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Title: Our business civilization
some aspects of American culture
Author: James Truslow Adams
Release date: May 4, 2025 [eBook #76007]
Language: English
Original publication: unknown: Albert & Charles Boni, 1929
Credits: Bob Taylor, Carla Foust, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR BUSINESS CIVILIZATION ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
OUR BUSINESS
CIVILIZATION
[Illustration] BONIBOOKS [Illustration]
[Illustration]
OUR BUSINESS
CIVILIZATION
[Illustration]
_Some Aspects
of American Culture_
BY
JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration] ALBERT & CHARLES BONI [Illustration]
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI, INC.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO KAY
PREFACE
All of the chapters included in this volume have appeared in various
magazines, although in their present form many of them have been
altered and several of them have been greatly enlarged. The author
wishes emphatically to state that the volume is not intended to give
a fair and complete presentation of the contemporary American scene
and its tendencies. The essays deal only with certain aspects, as the
title of the book indicates, and those the more sinister ones now to be
noted in what is, in many respects, the vigorous growth of our national
life. If a doctor pronounces a patient to have a bad circulation and
a dangerous local infection in his leg, it cannot be complained of
him that he has failed to speak the whole truth because he has said
nothing of what a good husband, loyal friend and able executive the
patient happens to be. Those are not aspects with which the doctor has,
at the moment, concerned himself. To change the metaphor, much of the
criticism that these essays have encountered when in magazine form, and
much of what I confidently anticipate they will now encounter in their
new and more elaborate presentation, is based on no more logical ground
of attack than that instead of saying what a dull dish prunes make
or how unhealthful cucumbers may be, I should have performed a much
more useful, patriotic and agreeable service by saying how delicious
strawberries are. My only answer to that sort of criticism is that at
the moment I am talking about prunes and cucumbers, not strawberries,
though some time I may discuss those. Sufficient unto the day....
My thanks are due to the editors of _Harper’s Monthly_, the _Atlantic
Monthly_, the _Forum_, the _Saturday Review of Literature_, and
_McNaught’s Monthly_, who enabled me first to discuss my unpopular
topics in their pages.
JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS.
London, 1929.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE VII
I. A BUSINESS MAN’S CIVILIZATION 9
II. THE COST OF PROSPERITY 35
III. OUR DISSOLVING ETHICS 63
IV. JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON TODAY 83
V. OUR LAWLESS HERITAGE 101
VI. HOOVER AND LAW OBSERVANCE 121
VII. TO “BE” OR TO “DO” 147
VIII. MASS PRODUCTION AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION 179
IX. THE MUCKER POSE 195
X. MAY I ASK? 221
XI. IS AMERICA YOUNG? 241
XII. HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD 261
XIII. THE ART OF LIVING 289
CHAPTER I
A BUSINESS MAN’S
CIVILIZATION
A BUSINESS MAN’S CIVILIZATION
I
As one grows older and, let us hope, wiser, one becomes more and more
shy of easy generalizations and classifications. As one moves through
one’s world, the old generalized types, for example, of fiction and
youth, standing for an “artist,” a Frenchman, or an Englishman, break
into the many and varying individual artists or Frenchmen or Englishmen
of one’s acquaintance, much as a ray of white light is broken into
a rainbow of colors through a prism. But age and experience would
be but poor substitutes for youth and freshness if they resulted
only in bringing chaos to our minds, a substitution of multitudinous
individuals for species and genus. If the old crude stock-in-trade
types compact of ignorance and too facile generalizing have to be
submitted to the spectrum of experience, individuals we find, in spite
of seemingly baffling variety, do somehow combine to form distinct
group types, and in the national sphere characteristics emerge that set
one nation off from another even though their millions of inhabitants
may differ among themselves almost more than some of them differ from
foreigners. For a traveler constantly passing from one country to
another and now long past the stage of mere romantic interest in the
exotic, there is no more fascinating task than to attempt to establish
the genuine characteristics of a nation out of the welter of individual
impressions.
It would be absurd to contend that America offers a simple problem to
the observer. If the scene is less varied than in some other countries,
nevertheless, to see about one only Babbitts means that one is not an
acute observer. But as one comes back again and again from foreign
countries, with fresh eyes and new standards of comparison, one comes
to simplify our civilization in some respects, as a scientist does the
continent. To the lover of scenery the Long Island beaches, the Big
Smoky Mountains, the prairies, the Arizona desert, the golden coast of
California, or the glaciers of Alaska offer variety in plenty; yet the
geologist finds North America the simplest of all the great continents
in the basic lines of its structure. In the same way, as we penetrate
below the surface variety of its social life, we begin to see that its
civilization is equally remarkable as that of the continent itself for
its extreme structural simplicity. This simplicity lies in the fact
that it has come to be almost wholly a _business man’s civilization_.
It may be asked why, in a modern industrial world in which everyone
must have money to live, and in which most people are engaged in
making it in one way or another, is America any more of a business
man’s civilization than that of any other country? The answer is to
be found in a wide variety of social, economic, historic, geographic,
and other factors. Let us, for example, contrast it with England, the
country which I know best outside of my own, and where I happen to be
writing at the moment. England has always been a great commercial and,
for the last century, a great manufacturing country, the “nation of
shopkeepers” in the eyes of European continentals. Business and trade
are foundation stones of England’s prosperity and power, yet English
civilization, whatever it may one day become, is not as yet a business
man’s civilization in the same sense as is America’s. The reason is
that the influence of the business man here upon society has been
limited by the presence of other and very powerful influences stemming
from sources other than business and having nothing to do with it.
In the first place, there is that relic of feudalism, the aristocracy,
including in its numbers, of course, many men and fortunes made by
trade, but exerting its influence through a long tradition. It may
be that “every Englishman loves a Lord”—though it is quite certain
he does not worship him as do many American women—but it is true
that the aristocracy exerts an influence upon the social manners and
customs of the people at large which is incomparably greater than
that exerted by the probably wealthier, but far less picturesque,
untitled bankers, shipping merchants, iron manufacturers, and what
not. In the country—still the best source of English life, though fast
passing—aristocracy and landed gentry possess so great an influence
that if a nouveau riche wishes to become somebody, he does not take a
great house and give costly entertainments in London but buys an estate
somewhere in the “counties” and painfully tries to make his way among
families that may have but a fraction of his own wealth.
Nor is the influence of these two great bodies of the aristocracy and
gentry based solely on social position or snobbery. Of black sheep in
both there have been plenty, but these two classes still retain the
best element in the feudal system, the duty of service. The broad lands
of the feudal lord, unlike the stocks and bonds of the modern business
magnate, were not his solely for pleasure. Just as his men owed
service to him, so he owed physical protection to them; and he was not
likely to retain his lands and castles long if he could not give it. A
considerable part of the wealth and power of England is still in the
hands of these landowners, large and small, who still perform in more
modern ways the duties that go with their wealth. The difference in
the sense of responsibility toward the public felt by the descendants
of historic families and the members of the new business magnates may
be noted in one minor, but illuminating, particular. For the most part
the treasures of art accumulated by the old families are regarded by
them as a public trust, and the public, at least on certain days of the
week are admitted to see them. The private galleries of Knole House, of
Warwick Castle and of scores of others are as well known and as easily
accessible to the public as are those of the national museums. On the
other hand, the motto of the new business magnate is usually “what is
mine is my own.” As a rule when a picture by a great master is carried
through the doors of the palace of a water-power magnate, a meat packer
or a banker in America it is lost to the public, save in rare cases as
an exhibit in a temporary loan collection, until after long years sale
or bequest may bring it into a public museum.
Again, there is the Church of England, dependent for its existence and
support not upon the gifts of business men but upon local taxation,
age-long endowments, and the support of the State. The leading
universities, for similar reasons, are independent of business to
an extent impossible in America. Politics, the army, navy, and the
diplomatic and civil services offer life-careers for the ablest
of men. The professions, such as law and medicine, are still
uncommercialized. A young man of ability and ambition may choose,
depending upon his particular tastes or opportunities, among a dozen
careers, not one of which has anything to do with business, and any one
of which offers him as a possible reward all the prizes that a man can
wish, although from the pressure of democracy on the one hand and big
business on the other this is becoming less true, perhaps temporarily,
than it has been heretofore. However, the successful business man still
finds himself only one among many factors influencing the manners,
thought, and life of his time. His own contribution is absorbed into
the varied and rich life of the nation made up of the ideals and
outlook of many other types and classes in addition to his own.
In America from the beginning there has been an entirely different
social scene, although in many respects it was more variegated in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than it is to-day. Neither the
best nor the worst of feudalism, however, was transplanted to the
colonies. We fell short of developing an aristocracy or a permanent
landed gentry. With the exception of a few colonial experiments, there
has never been an established church. Politics, save in a few rare
cases, have ceased to attract first-rate men as a career, and there is
none either in diplomacy, which is usually only an episode, or in the
civil service, which holds no position worth striving for. The rewards
of a lifetime spent in the army or navy are negligible. On the other
hand, we have the richest virgin continent in the world to exploit,
and the prizes for a successful business career, measured in money
and power, have been such as are undreamed of in European business.
In Europe a “great fortune” is reckoned in millions; in America
in hundreds of millions and now, in a few cases, even in billions.
Generation after generation the opportunities, instead of becoming
less, have become colossally greater. The result has been that most of
the energy, ability, and ambition of the country has found its outlet,
if not its satisfaction, in business.
Certain results have flowed from this fact. In the first place, human
nature alters, perhaps, less than we wish it might. Two of its most
persistent traits are love of distinction and the need to follow
leaders. When in founding the nation we did away with all titles
and badges, we opened the way in a fashion not anticipated to the
social sway of the business man. We may note for example that the
much-despised stars and ribbons of the old aristocratic order in Europe
have been replaced in America, where they are unconstitutional, by
the innumerable ornaments of the Mystic Shriners, the Order of Junior
Mechanics, and other similar emblems. Theoretically, since the American
and French Revolutions men have given lip-service to the doctrine of
equality, but in reality everyone craves his own little share of social
distinction, a something that will tend to set him somewhat above his
neighbor. Founded if you like in vanity, it is, nevertheless, one of
the most important elements in progress and conduct.
The great mass of men also tend to copy those above them, those who
by common consent are the leaders of the nation, or occupy the most
prominent and enviable positions in it. The youth of a savage and
warlike tribe will emulate its great warriors and shape his life
on theirs. In England, as we have seen, the genuine leaders of the
aristocracy and gentry still exert a great influence upon the manners
and outlook of those below them. In America these leaders have become
the great business men. In their hands are the wealth and power of
modern America. Their ideals, their manners, their ways of life, their
standard of success are, therefore, those which the great mass of
Americans, consciously or not, strive to make their own. In America,
moreover, no Order of Merit, no Companionship of the Bath, no peerage
is to be won as a symbol of a successful career. Most men, as we have
said, crave some badge as a tangible evidence of their distinction if
they have attained any. In America for those not content with being
a Master of a Grand Lodge or the High Priest of something-or-other
wealth is the sole badge of success. All other orders in society having
been swept away, and a business career being the sole one that leads
inevitably to power when successful, the business man’s standard of
values has become that of our civilization at large.
Owing in large measure to this, to the emphasis placed in America by
our universities on equipment and plant, and to their constant need of
money for endowments and upkeep, they also have come under the sway of
the successful business men to an extent undreamed of in Europe. If the
equipment of European universities seems meager and poor in comparison
with America, no one can claim that the work being done in them is
inferior; and partly due to the smaller demands for money for constant
building and expense, and partly to the presence in the European social
system of important classes other than business men, the universities
there are far more independent of business domination and ideals than
they are with us. The entire religious system of our country, also,
is in the same relation of dependence upon the business man. In the
absence of any establishment of large endowments from the past, the
churches of every denomination are dependent upon the richer members of
their congregation for support. As for politics, the relations between
parties, legislatures, and the business interests are too notorious
to call for specific comment. The present disgraceful struggling of
private interest against private interest, with no consideration for
the interest of the public or the nation, exhibited in the Tariff
controversy in Congress is merely one phase of what we have come to
consider a normal relation of American business to American government.
The dominant economic and social power of any country is bound to be
the dominant political one. If agriculture, for example, is now the
Cinderella of American prosperity and government interest, the cause
is in part to be found in the fact that the number of men engaged in
agriculture has dropped from 90 per cent of the total in 1790 to 36 per
cent in 1910 and 29 per cent in 1920. The professions, as we shall note
later, are also rapidly coming under the domination of the business
man’s type of civilization.
Thus, unlike Europe, the business man with us finds himself the
dominant power in the life of the nation and almost alone in his
control over the direction of its entire life, economic, social,
intellectual, religious, and political. It is a situation that, so far
as I know, is unique in history and well worth analyzing.
II
First let us analyze the business man himself. Is there such a thing
as a business “type”? Thinking of all the variations among those one
knows, much as one thinks of one’s varied French friends, one may think
it impossible to classify them under one head; but just, as contrasting
one’s French friends with English or Russian, a French type does
emerge, so contrasting a man who is in business all his life with those
engaged in other pursuits, a business type does also take form. Apart
from initial tastes and nature, a man is bound to be molded by the
aims, ideas, ideals, and whole nature of the career to which he devotes
practically his entire energies and time. It is obvious that a poet or
musician will react to the facts of existence differently from the way
a steel manufacturer, an admiral, a high ecclesiastic, a politician, or
a Supreme Court judge would do. All of them naturally have to provide
themselves with a living, but the fundamental facts that regulate their
reactions to the world about them are different.
For a business man that fundamental fact is, and is bound to be,
_profit_. Having made money, the business man may be, as he often is,
more generous and careless with it than an aristocrat or a churchman;
but that does not alter the fact that the main function of his work,
his main preoccupation, and the point from which he views everything
connected with his work is that of a profit. For one thing, all men,
whether they be poets, soldiers, diplomats, or department-store owners,
crave, as we have said, success and recognition in their chosen field.
The hallmark of success in business is the extent of profit a man gets
out of it. An artist may find no public for his wares but, if he is
doing great work, he will be supported by the opinion of his peers. A
doctor may struggle in a country village with nothing but a pittance
but he has the satisfaction of a noble work nobly done. A man like
Asquith may spend his whole life in the service of his country and yet
retire as prime minister with the income of a bank clerk. But a man
who spends his life in business and ends no wealthier than he began is
voted a failure by all his fellows, even though he may have personal
qualities that endear him to his friends.
This fundamental preoccupation with making a profit has been much
emphasized by the shift of business from the individual to the
corporate form. A man may do what he likes with his own and if he
chooses to be quixotic he can be; but in the new triple relationship
of workmen, executives, and stockholders in the modern corporation
there has ceased to be personality anywhere. The American is a great
believer in the magical power of words. The bare facts of business are
now being covered over by the new American gospel of “service”; but
when we analyze this, does it not merely come down to the obvious facts
that the business man performs a highly useful function in society and
that, so far as he can, he should see that the public gets its full
money’s worth? The fundamental need of profit remains. The professional
classes—doctors, artists, scholars, scientists and others—may, as they
often do, work for little or nothing at all, but, except in the rarest
of personal instances, the business man is precluded from doing so.
What stockbroker, manufacturing company, railway or electric light
corporation with all their talk about service would ever consider
running their business at a voluntary loss in order to render greater
service or tide the public over a crisis? It cannot be done. It is
profit first, and then, perhaps, as much service as is compatible with
profit.
Now this primary and essential preoccupation with making a profit
naturally tends to color a business man’s view of his entire world,
and is what, in my opinion, mainly differentiates business from the
professions. Nor do I speak as an impractical intellectual. Of the
last thirty years I have spent about one-half in business and half in
professional work, and I realize the great difference, having paid my
monthly bills, between concentrating primarily on the work rather than
the profit.
Moreover, dealing inevitably with material things and with the
satisfying of the world’s material wants, the business man tends
to locate happiness in _them_ rather than in the intellectual and
spiritual unless he constantly refreshes his spirit away from business
during his leisure. When the pressure of business on his time, or his
concentration on it, becomes so great as to preclude his reasonable use
of leisure for the development of his whole human personality, he is
apt to become a complete materialist even if, as is now frequently not
the case, he ever had it in him to become anything else. He may live in
a palace, ride in the most luxurious cars and fill his rooms with old
masters and the costliest manuscripts which his wealth can draw from
under the hammer at Christie’s but if he cares more for riches, luxury,
and power than for a humanely rounded life he is not civilized but what
the Greeks properly called a “barbarian.”
Aside from narrowness of interests, the business man, from the nature
of his major occupation, is apt to have short views and to distrust
all others. It was once said, as superlative praise, of the late J. P.
Morgan, one of the most public spirited and far-sighted business men
we have had, that he “thought in ten-year periods.” Most business men
think—and do well to do so as business men—in one or two-year periods;
the business man cares nothing for the tendency of what he is doing.
This has been emphasized in the American business man by the vast
extent of the natural resources with which he has had to deal and the
recuperative powers of an active people in a half-settled continent.
If, as he did in the northern Mississippi Valley, he can make his
personal profit by ripping the forests off the face of half a dozen
states in a decade, he is content to let those who come later look
after themselves.
Nor is he any more solicitous about the social results of his
activities. Obviously, what interests the business man as a business
man is a free hand to gather wealth as quickly as may be, combined
with a guarantee that society shall protect him in that wealth once he
has gathered it. He may steal the water resources of a dozen states
but, once they are stolen, he is a defender of the Constitution and
the sanctity of contract. It is not hard to understand why the United
States is the most radical country in the world in its business methods
and the most conservative in its political!
Preoccupation with profit, again, tends to make a business man, as
business man, blind to the æsthetic quality in life. A beautiful bit
of scenery, such as Montauk Point, is for him merely a good site for a
real-estate development; a waterfall is merely water-power. America’s
most successful business man, Mr. Ford, while rolling up millions by
the hundreds in profits, was content to turn out what was, perhaps, the
ugliest car on the market. It was only when his profits were threatened
that he turned to the consideration of beauty, and he would not have
done so had it not promised profit. No sane business man in charge of a
large business would do so. It is much the same with the cultivation
of the business man’s mind. Time is money, and anything which takes
time and does not give business results is waste. But if you tell him
that if he shows an interest in Keats he can probably land Smith’s
account—Smith being a queer, moony guy—or that if he will go to hear
the “Rheingold” he can make a hit with that chap he has long been
after, the effect will be magical. Innumerable advertisements of books
or teaching of foreign languages will easily illustrate what I mean.
These and other qualities of the business man are his qualities
_as_ a business man. They are qualities that are bred in him by his
occupation. Plenty of business men are much more than business men
and outside of their offices and business hours have other qualities
and other interests. But there is this to be said. Society at large,
including the business man himself, owes its opportunity for a fully
rounded life mainly to those who have not been business men. What will
be the effect on all of us of the growing dominance of the business
type and of the hold which the business man and business ideals have
attained upon our civilization?
III
Before we discuss this let me gladly admit that the business man’s
search for a profit has in many ways been of great cultural, as well as
material, benefit to the community at large. I am by no means decrying
business. If the business man has not, culturally, been a creator, he
has done marvellous work as a middleman. In the phonograph and the
radio, for example, the business man has brought the work of the
scientist on the one hand and the musician on the other together in
such a way that the lonely resident of a country village can listen to
the symphony orchestra of perhaps a half-dozen cities. The business
man, indeed, does not care a rap whether Jones listens to a symphony
or a prize fight, but he has given him an opportunity. Yet that
opportunity could not come to Jones unless both the abstract scientist,
reaching the business man through the medium of the inventor, and the
musical composer had existed and done their work in a spirit quite
remote from business. In a world entirely made up of business men (with
the qualities of business men only) it is doubtful if either pure
science or music would have existed.
Taking this cultural aspect of a possible business man’s civilization
worked out to its final result, we may note several things. If modern
business is not a profession—and I certainly do not believe it is—it,
nevertheless, has become an intensely absorbing occupation. Moreover,
like science and most of modern life, it has become highly specialized,
both for workmen and for executives. At no time before in the history
of the world have the occupations of all men tended to render them
so lopsided. Never before have leisure and a wise use of it been so
necessary. The functions of the lawyer and doctor, even of the thinker
and the artist, have become narrowed to only a small part of the field
formerly covered by them. Compare for example a modern scientist in any
branch with a Bacon, or a modern painter with men like Michelangelo
or da Vinci,—easel painters, mural decorators, poets, architects,
sculptors, military engineers, and other things by turns. The narrowing
of the field of work for all men has greatly intensified the need of
their finding opportunity for the development of other sides of their
personalities in pursuits other than their major ones. This is most
true of the business man because of the effect upon him of his work as
contrasted with the professions and other careers. The danger lurks in
exactly that situation; for the one who most needs, but least realizes,
the value of leisure and culture, of a fully rounded personality, of
what we may call humanism, is the one who has become the controller of
the destinies of all.
In the remainder of this article we can but glance briefly at some
of the effects, already becoming visible, of the dominance of
business ideals. Let us take first the question of that leisure so
essential from the standpoint of a humane civilization. In an economic
civilization in which efficiency is the one great good, leisure will
be considered as waste save in so far as it promotes the individual’s
productive capacity in his next stint of work. Having little use for
sanely occupied leisure themselves, our business spokesmen try either
to confuse it in the public mind with idleness or to make people
utilize it for the satisfaction of more material wants. Thus in his
_American Omen_, which we may take as an ultra-expression of the new
business ideal, Garrett says, speaking of leisure, that the American
“does not know what to do with idleness. He does not understand it.
Generally it kills him.” Again, speaking of adult education, he adds
that “in England the intent of adult education is to give the wage
earner a cultural interest to fill up his leisure time—nature study,
astronomy, the physics and chemistry of everyday life, literature,
perhaps. In Germany the intent is technical. In Denmark it is to
stimulate the mind generally. In France there is not much of any kind.
But,” he adds triumphantly, “the American idea of adult education is
to enable a man to find greater self-expression in his job.” Certainly
from the standpoint of humanism, of a fully rounded human existence, no
comment on this business ideal is needed.
If it be claimed that Garrett does not speak responsibly for business,
let us turn to another spokesman. Harvard University has taken the lead
in giving its scholastic benediction to business, which it proclaims
in stone over the entrance to its Business School, given to it by one
of the richest business men in America, to be “the oldest of the arts,
the newest of the professions.” Doctor Carver, professor of economics
at Harvard, writes that in America “we may take a certain genuine
satisfaction in the fact that we have no leisure class and are never
likely to have one ... though we do fall behind in those arts that are
commonly cultivated by a leisure class ... and must therefore content
ourselves with such arts and graces as can be cultivated by busy
people.”
It is obvious, except to our “practical” business men, that there are
many kinds of work, not only like the arts, needful for humanism,
but like pure science, needful for business itself, that can be the
fruit only of free time and of the absence of the need to turn the
results into immediate cash. Yet here again we run counter to the new
business ideals as promulgated by Professor Carver. “Generally with
some exceptions,” he writes, “the more useful the person the more he
is paid,” adding that “if a pupil shows a special aptitude for a kind
of work which is being overdone and poorly paid, to train the pupil
for that work would be to condemn him to poverty, and no conscientious
educator would care to do that. He must, in fact, train the pupil for
a kind of work which is reasonably well paid.” We need not add the
recent dictum of another professor that the best standard of value
of a piece of literary work is, after all, what it will fetch in the
market, to see how the new leaven of the business ideals of profits
and “service” are working in our academic minds. “The greater the
service rendered, the greater is the personal income” (we may thus
syllogize this idea), “therefore, we can estimate the service in terms
of income, and (with no selfish philosophy, of course, only idealism)
we must train our boys to make the largest incomes possible so that
they may be sure they are rendering the greatest service to society.”
Q.E.D. Naturally the business men, whose badge of success is income,
applaud such a theory, for it establishes indubitably that the owner
of a cigar-store chain is infinitely more valuable to humanity than a
Keats, even though from every past civilization the only things which
remain of value to humanity are the creative works of those who were
not business men. The business men of those days are as forgotten
and indistinguishable as the leaves of yesteryears in Vallombrosa.
Nothing could bring out more clearly than this barbarous syllogism
and philosophy the difference between a humanistic and an economic
civilization.
We may also note the changes occurring in the spirit of the professions
as they conform themselves to the dominant note of a business man’s
civilization. That civilization, as we have said, cloaks its crudity
under the name of service, yet even in the medical profession, perhaps
as yet the least tainted, what is the service rendered as compared
with a generation ago? Many articles in our magazines have dealt with
the seriousness of the crisis which is overtaking whole countrysides
where no physician can now be found to labor for little pay, and the
difficulties of finding medical service even in the cities at low cost
or at moments inconvenient for the doctor, such as night calls. But
if social service can be calculated in income, why not? If the theory
is true, is it not a doctor’s duty to leave a whole countryside to
struggle without medical care if it can pay him only three or four
thousand a year when in a city he can make twenty thousand if he gets
in with the right people?
The same applies even more to the legal profession. The great prizes in
this are for the most part now to be won only from the great business
men and their corporations. A man may struggle in private practice for
twenty years and not make in all that time what a more fortunate fellow
may get as a retainer from a railroad or a water-power trust in one
year. The business-civilization ideal of wealth as distinction would be
a powerful influence tending to make the lawyer turn to business in any
case, but now the new business philosophy of service measured by income
makes that turning a social duty and salves the professional conscience.
Another profession, architecture, is beginning to feel the influence
of the dominance of business. We have good architects in America—none
better—but business does not give them their chance. Buildings are
built to sell, and, being built on borrowed money on speculation,
must be sold as quickly as possible. No chances can be taken on
not pleasing the taste of the public. Moreover, in buildings every
inch of space must be made to bring in rent. In every direction the
architect’s hands are tied. In many cases, partly from the spread
of the business ideal of life and partly perhaps from despair, the
architect has come to adopt the attitude expressed by one of the
well-known ones recently. “As an architect,” he writes, “I am really
just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space, and my job,
as I see it, is to make as attractive a package as is physically or
æsthetically possible for me in view of all the conditions imposed.”
The consequence is that in architectural experiment America is falling
so rapidly behind countries like Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria,
and even Russia, that after studying the new buildings, particularly
the private houses in those countries, returning to America is almost
like going back to the early Victorian age. I have not been to Russia,
but the noted French architect Le Corbusier has recently gone there to
investigate the new buildings and he reports of the Muscovites that
“their works are a splendid outburst of lyrical poetry. They are poets
in steel and glass.” The picture of the new “Palace of Industry” at
Charkov certainly goes far to confirm this opinion. Much of the new
architecture I have seen and the marvellously interesting new bloom
everywhere in the countries which I have named makes the American
revamping of the English, Colonial, and Spanish types seem to belong to
a past world. Plagiarism is a confession of sterility. Of all the new
movement and the new method of living it entails, the American public
is almost totally ignorant. The business man with an eye solely to an
immediate profit, and the architect who considers himself a business
man, “just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space,” are
not likely to carry America far on any new road.
