teller, though inspired not by ideas, but by the chance to
-interest an energetic society absorbed in the conquest of nature and
-hot-blooded with the taste of success, yet feels bound to urge what he
-feels to be American morality and American idealism.
-
-This common sympathy with democracy is the hope of American literature
-in the sharp tests of our nationality now almost upon us. Emerson and
-Cooper, Hawthorne and Mark Twain, are examples of what once it could do.
-
-Emerson was a man who never courted or obtained popularity, who hitched
-his readers to a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who wrote
-always for minds that may have been democratic, but certainly could
-not have been common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an aristocrat in
-tastes, a democrat by sympathy and conviction, whose stories, even
-his bad stories, contained that essential adventure, that rapid and
-unexpected and successful action, which satisfies the universal craving
-for struggle well ended, stories so popular that his enemies were
-entranced by them even while they abused him.
-
-The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the greatness of Emerson is the airy
-strength of his ideology, his permanence in the history of American
-civilization is determined by the expression he gave to the moral
-optimism of the typical American. And if the popularity of Cooper was
-due to the unflagging interest of his adventure and the romance of his
-actors and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him more than a good
-story-teller and gives him great place in the social history of America
-is his incarnation of the ideals and the morality of a native democracy
-in Deerslayer, whom all Americans could understand and admire.
-
-Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Hawthorne was a moralist romancer
-whose austere talents forced admiration and a somewhat doubtful
-popularity. Twain touched the universal note of humorous exaggeration
-so early and so readily that his stern moral basis went unremarked. Men
-read him for humor as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing the ideas
-of each as unconsciously as the child takes medicine in a sugared glass.
-
-Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of lofty moral ideals is more
-evident than any appeal to the masses, yet the most careless reader
-feels that his warnings are for a new world that has broken with
-tradition and must face its problems of sin and sex in a democracy of
-conscience. And if Mark Twain writes obviously to amuse the democracy,
-yet he seldom fails to preach to them also. “Huckleberry Finn,” to
-the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other things an epic of the
-injustice, the inconsistency of sophisticated man and his social
-system, seen through the eyes of the new world on the Mississippi,
-where tradition, in the fresh, crude light, showed its seams of decay.
-There is a tract upon slavery in “Huckleberry Finn,” and another
-upon dueling, and a third on social distinctions, and a fourth upon
-conventionalized religion. And readers of Clemens will not forget how
-the bones of his acrid philosophy wore through the skin of his humor
-in those later books, especially in “The Mysterious Stranger,” where
-a hatred of social injustice and the melancholy foreboding which has
-always accompanied the optimism of American democracy had such full
-escape that the publishers were led to print it as a fairytale for
-children that it might be enjoyed by minds too unobservant to trouble
-with its warnings.
-
-I do not wish to seem to be docketing all American literature in these
-brief comparisons. What I desire is to point to this common interest
-of our writers in the needs of democracy. Whitman, who wrote always
-for the most vigorous and sometimes for the best emotions of the many,
-might continue the argument. Howells, whose zest for the familiar
-experience kept his penetrating intellect busy with problems important
-for democracy, is another example. Poe, and Henry James in his later
-years, fall without both groups, being as indifferent to democracy as
-they are solicitous for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it is
-by such men that the writers who sway the masses are trained in the
-technique of their craft.
-
-In short, by and large, our literature is remarkable for its
-substructure of what might be called democratic idealism--idealism
-applied to the needs of a growing democracy. If the reader doubts, let
-him compare Emerson with Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with
-Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and answer whether our writers have
-not been formed by the social needs of America.
-
-That this is true of so many men, and has led to the
-cross-fertilization between popular writers and intellectuals of
-which I have written above, is perhaps more readily explained when
-one considers how homogeneous our society has been, how few and how
-slight its mental cleavages. Conservative and radical, traditionalist
-and anti-traditionalist, democrat and aristocrat--such clefts have
-not gone so deep with us as with other nations. Except for times of
-stress, as in the decade between 1765 and 1775, or in the years just
-before the Civil War, it would be hard to group, for example, our
-writers by fundamental differences in their philosophy of living.
-Whitman one could classify, and Poe and Irving, but the difficulty
-rapidly increases as the list lengthens. We have been homogeneous by
-a common tradition of liberalism, by a common environment varying not
-too greatly between Boston and the newer West. And our literature has
-resembled us.