IV
Of the effect of a business man’s civilization on the manners of
society I shall speak in a later chapter and need not here anticipate
what I shall there say. We may note, however, in passing, its effect
on taste and habits. As for taste, a business civilization has as its
core the idea of a money profit and of a material standard of values.
Business men devote their tireless energy to creating new wants which
their factories can supply. But two points must be noticed. One is that
these wants which they create and foster must be material or there is
no manufacturing to supply them and no profit to the business man. If
people wish to tramp about the countryside remote from motor cars, or
read a book or go to an art museum or simply engage in intelligent
conversation at home, the manufacturer is losing a possible profit.
The constant endeavor of modern business is therefore to get people
to fill up their leisure with _things_, things that can be made and
sold. Another point with regard even to these things is, that the
great profits being in mass-production, the wants so scientifically
created by advertising are such as may be made to appeal to the masses.
The spiritual or æsthetic value of the new wants is bound to be made
subordinate to the possibility of their being filled in quantity.
Some of the problems touched upon, as well as others, are world
problems. Their special importance in America is due to the curiously
lopsided development which American civilization has increasingly
followed. With the unique position that the business man has here
attained to impress himself upon the entire cultural life of the
people, the dangers of certain business tendencies are enormously
increased as compared with other countries where the ideals and
activities of the business man meet with checks from many other
influences, contemporary or historic, in the civilization as a whole.
Even if the American business man were alive to the enormous social
responsibility of the position in which he finds himself, it is not
likely that he could assume the rôles in civilization which have
hitherto been taken by a dozen or so classes of other types, that he
could include within himself all the springs to thought and action
and all the checks and balances which a variety of social types have
hitherto supplied. For one thing, the prime factor in business life,
the need for making a profit, is at war with the spirit of all the
arts and with what should be the spirit of the professions. Again, the
training in taking short views, the ignoring of the future results of
action beyond a reasonable period of profit, the subordinating to the
thought of profit of all the larger social implications of action,
are among the characteristics of business as business that do not
augur well for placing the supreme control of the entire national
civilization in business hands. The business man, moreover, is merely
a purveyor and not a creator of the real values of a civilization. If
under his dominance the business philosophy indicated above takes—as it
seems to be doing—increasing hold upon the universities, the churches,
the professions, and the people at large, it may be asked how long
shall we have any creators?
If the fundamental idea underlying our civilization, its _primum
mobile_, is to become that of a business profit, it is inevitable that
we shall decline in the scale of what has hitherto been considered
civilization as contrasted with barbarism in the Greek sense. The
Harvard professor may dismiss lightly the loss of the “arts and
graces,” but if his doctrine of the valuation of social service in
terms of income is to become established, is it not much more likely
to be lost than the “arts and graces”? What becomes of the artistic
spirit, of the professional spirit, of the pure scientific spirit? The
American is apt to think of his own country as in the van of at least
everything material and of Europe as negligible; but even in the things
considered distinctly American we are falling behind. That we have
recently lost the speed record both on land and water with that special
darling of America, the gasoline engine, may not be important, but it
will surprise most Americans to know that both the fastest and the
average speed of all trains in England and some parts of the Continent
are higher than in America. In aerial passenger routes America, in
spite of the efforts to make it appear otherwise, is far behind Europe,
where the whole continent is covered with a network of aerial routes
used as readily as we use trains at home.
I have touched at some length on architecture because it was not many
years ago that we were hoping for a genuine renaissance that should
have its beginning in America, and because we have, as I said, some
absolutely first-class architects. The present renaissance, however,
has come wholly in Europe from men like Le Corbusier in France, Gropius
in Germany, or Oud in Holland, with their enthusiastic followers. We
have had so little to do with it and are sharing so little in it that
the most recent pronouncement on the new movement there dismisses the
United States in three lines as offering nothing of theoretical value.
Civilizations rest fundamentally upon ideas. These ideas to be
effective must be those of the dominant classes in the civilization.
In making the business men the dominant and sole class in America, that
country is making the experiment of resting her civilization on the
ideas of business men. The other classes, dominated by the business
one, are rapidly conforming in their philosophy of life to it. The
business man, in so far as he is more than a business type, in so far
as he is a fully rounded personality (as, I repeat, many of them now
are), owes that development of himself outside his work to the work of
other classes in the past or present. If those classes become merged in
his own, whither can even he himself look for his extra-occupational
development? If the leaders are not humanely rounded personalities,
civilized rather than barbarian, what shall be expected of the mass
which patterns itself upon them? In a word, can a great civilization be
built up or maintained upon the philosophy of the counting-house and
the sole basic idea of a profit?
CHAPTER II
THE COST OF
PROSPERITY
THE COST OF PROSPERITY
I
Not long ago a despatch from Washington announced that “the highest
standard of living ever attained in the history of the world was
reached last year [1926] by the American people,” and gave as basis for
the statement the government’s figure for the income of our population,
which income was set at ninety billion dollars. The “high standard”
thus indicated is unhesitatingly accepted by almost everyone; but even
if we do accept as a fact, though it is far from being a universal
one, the ability of all persons to spend more and to buy more things
than ever before, it may be worth while to consider what some of the
by-products of the processes involved have been. Overwhelmed by the
material advance made in the past five decades or so and by the vast
amount of Pollyanna literature with which we are flooded by politicians
and business executives with axes to grind, we are apt to lose sight
of the law of compensation and to think of all change as unalloyed
improvement.
Change may or may not be “progress,” but whether it is or not it
is bound to involve compensatory losses. Man may have advanced far
from his ancestor which lived in the primeval slime, but that lowly
progenitor could breathe either in air or water and if he lost a leg
could grow another. To-day man can make his voice heard three thousand
miles away, but he dies if you hold his nose in a water basin and is a
cripple for life when he loses a foot. What he gains in one direction
he drops in another, unpopular as Nature or anyone else may be when
they tell him so. One is not necessarily a pessimist, therefore, when
one chooses to consider what losses may have been entailed by attaining
to the present “highest standard of living.”
Two points are notable in the popular belief as to that standard. One
is that all classes in the community are supposed somehow to share
in its beneficences, and the other is that the measuring rod used
is material and economic. The leaders in the “marvellous advance”
are automobiles, radios, vacuum cleaners, electric washing machines,
telephones, etc. It is assumed that spiritual and intellectual progress
will somehow come also from the mere accumulation of “things,” and
this assumption has become a sort of American religion with all the
psychological implications of religious dogma. In business circles,
mass-production, on which our present prosperity is based, is not
considered merely as a transient and possibly an unsound economic
phase, but as the creator of “the highest standard of living ever
attained,” and, as such, as little to be doubted or questioned as God
the Creator before Darwin. At any rate, mass-production is so closely
linked to the ninety billion dollars that the two may be considered as
the heads and tails of the same coin, and the by-products of one those
of the other.
It may be noted that, although ninety billion dollars is a staggering
sum to contemplate, we receive something of a shock when we read
farther that the average income of all persons “gainfully employed”
was $2210 a year. When we turn to another statistical source and find
that nearly ten thousand persons paid taxes on incomes of from $100,000
to $1,000,000 year each, two hundred and twenty-eight on incomes
over $1,000,000, and fourteen on incomes of over $5,000,000 each, we
begin to wonder whether the masses are getting quite their share of
the benefits of mass-production. It is evident that however great the
“national” wealth may be, there is something very queer about its
distribution, and that the gulf between the average man and the rich
man has widened with appalling rapidity.
We are not here concerned primarily with that point nor with the
average person “gainfully employed,” whose income is evidently not much
above $2000, but we may glance a moment at the condition of the latter
in order to get some standard of income measurement. In 1917 the street
railway employees in Seattle submitted a minimum budget for living in
a dispute with their company over wages. They figured that $1917.88
annually for a family of five would allow, among other things, $12 for
the education of the children, $30 for reading matter of all kinds, and
$120 each for insurance and old-age savings. The company was able to
reduce this to $1505.60 by eliminating all reading matter, including
newspapers, reducing education from $12 to $11, old-age savings from
$120 to $100, and insurance from $120 to $30. Carfare was reduced to
$35.70 annually, with the somewhat ironical result that the members
of the families of the men engaged in running the street cars were
allowed only enough to use a car themselves on an average of once every
six days! As $5 a year per person was allowed for “recreation” and $4
for all “miscellaneous,” we need not linger over the average man in
our total population who is “gainfully employed” when considering for
the moment the high standard of living. We are here concerned with
the persons between those and the ultra wealthy—the persons who both
suffer from and enjoy factors in that standard.
One of the outstanding features of life to-day is its frightful and
steadily increasing cost. Apart from taxation, it is much higher in the
United States than in any of the other ten countries in which I have
spent longer or shorter periods in the past few years. This is in part
due to the intentionally prohibitive tariff, in part to the terrific
increase in wages, and in part to the increase in the kind and number
of things we are supposed to have in order to be happy.
Those who defend the present wage schedules are forever telling us
that they do not increase the cost of living because of the increased
output per man and the increased savings in cost due to new machinery
and mass-production. Much of this, of course, is sheer bunkum. For the
housekeeper who pays a cook anywhere from $75 to $100 as compared with
$25 to $30 fifteen years ago there is a clear loss in the family budget
with no increased output whatever. The cook gets the full benefit of
all the labor-saving devices, and the mistress pays for these and the
advanced wages as well. When the other day I had some bookshelves put
up and paid two of the stupidest workmen it has ever been my luck to
encounter $12 a day each there was no compensating advantage whatever.
I am told I might have got it done for less had I taken the trouble
to find a “scab” workman out of work. In the first place I do not
know where to find one and in the second place it would not have been
necessary fifteen years ago. I could then have gone to any union shop
and had the job done reasonably. No, a factory may increase wages and
lower costs, but the ordinary householder cannot do so in all that
affects the running of his home and family. The increase of wages, in
many cases to prohibitive levels, is the heaviest single burden, except
rent, to the man of moderate means to-day.
But to a great extent the increase in living cost is due also to the
increase in the number of things. We live so fast and heedlessly that
we seldom consider how much of our present annual expense is made up
of costs incurred for things that few of us used fifteen or twenty
years ago. Of course the automobile bulks largest in this respect as
a single item. In the well-to-do New York suburb where I lived for
some years before the War, comparatively few people had cars. Most of
the commuters of the class then spending $8000 to $10,000 a year—the
equivalent of $15,000 to $20,000 to-day—always walked to and from
the station, taking a hack in bad weather. To-day there are over
twenty million cars in the country, or about one to every family.
If one examines the real-estate advertisements one finds that now a
small modern house will have its vacuum cleaner, its washing machine,
elaborate wiring with outlets all over the place, its cedar closets,
electric refrigerator, radio, automatic heat-regulator, its several
bathrooms, and a garage for one, and not seldom two cars, to mention
some of what are considered essentials. I do not question the comfort
and convenience of at least most of these things, but their steady
multiplication adds heavily to the burden of the man who has to pay
for them in order to maintain his family according to the “American
standard.” For all with incomes of from $5000 to $50,000 the burden
is almost equally felt, for standards of expense are in proportion to
income and annually mounting.
II
The demand for luxury even in the transaction of ordinary business
is adding tremendously to the overhead expense of doing it and so
to the cost of goods or services. A railway station must be as
magnificent as a Roman bath. Our shops must be housed in Renaissance
palaces on expensive streets. We are told that expensive office
furniture is the safest investment in the world. A “front,” whether
of clothes, furnishing, building, or location, must always be put
up so as to indicate wealth back of it all or the business may not
be considered sound, profitable, and “up-to-date.” Salesmanship has
become increasingly expensive. I was recently talking with a woman who
has an excellent salary (forming, of course, part of the overhead of
her department), in one of the supposedly less extravagant shops. She
complained of the expense she was under because of the high standard of
salesmanship demanded by her customers. Fifteen years ago, she said,
if she had dared to appear in the costly clothes the house now _makes_
her wear, she would have been promptly discharged. She has to go to the
theaters, know the latest plays and books, and be able to chat with
her customers, not about her goods, but socially by the half-hour. Her
sales are splendid—with prices according.
Fifteen years ago almost every physician, dentist, or oculist had his
office in a room in his own home and rarely had an assistant. Now
almost without exception they have to take an office in some apartment
house at rents of from $1200 to $3000 a year, and employ at least one
uniformed nurse in attendance—expenses which, of course, are borne
by the patients. To a considerable extent this is the fault of the
patients themselves. There is an instinctive tendency to feel if a
doctor still has his office in his home with only a maid to answer the
bell that he is either not up-to-date in knowledge or is unsuccessful
for some reason. I know of one very able medical man who has
deliberately done so and who has tried to keep down his professional
expense for the benefit of his patients, but several of these patients
have more than hinted to him that they would prefer to have a more
expensive car standing at their door when he makes his call!
To an incredible degree we have most of us unthinkingly adopted the
cost standard as the value standard. Some time ago a prosperous and
practical inventor disclosed some of his adventures with popular
psychology. He had invented a small article which, with fair sales,
could make a large profit when retailed at ten cents. He sent out a
number of street hawkers to sell the article, half of them with the
thing priced at ten cents and the other half with a twenty-five-cent
price. The latter sold immediately whereas few were sold at the lower
price.
Often the influence of this false standard is more insidious and
disastrous. I was discussing the matter the other day with an
internationally known scientist. He was at one time—but is no
longer—a professor in one of our leading universities. He said that
when his first child was born he was getting a salary of $2500 a
year. The leading obstetrician in the town charged $500 for a “baby
case”—one-fifth of my friend’s annual income. When the financial
situation was explained the doctor told him that his assistant was
just as able a medical man as himself and would charge only $100, and
that he himself would be on the telephone ready to come in a moment if
anything went wrong. My friend, after wrestling in his mind for some
time, decided to have the assistant, but he told me that he hoped never
again to go through such hell as he endured during the hours of birth,
when he thought that if anything went wrong with his wife he would feel
all his life that he had sacrificed her for the four hundred dollars’
difference. Yet I consider that this man has the sanest and most
balanced mind of all the men I know.
The situation outlined is a very real and, both financially and
psychologically, a serious one. When anyone we love is ill we feel
impelled to have the best attention for him, a half-dozen specialists
if necessary; and the standard of the best, more subtly than we
realize, is the cost standard. We have become hypersensitive, and this
sensitiveness is terrifically costly. I myself was born in New York of
a well-to-do family. My mother’s father was rich as things then went.
Yet it could not have cost at most $100 to bring me into the world.
There were no graduate nurses, no maternity hospitals, few, if any,
specialists. The ordinary family physician, at $2 a house visit, and
two women such as we call practical nurses did everything, in the home.
To-day, what with doctors, nurses, and the hospital charge, the cost
would run to about $1500 for a family of the same social grade, or
fifteen times the old cost, whereas the ordinary income has less than
trebled.
III
The increased cost of living from these and other causes is having
marked effects. It is, for one thing, largely destroying the old idea
of thrift and saving in the classes with which we are here concerned.
In the first place, there is the natural human desire to possess many
of the new things available for their own sakes, and often because Mrs.
Jones has them, and they belong to the new standard. But there are
more insidious forces at work. Mass-production requires an enormous
and steady output to be profitable. There is a saturation point for
nearly every article. Fresh vegetables are eaten up in a day or two,
but clothes or cars may last several years. There is no reason why
many of the mechanical contrivances we buy should not in themselves
last many years. From the standpoint of the producer there is always
the danger that the consumer may have enough of any particular article
unless he is made to want more. This is accomplished in several ways
in the technic which has been developed by psychologically trained
sales experts. The consumer is cleverly induced to want an article
that he had thought he could do without or could not afford. If he has
already owned one, as an automobile, the slogan becomes that every
self-respecting family should have two. The model is changed every year
and social vanity is played upon; or an appeal is made to the powerful
motives of fear, shame, and pride. In selling many of the mechanical
contrivances a more brutal method is employed. Manufacturers stop
making essential parts so as to require the owner to buy an entirely
new and perhaps only slightly altered model. Some years ago, for
instance, I bought at a cost of $450 a certain instrument. It was good
for a lifetime. I added steadily, as I could afford it, to the things
that were to be used with it, and without which it was useless, until
the whole investment was over $800. One day when I went to get more, I
was told they no longer made anything for that “model,” I would have to
get another and, of course, with a condescending tone that was almost a
sneer, “I must want to have the latest.” The new model, differing only
slightly from the old, cost, the salesman told me, as though it were a
trifle, $750. To accumulate the same things to go with it that I had
for the old would cost about $400 more. My old investment was rendered
worthless, and the salesman made it evident that he had no interest in
a person so cheap that he would not casually throw away $800 and spend
$1,000 more on a toy. His company did not have the least glimmer of an
idea of responsibility toward a public out of which it had made its
money and which had made, in the aggregate, a colossal investment in
its instruments. When other methods fail and you really have no money,
the advantages of the partial payment plan are glowingly placed before
you.
Again, we are told by leaders of the world of mass-production that
thrift is out of date. One of the greatest manufacturers in the country
recently wrote that “use” not “saving” should govern our ideas with
respect to our national and other resources. In another remarkable
pronouncement, this man, who is an idol of a large part of the people,
said that no boy had ever succeeded or would succeed who saved money
when he was young. Another leader writes that “one reason for America’s
prosperity and one reason, in my opinion, why that prosperity will
continue, is that we have committed ourselves to a standard of living
far beyond our wildest pre-war dreams.... We cannot make good except by
producing more wealth, and always a little ahead of us is advertising
with its alluring images of still other good things that work will buy.
Americans have passed out of the period where they care about petty
economies. They want convenience. They want action. They want comfort
and style. It is impossible to call Americans back to petty thrift, and
I personally am glad of it.... I live now in New York where everybody
expects to be overcharged and where nobody counts the dimes, much less
the pennies.... We have ceased to count our pennies in America, and I
certainly hope we never return to the days of the most graceless of all
virtues, a niggardly and penny-pinching thrift.”
One wonders just what spiritual joy there should be in being
overcharged. Also, most of us have still to count the dimes. The other
day I wanted a mere bite of luncheon in a hurry. Going into the only
business men’s restaurant in sight, I paid one dime to have my hat
checked, another to the boy who insisted on handing me a towel in the
washroom, and another for the cover charge; and I wondered what, over
the old days, was the advantage in paying at the rate of a hundred
hard-earned dollars a year for an ordinary snack of lunch without
getting anything to eat.
There are other factors at work to make thrift appear hopeless and so
to destroy the average man’s peace of mind as he contemplates old age
or possible long incapacity from illness. One is the fact that savings
do not seem to go anywhere when made from a modest income. Although the
cost of living has easily tripled in thirty years, the income from most
sound investments has not gone up at all. When one saves a thousand
dollars and contemplates the $50 or even $60 a year that that will
bring in income, and thinks how many fifties or sixties it will take
to support him and his family, he wonders whether it is worth while to
pinch for so meager a result. Moreover, owing to advancing costs and
the changing scale of living, there is no telling what the cost of
living may be not merely in one’s old age but even ten years hence.
Before the pace of living started on its now annually accelerated
speed, a man could forecast with reasonable certainty what income would
enable him to maintain his relative position in his stratum of society
for the fifteen or twenty years of life that might be left to him when
he retired. Now, apart from other factors, an invention one year means
a luxury on the market in another two or three, and that luxury becomes
a necessity, like the automobile, in another three or four. In a recent
study of the income and expenses of nearly a hundred families of the
members of the faculty of the University of California it is shown that
the average savings per family including life insurance are $360. The
annual cost of medical service alone among them is $325. A New York
professional man who considered this article, when read to him, unduly
pessimistic, admitted that although he lives on a scale indicated by
his rent of $2500 a year he is unable to save anything. The surprising
extent to which the hope and even the thought of providing for old age
has gone from the mind of the moderately well-to-do was still further
shown by this man’s comment that life insurance was the equivalent of
savings. Life insurance is excellent and essential, but only in its
more expensive forms does it permit the insurer himself to enjoy the
benefits of it, and straight life policies are not complete protection
for one’s own old age. Even if one insures against accident, sickness,
and death, there are many emergencies in life which can be met only
from one’s own saved money. Is it any wonder that there has been a
rush in the last decade for common stocks and speculation when the
newspapers continually tell of stupendous profits (and advance in
“values” of nearly two and a half billions in one month alone), when
business leaders decry thrift, and the cost of living gives us a kick
from behind? Even the President of the United States and the Secretary
of the Treasury encourage the people to speculate, and in the _New
York Times_ I read that the Mellon family made $300,000,000 in a year.
I know many men who have large salaries and many who have accumulated
fortunes but I do not know a single one who has accumulated more than
the merest competency except from gift, inheritance, or advances in
stocks. For some years the stock market may have been an ever-present
help in time of need to many, but stocks cannot continue to the end of
our lives to climb an endless escalator; and as one looks forward to
an eternal making of money to buy an endless succession of new things,
or even merely of new “models,” one wonders whether the “highest
standard ever attained” is really worth all it costs and whether if
Wordsworth could to-day see the richest nation in the world he would
not be more than ever convinced that “Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers.” Yet still the high-powered sales forces urge “buy,
buy, buy and make yourselves and everybody prosperous by it.” We are
hearing a good deal about prosperity without profit. We may soon be
giving consideration to prosperity without peace of mind. It is a
fact not without its significance, perhaps, for social trends and
tendencies that when the disaster in Florida and Porto Rico occurred a
year ago, less than one person in a thousand in the richest city in our
country, a country formerly quick to respond to the call for help, has
contributed even one of those dimes we are told are so unconsidered in
New York.
IV
Let us turn to some of the other social effects of this high standard.
It is obvious that with a national income of even ninety billions, a
hundred and twenty million people cannot buy everything. Some things
have to go if we are to have new things constantly and pay double or
treble for the old. We are electing, in many cases perforce, to let
go the home. This is due partly to the cost of housing and partly
to that of servants as well as general costs. In the urban centers,
at least, gild the pill as we may, the people who fifteen years ago
had comfortable homes are by no means so comfortable to-day. The
New York papers advertise “beautiful one-room homes” consisting of
a room eleven by fourteen with a bath, a bed that folds up into the
wall, and a cooking shelf in a dark closet. The one I have in mind
costs as much in yearly rent as twenty-five years ago the dignified
three-story eleven-room house on one of the finest streets in town cost
my father—that is, $1200. Even if one succeeds in finding a five- to
seven-room apartment, with one or two of the rooms of good size, at
$2000 (which is by no means easy to do), one has only half the space
at about double the cost of two decades back, and nothing like the
dignity, quiet, or privacy. Moreover, the maid service, when it can be
afforded, is at two to three times the former cost.
In the pre-war days a good neighborhood was usually sufficiently large
to permit of extensive walks in it. To-day in New York even a very
expensive neighborhood is as frequently as not an oasis of a block
or two, or even an apartment house or two, in the midst of a desert
of dreary and depressing slums. The rookery quarters of a medieval
city may be picturesque. The slums of New York are merely drab and
sordid. To those accustomed to a house or even to the spaciousness
of a better-class Paris apartment the usual New York apartment seems
hopelessly cramped and lacking in all character and dignity. The rooms
seem almost to open into one another and the family to be always on top
of one another, whether taking their baths or entertaining guests. And
guests are infinitely more of a problem than they ever were. Overnight
guests are out of the question for most people of moderate means. It
is hard enough to get an apartment which affords decent living for
the family, not to speak of a guest room. The lack of service, the
dependence upon one maid, when any, instead of upon the invariable cook
and waitress of even the modest families of twenty years back, has made
entertaining a genuine and not seldom an insoluble problem for families
living on such incomes as before the War would have made hospitality
merely an easy and gracious function of household life.
Moreover, within the family itself, the close quarters of the modern
apartment afford infinitely more opportunity for friction of tempers
and temperaments than the old homes. A third-story front bedroom as
an escape from the family sitting-room two stories below had almost
the aloofness of a mountain peak. The unsatisfactory character of the
new homes, or the unsatisfied natures of their tenants, are proved
beyond dispute by the restlessness engendered. Last October (1928) in
New York alone a hundred thousand families, involving at the lowest
estimate three hundred thousand people, moved from one apartment to
another. What memories can cluster about his “childhood home” for a
child who is thus annually dragged from one set of rooms to another
by parents in search of cheaper rents or the latest installations in
the way of electric iceboxes or garbage incinerators? Perhaps sunshine,
air, quiet, spaciousness, decency of neighborhood, dignity, privacy are
aristocratic requirements, vestiges of a now lost mode of comely and
gracious living. At any rate, they are now the most expensive “things”
to acquire, when they can be acquired at all, in a great modern city.
Yet two decades ago even in New York and Brooklyn they were readily
obtainable on such modest incomes as $3000 or $4000 a year.
V
What has been the effect on the professional and intellectual classes?
Of course where they have linked themselves to big business or made
their work fit into mass-production they have weathered the storm
of the high standard very well. No one need worry about the general
counsel of a motor-car company, the artists who draw the syndicated
comic strips, or the movie stars. But there are whole classes who do
not or cannot thus fit in. A nationally known trust company officer
recently wrote that most of those who disliked the present situation
and who were given to dire comment or prophecy were merely those who
had had comfortable incomes before the present high standard hit us and
who had been unable to adjust themselves to it, that is, make _large_
incomes. But according to the present modes of dividing the national
income, how _can_ these classes thus adjust themselves except by
abandoning their work and going into business?
Our glance at the minimum wage budget prepared by the street railway
men has shown us what can be done on $1900 a year: $12 a year for
education, $30 for all reading matter (one-third of which would
be consumed by one daily paper), and $12.20 for tobacco and all
recreation. The average pay of all clergymen throughout the United
States is $735 a year. Even if this frequently includes a house, how
are they to adjust themselves? To attain even to the minimum budget of
the street railway worker they would nearly have to more than double
their income, that is, to give approximately one-third of their time to
the work of their ministry and two-thirds to making money solely. Even
if they could do so, what would they get as their share of the “high
standard”? We have seen that even the street railway company had to
cut out all reading matter, even newspapers, from the homes of its men
if they were to live on $1505. Yet under the high standard the country
allows its clergy scarcely half that sum and complains that the church
is failing in leadership.
Let us turn to another class, which is great numerically and should be
great in influence, and which we shall consider more particularly in
a later chapter. The average pay of teachers throughout the country
districts of the Middle Atlantic States, including that manufactory
of millionaires, Pennsylvania, is $870 a year; in the villages it is
$1244. Let us bear in mind the bleak budget of $1900 of the street
railway men and remember also that the conductor of a railway freight
train gets about $3750 a year and the engineer about $4700. What
are the opportunities and prospects for a man of scholarly tastes,
attainments, and pursuits? The average pay of over eleven thousand
members of college faculties is less than $3000 a year, and, although
in rare institutions a comparatively few men may attain to $8000 or
$10,000, a man is fortunate indeed who gets from $5000 to $7000. How
are these men to adjust themselves? Most of them do do extra work to
earn money as, in forty per cent of the cases, do the wives also.