-
-And now, when at last our literature, like our politics and our
-economics, must at last challenge world scrutiny, this national
-character, and all that represents it, has come suddenly to seem of
-vast importance. We have become vividly aware of it, and we realize
-that we are in dire need of self-expression--of self-expression by
-new literature. The self-consciousness of Americans throughout the
-nineteenth century, which showed itself keenly in their restlessness
-under foreign criticism and their irrepressible desire to talk about
-God’s country, was of a different kind. It was due to a nervous
-uncertainty as to the success of the American experiment. We were
-more concerned with what others thought of our qualities than with
-what we were or had been. But three things have altered our situation
-radically, and made us think more of character and less of reputation.
-
-The first is the absolute success, as success is measured by the
-world’s finger, of this American experiment. The hope of the founders
-to establish a stable and prosperous republican government where life,
-property, conscience, and opinion were safe has been realized.
-
-The second and more sensational change came from the Great War, which
-gave us that quiet confidence in our national strength that comes when
-recognition from without confirms the fact and makes self-assertion
-unnecessary.
-
-The third, and probably the most important, has been the rise to
-intellectual influence and cultural and social power of aliens--Irish,
-German, most of all Jews--who, unlike the earlier immigrants, do
-not cherish as their chief wish the desire to become in every sense
-American. Such phenomena as an Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Paine,
-becoming almost from the day of their landing more native than the
-natives, are becoming rarer and rarer. More and more we must count
-upon cosmopolitans of brains and ability among us who know not Israel,
-though they may love the traditions of their home lands even less. It
-is this new America, heterogeneous, brilliant, useful, but disturbing,
-that has more than anything else sharpened the self-consciousness
-of America, turned us toward introspection, made us sensible of our
-homogeneity, and the new alignments inevitable for the future.
-
-And just as at the turn of the eighteenth century enthusiasts were
-clamoring for a new literature from America, in which freedom and
-liberty should have their apotheosis, so now the awakened consciousness
-of Americans of the older stock is clamoring for the expression of
-what they vaguely denominate, and still more vaguely describe, as
-Americanism. Like all such terms called forth by a crisis and displayed
-like a flag or a button, the term is at the same time indefinite and
-full of significance. Ten men and women will in ten different ways
-define it. And yet none can doubt that vast feeling lies behind the
-word, and would crystallize, if power were given it, into an expression
-of our national experience and aspirations and ideals as we have lived
-with them and seen them develop for a century.
-
-And opposed to this clamor for a literature of Americanism is
-another call, not loud yet, but rising--a demand for a different
-literature, mordant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, which will cut at
-the sentimentalities in which our idealism has involved us, strike
-at the moribund liberalism which we still regard as our basis of
-action, take issue with the moral standards that have been received
-as irrevocable because they were American. Keenly aware of the need
-for a more honest and more vigorous expression of what America means
-to-day, and sensitive to these caustic attacks upon all that we have
-called American, the thoughtful mind finds little to console it in
-the clever, sentimental writing which, with sewing machines, dental
-pastes, ready-made clothes, and cheap motor-cars, has become one of the
-standardized products of America.
-
-There has been one response already to the awakening national
-consciousness, and this, curiously enough, has been almost identical
-with the reaction of the new republic a century and more ago to its
-responsibilities. Then the first writing which commanded attention here
-and abroad was to be found in so-called state papers, declarations
-of Congress and legislatures, pamphlets by Adams and Hamilton and
-Jefferson. And the first response to our modern clamor for Americanism
-has also been in state papers, beginning perhaps with Roosevelt’s
-administration and continuing through Wilson’s messages and the many
-documents on the war. The worth and significance of many of these
-public utterances have commanded world-wide respect, and possible
-permanence in literature.
-
-Yet it is rarely that state papers can satisfy a national need for
-literature. They are too restricted in their interests and too
-occasional in their provenance. It is only once in a century that a
-Gettysburg Address sums up the political and moral philosophy of
-millions or a discourse on the needs and obligations of democracy
-unites public opinion in America and Europe. The emotions of the
-race seek outlet and interpretation in pure literature, and here the
-American response is more doubtful.