In the days before the “high standard” a vacation was a vacation, a
period in which the professor, fagged from nine months’ drilling of
immature minds, could rest and catch up on his professional reading,
get fresh points of view and prepare for the next nine months’ bout
with inquiring or resisting youth. Now, we read, one-third of the
faculty could take no vacation at all; 40 per cent took less than two
weeks, and 60 per cent less than four weeks; yet yesterday the men
in the building trades in New York laid down their demand for every
Saturday off on full pay, equivalent to six and a half weeks’ vacation
from purely physical work requiring practically no mental preparation
or recuperation. Is it any wonder that a professor at Berkeley on $3000
a year goes into business at $20,000 a year, that a professor from
an Eastern university on about $6000 a year becomes president of a
business company with $75,000 a year drawing account, and that another
turns from teaching history to writing advertisements, to mention the
three who occur first to me?
Let us glance at writing under the high standard. Big incomes can be
earned by anything adapted for mass-production, such as best-selling
novels (with possible movie rights), articles for the mass-circulation
magazines, certain sorts of “syndicated stuff,” and so on; but that
sort of writing is not the most valuable for our national culture as a
rule. The cost of living is certainly from 200 to 250 per cent of what
it was in the decade before the War. “Index figures” are misleading.
It is of little importance to the average man whether pig lead is up
25 or 50 per cent. It is of prime importance to him that, as I can
show by my checkbook, a cook who cost $30 a month then costs $75 now,
that a suit of clothes which cost $28 then costs at the same store $74
now, and so on; to say nothing of all the new things to be bought. Of
course, the changes in wage schedules would differ from newspaper to
newspaper, but in one which gave me the figures for before the War and
now I find that editorial salaries have advanced 50 per cent, junior
reporters and book reviewers the same, poets 25 per cent, whereas,
rather oddly, space writers get actually 10 per cent less than before.
I am told that writers for the high-grade magazines get about double.
Comparing the flat price paid for scholarly volumes in two similar
works twenty years ago and now, I found that the scholars working
to-day were paid no more than before the War. On a royalty basis, owing
to higher book prices and larger sales, authors probably fare better
than fifteen years ago, though strict comparison for many reasons is
difficult. On the whole, taking the ordinary man of letters who lives
by his output and who writes books, articles, reviews, and does the
other various literary jobs, it would seem that in order to maintain
himself in the same relative position in the social and economic scale
he would have to increase his output very materially.
Business rewards are greater than ever for those who are successful,
but granted the social value of the business man’s services and
granted also the “dignity of labor,” it may well be asked whether a
standard of living is really intrinsically high which thus places
additional burdens on the shoulders of whole classes of the country’s
spiritual and intellectual leadership, its clergymen, its teachers,
and writers, in order to lighten the load of the carpenters, cooks, and
chambermaids. It may be truly said that Society has always expected
the intellectual classes to content themselves to a great extent with
rewards that are not pecuniary. That is so, but the tremendous advance
in the standard of living and the tremendously increased gulf between
the man of large income and the man of a moderate one has served to
depress these classes in the comparative scale far below the point of
two decades ago. I have every sympathy with labor, but its increased
share of the national income should come from the accumulating surplus,
the location of which is very clearly indicated from the income tax
lists, and not from mulcting the professional and clerical classes
scarcely a step now in the economic scale above labor itself. I cannot
see that the standard of life for the community as a whole is going to
be made higher by taking a vacation and a cook away from the college
professor and giving them to the conductor or the bricklayer, while the
rich business men get incredibly richer.
Before we leave this phase of the question, let us glance at some of
the office workers under the new standard. What mass-production methods
have done in the way of deadening routine for the factory workers is
too well known for repetition, in spite of much glossing over, but what
is going on in office work may be less generally understood. The new
idea of the relations between employer and employee in mass-production
is that the employer buys “production,” that is, “output,” from the
employee. Thus we read in a book on office technic how improvement was
made in an up-to-date office. Motion pictures were taken of the clerks
opening the morning mail. As a result of a study of these pictures,
the motions of the clerks were “reduced from thirteen to six and the
output increased from 100 pieces an hour to 200 an hour. A further
refinement in the manner of arranging the opened and unopened letters
on the table brought the rate to 250 an hour. Output was still further
increased by the use of a ‘motion-studied table’ to 300 an hour.”
Stenographers, of course, have been included in this speeding-up
process. We read that “in measuring production of this kind several
systems are in use. One is that of measuring production by the square
inch, with a transparent celluloid, but in most cases a cyclometer
is used, which is attached to the machine and records the number of
strokes.” Production is counted by “points,” each “point” being equal
to a certain number of strokes, and pay is given accordingly. 250
strokes are deducted for an ordinary error and 1275 strokes for an
error on the envelope. 10,000 strokes are added for “a perfect desk,”
that is one on which, every minute of the week, every implement is
so placed as to permit of the greatest speed. Medals and vacation
allowances are given for records, and contests are held—though, as to
these last, the expert admits that “as a general rule, office contests
are not to be recommended. Spurts of speed of any kind are bound to
have their reactions and the contest is _often succeeded by a certain
amount of lethargy after the goal has been won_. [Italics mine.] But
for clearing out an accumulation of work or to rouse the office force
they may be very effective.” One rubs one’s eyes and wonders whether
he is reading about America under the highest standard of living ever
attained or England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Stenographers share in the high standard to the extent of from $1250 to
$1700 a year.
VI
It would be possible to go on almost indefinitely listing our
by-products. For example, having everything from furniture to
buildings always of the latest is doing away with a whole range of
human emotions. When I was at Yale in 1898 I lived in a new dormitory
then one year old. Twenty years later when I went back to see what
memories the old place might bring to me, I found that the dormitory
had been torn down and replaced by a “modern” building. Our schools and
their furnishings, altered or rebuilt every few years, make an Eton
or a Harrow look painfully shabby perhaps and “unprogressive”; but
the boy who sits at the same desk where Shelley or Byron or Chatham
or Gladstone or Wellington sat, or lives in their rooms, will dream
dreams and gain an inspiration never afforded by the latest efficient
furniture from Michigan. It is the law of compensation at work, and
what is gained is not always better than what is lost. So far, what has
been gained under the high standard is mostly material and what has
been lost is mostly spiritual.
It might be thought that with a really high standard, the extra nerve
strain of life would be compensated for by extra opportunity for rest,
leisure, and quiet, but exactly the reverse is the case. There is less
leisure, except perhaps for the old poor and the new very rich, than
there was twenty years ago. It is also infinitely harder than it was
to find any quiet spot in the country at possible cost to which one
can retire to rest one’s tired mind and soul. The automobile offers
an instructive example of how an end can be defeated by its apparent
means. When there were few cars they afforded people a chance to get
away into the peace of the country, but now their very numbers have
ruined the quiet of the countryside. People motor out of the big cities
for quiet, only to find that they themselves, multiplied by thousands,
have killed the very thing they sought. Recently I inquired of a
surgeon who had gone to his house in the country a hundred miles from
New York if he had come back rested. He replied emphatically that he
had not, and that his place was ruined by people who raced their motor
boats with engines unmuffled and made it noisier than even his house in
town. As to what will be the condition when aeroplanes become really
common, one shudders to think.
Is it any wonder that as other by-products the statisticians tell us
that the age of marriage is steadily being postponed, with all that
that implies physiologically and psychologically, that the birth
rate is falling, that heart disease, divorce, and insanity are all
increasing? As we contemplate these and other by-products we may
well ask, what makes a high standard of life rather than of living?
Granted that we now have billionaires where even millionaires were
relatively scarce a generation ago, that labor has risen a little
farther above the subsistence level, and that science has given us
innumerable toys and conveniences, has not the gulf in comfort widened
infinitely between rich and poor? Are the great mass of professional
and intellectual workers and of moderate-salaried people as well off
in the things that really count as they were a generation ago? For the
common fund of our civilization has the advance, such as it is, in the
condition of the laboring class offset the comparative decline in the
great and almost forgotten middle class? Has the nation as a whole
gained or lost in contentment, peace of mind, assurance of the future,
rational enjoyment, and spiritual as well as material comfort? Is it
worth while to be continually driven to meet the rent, life insurance,
the installments on one’s purchases, in order that big business may
declare its billions in stock dividends?
There are evidences that a great change may be in prospect.
Mass-production requires a steady and enormous flow of sales. On the
one hand, the jaded buyers are showing signs of restiveness and of
becoming tired of wasting their lives in buying, buying, buying, and
paying, paying, paying. They have to be whipped into it by more and
more expensive salesmanship. On the other hand, office and sales forces
are getting tired of being speeded up as they compare their share in
the high standard with that of the men above them, and have to be
whipped by the most improved technical methods into greater and greater
activity. And all for what? That mass-production shall not falter or
fail. The overhead costs of distribution have become staggering. If
the public begins to economize and does not buy, then we are told that
mass-production will fall down and in the crash to follow no one will
have money with which to buy anything. Better than that, we are told,
is to buy what we do not really want or cannot afford.
There is no rest from the effort to make money in ever larger and
larger amounts. There is no prospect of comfortable retirement in old
age. For many who never thought of it in the old days there is the
ever-present spectre of illness or incapacity. As has been said, our
prosperity can be maintained only by making people want more, and work
more, all the time. Those, and they are many, who believe that our
recent prosperity has been mainly caused by the phenomenal expansion
of the automobile business tell us that it will soon be necessary to
find some other article which will similarly take the public fancy and
create billions of sales—and billions of expense to men already tired
of doing nothing but meeting new expenses.
“The highest standard of living ever attained in the history of the
world”?
CHAPTER III
OUR DISSOLVING ETHICS
OUR DISSOLVING ETHICS
I
The scapegoat is one of the most venerable and widespread of human
institutions. The victim may be literally a goat, as among the Children
of Israel, or a rat or a monkey or other animal. Not infrequently it
is a human being. For example, among some tribes in Africa all persons
who during the year have committed incendiarism, witchcraft, theft,
adultery, or other crimes, chip in about ten dollars each and buy
a young girl, who is then dragged to the river and drowned for the
sins of the town. The sense of guilt requires some sort of expiation,
and this “cash and carry” system of expiating the sins of an entire
community by attributing them to someone else has obvious advantages.
It enables one to settle with one’s conscience and the social
conventions with a minimum of personal inconvenience and mental anguish.
Here in these United States in this post-war period, realizing that
all is not right with our world, we have found the scapegoat which
permits us to go about our business with a free mind. The name on its
collar is “The Younger Generation.” The absurdity of believing that the
older generation is not responsible for shaping the conditions which
have surrounded the younger, and that a world of mature men and women
is being set topsy-turvy by young persons but recently emancipated
from the nursery, seems to occur to no one. The hen which hatches a
duckling from the egg which some person has set under her unsuspecting
wings may well disclaim responsibility for the thoroughly disreputable
habits—from the standpoint of a hen—developed by her hatch, but can the
older human generation so easily disclaim its responsibility? They may
deny it individually and take refuge in the theory that the individual
is powerless to counteract the social forces of his time, but this
way of escape is as much open to the berated young as to the berating
elders. As a matter of fact, whatever we may say of the individual of
either generation, I think the responsibility of the older as a whole
to the younger as a whole is—to use a liquid measure—just about in the
ratio of dad’s quart bottle to son’s half-pint flask.
That youth is questioning the validity of our entire system of ethics
to an extent that is perturbing to parents and, in a lesser degree,
to grandparents may be admitted. But it cannot be so readily argued
that the babies born between 1900 and 1910 all received a hypodermic
injection of new original sin. The most distinguishing characteristic
of modern thought is its use of the genetic method. We explain the
present by the light of the past. We are most of us evolutionists,
except when it comes to the supposed iniquity of youth. But in fact is
there any break? Is not the present attitude of youth toward ethical
questions the direct and inevitable outcome of what has been going
on in our mental world for not one but many generations? That it is
so seems true to the author, who also feels that the salvation for
society lies in at least a questioning attitude on the part of the new
generation.
When we speak of the attitude of youth toward ethics we mean by ethics
those general ideas and rules that govern the individual in the
practical conduct of his or her life. These have always, in the main,
had two sanctions to assist in making them pass current without being
questioned by most people. One of these sanctions has been religion
and the other the public opinion of the particular class or group to
which the individual belonged. Backed by these sanctions, ethical ideas
and codes of conduct tend to become fixed, but they are in reality
never absolutely fixed. The forms may for long remain the same, but
in private conduct the individual, while still outwardly conforming,
may cease to be governed by them. Like the dollar, they may remain
the standard of value, but their own value—that is, their purchasing
power in happiness and human good—may come to vary greatly. The form,
however, will not be generally questioned so long as the sanctions
behind it are not brought seriously into question.
In the youth of the older generation—that is, let us say, in the
decade of the 1880’s—the sanctions of the established system of
ethics, although being undermined, were still standing firm, to all
appearance. These were the religious one of a belief in the Bible as
the inspired word of God to be taken literally, and the social one of a
code of conduct that belonged to the feudal rather than the industrial
phase of society. It is true that Darwin had been writing for twenty
years, but such a book as Mrs. Ward’s _Robert Elsmere_ was considered
too dangerous for young people to read, and, although the Industrial
Revolution had occurred, woman’s sphere in the only classes that were
supposed to count in those days was still the home. Very few girls
went to college, and even for them the intellectual problems set were
not particularly disquieting. The individual youth of either sex
may not have been religious or consciously interested in the social
sanction for ethical ideas, but on the other hand there was nothing in
upbringing or education to make them seriously question the accepted
code and standards. Theoretically, that the Bible said “thou shalt not”
or that one’s group frowned was pretty generally a sufficient guide
to conduct. What, in practice, that conduct may have been only the
memories of the older generation can reveal.
II
However unquestioningly the average boy or girl of the 1880’s may have
accepted the traditional views of ethics in relation to the world, many
forces of different sorts had long been operative which almost before a
new generation should be born were going to blow the old world to bits
and create a new one so different as to be almost unrecognizable. That
the old ethics and the old sanctions should in all respects have fitted
nicely in all the adjustments with that new world is surely too much to
expect. And if they did not fit, the only thing to do was to face that
fact and try to work out some new adjustment between ideals of conduct
and the new environment. It is that need which the older generation has
for the most part refused to recognize but which has been recognized
by the younger, in many cases heedlessly, but in many more cases
seriously, sanely, bravely.
That there may be need for a revaluation of our ethics is obvious to
them. Why should it be to them and not to so many of their elders? For
one thing, these youngsters have been fed on a different intellectual
fare from that on which their parents were fed. It must not be lost to
sight, however, that this fare has been prepared for them by their
parents, or at least by their elders. It must also be noted that they
are receiving instruction in enormously increased numbers. College is
no longer for the exceptional man only, socially or intellectually.
Young men of all grades, and, what is more important, young women
also, are going to college by the hundreds of thousands annually.
The responsibility for what happens to them there intellectually is
squarely up to the older generation. The institutions are provided and
run by that generation, the young are in great measure sent by it, and
the instruction is almost wholly provided by it.
Before we pass on to consider the intellectual environment of the
younger generation, we may note another point with regard to the
general atmosphere which has been provided for it by the older. That
atmosphere is one of intense absorption in the material basis of
life. The older generation has lost its spiritual bearings by its
mad scramble for money at any spiritual cost in order to pay for the
so-called high standard of living which, to a great extent, has been
due to lack of character, that character which enables a person to
perceive clearly what is for his genuine good and to reject what is
not as forcibly as the body tries to reject poison. The high standard
is, in most of its aspects, a high standard on a low plane, and to a
considerable extent it has been made possible because people have given
up using their energies and resources to attain to any standard on the
higher plane. Having, with all the accumulated resources of a wealthy
and powerful civilization, devoted their energies to the easier task of
elaborating their life on the lower, the material plane, it is little
wonder that they have achieved “the highest standard” _on that plane_
the world has seen.
But by devoting all their energies to the elaboration and piling up
of things, to the making of the possession of things a necessity of
their lives, a symbol of success and a basis of personal appraisal,
they have brought about a situation in which the obtaining of money
in quantities wholly unnecessary for a sane ordering of life has
become the overwhelming preoccupation of their minds. The softness of
intellectual fibre that makes the search for material good so much
easier than the search for spiritual, that lack of character that makes
us easy victims of the opinions and standards of others, that lack of
resisting power that makes us the victims of any advertising expert or
persuasive salesman, that fear of mass opinion, that love of luxury
which is always insidious and which grows by what it feeds upon,—all
combine to make us believe that we are rising to a higher life when we
are in reality losing that life in a complete devoting of ourselves to
the mere machinery of life.
Man always attempts to rationalize any position he assumes, and to give
high-sounding motives to what may in reality stem from the basest.
Because we choose to make making money our main preoccupation, we call
it service. Because we choose to put off the day when the nation shall
turn to other things, we say “America is young.” Because we choose to
yield to the seduction of every new toy and luxury, we claim that we
are establishing a “high standard of living.” Because we cannot resist
giving ourselves everything, we say that we devote ourselves to our
mad rush for money in order that we may give our children everything,
regardless of the fact that by raising their standard of income and
needs, and lowering their standard of life, we are in reality making
their future infinitely more difficult for them. The ethics of the
older generation have dissolved in part from the hypocrisy that has
been bred in it by this desire for money and what it will bring in
luxury and social consideration. The dissolution is evident not only
in our having become a nation of speculators who are forever trying to
get something for nothing, not merely in the defalcations and greater
or lesser crimes committed by the weaker, but in that more subtle crime
against our higher natures, and against the new generation, the crime
of cloaking our weakness and material desires in the guise of a “high
standard” and of “giving our children everything.”
Let us consider further a few of the ideas which are familiar to the
younger generation and which to a great extent were not so to the
youth of the older one. For one thing, we may cite the comparative
study of religion. There are only two methods of intellectual approach
to any subject, whether religious or scientific. We may rely upon
authority—that is, someone else’s judgment—or upon our own. From the
time that Protestantism rejected the authority of the Catholic Church
and insisted upon the right of personal searching and interpretation of
the Scriptures the way was opened for the decline in the prestige of
authority. (I may say that I am not a Catholic.) Of course particular
sects could establish new creeds and try to set up new authority in
the place of old; and because man is not wholly a logical creature,
and because most men still believed in the verbal inspiration of the
Bible however they chose to interpret it, this served to maintain its
authority until almost the present day. With the rise, however, of
the higher criticism, and more particularly the study of comparative
religion, the religious sanction for ethics received a severe blow.
For one young person who bothers to read a textual criticism of any
Biblical book, numbers are familiar with and delight in Frazer’s
_Golden Bough_. Nothing serves more subtly to break down a belief
in the theology of Christianity than to find, for example, that the
idea of a dying god is common to many religions and many people, that
likewise is the idea of an immaculate conception or a virgin birth, and
that even the doctrine of transubstantiation and the eating of bread
which somehow becomes the body of a god is widespread. The question
naturally arises why, if we must reject these doctrines as taught by
every religion except Christianity, should we be obliged to accept them
as true in that? Religion and theology are very different things. The
younger generation are not irreligious. In the truest sense they want
a religion, but they do not want as a substitute the theology preached
by many clergymen or the mere husk of social service given in so many
churches in place of both theology and religion. It is my experience
that many boys and girls who cannot be induced to go to church are more
genuinely religious than the clergyman who bewails the fact that they
will not come to hear him preach. But for them a mere sentence in the
Bible can no longer be appealed to as affording a sufficient sanction
for an ethical idea or a code of conduct that has no other apparent
reason for being.
In another comparative study, that of anthropology, they also find
much to make them question current ethics. By a study of the various
tribes and races of the world in different times and places the student
finds that they all, indeed, have codes and ethics, but that these all
vary and have grown out of specific social or economic needs under
particular conditions. The institution of the family, for example, and
the relations of the sexes have assumed many forms. The whole question
is thrown into the intellectual melting pot as one for discussion, and
the sanction tends to become not some religious authority but the good
of society and the individual. The older generation was taught that God
gave certain commands, regarding sexual and other relations, engraved
on a tablet of stone, to a Hebrew some thousands of years ago. It is
useless to tell that to a young person to-day and expect it to settle
the matter.
If he turns to philosophy he comes in contact with a world, not of
fixed ideas, of eternal verities, but a world where all is in a state
of flux. It is not that certain “eternal truths” are being attacked
in order to substitute others in their places, but that the lasting
validity of truths, any truths, is itself under fire. No teacher,
perhaps, has been more popular or exerted greater influence than the
late William James, and the pragmatism associated with his name is, in
the form of its presentation at least, one of the original American
contributions to philosophy. Now the essence of pragmatism is that the
truth or validity of an idea depends on whether it works in practice.
“The truest scientific hypothesis,” he says in one of his most popular
books, “is that which, as we say, ‘works best’; and it can be no
otherwise with religious hypotheses.” For the reader to add “ethical
hypotheses” is to take an obvious step. Again he says: “The true ...
is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is
only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” It is true that he adds
“expedient in the long run and on the whole,” but if the true and the
right can only be tested by their working it is evident that, as the
world is made up of individuals, the only experimental tests possible
must be made by individuals.
This philosophy is thoroughly consonant with the American temperament
and natural outlook on life. We are not mentally a subtle or an
abstract people. If a thing does not work, it is of no use. If it does,
that is a sufficient answer to any attack, and it is this pragmatic
sanction that, consciously or not, many a thoughtful young person of
to-day is seeking for the new ethics. In the writings of the most
influential living American philosopher, John Dewey, he again finds
this sense of fluidity in life and thought. “The first distinguishing
characteristic of thinking is facing the facts,” says Dewey, in words
which appeal to one of the finest sides of the young people. Dewey
as an ardent evolutionist, and a disbeliever in any fixed forms or
species, holds out as the hope for the future—and disagreement with
him would seem to plunge us in hopeless pessimism—that human nature is
not unchangeable, that there is possibility of unlimited alteration by
change in the environment, and that this change may be brought about
by taking conscious thought and not awaiting the slow alteration of
nature. This again throws open the way for a serious consideration as
to whether, if we can change the environment and human nature,—and both
_have_ been enormously changed,—we keep unchanged codes of conduct.
Philosophical and scientific ideas are coming to affect the thinking
of people, who may never read the books in which they are primarily
expressed, with steadily increasing acceleration. It took many
generations for the discovery by Copernicus that the earth was not the
centre of the universe, but moved round the sun, to affect religious
and other ideas. It took something more than a generation for Darwin’s
theory of evolution to revolutionize all our thinking. Who knows what
the influence, not merely in science, but in all social thinking,
including ethics, may very soon be of Einstein’s theory of relativity?
It has already had great influence, in spite of the fact that those of
us who are not mathematicians cannot comprehend it. But to be told—to
mention only one aspect of his theory—that there is no such thing as a
“correct size” of anything, but that for human knowledge the size of
anything depends on the relative speed maintained by the observer and
the thing observed, is, literally, appalling. This fact brings to us in
startling fashion and in mathematical terms the realization that things
are not absolute but relative. The theory of relativity is far more of
a solvent for the eternal verities than either the Copernican or the
Darwinian theory, and its effect, already being felt, is bound to be
profound in realms of thought seemingly remote from physics.
III
In a few words, the young generation has a religion, but it is
nebulous. It may to some extent serve, at moments when it is felt,
as a source of strength, as an aid to being straight and decent. At
many times it is not felt. In any case it issues no commands covering
specific conduct. It has no decalogue, and the question of what is
decent and straight is left open by it. The youngster’s ethics,
therefore, have no religious sanction which points out any specific
rules of conduct. On the other hand, through his anthropological and
sociological studies he comes to realize that there are innumerable
ways of living and choices of conduct, all of which have been or are
thought right and moral by some people, sometime, somewhere. What
constitutes right conduct depends, therefore, apparently on conditions
and not on any eternal rules. The prevailing temperament of his nation
and its most popular philosophy teach him that the only test of
validity is “work-ability”—that if an idea has good results it is good,
if it has not it is bad. The world has never been a very satisfactorily
organized place, and nowadays, what with the results of the war, our
socially developed conscience, and all the conditions of present life,
it can hardly be said to look like an outstanding success. Those
who have lived long have for the most part become either reconciled
or hopeless over the situation. But for the young it is different,
fortunately. They see the poverty, the social injustice, the frequent
emotional maladjustment between the individual and society, and they
do not see, and let us hope that they are right, that such things need
always be.
The ethics of the older person do not change. He too may have, as he
probably has, lost the religious sanction, but as the twig is bent
the tree has grown. He was taught so-and-so and he sticks to it, and
anything else seems wrong. Moreover, he has learned that one cannot
meet every moral emergency by thinking it out as a unique case. Life is
short, emergencies come suddenly, and one must have some general rules
to guide. He is accustomed to the old rules, it is his habit to obey
them, and he simplifies his life by continuing to do so. The youngster,
however, has no ready-made adjustments and is intensely interested
in life, and willing to take time and risks. His entire education
has taught him to take a scientific view of life, and to reject mere
authority. It is not enough for a parent to point out that something
is “right” or “wrong.” The youth asks “Why?” The only satisfactory
answer is one that will convince him that a certain line of conduct
will or will not conduce to his own good or that of society.
With the education which we give to youth, I do not see how we could
expect any other result. The fact is that the younger generation is
simply carrying forward where we leave off. The decay in belief in the
Christian theology, the loss of religious sanction for ethics, the
development of such comparative studies as religion and anthropology,
the pragmatic philosophy, the Freudian psychology of inhibitions and
complexes, and the various scientific and mechanical discoveries
which have transformed the world, have all been the work of the older
generation. The youth who are coming forward to-day receive the full
force of all this straight in the face and all at once. And the changes
are coming faster and faster.
Personally I do not see how we can quarrel with the general ideas that
the younger generation has as to its ethical problem—that is, that
there is no indubitable religious or other authoritarian sanction for
any specific rules of conduct; that different ethical codes have best
suited different peoples, times, and conditions; that the best test of
any hypothesis is whether it will work; and that in a world in flux
there is no reason for positing and insisting upon an eternally fixed
code of ethics. We do know that such codes will gradually alter in
any case. The question is whether it is possible to use intelligence
in altering them or whether we have to trust to the slow process of
an unintelligent alteration. If they do gradually get adjusted to new
social conditions and structures, then it is reasonable to suppose
that such an adjustment should bear some time relation to the rapidity
of change in society. With the increasing speeding up both of thought
and of scientific discovery, the rate of change in society is also
speeding up enormously. Unless we can assist intelligently the process
of adjusting ethical ideas and codes to the social change, the amount
of injustice and individual maladjustments, emotional, economic, and
other, may increase so rapidly as to endanger the social structure
itself.
The economic independence of the younger generation of women has
already profoundly altered the whole family relation and that of the
two sexes. The motor car, whether one likes it or not, has almost
equally altered the whole question of the supervision of the two sexes
at an earlier stage. Again, whether one likes it or not, the scientific
investigations now being carried on in several parts of the world into
the question of methods of birth control may have still more profound
effects within the lifetime of the coming generation. The changes which
have come already since the Industrial Revolution and the harnessing
of steam are probably nothing to what we may expect within the next
generation if the present rate of discovery and alteration continues.
To say that rules of personal conduct established under sanctions which
no longer exist for most people, and for conditions which have already
been changed almost beyond recognition, must last unaltered forever is
simply to refuse to see the facts and to court disaster, individual or
social.
Our ethics and their old sanctions are already in dissolution. That has
been accomplished by the older, not the younger, generation. What the
younger generation and their children may be called upon to do may
be to make the most rapid, far-reaching, and consciously intelligent
readjustment of ethical ideas to altered social structure that the race
has ever been called upon to make. We of the older generation have
played with ideas and let loose forces the power of which we little
dreamed of. We have, indeed, sowed the wind, and it will be those of
the younger generation who will reap the whirlwind unless they can
control it. Individually we may feel guiltless. We may merely have been
busy with our intellectual hobbies, our money-getting, our loving and
striving, but we surely cannot lay the blame for the intellectual or
moral conditions upon the scapegoat of the “Younger Generation.” To
condemn them and regard ourselves complacently is as unjust as it is
unwarranted. They have inherited, perhaps, the biggest mess and biggest
problem that was ever bequeathed by one generation to another. Never
has the road been wilder or the signposts fewer.
We may address the young in the words of FitzJames Stephen: “Each must
act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.
We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding
mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may
be deceptive. If all stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we
take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly
know whether there is any right one. What must we do? “Be strong and
of a good courage.” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
comes. If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.”
But if that is all the injunction we can give them, are we performing
our duty, and can we blame them, instead of ourselves, if they take the
wrong road, or if death ends all? We of the older generation believe
both from education in youth and from the experiences of our lives that
there are certain values in life. In our minds they have the sanctions
of tradition and experience. The new generation has no experience and
declines to accept mere tradition. Is it not the duty of the older
generation to face the problem, both for its own sake and that of the
young, and seriously to attempt to arrive at some reasonable philosophy
of life that shall validate the values it believes in?
Is it not the plain truth that in all too many cases the older
generation has had both its intellectual and its moral fibre sapped
by its own mad desire to make money? While paying lip service to the
old values of life, which it repeats, without being able to produce
any sanction for them, to the young, has it itself lived according to
those values or has it not abandoned them for the sake of piling up
riches? In the past forty years have the ethics of the counting room,
the office, the factory, and the legislatures been those of the church
and the drawing-room? Has the older generation lived soberly, has it
spent sanely, has it lived chastely, has it preferred the spiritual to
the material things of life, has it refrained from bribing policemen
and legislatures, has it voted from principle, has it tried to insist
upon honesty in its public servants, has it tried to cultivate its mind
and taste, has it tried honestly to think things through and attain
a sound philosophy of living that it may pass on to its children?
These questions to a great extent answer themselves. They are not
put to absolve the younger generation from responsibility but from
blame. In the moulding of character, example, after all, is perhaps of
more importance than moral saws or authoritative sanctions. When the
older generation looks at the younger it is looking in the mirror at
itself. It is itself, only far from the safe shelter of home, straying
inexperienced on the “mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow
and blinding mist.” Would the younger generation be out in the storm
so utterly without guidance, if the older had not devoted its time,
strength and mental energy to the gaining of wealth and luxury instead
of to the values of a sane and humane life?
CHAPTER IV
JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON
TODAY
JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON TODAY
I
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,—that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness.”
—JEFFERSON
“The People, your People, Sir, is a great Beast.”
—HAMILTON
Rhetoric and sentimentalism have always appealed almost equally to the
American people. “Waving the flag” and “sob stuff” are the two keys
which unlock the hearts of our widest publics. It is not, therefore,
perhaps wholly unfair to take the most rhetorical and emotional of the
utterances of Jefferson and Hamilton with relation to their fundamental
political philosophies to head this article. The complete divergence of
the two men could be shown in many quotations more carefully worded,
but would appear only the more clearly. That divergence was sharp-cut
and complete. Their views as to the relation of the people at large to
government were as far asunder as the poles. In examining the writings
of both these statesmen, it has been borne in upon me that if, as
Lincoln said, a nation cannot live half slave and half free, neither
can it live half Hamilton and half Jefferson, especially when the two
ingredients are mixed, as they now are, in the blurred mentalities of
the same individuals.
The two men themselves knew this well in their own lifetimes. Each
fought valiantly for his own beliefs. Each felt that one or the other,
and one philosophy or the other, must conquer. Neither believed that
the two could lie down together, lion and lamb, in that curious and
conglomerately furnished mental apartment, the American consciousness.
That this has come to be the case merely shows for how little ideas
really count in modern American political life, a life which is almost
wholly emotional and financial rather than intellectual. Ideas are
supposed to be explosive. In America, apparently, they are as harmless
as “duds.” Even the Civil War, our greatest “moral” struggle, was
largely a matter of emotion; and as for the last war, anyone who,
like myself, was in a position to watch the manufacture of propaganda
can say whether it was directed to the heart or to the head of the
multitude.
There are certain ways in which conflicting ideas may be held in the
one community without hypocrisy. In every age, for example, there
has been one set of beliefs for the learned, the cultivated, and the
sophisticated, and another for the mob. The mob in the past was never
educated, and even “the people” to-day, in spite of a smattering of
“book knowledge,” are not educated in the same way that the cultivated
and, in an uninvidious sense, the privileged classes are. Here and
there one may find a case of a mechanic, a farmer, a saleslady, or what
not who really uses his or her mind, but how rare the cases are I leave
to anyone who is not afraid to come out and tell the truth as he has
found it, speaking broadly. Merely reading a newspaper, even if not
of the tabloid variety, or tucking away unrelated bits of information
uncritically, is not thinking. Between the man who critically analyzes,
compares, and thinks, and the one who merely reads, there is a great
gulf fixed as to ideas.
Such a case has always been common in religion, from the medicine
man or the Egyptian priest down to the Archbishop of Canterbury or a
cardinal in Rome. The dogmas of the Christian religion, for example,
as held by the two latter are quite different “ideas” from the same as
held by a person who has had no philosophical training and who could
not if he would, and would not if he could, undertake the course of
study necessary to get the point of view of the bishop or the cardinal.
In this sense, ideas which are so different as to be almost, if not
quite, contradictory may nevertheless live on side by side in the
same society without hypocrisy. They may, indeed, be considered as
expressions of the same idea merely attuned differently to be caught,
as far as possible, by minds of different “pitch.”
Again, we may have ideals which apparently conflict with the practice
of society, but they _are_ ideals and, however far practice may fall
short of attainment, there is no real conflict, because in fact a
certain amount of effort, however slight and however sporadic, is made
to attain them. The conflict is not between clashing ideas or ideals,
but between ideal and practice.
Once more, contradictory ideas may exist in the same society without
hypocrisy if they are held by different individuals or parties who
openly avow them and who either honestly agree to differ in peace or
who struggle to get one or the other set of ideas accepted by all.
But the odd thing about the contradictory Hamilton-Jefferson ideas
is that they are not held by different social classes,—the one set
of ideas as a sort of esoteric doctrine and the other publicly
proclaimed,—nor are they any longer the platforms of two parties,
as in the days when the two statesmen themselves fought honestly,
courageously, and bitterly for them in the open. And I say this even
though the portrait of Hamilton may adorn the walls of Republican
clubs and that of Jefferson those of the Democratic ones. The present
situation is anomalous.
Hamilton and Jefferson each had a fundamental premise. These were
as utterly contradictory as two major premises could possibly be.
From each of these respectively each of the men deduced his system
of government with impeccable logic. Yet what of these men and their
philosophies in our politics to-day? There is scarcely a politician
of any party who would dare to preach Hamilton’s main deductions,
while not a single one could be elected to any office if he did not
preach Jefferson’s premise. The Republicans claim to be followers of
Hamilton, yet they would not dare to preach Hamilton’s most fundamental
assumption, that on which his whole structure was based. The Democrats
claim to be followers of Jefferson, yet they have departed far from
some of his most important deductions. On the whole, I confess I think
they show the greater intellectual integrity of the two parties, yet,
so far, I have always voted Republican, which is a sample of the
intellectual muddle our politics are in.
II
Before going further, let us examine very briefly what the ideas of the
two men were.
Jefferson’s fundamental idea, his major premise, was an utter trust in
the morality, the integrity, the ability, and the political honesty
of the common man of America, at least as America was then and as
Jefferson hoped it would remain for centuries. He made this point
again and again, and from it deduced his whole system. Based on that
belief, he wrought out the doctrine that the only safety for the State
depended on the widest possible extension of the franchise. “The
influence over government must be shared among all the people. If every
individual which composes their mass participates of the ultimate
authority, the government will be safe.” “It is rarely that the public
sentiment decides immorally or unwisely.” “It has been thought that
corruption is restrained by confining the right of suffrage to a few
of the wealthier of the people; but it would be more effectually
restrained by an extension of that right to such numbers as would bid
defiance to the means of corruption.” He dreaded the power of wealth,
the growth of manufacturers, the development of banks, the creation
of a strong central government, a judiciary which was not elected
and readily amenable to the will of the majority. He wished for as
little government as possible, with few hampering restrictions on
the individual expression of the citizen. He was for free trade and
universally diffused free education. He wished to preserve the State
governments in all their vigor, which, at that time, meant practically
independent and sovereign commonwealths. To the Federal government he
would allot the most meagre of functions, merely those dealing with
foreign nations and concerning such acts in common as it would be
impracticable for the states to perform individually. His ideal was “a
wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one
another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits
of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of
labor the bread it has earned.” “This,” he added, “is the sum of good
government.”
On the other hand, let us turn to Hamilton. The remark prefixed to
this article, although made in a moment of vexation, expresses his
attitude toward the common people, whom he never trusted. In his
writings for the public, he had, of course, to be more discreet in his
utterances, but his statements, and still more his acts, are clear
enough. “Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their
passions.... One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest
than they are.” “It is a just observation that the people commonly
_intend_ the _public good_. This often applies to their very errors.
But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that
they always _reason right_ about the _means_ of promoting it.... When
occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are
at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons
whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to
withstand the temporary delusions.” “The voice of the people has been
said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been
quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent
and changing; they seldom judge right or determine right.” “Can a
democratic Assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be
supposed steadily to pursue the public good?” “The difference [between
rich and poor] indeed consists not in the quantity, but kind of vices,
which are incident to the various classes; and here the advantage
of character belongs to the wealthy. Their vices are probably more
favorable to the prosperity of the State than those of the indigent,
and partake less of moral depravity.” “It is an unquestionable truth,
that the body of the people in every country desire sincerely its
prosperity. But it is equally unquestionable that they do not possess
the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government.”
As a corollary from this fundamental assumption, Hamilton devoted
all his great abilities to the development of as strong a central
government as possible. He would remove power as completely as might
be from the hands of the common people and place it in those who
had inherited or acquired wealth and position. For this purpose he
deliberately set about to tie the wealthy classes to government by
his Funding Act, by the creation of manufactures, by a protective
tariff, by the establishment of banks, and in other ways. He felt that
human nature had always been the same and would not change. Public
education did not interest him. His one interest was the establishment
of a strong government in strong hands, and he evidently felt that a
smattering of book knowledge, such as our people even yet get in grade
and high schools, would not alter their characters and make them safe
depositaries for political power. In fact, and this is an important
point to note in his system, the development of the industrial state
would tend to make the people at large even less capable than in his
day by creating, as it has done, a vast mass of mere wage-earners,
floating city dwellers, on the one hand, while it built up his wealthy
class on the other. The great mass of the people, he reasoned, would
always have to be governed in any case, and the more powerful and
influential the wealthy could be made, the stronger would they be
for governing. Out of these simple assumptions, the banks, the vast
“implied powers” of the central government, the funding of the national
debt, the rise of a manufacturing industry, and the formation of a
tariff designed not merely to protect infant industries but to create a
dependence of wealth upon government favor, were developed as clearly
and logically as a theorem in Euclid.
Thus, very briefly, and perhaps a trifle crudely, we have stated the
real bases of Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism. Their whole systems
of government sprang logically from their differing premises. Jefferson
trusted the common man. Hamilton deeply distrusted him. That was a
very clear-cut issue from 1790 to 1800, and both men, and the people
themselves, recognized it as such. Stupendous consequences would follow
from the success in practical politics at that time of either of those
theories of human nature. For the first decade of our national life
Hamilton beat Jefferson in practical politics, and in a very real sense
created the United States as we know it to-day, a vast manufacturing
nation with its Federal government eating up all the state governments
like an Aaron’s rod, with its trusts and its money power and its
Chinese wall of a protective tariff, and all the rest. There is no
doubt of the strength of the present government. There is no doubt of
the support it derives from the wealthy classes. There is no doubt
of the colossal success of the industrial experiment as a creator of
wealth.
The Republican Party may well look back to Hamilton as its High Priest,
but the odd thing is that Hamilton created all this heritage of
strength and power and banks and tariffs for a very simple reason, and
that reason the Republican Party would not dare to breathe aloud in any
party convention, campaign, or speech. “The People, your People, Sir,
is a great Beast.” Imagine that as an exordium of a keynote speech to
nominate Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover. Hamilton deliberately set
about to create special privileges for certain classes so that those
classes would in turn support the government and control the people.
What does the Republican Party do? It hangs on for dear life to all
those special privileges, it preaches Hamilton’s corollaries as the one
pure political gospel, and then it steals Jefferson’s major premise,
and preaches the wisdom and the nobility and the political acumen
of the common people! One feels like inquiring in the vernacular,
with deep emotion, “How did you get that way?” As when watching a
prestidigitator, one’s jaw drops with amazement as the rabbit pops from
the one hat we could not possibly have expected it from.
On the other hand, how about the Democrats? They too preach Jefferson’s
major premise—the wisdom, the ability, and the political acumen of
the common people. But what have they done with most of Jefferson’s
deductions? They certainly do not evince any strong desire to reduce
the functions of government and bring it down to that “wise and frugal”
affair their leader visioned. They are more inclined to increase
government bureaus and supervision and interference with the affairs
of the citizen. As to the tariff, they have capitulated completely and
in the last campaign scarcely mentioned the dangerous topic, for fear
of losing money and votes. They preach their founder’s major premise
and hurrah for the common people, but beyond that I cannot penetrate
at all through the murky fog which hides all real political issues in
the United States to-day. There is the vague sense of expectancy one
has during the entr’acte at the theatre. There is nothing to see, but
eventually the curtain will go up again. Meanwhile the scene shifters
are supposedly busy. I have an idea that before long the scene-shifters
will not be our spineless politicians, but the Fates.
III
And now, lastly, let us consider one more curious thing about this
preaching and living of Hamilton’s conclusions illogically from
Jefferson’s premise.
Is that premise really valid to-day for either party? Would even
Jefferson believe it to be? There is no telling what he would say if
he came back, but it must be remembered that he did not believe in the
common people always and under all circumstances. He drew a distinction
many times between those living in the simple agricultural America
of his time and those in the crowded cities of Europe. In a long and
interesting letter to John Adams, he wrote: “Before the establishment
of the United States, nothing was known to history but the man of the
old world, crowded within limits either small or overcharged, and
steeped in the vices which that situation generates. A government
adapted to such men would be one thing; but a very different one, that
for the man of these States. Here every one may have land to labor
for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other
industry, may exact from it such compensation as not only to afford
comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from
labor in old age.... Such men may safely and advantageously reserve to
themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree
of freedom, which, in the hands of the _canaille_ of the cities of
Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction
of everything public and private.” Again he says that our governments
will surely become corrupt when our conditions as to crowded cities
shall have approximated those of the Europe of his day.
Without here attempting to pass any judgment on the success of
Hamilton’s work in its human rather than its financial and governmental
aspects, we shall have to admit that it has brought about the very
conditions which Jefferson dreaded and under which he feared that his
common man would become corrupt and incapable of self-government. The
tremendous demand for labor resulted in our importing by the millions
those very _canaille_, in Jefferson’s phrase,—people from the lowest
classes of overcrowded Europe,—in whom he had no confidence whatever,
whom he considered incapable of self-government. We have ourselves
developed overcrowded conditions. There are three times as many people
in the metropolitan area of New York to-day as there were in the entire
United States in Jefferson’s day. Over fifty per cent of our population
now live in cities and are beginning, in the larger ones at least, to
develop the vices of a city mentality. In fact the corruption is worse
here than in Europe in many respects. London has a larger population
than New York, yet it costs $180,000,000 a year to run that city and
$525,000,000 to run New York. Even making all allowances for difference
in prices, there is no escaping a most unpleasant conclusion from those
figures.
Yet Jefferson claimed that if he was right in his assumption that
the common man was honest, able, and capable of self-government, the
governments most honestly and frugally conducted would be those
nearest to him, the local rather than the Federal. Jefferson’s whole
philosophy was agrarian. It was based on the one population in the
world he thought worthy of it—a population of which ninety per cent
were farmers, mostly owning their own homes. He hoped it would remain
so for many hundreds of years and believed that it would. It did so for
only a few decades.
How long are we to go on preaching Jefferson and practising Hamilton?
Jefferson’s philosophy develops from his premise and hangs together. So
does Hamilton’s. But the two do not mix at all, as both men recognized
in deadly earnest. We have been trying to mix them ever since,
oratorically at least. We practise Hamilton from January 1 to July 3
every year. On July 4 we hurrah like mad for Jefferson. The next day
we quietly take up Hamilton again for the rest of the year as we go
about our business. I do not care which philosophy a man adopts, but to
preach one and to practise the other is hypocrisy, and hypocrisy in the
long run poisons the soul.
Personally I prefer Jefferson as a man to Hamilton. In his spirit
I believe he was far more of an aristocrat than Hamilton ever was,
with all his social pretensions. I prefer the America which Jefferson
visualized and hoped for to that which Hamilton dreamed of and brought
to pass on a scale he never could measure. On the other hand, I believe
that the future will be, as the past has been, Hamilton’s. His hopes
and Jefferson’s fears have come true. The small farmer, the shopkeeper,
the artisan are being more and more crowded out from the interest of a
plutocratic government. A Hamiltonian philosophy or government cares
nothing for them as compared with the large manufacturer and larger
trust.
If we want to know why they should not be helped or protected as
well as corporations which can declare hundreds of per cent in stock
dividends and then cash dividends on the stock dividends and so on ad
infinitum, we must go back to Hamilton and the beginning of his system.
I do not see now that any other system is possible. Perhaps some day we
may secure a lowering of the tariff to less swinish levels and certain
other reforms, but as a whole the system must stand. Jefferson’s dream
of a new and better world at last opened to men, with a whole continent
at their back over which as freeholders they could slowly expand for
ages, has passed. We have swallowed our heritage almost at a gulp. We
have become as a nation colossally rich. But if anyone thinks we have
become more honest or more capable of self-government, let him study
the records.
If we are to accept Hamilton’s conclusions and system, why not be
honest and accept, instead of Jefferson’s, his own premise, the only
real basis for his conclusions and, as he believed, the only real
buttress for his system? That system was based upon the deep, honest,
and publicly avowed belief that the people could not govern themselves.
That they do so, except to the extent of sometimes impeding action at a
crisis, is, I believe, far less true than they believe, unpalatable as
that remark may be. Of course, “public opinion” has to be considered,
but anyone who knows how public opinion is manufactured can take that
at its real value. Of course, again, there is a lot of bunkum talked,
but that can also be taken at its real value. There are two passages
in “Uncle” Joe Cannon’s _Autobiography_ that, taken together, are
very amusing. In one of the chapters he describes how Mark Hanna had
the nomination for President of the United States absolutely in his
own hand. The sole choice “the people” had was to vote for or against
Hanna’s man. Yet Cannon ends his book by saying that America is ruled
from the homes and the firesides! As for public opinion, it is far from
always being salutary. I have good reason to believe that, had it not
been for public opinion in the Middle West, Wilson would have entered
the war long before he did; it would have ended far sooner; and the
world would have been saved much of all that has happened since. Had
it not been for public opinion, which really meant popular emotion,
in about twenty countries after the Armistice, the men gathered at
Paris to make the Peace Treaty would have been able to make a far more
sensible one than they did.
One last point. Hamilton believed in giving special privileges to
certain classes so as to secure their adherence and support. That is
understandable, and is good Republican doctrine to-day. But those who
did not get those privileges were to be kept as far as possible from
any control of government. That may sound a bit cold-blooded, but it
also is logical and understandable. Jefferson believed in privileges
for none and a voice in the government for all. Again, given his
premise, that is a logical and understandable position. But where
is the logic, and what will happen, when you give the power to all
and still try to retain special privileges for some? For a while the
patient may be kept quiet with strong doses of “hokum,” but some day we
may find that the opposing views of the two statesmen of 1800 cannot
be fused as innocuously as we have tried to fuse them.
Hamilton and Jefferson. Honest men both, and bitterest of foes in a
fight over premises and principles which they knew were fundamental.
How amazed they would be could they return and find us preaching
the one, practising the other, and mixing their clear-cut positions
together! Hamilton might be pleased to see the stupendous growth of
all he had dreamed, but would ask why, when all had gone so perfectly
according to his plans, political power had been transferred to the
people at large. Jefferson would say, why preach theoretically his
fundamental assumption and then do all and more than his bitterest foe
could do to nullify it practically? Both might say, hypocrites, or
addle-pates.
Our apologetic answer for the last century might be—democracy. The
answer for the next century is hidden, but is deeply troubling the
thoughtful or the wealthy of every nation except the prosperous class
in America, which is too gorged with profits to think about anything.
CHAPTER V
OUR LAWLESS HERITAGE
OUR LAWLESS HERITAGE
I
The question is frequently asked, “Is the Eighteenth Amendment making
us a nation of lawbreakers?” There are two answers, depending upon the
meaning of the question. If it is intended to ask whether many people
are disobeying the law and whether the Amendment is helping to break
down respect for law itself, the answer is emphatically, yes. If,
on the other hand, the question is intended to imply that we were a
law-abiding nation before we went dry, the answer is as emphatically,
no. Any law that goes counter to the strong feeling of a large part of
the population is bound to be disobeyed in America. Any law that is
disobeyed inevitably results in lawbreaking and in lowering respect for
law as law. The Eighteenth Amendment is doing that on a gigantic scale,
but it is operating upon a population already the most lawless in
spirit of any in the great modern civilized countries. Lawlessness has
been and is one of the most distinctive American traits. It is obvious
that a nation does not become lawless or law-abiding overnight. The
United States is English in origin, and, even making allowance for the
hordes of “foreigners” who have come here, there must be some reason
why to-day England is the most law-abiding of nations and ourselves the
least so. It is impossible to blame the situation on the “foreigners.”
The overwhelming mass of them were law-abiding in their native lands.
If they become lawless here it must be largely due to the American
atmosphere and conditions. There seems to me to be plenty of evidence
to prove that the immigrants are made lawless by America rather than
that America is made lawless by them. If the general attitude toward
law, if the laws themselves and their administration, were all as
sound here as in the native lands of the immigrants, those newcomers
would give no more trouble here than they did at home. This is not the
case, and Americans themselves are, and almost always have been, less
law-abiding than the more civilized European nations.
Living much in England, I have already had frequent occasion to note
the startling difference which one feels with respect to the public
attitude toward law in that country and in our own. No one can be there
without feeling this difference, but lest my own insistence upon it be
set down to prejudice, let me quote the opinion of Dr. Kirchwey, head
of the Department of Criminology in the New York School of Social Work,
formerly Dean of the Columbia Law School, and one-time Warden of Sing
Sing Prison. “Our visitor to London,” he writes, “will have heard much
of the low crime rate of that great city, of the efficiency of the
unarmed police, of the swift and sure administration of criminal laws.
Let him look further and note the ingrained habit of law-observance of
every class of the population from the man in the street to the judge
on the bench. He will find no attempt made to violate the restrictive
laws governing the sale of liquor, whether by licensed vendor or by
the customer; rarely a violation of traffic regulations by cabmen or
private driver ... he will not discover a trace of the sporting spirit
which leads his fellow-citizens of the American commonwealth to laugh
at the escape of a daring criminal from the legal consequences of his
guilt. And, if he cares to pursue his studies further, he will find on
the other side of the English Channel still other communities where,
as in England, a low crime rate is set against a background of an all
but universal sentiment of respect for law and order.” How is it that
we in America to-day are without the pale of this respect for law which
is one of the fundamentals of civilization? In seeking an answer we
obviously cannot confine ourselves to the present decade, but must dig
deep into the past. Only parts of the appalling record that we shall
find, when we do so, can be touched upon here.
Respect for law is a plant of slow growth. If, for centuries, laws
have been reasonably sound, and impartially and surely enforced by
the lawful authorities, respect for law as law will increase. If, on
the other hand, laws are unreasonable or go counter to the habits
and desires of large parts of the population, and are not enforced
equitably or surely, respect for law will decrease. On the whole, the
first supposition applies to the history of England for three hundred
years and the second one to our own.
II
Let us consider our colonial period first; and it must be remembered
that we were a part of the British Empire for a longer period than
we have been independent. The way in which those supposedly godly
persons, the leaders of the Massachusetts theocracy, began at once
by breaking the law of England will help us to an understanding of
the whole colonial situation. The Massachusetts Company, a business
corporation in the eyes of the English Government, applied for a
charter of incorporation and received it. It provided for what we
should call voting stockholders and a board of directors to be elected
by them. Nothing more was intended in the grant by the Government. Some
of the leaders in the company conceived the brilliant idea of secretly
carrying the actual charter to America and using it as though it were
the constitution of a practically self-governing State. This was done,
but the foundation of the strongest of the Puritan colonies was thus
tainted with illegality and chicanery from the start. Not only that,
but in the beginning even the terms of the charter were not complied
with and the government was usurped by the leaders, the government
thus being made doubly illegal. The reasons for these acts included
the distance of America from England and the desire of the leading
colonists to govern themselves without interference from the home
country.
With local variations the story of the colonial struggle for
administrative (rather than political) independence explains much
of our later legal history. Speaking generally, we may say that the
standard form of colonial governments came to be that of a governor
appointed by the crown, of an upper house appointed by the governor
or elected subject to his veto power, and a lower, popularly elected
assembly. In some cases the upper house had judicial functions, and
many judges, such as those in the admiralty courts, were appointed by
the Crown. The colonists were settled on the edge of a vastly rich,
virgin continent which fairly cried aloud to be profitably exploited.
Imperial legislation was considered to be, and frequently was, a
hampering influence. In this complex we may find the beginning of the
disease of lawlessness.
Law must have some sanction. There can be only three. It may be
considered either as the dictum of some supernatural being, or as
the command of an earthly sovereign,—not, of course, necessarily an
individual,—or as receiving its sanctity from the consent of the
governed. The supernatural was tried only in New England theocracies,
and soon abandoned as unworkable. The sovereignty of the empire
obviously resided in “the King in Parliament,” but that, for practical
purposes, the colonists usually denied or strove against. The consent
of the governed, in a strictly local sense, was all that remained, and
it has continued, also in a local or partial sense, to control American
obedience to law. Even if local law was fairly well obeyed when passed
by the colonists themselves, respect for law as law could not fail to
be lessened by their constant breaking or ignoring of the imperial
laws. Without attempting to go into detail or to adopt a chronological
arrangement, we may note some of the ways in which this was brought
about.