-
-None of the more popular brands of contemporary writing seems to
-satisfy the craving for national self-expression. It is true that we
-are going in for universals. Our books reach the hundred thousands, and
-our magazines the millions. The successful writer of plays, stories, or
-special articles trades in the thoughts that circulate through a vast
-community of common education, experience, and environment. The result
-is to spread and perpetuate the ideals and the liberal hopes that we
-call American, but also to stereotype and thus weaken their influence.
-They become counters in a game, or, better still, standardized foods
-for the imagination, whose popularity is certain until the fashion
-wears out. The writer of adventurous fiction to-day uses the same
-formulas as did Cooper, because he writes for a people still true to
-the mold of that America which they have inherited directly in family
-life, or indirectly in the schools. But his idealism is faint beside
-Cooper’s; his “strong, simple Americans” too often mere fabrications
-when compared with Deerslayer, or crude, vulgarized approximations,
-like sculptures of the decadent fourth century. Vulgarization is the
-menace of democratic literature--vulgarization by smart and cheap
-short stories, by plays where the wit is raw, the sentiment mushy, the
-characters, like their language, cheap and mean. Slang can be racy;
-colloquialism belongs to a literature of the people; to be homely is
-often to be lovable and true: but a literature, no matter how moral,
-which in its lack of clarity and sweetness is like a glass of dirty
-water, is a heavy price to pay for mere circulation. The appeal to
-universals is essential in a democracy, but unless clarified by love
-and hope and conviction, it leads toward universal vulgarity.
-
-Nor does the prospect cheer if one looks to the contemporary Brahmins,
-who seek not the universal, but the particular; who write for the
-best, not the broadest, emotions of democracy. Lowells and Emersons
-have not yet reappeared in our society. No Emerson has philosophized
-the reactions of America to international obligation; no Lowell
-assailed militarist and pacifist alike in the war; no Whitman even has
-sung commonplace America become momentarily heroic in the cause of a
-half-understood democracy. We have had an abundance of writing directed
-to fine minds and fine souls, but it has lacked the authentic note of
-national inspiration.
-
-Perhaps the coldness of our intellectual literature has been due to the
-specialization of the age. A Lowell, an Emerson, even a Longfellow,
-has been difficult for the last three decades. Learned men, like
-these, have been driven by the public opinion of their world toward
-investigation and scientific research. They have been weighted with
-a frightful responsibility for facts; they have been better scholars
-than their predecessors, but less effective citizens. The tool-cutter
-nowadays knows only his own operation. The scholar and philosopher have
-a lifetime of labor assigned them, with no time to become acquainted
-with their United States. In nineteenth-century America there was
-little place for the scholar. He was driven into the world, and if
-scholarship lost, we profited. Now his corner is built for him, and he
-has gone into it.
-
-As a result of all this we face a very real danger. American
-literature, with its burden of ideals and experience, being cheapened
-by writers for the mob and deserted by the academician, may lose its
-virility and pale before a new literature of cosmopolitanism, which
-could find no better breeding-place than Chicago or New York.
-
-Artistically, this might be no calamity. Such a society as a great
-American city presents has never before been seen in the world, not
-even in Rome, and the international democracy which it forecasts is
-worthy already of a great literature, has, indeed, already begun one.
-But we old Americans, even though our age is of only two generations,
-are not yet ready for international democracy. Our own racial character
-has not received its final stamp, come to full self-expression,
-established itself as the permanent influence upon the world’s
-development which our career and our opportunities should make it. To
-rush into literary internationalism before the long American experience
-has ripened into a national democracy would be to skip a step. It is
-to commit again the error of our forefathers, who proposed an epic
-of liberty before we had freed ourselves from the burden of economic
-development.
-
-And what we need is precisely such a cross-fertilization between the
-mind that reaches for the best and the imagination which feels for
-the many, as one finds in varying measures in Mark Twain and Holmes,
-in Cooper and Whitman and Emerson. It must be a different and perhaps
-a more mature product, but nothing else can make American ideals worth
-saving in literature, for nothing else can grasp the shrewd native
-quality of this people, which is still pervasive through all our alien
-swarms.
-
-For three centuries now we have been at our experiment in democracy. We
-have been sordid and we have been magnificent. We have been timorous
-and we have set examples for hardihood in man. We have stumbled blindly
-on our road, and we have had great moments of illumination. We have not
-made a perfect democracy, but perhaps more men, women, and children
-have been happy in America than elsewhere in world history. And on
-the whole our course has been consistently onward. No purpose of the
-founders has failed to continue; no valuable element of character has
-yet been lost by the way. We are no worse men, by and large, than our
-forefathers. And either this great experiment is worth something or it
-is not.