A constant source of lawbreaking, particularly in the North, was the
legislation by Parliament with regard to what were called “the King’s
Woods.” In that day of sailing ships, trees suitable for masts were in
great demand. England preferred to depend upon the forests of America
rather than upon the foreign ones of the Baltic Provinces, and laws
were made to save for the use of the Royal Navy all trees above a
certain size upon lands not specifically granted to individuals. The
colonists on the spot felt this to be an abridgement of their right to
exploit the continent and use all its resources themselves. Not only
were the laws disobeyed and the authority of the officially and legally
appointed “Surveyors of the Woods” flouted, but force was used to
oppose authority, and rioting not seldom was employed against law.
Again, according to the generally accepted economic theory of the day,
colonists were supposed not to manufacture in competition with the
home country, but to supply her with the raw materials. Laws against
manufacturing worked, as a rule, but little hardship on the colonies,
owing to high wages, scarcity of skilled labor, and other reasons,
but they did in a few instances, as in the case of wool and smaller
hardware such as nails. These were mostly household manufactures, but
they were carried on by nearly every household in conscious defiance of
imperial laws.
After the French and Indian War and the acquisition from France of
Canada and the West, the British Government by proclamation in 1763
forbade any settlement in the new regions, the intent being to consider
the problem deliberately in the light of Indian and other relations
which the colonists had never been able to agree upon among themselves.
Owing to procrastination, this temporary, and to the colonists most
galling, restriction was not removed. Settlers and traders ignored the
proclamation and poured into the new territory, all against the law. In
fact, whenever there was profit to be made, the colonists ignored even
their own laws. Most colonists had legislated against selling firearms
or spirits to the Indians because of the obvious dangers involved,
but these laws were constantly transgressed. In New York it was made
illegal to trade with the French in Canada by way of Albany because by
so doing the French were enabled to strengthen their Indian alliances
at the expense of the colonists, but the temptation to profit was too
great, and the merchants not only broke the law, but plotted to secure
the removal of the governor whose far-sighted policy had insisted upon
its passage.
Of even more pernicious effect were the laws of trade. For example,
in 1733, owing to the insistence of the West Indian sugar planters,
Parliament passed an act placing a prohibitive duty upon the
importation into the continental colonies of any molasses from foreign
islands. The problem was a triangular one and no attempted solution
of it could be fair to all three parties involved. For reasons which
we need not go into, had this law been obeyed, the commerce of New
England, including its profitable slave trade, would have been ruined.
The law was never obeyed, but as a consequence, the New Englanders
became a race of smugglers, and the most reputable merchants became
lawbreakers. In this case, smuggling and lawbreaking were forced upon
them, but, having become used to them, they passed on to smuggling when
there was no reason but increased profit. In the French and Indian War,
twenty years later, we find the merchants trading with the enemy on a
scale which certainly prolonged the war, and in the decade before the
Revolution men like John Hancock did not hesitate to smuggle wines on
which there was only a moderate duty, and even forcibly to resist the
authorities in doing so. As the Revolution drew nearer, the radicals
made it a point of patriotic duty to break the English laws, and force
and mob violence became more and more common. The Boston Tea Party is a
case in point. That wanton destruction of fifty thousand dollars’ worth
of private property was in no way essential to the patriotic cause and
was condemned by many of the patriot party.
As a result of the imperial-colonial situation through a century and a
half, only some of the aspects of which we touched upon, there steadily
developed a disrespect for law as law and a habit of lawbreaking. The
colonists made up their minds not to obey law, but merely to obey such
laws as they individually approved of or such as did not interfere
with their own convenience or profit. We are not arguing the ethics or
rights of the cases, but merely stating facts and results. Moreover, in
every colony there was constant conflict with the royal governors, so
that the executive power came to be considered as inherently something
to be distrusted and limited as far as possible, a feeling which is
strong today as an inheritance from our colonial past. The executive,
represented to the colonists as a hostile and outside power in their
“constitutions,” came to appear a power to be disobeyed and thwarted
whenever feasible. In a similar way did the judicial. The people stood
together to defeat the courts and to protect friends and neighbors.
This was particularly notable in the admiralty courts and all cases
prosecuted under the laws of trade. Juries would not convict no matter
how flagrant the smuggling or other lawbreaking. Thwarting courts and
officials became as much a game on the part of otherwise reputable
people as fooling prohibition officers to-day.
In the South another element was introduced into the complex situation
by slavery. There were slaves in the North also, but for the most
part in too small numbers to affect the matter greatly. In the South
the large numbers of blacks, many of them recently imported from the
jungle, and their peculiar status as personal property, resulted in
legislation and judicial administration which tended to some extent
to break down respect for law. In Maryland and many other colonies,
for example, a negro was not allowed to testify against a white man.
Moreover, the court in which the slave was most likely to be tried was
that presided over by a single local magistrate, a slave-owner himself.
In Virginia until 1732, if a master killed his slave in consequence of
“lawful correction,” it was viewed merely as “accidental homicide.” The
raping of a female slave was “trespass upon property”! If we consider
the laws relating to the negro, and the relations between him and the
whites, even admitting that the great majority of slave-owners may have
been kindly, it is evident that in the two centuries of the existence
of the institution among us an immense amount of crime must have gone
not only unpunished but without fear of punishment.
One other element may be taken into consideration, the effect of the
frontier. Until thirty years ago, America has always had a frontier,
and that fact has been of prime importance in many respects for the
national outlook. For our purpose we may merely note that in the
rough life of the border there is scant recognition for law as law.
Frequently remote from the courts and authority of the established
communities left behind, the frontiersman not only has to enforce his
own law, but he elects what laws he shall enforce and what he shall
cease to observe. Payment of debt, especially to the older settlements,
may come to be looked upon lightly, whereas horse stealing may be
punishable with shooting at sight.
III
When the colonies united and won their independence and the United
States was formed, there had thus already developed a fairly definite
attitude toward law and authority. In many respects, owing mainly to
their economic prosperity, the colonies were more law-abiding than
Europe. In all my research, for example, I have found only one case of
a traveler being robbed on the highways. Moreover, the colonists came
to be a kindly and hospitable folk, and crimes involving brutality
were proportionately less common than in the Europe of that day or
the United States of this. But the essential point is that Americans
had developed a marked tendency to obey only such laws as they chose
to obey, and a disregard of law as law. Laws which did not suit the
people, or even certain classes, were disobeyed constantly, with
impunity and without thought. A habit had grown up of attempting to
thwart the courts and judges, of distrusting the executive, and of
relying solely upon the legislatures. Juries had got into the way of
not considering the law, but merely their own or their neighbor’s
interests. When cases became desperate or law officers made some show
of real enforcement, as did occasionally a rare Surveyor of the Woods
or a customhouse officer, they were taken care of by mobs, and as a
rule the absence of any real force behind the show of royal authority
made the officials powerless. In the national period we shall see the
fruits of this long training in disrespect for law.
We need not linger over Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1787,
when mobs of malcontents with genuine grievances forced the closing
of courts and brought the state to the verge of civil war; or the
Whiskey Insurrection in 1794 in Pennsylvania, when attempts to enforce
an excise tax required the use of fifteen thousand Federal troops.
Nor need we go into the practical nullification of Federal laws and
authority by some of the New England states in the War of 1812, or
the smuggling and trading with the enemy during that ill-advised
conflict; or into the threatened nullification of the Federal tariff
by South Carolina some years later. The ripest fruits of disregard
for law are found mainly when passions are aroused, as they were for
several decades from 1830 onward. We will briefly touch first upon the
persecution of the Irish and Catholics, in which law and order were
abandoned from 1833 to 1853. The building of the Baltimore Railroad was
punctuated by race riots. Even the militia failed to quell a similar
one on the Chesapeake and Ohio, and a “treaty” had to be drawn up.
In 1834 the Ursuline Convent near Boston was burned to the ground
and sacked by anti-Catholics. The next night a race riot, this time
directed against negroes, broke out in Philadelphia in the course of
which thirty houses were sacked or destroyed, a church pulled down,
and several persons killed. Similar riots occurred within a few weeks
at other places, and in a few years the militia had to disperse a
mob of two thousand marching on the house of the Papal Nuncio at
Cincinnati. The Irish quarter in Chelsea, Massachusetts, was attacked;
the chapel at Coburg was burned, that at Dorchester blown up, and that
at Manchester, New Hampshire, wrecked; at Ellsworth, Maine, the priest
was tarred and feathered; the convent at Providence was attacked; and
at St. Louis a riot resulted in ten deaths. But it is unnecessary to
detail more, such incidents being all too common throughout the country.
Similar violence was used against the Mormons, mainly while they were
resident in Missouri and before they had adopted the doctrine of plural
wives. The feeling against them first manifested itself in tarring
and feathering, but by the autumn of 1833 a veritable reign of terror
had begun. Houses were destroyed, men were beaten, and even a battle
took place. By November mobs had forced about twelve hundred Mormons to
leave their homes, pursuing them across the Missouri River and burning
over two hundred of their forcibly abandoned houses. The governor was
unable to afford them protection, although admitting that they were
entitled to it. Law having completing broken down, a military order was
given either to drive them all from the state or to “exterminate” them.
They had broken no laws, but in another battle in defense of their
legal rights seventeen were killed and some of their bodies horribly
mutilated after death.
We find the same disregard of law when we come to the Abolitionists and
the antislavery agitation. The episodes in connection with this, such
as the murder of Lovejoy in Illinois, the mobs threatening Garrison at
Utica, Boston, and elsewhere, the destruction of printing plants and
newspaper offices, are almost too well known to call for repetition.
Even Connecticut, “the land of steady habits,” was not immune. In
Philadelphia a pro-slavery mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, dedicated to
Free Speech. We could multiply instances indefinitely, but need only
say that violence was the order of the day. Lincoln complained that
law and order had broken down, that “wild and furious passions” were
substituted for “the sober judgments of the courts,” that “outrages
committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times” and that they
were “common to the whole country.”
The passage of the new Fugitive Slave law brought more lawlessness.
Calhoun had rightly stated in the Senate that it was “impossible to
execute any law of Congress until the people of the states shall
cöoperate”—a clear statement that Prohibitionists would have done well
to remember. Everywhere in the North the law was not merely disobeyed
but bloodily denounced. In New York, for example, it was declared that
“instant death ... without judge or jury” should await anyone who
attempted to enforce it. The _New York Tribune_ declared that it would
be better to blow up the Capitol at Washington than to allow the law
to be passed in it. Throughout the states, in the decade preceding
the Civil War, there was an utter disregard of law in the sense that
people obeyed such national laws as they chose to and used violence to
defeat those they were opposed to. In the North the Fugitive Slave law
was the one specially attacked. In the South the mails were interfered
with and free speech was suppressed. A Northern antislavery man could
not enter the Southern states without danger to his life. Sums of
five thousand dollars and upward were offered for the kidnapping of
prominent speakers on the subject of slavery. In Kansas the struggle
between those who wished to have the state enter the Union as free and
those who wished it slave resulted in such constant violence as to give
the state the name of “bleeding Kansas,” though Professor Channing
finds that probably only two hundred people were killed—killed, it
must be remembered, however, in time of peace. To detail all the acts
of violence throughout the country in the decades before the war would
be impossible here. The total effect, however, would be to picture a
nation in which passion had usurped the place of law. The riots which
occurred after war was declared may be partially discarded for our
purpose, though they probably would not have occurred in a country in
which the people had an ingrained sense of law. The worst one in New
York, in 1863, lasted four days and resulted in the destruction of
$1,500,000 worth of property and the loss of one thousand killed and
wounded. It was followed by lesser riots at Detroit, Kingston, Elmira,
Newark, and elsewhere. In the country districts threats of arson and
murder were openly made.
The war over, we found ourselves with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments to the Constitution, giving the negro the right of suffrage.
However these may or may not have been observed in the North, it is
obvious that they could not be and never have been in the South. To
have observed these Amendments, particularly the Fifteenth, in some
states, such as Alabama, where the negroes outnumbered the whites,
meant that the whites might be ruled by the blacks, and in any case
it meant serious trouble, racial feeling being what it was then and
is now. The complete nullification of such laws, having all the
sanction of being parts of the Constitution, could not fail to reduce
respect for law. Again, Americans obeyed such laws as they chose, and
disregarded or opposed by force such as they did not choose.
IV
We may now come to another phase of our national lawlessness. There is
a good deal of popular misunderstanding with regard to lynching. It is
generally regarded as rather peculiarly a Southern institution, and the
consequence of attempts at rape on whites by negroes. The term “lynch
law” appears to have been first used in 1834, and it is from that time
that the practice of lynching became common in the United States. At
first the most notorious cases were those of gamblers, such as occurred
in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and in Virginia. It was, however, also
practised in the North, and spread to California and the West after
the discovery of gold. In California, in 1855, out of five hundred and
thirty-five homicides committed there were but seven legal executions.
The celebrated Vigilance Committees were formed in San Francisco, each
of which hanged four men and banished about thirty. These “popular
tribunals” were also formed in Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho,
Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado during their early periods
of settlement.
That lynching was not confined to negroes, the South, or the crime of
rape is easily proved by such statistics as we have. I have no recent
figures, but as this chapter is concerned with our “heritage,” and not
our present lawlessness, this is not of account. In 1900 over 52 per
cent of the persons lynched in Illinois were white, over 78 per cent in
Indiana, over 54 per cent in Missouri, over 38 per cent in Kentucky,
and over 35 per cent in Texas. Tables prepared by the United States
Government failed to show any relation between the distribution of
lynchings and the proportions of blacks to the total state populations.
Nor did they show any correlation between the numbers of lynchings
and the percentages of illiterates or foreigners. The responsibility
therefore must rest on the literate native element.
In the period from 1882 to 1903 there were 2585 persons lynched in
the Southern states, of whom 567 were whites, 1985 negroes, and
33 “others”; in the Western states the figures were, respectively,
523 whites, 34 negroes, and 75; in the Eastern states, 79 whites,
41 negroes, and no “others.” In the country as a whole there were
thus lynched in the twenty years 3337 persons, of whom 1169, or
over one-third, were white, and 2060 negroes. In all three sections
the crime for which the greatest number of lynchings occurred was
murder. Rape comes next, with “minor offenses,” arson, theft, assault,
following in much smaller proportions. In our country in a time of
perfect peace there were thus an average of between three and four
lynchings every week in the year for the twenty-year period chosen by
hazard for examination. Allowing for the difference of population, is
it possible to conceive of two persons being murdered by individual
citizens, instead of allowing justice to take its course, every week in
England or France for a generation?
In the above rapid and wholly inadequate survey no attention has been
paid to the problem or statistics of ordinary crime. The United States
has no adequate criminal statistics even at the present day. Such a
survey projected into the past would be impossible. I have not been
concerned with, so to say, “crimes under law,” but with opposition to
or disrespect for law itself as law. Even thus I have neglected much
which would properly be included in a full treatment of the subject.
It is needless to say that we are not going to be able to shed this
heritage quickly or easily. In fact we have gone so far on the wrong
road that it is by no means certain that we can ever get back on the
right one even with the best of intentions. Inbred respect for law,
as I said in the beginning, is a plant of slow growth. For three
centuries we have been developing disrespect. Our heritage has made
recovery more difficult for us by bringing about conditions that
themselves help to increase our disrespect and lawlessness, aside from
the feeling of the individual citizen. This portion of our heritage
is in some part from our Puritan ancestry, North and South. The
Puritans insisted that their own ideals of life and manners should
be forced on the community at large, and they also believed that any
desirable change could be brought about by legislation. Partly from
Puritanism and partly from the exaggerated influence attributed to
the legislatures in colonial days for the reasons I have noted above,
Americans have believed that their ideals should be expressed in the
form of law, regardless of the practical question of whether such
laws could be enforced. They have apparently considered that the mere
presence of such laws will help _respect_ for the _ideal_ of conduct,
regardless of the fact that the presence of such unenforceable laws
will bring about _disrespect for law itself_. Every minority which has
had a bee in its bonnet has attempted to make that bee “home” into a
law, and to a remarkable extent the majorities have not cared, partly
because they take little interest in public affairs, but mainly because
they imagine that even if some “fool law” is passed they can disobey it
if they choose, as they have others. Because we have ceased to have any
respect for law we allow any sort of laws to be passed, and then—the
vicious circle continuing—our disrespect increases yet more because
of the nature of such laws. When Americans talk about their glorious
past, it may be well for them to remember that we have one of the most
sinister inheritances in this matter of law from which any civilized
nation could suffer, a heritage that we are apparently passing down to
our children in a still worse form. For this reason, if for no other, I
believe that the unenforced and unenforceable Eighteenth Amendment was
one of the heaviest blows ever directed against the moral life of any
nation.
CHAPTER VI
HOOVER AND LAW
OBSERVANCE
HOOVER AND LAW OBSERVANCE
I
To an American citizen profoundly interested in the welfare of his
country, it is all too obvious that the one fundamental question
transcending all others is that of law and the observance of law.
Prosperity may temporarily increase or decline. The manufacturers may
get the extra profits they desire from a prohibitive tariff or they may
not. The farmers, like the intellectual classes, may for a time be out
of adjustment with the earning power of other classes and the general
economic level. America may for a while either accept or refuse its
responsibilities to the world at large. But far more fundamental than
these or any other problems confronting this country at the moment
is the problem of whether the United States is to remain a civilized
nation or come to be ranked with Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the
law.” It is evident that the present situation, which would disgrace
a savage tribe, cannot continue along its indicated curve without
leading directly to a breakdown of government or to a dictatorship.
To a considerable extent, indeed, the government has already broken
down in one of its most essential duties—the protection of the persons
and properties of its citizens; as is evidenced by private policemen,
armed guards, and armored cars, the citizens have had to undertake such
protection for themselves.
So far as I know, Mr. Coolidge, intent on paring budgets, never
troubled himself over the rising tide of crime and lawlessness, beyond
seeing to it that Mrs. Coolidge was accompanied on her shopping by
an armed protector. It is therefore a matter of the most earnest
congratulation that, although Mrs. Hoover has dispensed with a personal
guard, Mr. Hoover is evidently sufficiently impressed by the situation
to have devoted one-quarter of his inaugural address to the topic.
A careful and sympathetic reading of that address, however, leaves
one wondering whether he has the slightest comprehension of the
magnitude and causes of the danger which we face, although a later
public utterance shows some advance. In his Inaugural he said, indeed,
that “the most malign of all these dangers [to the state] to-day is
disregard and disobedience of law,” and every honest citizen must
whole-heartedly agree with him when he goes on to say that “our whole
system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what
laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.
The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect
for all law.”
But what remedy does he suggest, beyond appointing the inevitable
investigating committee which, according to the custom of such bodies,
will probably sit for from one to five years, publish a voluminous
report, with perhaps one or two dissenting reports, and be discharged
with thanks? The only recommendation he can offer is to say that “if
citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to
discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.”
Obviously, from the context in which these passages are found, Mr.
Hoover was thinking mainly of the Eighteenth Amendment, but as he
rightly points out, and as we cannot too strongly stress, the whole
observance of law hangs together. A loose administration which would
allow officials to pick and choose among the laws they enforce, or
citizens to determine at will which laws they obey, could only be
destructive of any real sense of law on the part of the public. The
American problem, though complicated by Prohibition, lies far deeper;
and it is the lack of understanding as to what the problem is that so
greatly diminishes the force of Mr. Hoover’s appeal to us as citizens
anxious to do our duty toward society.
II
It is needless to waste words in painting the situation in our country
to-day. The headlines of any metropolitan newspaper any day do so only
too clearly. Crime of the most desperate sort is so rampant that unless
a robbery runs into six figures or a murder is outstandingly brutal or
intriguing, we no longer even read below the headings. We are no more
interested than in a stock that does not move. We have ceased to expect
criminals to be caught and punished. We accept the statement from the
Chief Justice of the United States that our criminal justice is a
disgrace to civilization with the same lack of reaction with which we
accept the Department of Agriculture’s estimate of the cotton crop as
about the same as was expected. On the other hand, tens of thousands of
reputable citizens, who in all the private relations of life are decent
and trustworthy persons, are daily breaking one law or another. When
a state has ceased to be able to enforce law, when its citizens have
ceased to feel any sense of duty to obey law as law, when they have
lost all respect for law as law, when they have lost all respect for
law enforcement and the courts and officials charged with enforcement,
it is clear that something more than merely one amendment to the
Constitution, however unwise, must be sought for as the cause.
With regard to the increase of crime of one type and the failure
of the American state to protect its citizens, I can from personal
experiences date a marked change with some accuracy. I was in Wall
Street in business until about 1912. From about 1900 to that date I was
usually the one in my office, first as manager and then as partner,
who saw daily to getting the securities from the safe deposit vault to
the office in the morning and back again at night. The value of the
negotiable securities and cash sometimes ran to a couple of millions.
Unarmed and unguarded, with only an office boy to carry the boxes,
it never once occurred to me or to anyone else in that period that
there was any danger to the securities or to myself in so carrying
them through the public streets. About 1908 or 1909, I think it was,
New York State passed a new law taxing the securities of non-resident
decedents if the securities were in a New York safe deposit at the
time of death. In order to avoid this extra taxation, a member of my
family, a resident of New Jersey, decided to transfer his securities
to Hoboken. I did it for him by the simple method of putting about two
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coupon bonds in a suit case and
carrying it, unguarded and, indeed, unaccompanied from Wall Street
down to the old Hoboken Ferry, over the Ferry, through the streets of
Hoboken, along the river front to the Trust Company in that city,—again
without thought of risk or danger.
Let us note the difference today. Going abroad to stay for a
considerable period, I decided last December (1928) to transfer my
securities from bank vaults at practically the corner of Hanover and
Wall Streets, to a bank which would keep them in custody for me,
cutting coupons, and so on without trouble to me. I first thought of
transferring them to an institution just over the river in Brooklyn.
On asking the Vice-president how, in view of modern crime conditions,
the actual physical transfer would be made, he answered as follows:
“We have our own armored car, with three men in it. We are, of course,
very careful in selecting them in the first place, but we always have a
detective who keeps track of them. The chauffeur sits in front of the
car, and behind him we have a guard who keeps his revolver in his hand
so that if the chauffeur starts any tricks he has a gun in his neck at
once. In the back of the car sits the third man, who keeps his foot on
a valve which by pressure would shut off the supply of gas at once. If
a fracas should start between the other two, he would stop the car.
If you would care to do so, you could also come in the car with your
securities.” I decided finally on a trust company in Wall Street, very
near the vault where the securities were, and where I would have to
walk only a block. There it was agreed that two armed guards would meet
me when I was ready to make the transfer. One day, with my wife and
sister, who also had securities, I went to the vault. In my innocence
I suggested that I would telephone to the trust company to send over
the guards. The official at the vault hesitated, and then said: “If I
were you I would go to the trust company and get them, so as to be sure
that no one is listening in, and that the men who come are really the
men sent by the company.” So I went to the company, got the men, and
with my wife and sister in front, one guard carrying the bags beside me
and the second following with his hand on his revolver in his pocket,
the procession formed to carry my worldly goods a few hundred feet
past the U. S. Subtreasury and the office of J. P. Morgan and Company!
To elaborate on this feature of modern American life would seem to be
needless. Yet a curious feature about it is that American business
men themselves do not seem to realize what an appalling situation has
developed when the state has completely broken down in its function of
protecting its citizens and making the streets of the largest city in
the country safe to walk in. When I mentioned this topic of armored
cars in an article in _The Atlantic Monthly_, among the usual crop of
letters from indignant citizens came one from a technical expert of one
of the leading American corporations with an office in the very heart
of the Wall Street district. He said that I was seeing ghosts; that he
had had his office in Wall Street for fifteen years and neither he nor
any of his friends had ever seen an armored car! I do not question his
honesty, but there was a business man with a scientifically trained
mind who indignantly denied my statement because he had never seen
what it seems incredible he could help seeing. Every time I have been
in Wall Street since, I have never failed to see from one to five of
these cars. On receiving his letter I called up the several companies
which provide armored-car service and was informed by them that,
between them, they operated one hundred and fifty armored cars in the
metropolitan district alone. Just think what that means. A hundred and
fifty armored cars (and the number has increased since) to handle the
ordinary daily business of New York City when not one is required in
all Europe. There are three most astounding points to be noted. One is
the appalling prevalence of criminals; second, the equally appalling
breakdown in the performance of its primary function by government; and
third, the blindness of the American business man to what is happening
under his nose and his utter satisfaction and complacency with respect
to it.
In the preceding chapter I dealt with that heritage of lawlessness
in America which is the historical background to any discussion of
the question. I tried to show how, from the first settlement in the
seventeenth century to the last rioting in Chicago, we have, for one
reason and another—often political, sometimes racial, occasionally
geographic, usually economic—developed a disrespect for law. Granted
that background and granted, as must be, the truth of what Mr. Hoover
says, what is the situation in which the patriotic citizen, anxious to
obey the law of the land, finds himself to-day?
In the first place, there is the infinite number of laws and
ordinances—Federal, state, municipal—which Congress and forty-eight
state legislatures, not to mention lesser bodies, are turning out
literally by thousands every year. I have seen the statement that
taking all the law-, ordinance-, and regulation-making bodies in the
country together, over twenty thousand statutes were passed in one year
regarding railroads alone. Despite the fact that state boundaries are
imaginary lines which have ceased to have any meaning for us in daily
life, the laws of every state vary. The metropolitan area of New York
City lies within three states. For some years I lived in New Jersey
and worked in New York. I spent half my waking hours in one state
and half in the other, and I lived under two different sets of laws
relating to inheritance, taxation, and to innumerable other matters of
daily concern. Had I commuted to Connecticut instead of to New Jersey,
I should have had to learn an entirely new set of laws and regulations,
for ignorance of the law is no excuse for disobedience.
This anomalous condition is found throughout the country; in countless
minor matters it is impossible to tell whether one is obeying the law
or not. Motoring from New London to Providence, one must not run at
_more_ than thirty miles an hour, I believe it is, if there is now any
speed limit, in Connecticut; but as soon as one has crossed into Rhode
Island it is against the law to run at _less_ than thirty. Traveling
on the train from Buffalo to Chicago, it is legal to buy cigarettes
for the first hour or two; but after crossing into Ohio (no one knows
when or where) it becomes illegal for two or three hours until one has
again reached the safety of Indiana. Before Prohibition, it used to
be legal for one to have a flask of whisky while going by train from
Denver to Dallas—up to the imaginary line which separated some county
in Texas from another, at which point one was a lawbreaker, and, as
occasionally happened, could be hauled from the train and jailed.
Ignorance of the law, as we have said, is considered to be no excuse.
A law-abiding citizen who finds himself frequently breaking such laws
feels none of the emotions which a reputable citizen should feel in
such circumstances, and the fact that the situation is so obviously
absurd insidiously breaks down the feeling that law as law should be
implicitly obeyed.
Again, many laws are passed merely because it is the easiest way for
lazy or supine legislators to rid themselves of noisy and fanatical
minorities; likewise they may be passed by legislators who are simply
ignorant or have some racial ax to grind. As instances we may cite
the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in Tennessee; the law
recently passed by one of the Southern states, prohibiting the presence
in any public or school library of any book “defining evolution” (which
would rule out all dictionaries and encyclopedias); or the several
so-called “pure history laws,” penalizing the critical writing of
American history. Included also in this group are the broad censorship
laws of various places, such as that which in St. Louis resulted in the
seizure and destruction of a collector’s rare edition of Boccaccio,
and that which makes it illegal for bookstores in Boston to sell a
considerable number of current volumes sold almost everywhere else in
the United States. As I write these lines my attention is called to the
latest limitation of my liberty. I have in my library here that finest
of all war books, _All Quiet on the Western Front_. The author comes
nearer to telling the truth, the whole horrible stench of truth, about
war than has anyone else. War is brutal, and it would be well if people
could know how brutal. One or two incidents are brutally told, but
there is nothing pornographic in the whole book. Yet I discover it can
be published in America only in an expurgated form and that if I take
my copy home it will be confiscated. My government will not allow me to
read what any European in any country is free to do, and I am faced by
the dilemma of either having to destroy or give away a fine book which
I have bought here quite legally and with entire honesty of mind, or
having to break the law of my native land and smuggle it in.
In constantly passing back and forth from Europe, I am continually
confronted by similar problems. In all enlightened countries over here
not only are treatises on birth control by medical authorities to be
had in the bookshops of any city, but frequently public instruction
is given in free clinics. If I take any such book home to New York, I
become a lawbreaker and am liable, I believe, to a year in prison or
five thousand dollars’ fine. I am interested in modern literature and,
although greatly disliking the book, I realize that Joyce’s _Ulysses_
is a landmark in its development. For the purposes of an article I am
now writing I can readily buy _Ulysses_ for five dollars in Paris or
here in London (where I am working at the moment), but if I take it to
New York to use there, I shall again be a lawbreaker and shall again be
liable to a year in prison or five thousand dollars’ fine.
Recently the Federal authorities in Boston ruled that it was illegal
to import copies of that classic, Voltaire’s _Candide_, which is
required reading for the students at Harvard, Radcliffe and, I believe,
Wellesley. The boys and girls are thus faced at the outset of their
careers as citizens with the delightful dilemma as to which they will
obey, the Harvard and Radcliffe authorities or the Customs Officers
clothed with Federal authority. If they do not buy the book they are
refusing to do required college work; if they do, they are breaking the
Customs laws. Thus early does a paternal government gently lead youth
on the path of lawbreaking and laughing disrespect for law. Living
under laws like these, is it any wonder that the sober, law-abiding
citizen has little respect for law as law?
III
But let us consider such a citizen facing some concrete problems.
Personally I agree heartily with all that Mr. Hoover says. I have
keen respect for law and believe that such a respect is an essential
element in building up any civilization. But what is the situation in
America that confronts such a normal, law-abiding citizen? Is a citizen
of Boston who wishes to know what is being written in contemporary
American literature bound to deprive himself of knowing anything about
a dozen or so important titles because it is illegal for a bookseller
to furnish him with them? Or shall he surreptitiously import them from
New York, or break the law and buy them furtively from a “book-legger”?
Shall a teacher in the state which prohibits dictionaries and
encyclopedias in its schools and libraries throw those books out of the
windows, or shall he give the students illegal use of copies hid in
closets? Shall a man interested in Italian literature and the culture
of the Renaissance leave a hole in his knowledge where Boccaccio should
be, or shall he break the law and buy a copy? Shall I destroy the books
which I buy in Europe or take them home? Shall the Harvard students
read _Candide_ or obey the law and flunk their work?
Consider the question of possessing firearms in New York State. Any
thug can readily procure a revolver by the simple process of going
across the river to New Jersey and buying one; but it has become
increasingly difficult and in many instances impossible for the
law-abiding citizen who wishes to protect his home from the thug to get
a permit. The Constitution of the United States says that the right
of the citizen to bear arms shall not be abridged, but this has been
abrogated by the “police power” of the states, so that we now have a
situation in which any thug can get a gun, but the sober citizen often
cannot. In fact, in a recent skirmish in New York which resulted in
the killing of a policeman by thugs, it was found that the officer was
acting as “gun-toter” for a rival gang of thugs who had no desire to
be caught with the tools of their trade—three guns—on their persons.
Some years ago a concern with which I had relations had its pay roll
of about five thousand dollars brought to the factory through a bad
neighborhood every Saturday by a trusted employee. (This was before the
breakdown in government had become so complete as to make it profitable
for private companies owning armored cars to perform that service
for business men.) Since there had been many holdups, the company
attempted, unsuccessfully, to get a permit for the messenger to carry
a revolver. After a while it was discovered that the difficulty lay in
omitting to tender the usual fifteen-dollar bribe to the police captain
of the precinct. There was no use in carrying the matter higher. The
company could not prefer charges, for in such situations there is never
any proof. It had three options: to risk its five thousand and its
employee’s life by leaving him undefended; to break the law by bribing
a police official; or to break it by having the messenger carry a gun
without a license.
Recently one of my friends, driving a motor car in a large American
city, was overhauled by a motorcycle policeman who told him, with
foul language, that he had been speeding. As a matter of fact this
accusation was not true, but it was the habit of this particular
policeman to allow a car to get ahead and then, by speeding after, to
show a high rate on his own speedometer. My friend would have had no
case had he gone to court and, what he minded more than a possible
fine, a black mark would have gone against his driver’s license.
Knowing the situation, he immediately placed his hand on his wallet
pocket. “Mind you,” said the policeman, “I’m not asking for anything.”
“All right,” said my friend, handing him ten dollars. The cop smiled
and speeded off to wait for his next victim and bill. It must have been
a profitable business. Another friend of mine in a large contracting
firm operating in a certain large city tells me that to their bids for
every sizeable job they add, as do their competitors, an item of five
hundred dollars. This is for the policeman on the beat, about fifty
dollars a week being handed to him so that he shall not be constantly
bothering them with unjustified complaints about obstructing the
sidewalk by their operations. If the money is not paid, an official of
the company has constantly to waste his time appearing in the police
court to answer summonses. It is easy to say that, instead of breaking
the law by bribing officers, my friends should have reported them. All
I can say in reply to any enterprising private citizen is: let him try
single-handed to clean up the police department of any large American
city and see how far he will get.
Let us take another example. Let us suppose a person has some
pre-Prohibition brandy in his house. Such possession is quite legal;
but his father, living across the street, has a sudden heart attack
and the family telephones over for the brandy. If the man takes it
over, under the last law passed by Congress on the subject, he becomes
a felon and is liable to ten thousand dollars’ fine or five years in
prison—or both. Should he leave his father to die while waiting for
the law to be repealed, or should he become a felon in the eyes of
the law? For the reasons noted above, we have ceased to have much
respect for ordinary laws; and now, under the teaching of Congress,
we are likely to have no fear of even felony. The effect is subtle.
Heretofore no self-respecting man could have borne to think of himself
as genuinely a legal felon, for this term was applied only to those
who committed arson, rape, homicide, and similar crimes. But no man
is going to think that by breaking the Eighteenth Amendment he places
himself in that category, although the law declares that such is his
classification. The result will be to make the word “felon” lose its
damning character.
IV
When laws are just and wise, they ought to be obeyed and are likely to
be; but when they are not, they open very genuine problems in ethics
for the decent citizen. I wonder if Mr. Hoover himself, with his love
of efficiency, his sense of organization and efficient government, to
say nothing of his racial pride, would under all circumstances insist
upon an absolute observance of the Fifteenth Amendment? Should the
negro race largely outnumber the white in any state (in Mississippi
there are already 935,000 negroes to 854,000 whites), would he insist
upon a strict observance of that amendment, even if it resulted in a
negro government permanently set up over the whites? The situation,
being a local one, would hardly result in a nation-wide repeal of the
constitutional amendment. If Mr. Hoover were a resident of the state,
what would he do? Would he live under the negroes, would he move away,
or would he disobey the law? Many cannot move away, and even if they
could, I doubt if Mr. Hoover would willingly abandon any considerable
number of states to negro republics.
Prediction is dangerous work but I think there is one prediction
not hard to make. That is, that our having so unthinkingly written
unenforceable prohibition into the Constitution, and our then insisting
upon the sanctity of that Constitution, is going to result in time in
the awakened negroes’ insisting upon the observance of the Fifteenth
Amendment. If Prohibition is sacred and inviolable because it is a
constitutional amendment, how about negro suffrage? There are already
rumblings being heard, and in my opinion the fanatical wets have not
only split our country into bitterly opposed factions and decreased
respect for the Constitution, but they have, without giving the matter
a thought, brought the crisis of racial hostility nearer to us than
it could ever have been brought in any other way. The time is rapidly
coming, if the Methodists and Baptists and W.C.T.U. and all the
other Prohibition forces insist upon the sanctity of the Eighteenth
Amendment, when the fifteen million negroes, fast growing in wealth,
education and racial self-consciousness and assertiveness, will insist
upon the sanctity of the Fifteenth.
But we may also ask Mr. Hoover about the Fourth Amendment, which the
officials of his government are constantly violating, certainly in
spirit. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unwarrantable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Yet, without
warrant and without probable cause, the agents of Mr. Hoover’s own
government have stopped, seized, searched and even murdered citizen
after citizen in yacht or motor car within the past few months. Let
Mr. Hoover and Mr. Mellon talk of law enforcement to the shades of
John Adams and James Otis! What is the law-abiding citizen to do when
driving his car on a lonely road with his wife or children he is told
to halt by an un-uniformed man? How is he to tell whether the man is
a thug who will rob him if he stops, or a legal officer of the United
States government acting unconstitutionally? If he stops, he may be
robbed or worse; if he does not stop, the agents of the United States
government, as they have done time after time lately, may ruthlessly
murder him. This is not a hypothetical case. It is an actual situation
that confronts every citizen who has a car or a boat, and which has
already resulted in the slaying of many innocent and law-abiding
persons. Their wrongs and deaths have been thundered from the halls of
Congress, but the government calmly says it will uphold its agents.
Mr. Hoover speaks easily of the right of citizens who disapprove any
law “openly to work for its repeal,” but he must realize the inherent
difficulty of this for unorganized individuals. In the first place,
for some obscure reason in the American character, laws are rarely
repealed; they are allowed simply to lapse in observance. It is far
more difficult to get any legislature, including Congress, to take an
interest and initiative in repealing a law than it is to enact one.
Getting a law repealed may mean no less than educating an entire state,
which may take a long time and which most certainly will require a
large expenditure of money. In the second place, many of the laws to
which the law-abiding citizen objects were originally passed either
through ignorance of the electorate and the legislature or through the
influence of an organized minority whose crusade was well supplied with
funds by some fanatic angel. It is notorious how politically effective
even a small minority may be if sufficiently active, well organized,
and wealthy; and in most instances, the opposition—the people who feel
oppressed by some law passed by the efforts of a minority—are both
unorganized and without adequate funds. To overcome these handicaps
takes time—a long time.
To-day the power of the individual is largely lost. An enormous amount
of money is necessary to place any movement before the public, as may
be proved by a glance at the sums spent by the Republicans in the last
campaign to elect even Mr. Hoover. Let me illustrate by an example. For
a while I had an apartment overlooking the harbor in Brooklyn. The view
was superb, but I soon found, as all others do there, that the place
was rendered impossible by the clouds of oily, black smoke blown into
our windows from the tugs and steamers in the river. Complaining of the
situation, I was asked why I did not start a movement to remove the
nuisance, and take advantage of the law which makes burning soft coal
in the harbor an offense punishable by a five hundred dollar fine. The
answer was obvious. I had to earn my living, and heading such a crusade
was a full-time job. I should have had to abandon my work, organize
a publicity bureau, spend large sums on postage and stationery, form
committees, and so on through the whole usual business. The help to
be derived from the city authorities was well indicated from the fact
that the Municipal Building itself appeared to be, and I was told
was, one of the worst offenders in the use of the illegal fuel! It is
against the law in New York to drive a car with the muffler cut out,
yet Sunday afternoons in my apartment were rendered hideous for an hour
or two Sunday after Sunday by a car running at top speed up and down
several blocks, passing under my windows. Apparently the crew were
merely cooling themselves off in the hot weather, and enjoying the
noise and speed. Could I do anything? The car was part of the apparatus
of the fire company a few blocks away. How far would I get in trying to
enforce the municipal regulations against the municipality itself?
A friend of mine in another city, which passed an ordinance prohibiting
the use of soft coal, spent several thousand dollars installing
smoke-consuming apparatus in his plant. One day, sitting at his open
window and being covered with soot from the three chimneys of an ice
plant not far away, he decided to try his hand at law enforcement. He
called up police headquarters and, after explaining the situation,
received as answer, “You mind your damned business and we’ll mind
ours.” The plant was owned by local politicians.
It is all right for Mr. Hoover to say obey the law or work for its
repeal; but what is a tug-boat captain to do if all his competitors are
saving money by burning soft coal, and if the government authorities
not only do not enforce the law but break it themselves? Is he to
abandon his business in order to organize an almost hopeless crusade
to get the law changed or enforced, or is he to give up his business
entirely? Is he to burn hard coal in competition with soft, or is he to
break the law himself?
Time to organize committees, money to make their work efficient—few
people have either. And both are futile if the opposition is
corrupt—and in power. No, Mr. Hoover, obeying the law until you can get
it repealed is not so simple a way out in the America of to-day as your
speech would imply.
The subject can take us even further. The theory of our government—that
the majority shall rule—cannot safely be stretched too far. It broke
down in 1860, and may again. Indeed, in several respects it is not
even the theory. A very considerable part of the legislation under
which the people of our country live and do business has, in the last
resort, been the determination of a single judge of the Supreme Court
passing upon the constitutionality of laws by votes of five to four. It
was shown lately that owing to the method of repealing clauses in our
Constitution, three million people strategically located in the right
states could block the will of all the rest of the nation. In such a
case would it be the duty of the nation to obey the law?
Theoretically there is no justice in the doctrine of majority rule. It
is a useful and practical method of carrying on popular government, but
that is all. No better method has been devised, but there is something
abhorrent in the idea of fifty-one per cent of the population being
able to force its ideas on forty-nine per cent—of sixty-one million
people governing fifty-nine million. The fact is that it cannot be done
without the acquiescence of the forty-nine per cent, or, indeed, any
considerable minority. Fortunately the minority usually does acquiesce,
for it realizes that the importance of carrying on the government is
greater than any temporary discomfort or even oppression caused by the
decision of the majority. But we must not lose sight of the fact that
in the American system sovereignty is supposed to reside in the people
at large, and that majority rule is merely an expedient for determining
the will of the people. But if the will of a sufficiently large
minority is deliberately and persistently thwarted by the majority,
revolt of some sort is inevitable.
V
In America revolt always takes one of two forms—nullification of the
law or armed rebellion. We have had the American Revolution, Shay’s
Rebellion, the Whisky Insurrection, and the Civil War. The other
method—nullification—has been used so often as to make it useless to
catalogue even the more noted instances. No one believes for a moment
that Prohibition will result in civil war; but it is obvious that this
particular law is against the will of so large a minority, if it _is_
a minority, of the people that thorough and impartial enforcement is
impossible, and that the old American weapon of nullification will
continue to be used against it. It is evident that not even the United
States government can patrol eight thousand miles of boundary and put
a policeman in every one of twenty million homes. A very considerable
number of our people consider the law to be unwise, unjust, and
tyrannical. Throughout the whole of English and American history there
have always been men who had the courage to defy such laws, and,
largely depending upon their ultimate success, history has recorded
them as patriots or malefactors. I do not say that the Eighteenth
Amendment is of such a character as to warrant infringement of it in
the name of patriotism, but I do believe that is unwise and unjust,
and it does seem to me to come perilously near being tyrannical.
Turning back again to the more general question, however, I cannot
agree with Mr. Hoover that the solution of the lawlessness of America,
with the peril that it brings to our form of government, lies in so
simple a formula as “obey every law on the statute book or get it
repealed.” Criminals are not going to obey any laws that are not
enforced, and the governments—federal, state, and municipal—have
largely abandoned their duty of law enforcement. Last autumn the _New
York Telegram_ reported that “Chicago racketeers boast of 215 murders
in two years without a single conviction.” In London in six months,
with more than twice the population, there were eighteen murders
and every single murderer either paid the legal penalty promptly or
committed suicide before he was caught. But even law-abiding citizens
will not obey laws which are but partially and unjustly enforced.
Our whole history has proved that. Would one-tenth of the merchants
of New York pay duties on their goods if they knew that the other
nine-tenths were allowed to import free? Year after year, on returning
home, I have scrupulously listed all my purchases for the customs men
on the dock, and, I will add, have usually been treated courteously by
them. But what incentive is there to do so when, as last year, in the
cabin before landing, one heard the names of twelve Irish and Hebrew
gentlemen, otherwise never heard before, called out as having been
given the freedom of the port? For two hours I had to keep my wife, who
was ill, on the dock in sweltering heat while these friends of somebody
in the Treasury Department had whirled off at once to their hotels or
homes without paying a cent or having a key of their baggage turned.
Does not that sort of thing, encountered at every turn in America in
relation to governments, city, state and national, tend to make a good
citizen feel rather like a conscientious idiot than like an upholder of
the wise and honest laws of his country? Can respect for law continue
when its daily enforcement is a matter of friendship and favoritism?
No—nor will citizens obey, nor as juries enforce, laws with unjust
penalties. How many juries under the Jones Act will find a man guilty
of taking a drink if the penalty is the same as for homicide? Nor will
citizens obey laws, such as the smoke ordinances, which the government
itself breaks. Nor will they obey laws which they believe thoroughly
unjust and infringing on personal liberty. If disobedience to just laws
leads to anarchy, obedience to unjust laws leads to tyranny, as our
forefathers well understood and implored us to remember.
No, Mr. Hoover’s formula will not do. The task is far greater. We shall
not develop obedience to law in America until we have educated both our
electorate and our legislators to a knowledge of the nature of law, to
the limits of laws, and to their effects; until we have educated them
both to a tolerance and a practical wisdom in the art of governing;
until we have cleaned the Augean stables of our public life of their
accumulated filth, and the governments themselves—municipal, state, and
federal—obey and impartially enforce the law; until public opinion and
public prosecutors demand the punishment of millionaires and of highly
placed officials in Washington with the same rigor as would be meted
out to the ordinary criminal; until the ideal of quickly accumulated
wealth, by any means whatever, is made subordinate to the ideal of
private and public virtue.
If Mr. Hoover merely tells the American people to obey every absurd
law, every unenforced law, every unequally and unjustly enforced law,
every unenforceable law, that is now on the statute books of the nation
and our forty-eight sovereign states, he will get nowhere. If, on the
other hand, he will undertake to show the people what underlies their
problem, and assume the leadership in a crusade to reform the very
foundations of their life—the rotten foundations that are at the bottom
of the problem of our lawlessness—then he will prove the leader for
whom America waits, and patriotism and nobility may again rise above
efficiency and wealth. By that path only can America regain respect
for law and for herself. Nor is it a question only of respect. Far
down the path which America is now treading, at the end of the vista,
in the shadow of the future, but all too clearly visible to the eye
of the historian, stands, biding his time, the sinister figure of the
man on horseback, the dictator who inevitably “saves society” when
social insubordination and disintegration have become intolerable,
when order has given place to chaos. We must rule or be ruled. Cæsar,
Cromwell, Napoleon, Mussolini—the line is long and the sequence
inevitable. America can be saved, but it must be by regeneration, not
by efficiency. May Mr. Hoover ponder the problem and face the issue!
CHAPTER VII
TO “BE” OR TO “DO”
TO “BE” OR TO “DO”
I
A recent writer in a privately printed volume on education begins
with the sentence: “What is the matter with our schools?—Everything.”
I would not go quite as far as that in a blanket indictment of
our educational system, but I must confess that to an outside but
interested observer the system appears to be more and more hopelessly
uncertain of where it is trying to go or what it is trying to do—a
welter of “isms” in a sea of expense, without the slightest agreement
as to basic aims.
In looking back, it is of course very easy to underrate the real
influence of one’s teachers. In the past couple of days I have happened
to note both Gibbon’s characterization of his Oxford days as the most
unprofitable of his whole career, and Henry Adams’s of his four years
at Harvard as wasted. I have often, however, tried to estimate just
what my education did for my own incomparably less powerful mind. I
must have had in all, I think, about twelve or thirteen years, and as I
look back on them I am impressed with the appalling waste of time and
effort. I was naturally a bookish and studious boy. I began collecting
my library when I could not have been more than ten or twelve, and was
an eager student, yet I was taught Latin, German, and French, with
the result that I never could read either of the first two without a
dictionary. In conversation I never could speak more than a sentence
of any of the three, and I have never known an American student who
could—that is, merely as a result of his studying a language in school
and college. Yet, at thirty-five, I taught myself in a few months more
Persian than I had ever learned of Latin in several years’ drudgery
in boyhood. I remember, during the war, meeting on the street in
Paris a young French lad of about twelve, of the better class, who
stopped me and asked where he could get for his collection one of the
insignia which I was wearing as an American officer. He spoke English
fluently and, on my asking where he had learned it, he replied,
somewhat surprised, “Why, at school.” In America, with all the colossal
expenditure on buildings, that is a feat which, so far as I know, no
American school has ever accomplished for one of its pupils.
Of history as I may have been taught it, I can remember nothing. So
far as I can now discern, all my historical knowledge, moderate as it
is, has been acquired by reading, long years subsequent to the ending
of my formal “education.” That I do not remember facts from my years
spent on “American,” “Ancient,” and “European” history may be due to a
poor memory, but apparently history was taught merely _as_ facts. The
rudiments of spelling and mathematics have undoubtedly been useful. As
far as my institutional education was concerned, the arts of painting,
sculpture, architecture and music were simply nonexistent. I never
heard a word about the world of delight to be found in them or of
their possible influence on the life of the spirit. Of my struggles
with grammar there remains nothing, not a single rule, so laboriously
studied. I came of a cultured family and learned at home to use my
mother tongue with a moderate degree of correctness. On the other
hand, from my experience with country people in a village where I was
on the Board of Education, I could not see that if they did not speak
correctly by home training, they ever learned to do so in school. Of my
physics and chemistry I have only hazy recollections. From mineralogy,
geology, physiology, psychology, and zoology much less remained to me
than from botany which I taught myself, learning, without forgetting,
to name the trees and wildflowers and something of the general science.
I have always been greatly interested in philosophy, and I well recall
with what anticipations I went from my small college to Yale to get
what I thought would be a genuine initiation into the subject under the
late Professor Ladd. Never were a student’s hopes doomed to more swift
and complete annihilation. As I recall it, in his course he lectured
to over three hundred students. During the lectures some of his
audience read novels, some newspapers, while a few “grinds” like myself
ruined their handwriting trying to keep up with the lecturer in their
note-taking. After another hour’s work in my study rewriting the notes,
I had a lecture written in longhand that was far inferior in exactness
and proper expression to any chapter in a textbook that Ladd might have
written, and after two hours’ waste of time I had merely reached the
point of having an imperfect text to study.
With the exception of one Japanese, none of the students whom I
happened to know took the slightest interest in the subject. I had
hoped that there might be opportunity, so essential in philosophy
above all other studies, for some direct play of mind between my own
uninstructed one and that of the instructor. There never was. The
professor was a mere unapproachable oral textbook. Nevertheless, he
had the illusion that studying “under him” _had_ induced some play
of mind among his novel-readers, and for that reason he used to give
out the examination questions at the year’s end so that the student
might give original thought to them. Five of my friends were among the
novel-readers. Having paid no attention to the course the entire year,
they got me to sit under the apple trees at Ik Marvel’s place, and
for a couple of afternoons before the examination I talked over the
questions with them. They all passed, with higher marks, I believe,
than I did myself, and received Yale’s _imprimatur_ that they were
proficient in philosophy.
Since I had completely lost the desire to teach which had taken me to
the University, I took my Master’s degree and let a Ph.D. go hang. I
have never regretted the step, though I have no illusions as to the
self-educated man’s being as well trained as one who has had a genuine
education. Thus ended mine, which had cost me a dozen years and my
father certainly a minimum of six thousand dollars, pre-war. If it
be objected that things are different to-day, I may add that I see
no evidence of it; instead, I see an even greater confusion of aim
and method. Not long ago I asked a well-known professor at one of the
largest and best-known universities in the East what, in his candid
opinion, his university did for the many thousands of students who
annually attended it. After a moment’s thought he said that as far
as he could see, the university turned out a standardized, low-grade
mental product, much like an intellectual Ford factory.
II
It is my experience that the professors themselves are getting
thoroughly tired of the overorganization and intellectual aimlessness
of our modern educational institutions. To a great extent they
themselves are caught in the mill. I think that America is the only
civilized country in the world where what a man _does_ counts for so
much more than what he _is_, and where the general public, having no
cultural standard by which to judge what a man is, takes as the basis
of appraisal solely the visible signs of what presumably he has “done.”
A college degree has come to have a perfectly absurd value in the eyes
of the public, not only in regard to the graduates of an institution,
but in connection with the teaching staff. It is practically impossible
for a man who has not obtained his Ph.D. label to progress far in
teaching as a profession. I cannot imagine any leading European
university, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, caring in the
slightest whether a man who was otherwise qualified to teach within
its halls had any degree at all, but every little picayune college or
“university” of the fifteen hundred or more scattered over the United
States has been seized with the Ph.D. mania. A member of the faculty
of one of the oldest institutions in the country, who receives many
requests from southern and western colleges for suitable men to teach
on their staffs, told me that the one _sine qua non_ on which they
all insisted in their applications was that the candidate must have
received his Doctor’s degree. Otherwise, no matter how well educated,
how brilliant intellectually, how good a teacher, the door was closed
to him.
A year or two ago I was talking with a very successful teacher of
English literature in a prominent school for girls. She had only an
A.B. but was soon, after many years’ work, to have her sabbatical
year. With sound instinct she wished to spend that year in England,
becoming more familiar with the background of her subject, browsing as
she wished among the masterpieces of the literature, and, at the end,
bringing back to her pupils a wider knowledge, a deeper insight, and a
freshened enthusiasm. But, no. She had reached the limit of salary to
which she could ever attain with only an A.B., and therefore she felt
it necessary to spend the year in the soul-killing routine of taking
“English courses” at an American university to obtain an A.M. According
to the American educational system, there was never a question of what
she _was_, of what she could give to her pupils, of how, for their
sake and her own, she could best spend that precious year outside the
schoolroom, but of what tangible label she could wear, indicating to
parents what she had “done.” The pages of school and college catalogues
listing the faculty must be scattered over with degrees, or the
institution is suspect.