-
-If it is worth something, it must pass into literature, and find men to
-make it pass. And these men and women must be lovers of what we have
-done here and what we are, as the young poets of England at war were
-above all lovers of their blessed England. They cannot be scoffers at
-our loose-held ideals and our nervous commercialism, who scold, which
-is easy, a great, though uneven, nation, but do not search out the
-cause of its greatness and proclaim its hope. Nor can they be recluses
-contemptuous of that public in whose progressive refinement lies the
-only chance for democracy. Nor mere buyers and sellers of emotion who
-have learned the speech of the great beast, as Hamilton called the
-common people, only to make profit by it.
-
-But you cannot summon a literature from the vasty deep by calling for
-it in oratorical vein. Perhaps, even now as I write, some wise youth,
-who takes his task more seriously than himself, has begun in humor a
-poem that is meant for some newspaper column, but will become a better
-description than an essay can give of the American who has been doing
-so much, but thinking also, who still knows how to grin at misfortune,
-and is not yet ready to declare himself bankrupt in ideas, deficient
-in character, or pallid in imaginative faith. As a nation we did our
-boasting early and got it out of our system; but the confidence and the
-strength and the hope that inspired that boasting remain, and approach
-fruition.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII
-
-THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN
-
-
-In the preceding chapters there has been much said of conservatism and
-radicalism, of idealism and the religious instinct, of literature that
-expresses the soul of a race. Nevertheless, when we look about in this
-our America, it is painfully clear that not these absolutes but man who
-makes and possesses them must chiefly concern us. It is the American
-who will make or break his religion, his literature, his politics. He
-is the entity. He is our destiny.
-
-And therefore one comes back after a survey of American traits, their
-strengths, and their weaknesses, to the man himself. Can we name him in
-this hive of millions? Can we find an everyday American that will be
-accepted here as typical, and be recognized abroad? If there is such
-a type, it will be among the middle class, the bourgeois Americans,
-that we shall discover it. The landholding aristocracy has passed. The
-moneyed aristocracy is in the best (and sometimes in the worst) sense
-bourgeois. Cosmopolitans are few. The intellectual aristocracy is but
-half emerged, like a statue of Rodin’s, from the common clay.
-
-What we find now is the middle class incarnate. What we may expect
-soon is the finished product of bourgeois life in America. For it is
-clear that this life is now in full career. We exult in it, and its
-characteristic virtues. We deprecate aristocracy. We heap scorn upon
-the proletariat and persecute its prophets. Better evidence still, no
-sooner does a new group rise to security in our social system than
-it becomes visibly bourgeois, and, what is more important, mentally
-bourgeois. This has been true of the railway employees, the carpenters,
-the plumbers, the tenant farmers, and many others. It has been also
-true of the “aristocracy” in the old sense of the word, whether native
-or European. They have come into the fold, sometimes reluctantly,
-sometimes at a run with poverty barking behind them. All these groups
-have been captured by the dominant class. And if the nature of our
-industrial system still keeps them in alignment against the capitalist
-(who is the soul of bourgeoisie) or dependent upon him, nevertheless
-they think as he does on all questions not involving work and wages,
-and especially in religion, politics, and morality. They act as he
-does; and the labor groups are coming to fight as he does, and for the
-same ends.
-
-All major influences in our American life seem to be directed toward
-this consummation, which is triumphant, or dismal, according to your
-point of view. The racial factor may seem to be an exception, but is
-not. It is true that as the old American assimilates more and more
-non-Teutonic and non-Latin races to his way of living, his psychology
-alters, and his habits are likely to follow. It is also true that the
-immigrant belongs prevailingly to the peasantry or the proletariat. But
-the immigrant has substantially no influence upon the dominant class
-until he is Americanized. And he is not Americanized in any true sense
-until he leaves his quarter and begins to read the papers, go to the
-theatres, eat the food, talk the talk, and think the thoughts of the
-American; in a word, until he becomes bourgeois. And in the majority of
-cases this takes at least one generation.