To a certain extent this might seem to be placing the responsibility on
the public, but as is so often true in speaking of American education,
we find ourselves arguing in a vicious circle. As Everett Dean Martin
has well said, “The school cannot evade the responsibility for the
present low level of mental life in this republic.” Considering the
enormous outlay for public education and the colossal sums represented
by the endowments of our private institutions, we have a right to
ask why, when educators have had resources undreamed of in any other
land, they have created merely a muddled system and a general level of
cultural attainment among our people below that of any one of eight or
more European countries.
In so far as there appears to be any definite trend in American
educational aims, it would seem to be toward President Eliot’s ideal
of “power and service”—one of the most baneful phrases, I fear, ever
let loose by an educator upon an uneducated people. The stress is laid
wholly upon the “doing.” We have, more particularly in innumerable
smaller colleges, courses in cost accounting, in real estate selling,
in “business English,” household decoration, basketball coaching as
a profession, poultry raising, personnel management—all counting for
“points” with philosophy or literature or science.
I cannot see that, as a general rule, American universities or colleges
leave the slightest cultural impress upon those who attend them.
Once out in the world, the ideals and the interests of most of the
university men are identical with those of any “go-getter” who, since
leaving high school, has been learning his trade of stockbroking or
real estate selling or manufacturing in the world of experience. A man
who has attended the Harvard Business School may indeed get ahead a
bit faster than his less-tutored competitor, but that is because of
his specific technical training, similar to that of a cabinetmaker or
lawyer. Some corporations, after exhaustive research, have come to
the conclusion that a “college man” is likely to prove more valuable
in the competition of business than one who is not; but that may be
explained on many grounds quite divorced from education. College men
come from a class that is at least moderately well up in the economic
scale, with all that this implies in producing a superior animal—good
air, food, and the rest. Moreover, a college man has four years more
of such things than has the non-college class. Then there are the
social knowledge, the friendship, and the “mixing” experience gained in
college. But none of these advantages is in any way related to the main
business of a university in its undergraduate department, which is, to
provide a cultural background and an education. The mere fact that the
graduate is a better money-maker has nothing to do with that.
“For power and service.” This phrase not only expresses a utilitarian
view of education, but, in the true American spirit of haste, it
has tended to emphasize the desire not only for “results”—that is,
“practical” results—but immediate ones. It has emphasized our belief
that “culture” either is something to help one in his economic career
or else is a mere fandangle ornament for those who wish to “put on
side”—not something vital in one’s own spiritual growth. American
education cannot be considered as disconnected from all the shortcuts
advertised in almost every American journal—the fifteen-minute-a-day
French courses that will enable you to entertain the representative of
a foreign firm and in a week astonish your employer into raising your
salary fifty per cent; or the scrapbook of the world’s wisdom that will
enable you to impress your hostess and to become popular in cultured
society by a few moments a day; or the five-foot shelf that will make
you the intellectual equal of the lifelong student. The American has
no use for the old Greek saying that “good things are hard.” He wants
knowledge and wisdom without striving. His education has taught him
no other path or ideal. If knowledge and culture are only for “power
and service,” why not buy them “canned,” if it is possible, much as he
stops at the service station to fill up with gas?
As compared with the “plants” of all our educational institutions
in America, those of Europe make but a shabby showing for the most
part—but they appear to get results that ours do not. There are idle
students everywhere in all lands, but one cannot help comparing the
mental outlook of the graduate of the high schools or “gymnasiums” or
the universities abroad with those here at home and finding there a
something which our students do not have—a maturity and a character.
The matter may be subjected to certain rough ways of measuring results
as well. Leaving out such intellectual world centers as Paris, I may
mention such a smaller town as Amsterdam, generally considered a mere
minor trading and industrial center. In wandering about the streets
of this northern Venice, one not only finds bookshops everywhere, but
displayed in them the latest books, in four languages, on science,
philosophy, and the arts. This fact speaks eloquently for the results
attained by Dutch education of whatever sort it may be. There are
plenty of cities in the United States of the same population—under
seven hundred thousand—in which it would be difficult to get in even
one language a tenth of the books offered at Amsterdam in four. Again,
in the twenty-eight years that the Nobel Prize in literature has been
offered, it has never yet been won by an American, though winners have
come from practically every country in Europe and even from the Orient.
Again, if we leave genius out of account and consider only the cultured
public, we find that the number of books published in various countries
in proportion to units of ten thousand inhabitants gives the following
table:
Denmark 11.4
Latvia 9.5
Holland 9.0
Germany 5.2
Norway 4.7
France 3.8
Great Britain 3.0
United States .85
Even such “backward” nations, according to our ideas, as Spain, Russia,
and Poland produce more books in the above ratio than do we—the most
abundantly supplied with money for education of all the nations in the
world!
III
Our errors are fairly evident. For one thing, our democracy has
harmed our education in two directions. On the one hand we have to a
great extent turned over our public educational system to the people,
although the weakest point in American life is perhaps its lack of
public responsibility. Our city, and not seldom our state, politics
are a byword and a hissing, a sink of corruption and ignorance; yet
it is usually to them that we leave the selection of the membership
in our Boards of Education. The cry is also raised that public money
should be spent only in giving the public what it wants—and, in its
uneducated and uncultured soul, what it wants is anything but a
“liberal education.” It all too often wants but two things: the ability
to earn a better living; and the label of having been educated—a
diploma or degree certifying that the recipient is as good as any of
the genuinely educated classes. As Lessing wrote a century and a half
ago:
The iron pot longs to be lifted up
By tongs of silver from the kitchen fire
That it may think itself a silver urn.
This situation would be bad enough were it limited to the public school
and state university systems; but, as a competent critic has recently
pointed out, too many of the private colleges and universities have
“gathered up their academic gowns” and run after the mob “offering
academic standing to anything for which there is a popular demand.”
Democracy, universal education, and high wages in the laboring class
have had another unfortunate influence upon education by swamping our
institutions with students who, although some are admirable, have in
all too many instances no background at all, no desire to be really
educated, and no power of becoming so. For this reason there has
been a general movement during the past five years to simplify the
wording of textbooks in all the higher grades of school, and even
in our universities a professor has to choose his words with great
care. I am told that even at Harvard a professor dare not speak of a
king as having been “crowned,” for fear that the students will think
he has been knocked on the head! Thus a student coming from a home
with cultural background, with an intelligent mind, and a desire to
learn, has to be held back to a pace no faster than can be kept by the
son of an ironpuddler or a carpenter. This is no negligible point.
As the Greeks said, “One comes to limp who walks with the lame.”
The attempt to bring about mass production in education has thrown
enormous responsibility upon, and created almost insoluble problems
for, our educational leaders. A few generations ago the larger number
of students in our higher educational institutions either came from
well-to-do homes or else were boys of unusual gifts or ambitions. If
a boy is really to receive the foundation of a liberal education by
the time of his graduation from college, it is evident that what the
college has to teach the boy who comes from one class of society is
quite different from what it has to teach one from another. Education
is far from being a mere matter of “book learning”, though many are apt
so to consider it. A person is far from being “educated” when his mind
has merely been crammed with facts for four or even seven years.
Man is more than an intellectual machine, and a genuine education
should develop and enable him to realize and utilize all sides of
his nature. He is, for example, as much an æsthetic and an emotional
creature as he is a reasoning one. Indeed, fundamentally he is more so.
He reacted to emotion long before he began to reason, and developed
art long before he did science, history, and all the rest of what now
goes under the old term “book larnin’.” In America, the emotional
and æsthetic sides of man’s nature, so deeply imbedded in it, are
starved to an extent that they are almost nowhere in Europe. The great
mass of our population, for example, rarely sees a really beautiful
building. Compare the churches scattered all over the land with those
which are the inheritance of the poorest in almost every community,
however small, in England, France, Italy, Spain and other European
countries. The great mass of our people, again, rarely see any genuine
and beautiful sculpture. It is the same with painting. Not only are
our greater museums poor in comparison with those of Europe but the
distances are so great that the bulk of our people are hardly brought
into contact at all with examples of really great art. In practically
every country in Europe not only can some of the finest art be reached
by almost anyone in a few hours’ travel at most, but a man living
almost anywhere can, in no more time than it takes to go from New York
to Chicago, see all the greatest galleries, London, Paris, the Hague,
Amsterdam, Vienna, Dresden, Florence, Rome, and the rest. In music it
is much the same, although not to quite the same extent. America is
practically a musical desert as compared with the life of ordinary
people in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, or Denmark.
When the “privileged classes” are mentioned it is usually in an
invidious sense, but there is a very real and inescapable way in which
a boy brought up in a family which is cultured and which at least has
money for travel is privileged as compared with the boy brought up
in a home and a general environment that is not cultured and who has
never seen anything beyond fifty miles from his village or small town
until he goes to college. In the first case, a very large part of the
boy’s education has been carried on outside of college altogether.
Social intercourse and foreign travel have given him certain elements
of education utterly beyond the reach of the other. There is all
the difference in the world, for example, between reading about the
cathedral of Chartres and standing in it. In our emotional and æsthetic
lives it is even more true than in other respects that we learn by
experience. How are we really to educate the vast mob of boys and girls
now crowding into our colleges, whose experience has been limited to
the architecture of our Main Streets, learning the names of Beethoven
and the other composers (or getting garbled versions of their works
on radio or Victrola), and whose experience of great painting and
sculpture is at most limited to black and white pictures in some book
on art?
For the “privileged classes” college education in a way is
supplementary education, but for a large part of those now crowding
into the fifteen hundred colleges of America it is the whole of their
education, and if it is limited to books, and, even worse, largely
limited to what may be learned from books for the purely practical art
of making a living, is it any wonder that the ideal and conception of
“education” and “culture” are steadily narrowing? It must be remembered
also that the college graduates of today will consider themselves the
“educated” class of the future, and with the public largely in control
of education, what will they consider education to be if they have
been told they themselves were educated enough to get their degrees by
studying chicken-raising with a little history and other things thrown
in for the looks of it?
The self-educated person has all the handicaps of a first explorer
in a new land. He may not always take the right roads. He does not
see the country as a whole. He has to waste much time finding out
things that everyone will know when the country has been well mapped.
A genuine education should be of immense help in orienting us in the
uncharted lands of the spirit. But that is just where so much current
education fails us. It is merely a hodge-podge of miscellaneous and
uncoördinated information that leaves the mind almost as bewildered at
the end as at the beginning. Occasionally, indeed, given a strong mind,
a self-educated person seems to have a better understanding of what
education is than our educators. I have before me a remarkable letter
from a workman, whose schooling stopped at the age of twelve. Being
the eldest of a family of eight he then had to go into a factory, and
though his position has much improved he is still in a factory, nor
is he there in an executive job. From twelve to sixteen he put in ten
hours a day of the most exhausting physical toil, but continued his
studies in history by himself. From history he proceeded to philosophy,
and the sciences of psychology, biology, physiology and physics. In
translations he has read such French authors as Rabelais, Villon,
France, Barbusse, Rolland, Proust, etc. Later he developed a taste for
poetry, apparently becoming interested first through Keats and Tagore.
Of music, he writes me: “I am fairly well acquainted with the best
music, having attended symphonies, concerts and organ recitals since I
was eighteen or nineteen years old. I used to take what little money I
had left after paying my board and go off to Pittsburgh alone to hear
the New York, Philadelphia or Chicago orchestras perform. My taste for
music was not created by the modern radio concerts. I acquired it from
seeing and hearing Paur, Herbert, Stock, Damrosch, Muck and others.”
Much of his recent reading has been in Bosanquet, Alexander, Eddington,
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. He does not own a car but spends his
holiday time hiking and studying nature as far from cars as he can get.
He is bringing up his children and trying to instil into them the idea
that education is much more than learning how to get a living; and
incidentally he says he has found some of the secrets of a contented
life.
I admit that here we have a very unusual case, but is it too much to
ask of an educational system which, at vast expense, takes a child at
four or five and now carries him on to twenty or so, that it should
succeed in doing for the student a little something of what this man
has done for himself? What, among other things, has he taught himself?
The joys of exact knowledge in science, of speculation in philosophy,
the joys of nature, of music, of rational recreation and sane
expenditure, and “some of the secrets of a contented life.” How many
American colleges of today would have given him as rounded an education
as that?
Let us read another letter that is on my table. It is from a woman
in one of the largest, wealthiest and most populated states in the
Union, the public school system in which should be of the best. She
began as a school teacher herself. “No doubt I did the work badly
enough,” she modestly writes, “but I did like to work with children
and I began to study them. Then and there I became a rebel against the
methods and system advocated and I departed from them just as much
as I dared. After five years of teaching I married. Ten years ago my
little daughter was born. Here was my opportunity to do as I pleased,
for a while at least. I began by interesting her, talking to her as
if she had a mind when she was a tiny baby. Before she was six months
old, she had spoken several words plainly enough to be understood by
disinterested persons. At thirteen months she was making sentences.
Before she was three years old she was reading script and print. The
most delightful books I could find were procured for her. Of her own
volition she was learning much each day. She had no lessons. In her
little _Readers_ she began anywhere her fancy dictated. An eighth
grade geography was worn out and another was procured. She browsed
among the books we owned; at four reading from Holmes and Longfellow.
At five she had read Poe and Hawthorne. At six years old I found her
reading Emerson’s essay on the Intellect. She had nature books and
travel books, and we thought she was doing splendidly at home but to
conform to custom at “half past six” we sent her to school (rural). She
didn’t fit anywhere. She was more interested in the work the eighth
grade pupils were doing than that of the lower grades. Fortunately
she had a tactful teacher. He did the best he could with her, finally
placing her in fourth grade.” The next year, under a teacher unfitted
for her work, the child lost all interest. The following year she was
kept home, “doing most excellent work”. The next year she returned to
school and for seventh grade work was given reading, spelling, grammar,
arithmetic, penmanship, geography, local state history, United States
history, physiology and health education. “At the end of the term
the County Superintendent gives a final examination. Beginning at 8
o’clock the children write on all these subjects and also on Reading
Circle books. They have till five o’clock to finish.... The County
Superintendent gives the teachers the hint that final questions will be
based on questions sent out through the term, so the teachers attempt
to get the children to memorize the answers to these questions. There
is a good cram before the examination. Of course most of them pass.”
The mother now faces the dilemma of continuing the ten year old child
in school where she loses her interest and desire to learn, or teaching
her at home which means that she will not have that shibboleth, a
diploma, essential economically for almost any sort of job.
Here again, we may say, is an exceptional case, but it illustrates one
of the most serious defects in our general education. That is that the
educational system from bottom to top is coming to be operated more and
more for the benefit of the unintelligent and not the intelligent. An
educational system that is operated with public money should be run,
so the easy logic runs, for the benefit of the public, all the public.
Of course, the more of the public that enters the schools, the lower
the work of the schools must be. Here and there there may be in a poor
home an exceptionally keen and alert childish mind. Here and there is
a poor home in which the parents are intelligent and do all possible
to develop the child’s mind and provide it with a stimulating mental
environment. But we know these are exceptional cases and not the rule.
With the lowered quality of teachers themselves, due to over-demand
owing to mass classes, and with the teaching geared lower and lower to
meet the requirements of a lower standard of pupil, from kindergarten
to college, is not the chance for the really intelligent child
getting less and less? How can an intelligent child from a home where
intelligent and ambitious and mentally alive parents help to kindle all
the child’s interests and tastes be expected to take any interest in
class work which is keyed to the rate of progress and general capacity
of dull-witted children from homes that are cultural vacuums?
In many lines of private business and, I believe, in all government
positions, a high school diploma is now essential. It has thus come to
have an economic value, which has operated on education in two ways. It
sends an enormous number of educationally unfit through the mill, not
because they want an education but because they want the certificate
that admits them to a job. If they could buy one for ten dollars they
would much prefer to do so. This degrades the ideal of education in
the minds of pupils and teachers alike, by making it serve primarily
an economic and not a humane end; and it hampers the education of the
intelligent pupil by dragging him down to the level of the vastly more
numerous unintelligent. Democracy considers it undemocratic to spend
public money on the few. It must be spent on the many, but the many
are not the equals of the few, and there is no escaping the conclusion
that our public educational system as we have it now, throughout
every grade, must sacrifice the intelligent, fit few to the supposed
advantage of the heavy-minded, unfit many. I do not speak of the few
and the many in any snobbish sense. It is reasonable to admit that
a child brought up in a stimulating home environment, with all the
advantages that a background of culture and experience in its parents,
and perhaps grandparents, implies, meeting interesting people, hearing
interesting things discussed, and with other “privileges,” is more apt
to be fit than one brought up in a dull, commonplace home with none of
these advantages. It is also reasonable to admit that the number of
homes of the first type are few and of the latter, many. It is in that
sense that I use the words few and many.
Our great democracy claims to base its future upon education. On that,
its spokesmen tell us, it must stand or fall; but, we ask, what sort of
education? Is it to be one aimed chiefly at getting ahead in the world,
at getting a white-collar job instead of a manual one, an executive
instead of a clerical one, and so on? Or is it to be an education that
shall teach us, whatever our economic rank and position, to get the
best out of life, to live fully and joyfully, to think sanely, to act
wisely?
In a recent article, the President of Yale asks educators: “Is your
philosophy of higher education aristocratic, or is it democratic? Do
you conceive the colleges as properly the homes of the children of the
upper classes (whatever that may mean in America) where an agreeable
social experience may be indulged in for four years, or do you regard
them as centers of a robust intellectual life to be enjoyed by all
who possess the qualifications of mind and character enabling them to
profit by the opportunities offered? Are you uncompromisingly committed
to a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’ education, or do you recognize
the unquestioned dynamic of vocational and professional interests?”
With all respect to President Angell this seems to me the most
amazingly misleading series of questions I have ever read from a man
of such academic standing. Why try to befuddle the issue by speaking
of an “aristocratic” and a “democratic” education? Does he mean by
the first a cultural education and by the latter a vocational one?
Or does he mean by the first one which can be pursued by intelligent
minds and by the second one suited to minds less so? I can readily
see the difference between cultural and vocational, and can see that
different grades of minds are capable of proceeding to different
lengths in the pursuit of either of these two sorts of education, but
I fail to see what he means by aristocratic and democratic so applied.
The whole series of questions appears to me perilously like an appeal
to popular prejudice rather than an honest attempt to set the problem
clearly before us. It is clear what he intends by the high-sounding
phrase “unquestioned dynamic of vocational and professional interest.”
In plain English it means money-making as an incentive to study and
regarded as the end of education. Yet the only alternative Dr. Angell
places before the public is what he calls, evidently intending to
discredit any alternative, “a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’
education.” I deny most obstreperously that these are the only
alternatives and I do not hesitate to assert that by putting the list
of questions as he has, Dr. Angell, so far from doing anything to
clarify the public mind on the problem, has done much to befuddle it.
Appealing to prejudice by calling vocational training or an inferior
quality of cultural education “democratic education” can only mislead
the people at large as to what a genuine education is. He might as
well speak of democratic truth or democratic fine art or democratic
scholarship or democratic beauty. Nor need he confuse the issue by
talking of “the upper classes (whatever that may mean in America)” as
contrasted with “a robust intellectual life.” Dr. Angell knows as well
as anyone that there is a great difference between homes in America
as everywhere, and the children in them, though homes and children
of the best sort may be found on all economic and social planes and
are not limited to any one “class.” He must also realize that under
modern conditions, which have given a great economic value to the
possession of a college degree, the masses of students that go to
college for the sake of acquiring such a degree for business reasons
do anything but make their college a “center of robust intellectual
life.” I suggest to Dr. Angell that he read that stinging indictment of
American collegiate and intellectual life, _Lone Voyagers_. “Chippewa
College” was assuredly not patronized by the children of the upper
classes, but the picture of the student body is all too true to life
in such places. “The ambition of the ‘co-eds’ was to teach in a small
town high school, not unlike the one where they had been educated. The
town often hadn’t even a library. Such girls couldn’t waste their time
developing a critical spirit. It would be suicidal for them if they
did. Their happiest fate was to marry the town dentist or doctor, the
clerk in the bank, the owner of the garage. Their highest ambition
in life would be to send their children to Chippewa. The men in the
College of Arts were generally serving time, taking the prerequisites
to get them into the professional schools, or lazy boys content to
loaf for four years before they settled down into business.” As to the
college life, the cheap toggery shops with the “cheap sport” clothes,
the yet cheaper movies with student cat-calls at risqué incidents, the
college “activities,” do we not know them all too well as Miss Neff
portrays them? Does this sort of thing, which is common enough all
over the United States, go to make that “center of robust intellectual
life” that Dr. Angell offers as the only alternative to “the life of
the upper classes, whatever that may mean in America”? No, the choice
is not between the “children of the upper classes” on the one hand,
and “all those who possess qualifications of mind and character” on
the other, but between those of all classes who have the desire and
capacity for genuine education and those, again, of all classes who
desire merely the social or economic benefit to be derived from the
possession of a college diploma. If, as he says, the effort to answer
his questions “will doubtless keep the educational pendulum swinging
vigorously for many a day to come,” all I can say is that the heads of
our educational leaders are more bemused than even I have ever claimed
them to be.
There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make
a living, and the other how to live. Surely these should never be
confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of
what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make
a living. In the old days we learned how to do it mainly in the shop
or on the farm or by practice in the office of merchant, lawyer, or
doctor. In the complications of modern life and with our increased
accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some
years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular
trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind
us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a
profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings. It
is merely learning how to make a living. Culture is essential in order
to enable us to know how to live and how to get the best out of living,
and a liberal education should help us on our way to acquire it, albeit
the acquisition is a lifelong process. “Culture” is a much misused
word and has come to have a very feminine and anæmic connotation in
America. There have been innumerable definitions, but we may quote one
of Matthew Arnold’s as being as suggestive as any for our purpose. He
speaks of culture as “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which
make the beauty and worth of human nature.” This is far removed from
giving the degree of Bachelor of Arts to a student who has learned how
to truss and dress poultry or has compassed the mysteries of how to
sell real estate and run an apartment house.
Of course, life is short and getting rich is long—or may be. Many
people who go to college to-day, aside from their lack of _desire_ for
education, have no _time_ for it, because it does not lead immediately
to “power and service.” This, to be sure, is nothing new. What _is_
new is that a large proportion of the colleges have opened their arms
to all such and have deceived them into believing that when they have
gotten an olla-podrida of ill-digested information of a scientific and
cultural sort, with the practical courses to teach them how to earn a
better living more quickly, they have acquired a liberal education and
are entitled to consider themselves Bachelors or Masters of Arts. The
words, indeed, have come to signify as little as “gentleman” or “lady.”
It all comes back, like most things, to the question of values—of what
is worth while, of what is the good life. Should we learn French in
order to impress the boss? Should we pick up scraps from collections
of the classics in order to make a hit at Mrs. Jones’s party and
impress her guests? One of the most sympathetic of foreign critics and
observers of American life, a man who has spent much time among us,
recently said that one feeling he always had here was that all our
goods were in our shop windows and there was nothing behind. I believe
this criticism is all too true. We are so busy _doing_ that we have no
time to _be_. We all have almost forgotten what it is to _be_. We all
have motor cars but no place to go. At present what we need above all
else in America is education—not the infinitely variegated supply of
courses that make a college catalogue look like Sears, Roebuck’s, but a
liberal education that will enable us to create a scale of values for
our experiences and to take a philosophical attitude toward the complex
reality about us.
If it be complained that most people have no time for an education
that does not give immediate results, I again reply that that is their
misfortune and has nothing to do with the matter. It is extremely
unfortunate, if they are really capable of being educated, that they
have no time for it; but, that being so, why tell them they _are_
educated? Why not face the problem frankly and divide education (and
degrees) into the two sections that I have suggested, the one to teach
people how to make a living and the other to give them a _liberal_
education, to teach them how to live, how to develop all those powers
within themselves that make for the beauty and worth of life? If
everyone in a democracy cannot have such an education (and a degree),
neither can everyone have some of the other good things—a million
dollars, or the talent that makes him a poet or painter or president of
an advertising company.
IV
Is it not time that we stopped marking down all our spiritual goods
to the price that the lowest in the cultural scale can pay? In the
seventeenth century the lower middle class in Holland became very
prosperous and there was a great demand for small paintings to adorn
their new houses. As one of the historians of their art writes, instead
of improving the quality of the art, this situation brought about a
deterioration, because of the simple rule that “a large uneducated
demand in any field can never produce anything but a glut of inferior
commodity.”
Whether a democracy can last is problematic, but it is certain it
cannot last if there are no leaders above the general level. How
are we to train them? Is it by training men solely for a particular
calling—medicine, engineering, running a locomotive, or laundering
collars? Or are we to give, to some at least, an education in
which doing is subordinated to being, in which the development of
intelligence and character shall be held superior to passing an
examination in philosophy after reading novels for nine months, or
learning how to truss and dress poultry? Sir Arthur Keith recently
said, speaking of English education, that “it is self-discipline; the
formation of character in making man’s higher centers masters of his
cerebral establishments.” However it may be brought about—and that is
something for the educators to decide (though they seem woefully at sea
about it)—what the leaders of our civilization need in education is to
be taught to _be_ something, rather than merely how to _do_ something.
In America, if I may repeat, far more than in Europe, the soul of the
people depends upon the culture to be obtained by a genuinely liberal
education. In Europe, in a sense, culture lies about one, for, in
another definition of Arnold’s, it is “contact with the best that has
been thought and said.” I happen to be writing this before my fire
in London. Any errand that takes me into the streets—a visit to my
agent in Fleet Street, a trip down into the City, a stroll through
Whitehall—stirs more historical questions than a month in college could
answer. Three minutes in one direction will take me to the marvelous
collection of the Dutch masters gathered here for the time being from
all the world. Ten minutes in a bus and I have the wonders of the
Elgin marbles and the choicest sculpture of Greece for the asking. I
am planning an ordinary week-end trip which in a few hours will take
me to France or Holland, where entirely new sets of impressions and
questions of every sort—æsthetic, historic, racial—will be aroused in
spite of myself.
It is far easier here, as I well know from years spent on both sides
of the world, to stress _being_ instead of _doing_ than it is in any
corner of my native land. In America not only is it almost impossible
to get into contact with “the best that has been said and thought,”
save through books alone, but _doing_ has been exalted into a national
cult and _being_ is despised by public opinion as something enervating
and almost disgraceful for a man to consider, something tainted with
the idea of “idleness-and-leisure,” which are usually hyphenated in
America.
“Power and service.” But of what earthly use is power unless it is to
produce or secure something worth while, and of what use is service
unless it is to serve some desirable end? In so far as any ideal is
considered an end in America, it is the ideal of “a better life for
everyone of every class”; but that merely puts off the question one
stage further. What is a better life? Are not power and service merely
_means_, just as are dynamos or locomotives? And what can the end be
except a state of _being_ desirable to man? And should it not be the
aim of education to help us learn what that end, that desirable state
of being, is, and how to attain to it as far as the imperfect nature of
man will allow?