-
-Economic conditions, on the other hand, favor this triumph of the
-bourgeoisie. We seem to be entering upon a period when a vastly greater
-number of men and women will have reasonable security of moderate
-income. But security of a moderate income, which means a guaranteed
-mediocrity, is the mainstay, is almost the cause, of the bourgeois
-spirit, just as privilege was the support of the aristocracy. And if
-in the next generation ten times as many families can count on a cost
-plus basis of living, this will but increase the middle class. It will
-make, to be sure, more education, more refinement, and perhaps more
-cerebration possible; but such a circumstance will not radically affect
-the character of the typical American.
-
-Culturally, we already see the results of the many influences which
-are making the United States bourgeois in warp and woof. Our traits
-are not the fine exclusiveness, the discrimination, the selfishness of
-an aristocracy. Nor are they the social solidarity, the intellectual
-democracy, the intolerance of a proletariat. One finds rather
-individualism in opinion and unity in thought. One finds conservatism
-in institutions and radicalism in personal ambitions. One finds a
-solid, though dull morality, a distrust of ideas, a plentiful lack of
-taste, an abundance of the homely virtues of industry, truth telling,
-optimism, idealism, and charity, which, in an age that suits such
-talents, make a man healthy, wealthy, and, in his own generation,
-wise. Such a cultural level, and such a national character are becoming
-more and more familiar in America.
-
-There must be some peak ahead; some top of the curve when the bourgeois
-spirit, even in the United States, will have reached the climax of
-its power, and the height of its vigor, and will begin to lose its
-sharpness of outline, and to give way to the spirit of the next age, be
-that what it may.
-
-This peak is perhaps nearer than we suppose. What will happen
-afterwards lies in darkness, but must depend in some measure upon the
-temper of the bourgeoisie; and as America bids fair to be the capital
-of Bourgeoisia, upon the temper of America. The question may be posed
-this way. Are we, who are no longer the middle class, since there is no
-power other than spiritual or intellectual above us, are we proposing
-to imperialize, or to federalize the world which we dominate?
-
-Is the bourgeois conception of security for all, and superiority
-(other than economic) for none, to be forced upon the years ahead? Is
-our democracy, as Brooks Adams thinks, a democracy of degradation, a
-level to which all must be either lifted, or lowered? Will we hold
-back, as long as our power lasts, the proletariat, feeding them,
-clothing them, converting them, but suppressing them, so that we may
-be secure? Will we tyrannize the exceptional in art, in literature, in
-statesmanship, in pure thinking, freezing it by distrust, or exploiting
-it for sensation and reducing its fruits to vulgarity? Will we resolve
-religion into a social emotion and poetry to rhythmic prose? Must the
-poor fragments of the privileged classes that still remain, and the
-little shopkeepers, and the teachers with their hankerings after an
-intellectual aristocracy, and the skilled workman with the feverish
-zeal of a new convert to security still upon him--must they all unite
-with the industrial magnate in a holy alliance of things as they are
-to crush into uniformity a humanity where only rebels against our
-authority and the uncivilized remain?
-
-This would be the imperialism of the bourgeoisie. And neither our
-churches, which are rigidly bourgeois, nor our universities, which are
-ponderously bourgeois, and both trading in security, offer leadership
-that guarantees escape.
-
-Or will we attempt to federalize this world that apparently we have
-conquered, allowing autonomy for races of ideas, nations of customs,
-and room enough for plantations of new desires in our fat fields?
-Will we tolerate fineness, encourage variety, permit heresy, prepare
-for change? It is said by way of compliment that here in America we
-have neither aristocrats nor peasants. Will we preserve, or destroy,
-the peasant virtues, the ideas of the aristocrat, the desires of the
-intellectual. Will we make possible a nation where to be average is not
-the highest good?
-
-I have no answer, naturally. There is no reply that can now be
-formulated. But the solution is already present in the problem itself.
-It is to be found in men and women, in boys and girls especially, who
-will belong to the new order and who will answer in their time. If you
-wish to speculate upon what will become of the post-bellum American,
-whose traits as they exist to-day have been the subject of this book,
-study, on the one hand, the younger leaders in the labor parties, and
-on the other, the college undergraduates. In them lies the future.
-
-
-
-
-      *      *      *      *      *      *
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber’s note:
-
-  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
-
-  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
-
-  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.
-
-  The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and
-  is entered into the public domain.
-
-
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