We have been “doing” for three hundred years. We have cleared and
settled a continent. We have accumulated the most colossal store of
material power and resources the world has ever seen. Is it not time
that we began to think what to do with all our means, what the end
is that we wish to attain? If we are not to do it _now_, when, in
Heaven’s name, are we _ever_ going to be rich and prosperous enough to
do it? We have always given as an excuse for our cultural barrenness
that we have had to lay the material foundations first. But how can
that excuse be given any more, when we are the richest nation in the
world, and we are told, until we are almost sick of hearing it, that
all classes enjoy the highest standard of material comfort in the
history of the race? Are we forever to continue getting more things in
order to get more things with which to get more things, and so on _ad
infinitum_? Are we forever to seek the means without ever considering
the end for which we seek them? Is there any sense in _doing_ if we are
never to _become_ something, to _be_ something, as a result? The entire
practical life in America urges us to do unceasingly and unthinkingly.
Should it not be one of the chief functions of education to find the
strands of meaning in our ceaseless web of doing and to teach us some
purpose in our lives? Can anything give us that purpose better than
culture, in the sense first defined above? Can that culture be attained
by a “liberal education” that permits “business organization,” “fire
insurance,” “business psychology,” or “personnel administration” to be
substituted at the whim of the student for literature, art, science,
history or philosophy?
Does not our whole educational muddle spring in part from mob
snobbery—from exactly the same mental attitude that makes the laboring
class talk of “colored wash-ladies” and “garbage gentlemen,” that
makes them want to be dubbed Bachelors of Art after studying business
English and typewriting, ever gaining heaven by serving earth? Does it
not also spring in part from the lack of character and of a coherent
philosophy of life among those who should be our educational leaders?
To the latter, in taxes and endowments, we are giving money reckoned in
hundreds of millions. We are giving them also a hundred million years
or so of the lives of our young in every generation. In exchange, what
are they returning to us in national ideals and culture? Is it not a
fair question?
CHAPTER VIII
MASS PRODUCTION AND
INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION
MASS PRODUCTION AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION
Education in America, where there are about seven hundred thousand
students in institutions of collegiate rank alone, has become almost
a major industry. Although teachers are not yet organized into trade
unions there is a greater cohesion among them as a body than there is
among artists, journalists, clergymen, authors, and other men leading
what may loosely be called the artistic or intellectual life. Moreover
it is easier to get at the economic situation of the professor’s
household than it is to do so in the case of the others. Statistics of
income are readily available and, thanks to two recent studies, one
made of the faculty of Yale and the other of that of the University
of California, we have very definite information as to their detailed
expenses. For these various reasons the question of the professional
income of the intellectual worker and its relation to the general wage
or income scale of the country and the standard of living has largely
been confined to the teacher. For the same reasons the teacher offers
perhaps the best starting point for a present discussion of our problem.
The California study[1] was a survey of the incomes, expenses, and
ways of life of ninety-six married members of the faculty, and I shall
attempt to summarize only a few of the salient points brought out by
the investigation. Half of these families had one child or none and
the entire ninety-six averaged one and a half children per family. As
a rule the salaries did not cover the necessary living expenses, the
median salary of the whole group amounting to only sixty-five per cent
of its total income (mostly spent), the difference being made up almost
wholly from extra earnings and not from investments. The salaries
ranged from $1,400 to $8,000, the average being $3,000; the bulk of the
men holding full professorial rank being paid from $4,000 to $5,000. In
forty per cent of the families the wives worked and added to the family
income. As a rule, the men found teaching in the summer the only way
of making the additional amount called for by their expenses, so that
one-third of the faculty members and their wives reported no vacation
at all; forty per cent had less than two weeks; and sixty per cent less
than four weeks.
Correlating salaries and length of service, we find that after four
years at college and three to five years additional preparation working
for a higher degree or as a teaching fellow, a man may serve on the
faculty from twelve to twenty-five years and be close to fifty years of
age before he is at all assured of getting from $3,000 to $4,000, even
if he is retained and successful. After fifteen years’ service on top
of from seven to nine years’ preparation, he has one chance in ten of
earning from $5,000 to $7,000. Fourteen years’ service, or twenty-one
to twenty-three in all, are required to bring him to security of tenure
on a salary of from $4,000 to $5,000. No family spending less than
$6,000 was able to afford a full-time maid. Nearly one-third of the
wives, mostly college-bred themselves, did all of the family laundry
as well as the rest of the housework. For two-thirds of the husbands
and one-half of the wives, clothing was reported as costing annually
between $100 and $200 each. The average amount spent per family for
recreation, other than an automobile, was $200 a year. As a result of
the study the investigator reaches the conclusion that $7,000 is the
minimum amount per year on which a professional family can live without
impairing their own efficiency in their professional work.
The findings at Yale are equally striking. The official report[2]
made on conditions there recites, with regard to the members of the
faculty spending $4,000 a year, that “the married men at this level
are usually of assistant professor rank, often with families of
young children. They must live with extreme economy in the cheapest
obtainable apartment, borrowing to meet the expenses of childbirth or
sickness. The wife does all the cooking, housework, and laundry.” Of
those spending $8,500 the report states that “the families of associate
professors and the younger full professors at this level, with three
children and school expenses from nothing up to $1,000 a year, may
either have a full-time servant or spend only $200 to $400 for
occasional service. They live on the edge of a deficit. Even a small
insurance premium is paid with difficulty and the purchase of clothing
is kept as low as possible.” More than a quarter of the faculty
families covered by the report had no children, and the average number
of children in such families as had any was exactly two. An instructor
for the first two years gets a salary of $1,500-$1,800, in his third
year $2,100, and thereafter $2,500. An assistant professor gets $3,000
during his first three years, $3,500 in the next three years, and
$4,000 during his next three. An associate professor gets from $4,000
to $5,000 and a professor from $5,000 to $8,000. A first-class cook
in New Haven costs about $1,000 a year. Summing up, the report adds
that “taking into account the expenses to which his position subjects
him and judging by the home that he is able to maintain, the American
university teacher in many cases lives essentially as do men of the
skilled mechanic class.... It would perhaps be generally conceded that
a reasonable standard for the economic level for a professor after
twenty-five years of service would be the amount of money necessary to
maintain a home in a ten-room house, which he owns free of mortgage, to
keep one servant and pay for some occasional service, and to provide
an education for his children in preparatory school, college, and
professional school on an equality with that obtained by the general
run of students in this University. From the costs of various modes of
living shown above [in the report], it appears that life at this level
in New Haven now comes to about $15,000 or $16,000 a year.”
It is well known to those familiar with the situation of other
intellectual workers that they find themselves in the same plight as
the teachers in every case in which they do not sell their product in
a mass-market, but before carrying the argument further I must touch
on one more point in connection with the teachers. In another recent
report[3] covering 302 colleges with 11,361 faculty members, it is
stated that the average salary paid instructors, assistant or associate
professors, and professors was $2,958. This compares with $1,724 in
1914-15. If we take that year as par and accept the usual comparison of
the value of the dollar now as 61.7 cents, we find that in purchasing
power the present average salary is $1,825, or about six per cent more
than eleven years previously. It is evident therefore that the present
crisis and deep discontent among intellectual workers is not due, or
due only in small part, merely to the depreciated value of money. We
must seek the cause elsewhere.
It is due in my opinion mainly to two things, both of which derive
largely from mass production, namely, a rapidly altered standard and
ideal of living, and a vast and equally rapid shift in the economic
positions of the various classes of society.
Mass production, for the manufacturer, greatly decreases the cost of
production, and selling in vast quantities greatly increases profits.
There will come a time for almost every product when the inertia of
selling it in a market already fairly saturated with it will increase
the selling cost to such an extent as may more than equal the decreased
cost of production, as is already occurring in certain lines. But
meanwhile mass production has created enormous profits. In some cases
and to some extent, though much fewer and less than generally assumed,
the consumer has shared in these profits through lowered retail prices.
The rest of the increased profit has gone in part to the workmen and,
in much larger part, to the owners of the plants. In some lines,
notably ready-made clothes for men, the prices of which are two and a
half times those of 1912, the consumer has not benefited at all.
A generation ago the range of goods which even the rich might buy was
comparatively restricted, and the scale at expenditure for practically
every one was moderate. Today there is an almost unlimited range,
and although mass production may have put innumerable things at the
disposal of the public, the cost of living has not only been enormously
increased by them (as in the case of the automobile which absorbed
on the average six per cent of the total expense of the University
of California faculty), but the constant assault on people’s minds
by the most insidious sort of advertising makes these things appear
necessities. Mass production requires mass sales, and mass sales
require that the public shall be made to believe in the necessity of
buying. The ideal of the modern business man is not to supply wants but
to create them. America has always been a mass-minded country, and the
modern sales manager not only appeals to the individual in creating new
wants but enlists on his side the whole force of social opinion. His
effort is directed not only at making an individual desire a certain
article for itself but at making him feel that his standing in the
community and the welfare of his wife and children depend upon their
having it.
Mass-production salesmanship thus develops throughout all society
a vast number of new and formerly unfelt wants, wants based on the
things themselves or on social prestige. If these wants are satisfied
by purchase the family expense is greatly increased. If the individual
resists when others of his own class, and more particularly those
formerly considered as in a lower social or economic class, buy freely,
he feels himself sinking in the social scale in a country in which the
“standard of living” has come to have wholly a material significance.
Moreover, many of these new things, such as the automobile and
telephone, become literal necessities, when they become so common as
to create a new social life based upon their possession. As I pointed
out in an earlier chapter a very considerable part of the increased
cost of living is due to the so-called higher scale of living, so
that a comparison between the increase of salaries and the increase
in the cost of certain goods is no indication at all of the increased
difficulty of living.
The scientific inventions and new commercial products of the past
twenty years would, in any case, have made their appeal to such classes
in the community as could have afforded them, but the complete change
in the American mode of life and the consequent cost which has engulfed
us all like a tidal wave would not have occurred had it not been for
mass production. No one is troubled by not having something of which
he has never heard, and he is not greatly so by not being able to have
something which no one has whom he is ever likely to know personally.
For example, it could not have troubled a college professor or writer
in 1890 that he had not an automobile. It does not trouble him today
that he cannot have a private five-hundred-foot ocean-going yacht
like Vincent Astor. It is not wholly a question of keeping up with
the Joneses. Having a $2,000 car when one ought to have only a Ford
is sheer ostentation, but having some car in the country is now a
necessity unless one is going to cut one’s self and one’s family off
from a very large part of social “neighborhood” as well as from the
pleasures that all one’s friends, practically without exception, are
enjoying. The fact that today “everyone is having everything,” whether
they pay for it or not, is due to advertising and “high-powered
salesmanship,” and these are due primarily to mass production which
requires mass markets.
But even these would not have been sufficient to alter so completely
the status and peace of mind of the intellectual worker had it not been
for the other effect of mass production mentioned above, that is, the
shift in the economic status of the other classes. Formerly, although
the intellectual worker occupied a comparatively low position in the
economic scale, he was distinctly above the laboring class, and even
between him and the successful business man there was no unbridgable
gulf. Between the home of the college professor, clergyman, or author
and that of the business man there was a difference in degree but not
in kind. The intellectual, like his business acquaintance, could have
decent living quarters for his family and a maid to relieve his wife
of the heaviest household duties, and make his home an expression of
himself.
Today the intellectual finds his life and status attacked both from
above and below. Whatever may be the other and somewhat problematic
results of mass production, it has assuredly made the rich incredibly
richer than they ever were before. Ford, who has refused an offer of
one billion dollars’ cash for his plant, and who, in his incorporated
form, keeps a balance at the bank of four hundred millions, is only
a glaring example of what has been going on all around us. The same
figures that represented the entire capital values of considerable
fortunes twenty years ago represent today but the annual incomes of
the fortunate transient war profiteers or permanent mass producers.
This colossal increase in the wealth of the wealthy is tending to
place a complete gulf between classes and at the same time to establish
unprecedented standards of living.
Though it may seem a minor matter, take for example the question of
furnishing a home. If the laws of imitation are of great power in
society, so is that which makes expressing one’s own personality one
of the joys of life. The masters of mass production may preach the
benefits of standardization but they themselves are exempt from the
process. “A standardized print on your wall is just the thing for
you,” say they, while, like Mr. Mellon, they are reported to bid Count
Czernin a million dollars for a Vermeer. “Standardized furniture is
just the thing for the home,” they preach from magazines while they
sweep the market clean, at fabulous prices, of the fine old bits that
even the most modest collector might have hoped to pick up with luck
twenty years ago, until they have forced even the richest museums to
forgo purchase. The intellectuals, because they are intellectual, are
among the most insistent of human beings against being standardized.
The mass production managers feed them Ford cars, Victrolas, cheap
prints and other forms of _panes et circenses_ and tell them they
should be satisfied, while they themselves by the power of their
wealth, and in their frantic endeavor to escape standardized homes for
themselves, bid fantastic prices against one another for old silver,
chairs, tables, pictures, and every product of non-machine-made art and
artisanship. The average man today, who wishes to make his home, sees
everything but standardized articles soaring into the financial heavens
above like toy balloons escaped from a child’s hand. It is symptomatic
of much else in a new world suffering from colossal and concentrated
wealth. The intellectual finds himself deprived of more and more in
comparison with the business man, and shoved downward into the general
undistinguished standardized mass.
But if he is shoved downward by the effect of the mass production
wealth above him, he also has had a serious blow from the mass
production wages of the classes below him. All wages have felt the
effects of the mass production scales, and the result is that while the
wealthy can pay the $900 or $1,000 demanded by a maid, the intellectual
worker’s wife does the cooking and laundry, as we saw above. Is it any
wonder, as a man watches his wife, who perhaps has as good a mind as
his own, spend her days over the range and the tub in order that he
may use his own mind to the best advantage, that he wonders what is
ahead for her and the children and meditates escape for all of them
from the plight into which they have been plunged? In a less material
civilization, such as that of France, where, moreover, intellectual
work has social recognition and reward quite apart from its financial,
the plight is in many respects less serious even in the face of what
Americans would consider poverty.
Such an escape, as we have just suggested, however, if made, has two
aspects, the individual and the social. Frequently it is not difficult
to make. It may be a complete flight from the intellectual to the
business world, as has been and is being made by many. Or it may take
the form of adapting one’s intellectual product to mass consumption.
One may try for the movies, preach sensational sermons, become a
popular lecturer, write text books, or, if one has been writing for
the serious magazines, try to learn the trick of writing for those
with circulation in millions; and quadruple one’s income or even
amass a fortune. All the methods of escape suggested, however, entail
for the individual a warping of the characteristic bent of his mind
and generally a serious degeneration in his intellectual quality and
character.
The escape thus has its social aspect. America already has, probably,
the lowest grade mental life of any of the great modern nations. It
can ill afford to destroy what intellectual life it has and force
all intellectual and artistic individualism into the mass pattern.
At the end of that road lies an Assyria, a Babylon, a Carthage. Not
only can a nation not continue to function humanely with a large part
of its intellectual life suppressed, but it may be asked whether it
can permanently continue to function at all. The rich may buy up
all the old furniture and paintings in the world, but without new
mind it would seem as though a machine civilization based on science
must perish. All of our practical business men and inventors are now
dependent in the last analysis on the pure scientist, the man whose
thought and experiments bear no apparent relation to the practical
life. The business man may consider the intellectual a crank and of no
account in a practical world unless he submits to mass production and
rolls up royalties that can be understood even by a realtor, but the
intellectual life is all of a piece and it may be questioned whether a
nation that gauges its values by purely material standards and yet at
the same time reduces its intellectual workers below the economic level
of a freight-car conductor can continue indefinitely to produce even
the pure scientist. As M. Herriot said in an address to the students of
the Sorbonne last July, “ne croyez pas à l’artificielle distinction
des sciences et des lettres.... Les faits sont innombrables et les
formes infinies. Au-dessus de tout, il y a l’esprit, maître du monde.”
Europe might supply us with ideas in exchange for dollars but I see
no remedy for our own intellectual life except a gradually growing
sense of the real values of civilization on the part of the people. If
business men consider a railway conductor a more important person than
a professor, they will, quite apart from the law of supply and demand,
give him a larger salary, and provide for college buildings rather than
for the men who alone can give the buildings any significance. The
problem comes back, as most do, to what people consider the real values
in life. If, in the overwhelming mass of the population, those values
are material and not spiritual, one cannot expect the spiritual life to
flourish.
Of course for the intellectual worker of any sort, Grub Street has
always been in the background, and a teacher, writer, or artist is
probably further removed from the fear of starvation and the gutter
today than perhaps ever before. It may also be conceded that the
intellectuals should lead the way in renunciation and a sane ordering
of life. But it must be remembered that in America owing to mass
_mores_ the individual (with his family) is infinitely less free to
lead his own life in his own way and yet retain social contacts with
others than he is in almost any country in Europe. To a considerable
extent, it is only after he has conformed to the material American
standards that his real spiritual freedom and influence in personal
relationships, begin. Moreover, whereas in Europe one can both
preach and practise renunciation of the material for the sake of the
spiritual, the doctrine in this country is considered un-American, and
if carried out by many would obviously bring the whole system of mass
production crashing about our ears. This is readily understood by the
business leaders, who are the real heroes and ideals of the people. The
last thing in the world that they want either preached or practised is
the simple life. The intellectual here, therefore, who is himself quite
content to live that life and do his creative work without any thought
of competing for rewards with the business man, finds solidly aligned
against such a scheme of living not only the mass production wage
scales which make the cost of almost any decent living prohibitive, but
also the opinion of a spiritually unawakened public singularly bent
upon forcing conformity to its own standards, and the opinion of the
interested leaders of the public, the business men whose own profits
now depend upon the public’s becoming more and more materialistic.
The gigantic powers of manufacturing now in existence require for
their profitable exploitation that the public shall be made steadily
to develop new wants, wants that can be satisfied only by manufactured
articles. Hoover and others may prate all they like about the
concurrent need of an intellectual and spiritual life, but how is that
life to develop if people are to be made to use their whole energies
in satisfying new wants on the material plane? Yet if, on the one
hand, they do not so grow, and, on the other, the intellectual classes
become steadily more pinched between the two classes benefiting by mass
production,—the owners above setting ever higher standards of living
and the operatives below pressing steadily past them in an orgy of
material well-being,—what will become of the intellectuals and how long
will they continue to struggle and deny themselves, and have their
wives do the laundry, in a civilization which will more and more look
down upon their lack of earning power and their declining economic and
social status?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Getting and Spending at the Professional Standard of Living. By J.
B. Peixotto. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1927.
[2] Incomes and Living Costs of a University Faculty. Edited by Y.
Henderson and M. D. Davis. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1928.
[3] Teachers’ Salaries 1926-7. By Trevor Arnett. General Education
Board. 1928.
CHAPTER IX
THE MUCKER POSE
THE MUCKER POSE
I
This borrowed title expresses better than any I have been able to
devise for myself a problem which has recently been put to me by
several of my American friends, men who on account of both their
profession and positions are familiar with the more cultured portion
of the American scene. The question which they put is one that I have
been hesitatingly asking myself as I contrast that scene on successive
returns from abroad with the one very obviously to be observed in
this respect in France or England. “Why,” they ask, “is it that a
gentleman in America nowadays seems afraid to appear as such; that
even university men try to appear uncultured; and that the pose of
a gentleman and a scholar is that of the man in the street?” A few
nights ago another friend of mine, a literary editor of some importance
in New York, complained in the course of the evening’s talk that the
verbal criticism of many of the writers whom he knew had descended to
the moronic classifications of “hot stuff,” “bully,” “rot,” and so on.
These writers, often meticulous in the artistry of their own work and
thoroughly competent to criticize acutely and intelligently that of
others, appeared afraid to do so lest they be considered as literary
poseurs. The real pose in their cases was in talking like news-agents
on a railroad train; but that appeared to them to be safe, whereas
vague danger lurked in conversing as would any intelligent French or
English critic.
The mucker-poseurs do not content themselves with talking like
uneducated half-wits. They also emulate the language and manners of the
bargee and the longshoreman, although where the profanity of the latter
is apt to have at least the virtue of picturesqueness, the swearing
of the mucker-poseur is apt to be merely coarse. A member of a most
distinguished family and a young graduate of one of our best-known
Eastern universities was overheard the other day in his university
club in New York describing his new position in the banking world. The
nearest to analysis or description of his work that this young scion
of American aristocracy with every social and educational advantage
could reach was to tell his friends that it was “the God-damnedest
most interesting job in the world.” Among both men and women of the
supposedly cultivated classes such profanity is much on the increase. I
know of a man who has recently declined to take foreign visitors to his
club for luncheon or dinner any longer on account of the unfortunate
impression which would be made upon them by the hard swearing of the
American gentlemen, mucker-poseurs, at the surrounding tables. One of
the finest scholars in the country, a man who once had distinguished
manners, has become not only extremely profane but exceedingly addicted
to smutty stories, both, apparently, in the effort to make himself
considered a good mixer and as a bid for popularity. If one wishes to
acquire an extensive and varied vocabulary of the most modern sort, one
has merely to watch the young ladies of the mucker-poseur type playing
tennis at Southampton or Newport.
Again, the mucker-poseur aims to act like the lowest of muckers when
he—and frequently she—gets drunk. Drinking in this country has ceased
to add any charm or grace to social life. On a sailing from New York
on the _Aquitania_ at midnight I counted twelve first-cabin women
passengers brought on board, all so drunk that they could not get up
the gangway without help. Many years ago, when I was a small boy of
twelve, I attended “Field Day” at one of the most exclusive private
boarding schools in the East. In the course of the day an address was
made by an old graduate on the subject of alcohol. To the surprise
and horror of the clerical head of the school, the good-natured but
somewhat inebriated speaker said nothing to condemn drinking, but he
threw out the comment, which is all I can now recall of his speech,
that “when you boys do drink, remember always to get drunk like
gentlemen.” That is something which our present generation of drinkers
have completely forgotten. They act in country clubs in a way which
would have been considered a disgrace to the patrons and patronized in
a disorderly house of a generation ago. It is a question not of a mere
decline in manners but of consciously striven-for pose.
In the case of the young this is more understandable, just as it is
more international. I am not here concerned, however, with (or at) the
vagaries of the younger and, in so many respects, admirable generation.
I am concerned with their elders, men who have lived long enough to
have developed personalities of their own, men who appreciate the value
of cultivating both mind and manners. Why should they be afraid to
appear as cultured gentlemen and assume as a protective coloration the
manners and level of thought of those who are beneath them?
The question would be a futile one unless we believed that manners and
culture possess genuine significance, a significance for society as a
whole as well as for the individual. It is all too evident that a large
proportion of the dwellers in our United States do not believe so, but
there is a large minority which does. Not to do so argues a failure to
think things through and ignorance of history and human nature. This
chapter deals with the contemporary attitude of many believers, and we
can but glance briefly, before passing to them, at the non-believers.
II
One of the most suggestive methods of modern study has been the
comparative. By the use of none other, however, are the unwary and the
untrained so likely to come to logical grief over a _non sequitur_.
The comparative study of habits and customs has revealed that both
moral and social conventions have varied from age to age, from place
to place, and from race to race. Immediately the unwary and untrained
jump to the conclusion that because there appear to be no eternal or
universal standards of morals and manners there is, therefore, no value
in a local, temporary, and but slowly changing one—a conclusion by no
logical possibility to be drawn from the premises. The result of this
particular and, at the moment, very popular _non sequitur_ has been to
cause in many persons a headlong jettisoning of their whole cargo of
morals, manners, and conventions, and the bringing about of a muckerly
chaos which arouses mirth or terror according to the temperament of
the social observer.
It would seem as though no sane person with a knowledge of the past of
his own species and any adequate insight into human nature could fail
to believe in the absolute need of _some_ standards, _some_ established
values, to save us from a derelict wallowing about in the welter of
sensations, impulses, attractions, and repulsions which form so much
of this strange dream we call life. The standards, the values, will
undoubtedly alter from time to time and from place to place; but that
does not invalidate the need of having some of them at any one given
time and place. Even the now much scorned minor conventions have
their effective influence upon conduct, remote or proximate. A story
is told of an English gentleman who was sent out as governor of an
island where the entire population save for his sole self was black and
savage. He dressed for his solitary dinner every night as carefully as
though he were about to take a taxi to the smartest residence in Park
Lane. He did so not from habit but from a knowledge of human nature.
“If,” he said, “I should drop this convention of civilized society, I
should find myself some day having dropped one and another of the more
important conventions, social and moral, and lower myself to the level
of the blacks whom I govern. Evening clothes are far more important
here than they ever were in London.”
As for the second point, lack of culture, it is most evident in the
extreme slovenliness in America in the use of the English language.
There is, of course, some slang which is not slovenly but which has
been born in a flash of genuine insight; and the language is always
being enriched by absorbing many such words from below, much as the
English aristocracy is by marrying or admitting commoners. But this is
not true of the vast mass of slang words and cheap and easy expressions
which are intellectually slovenly and nothing else; and anyone
habitually using them impairs the keenness of his mind as much as he
would the strength of his body by lolling in a hammock all his life.
There is no question but that slang, hackneyed phrases, and clichés
worn smooth make for intellectual laziness, and if constantly used blur
the sense of discrimination. The very first step toward a cultivated
mind is the development of the ability rationally to discriminate,
to distinguish between varying values and qualities. It is not easy,
and most of us Americans rarely achieve it in the cultural field. I
have often been struck by the different replies one receives from an
American and a Frenchman if you ask them what sort of person so-and-so
is. The American will usually find himself helpless and toss off a
mere “good scout,” “a great guy,” “a good egg,” whereas the Frenchman,
with a moment’s reflection, will give you in half a dozen sentences
a sharply etched sketch of the man’s distinctive characteristics, or
what he believes to be such, and classify him accurately as to type. To
describe anything accurately—book, picture, man or woman—so as to bring
out its unique individual qualities, calls for mental exercise of no
mean order. One has to train one’s self to do it and keep in training;
yet the ability to distinguish, if one of the first steps toward
culture, is also, in its higher forms, one of its most perfect fruits.
If one dodges every call for discrimination, if one gets no farther in
describing a book than “hot stuff,” one loses the power after a while
even if one ever possessed it. Slovenly language corrodes the mind.
These few observations as to manners and culture are well enough
understood by any cultivated person who has had social and intellectual
training and who has thought things through. He knows that there
are both values and dangers in life, that some things are more
valuable than others, and that if he has achieved any such social and
intellectual training he cannot lower himself to the general level
again without risk. If manners and culture have no value, there is
no question involved, but if they have—and we shall now assume that
they have—the man who possesses them is above, in those respects at
least, the vast mass of men who do not possess them. Why then should he
pretend not to, and assume the manners and mental lazzaronism of the
crowd? It may be that there is no answer to the question, but as I find
those better qualified than myself asking it, it is worth pondering
over, and I have come to think that there may be three fundamental
influences at work in America which will help us to solve it. One is
democracy as we have it, another is business, and the third is the
extreme mobility of American life.
III
In civilization no man can live wholly to or for himself, and whoever
would achieve power, influence, or success must cater to the tastes and
whims of those who have the granting of these things in their hands.
In a democracy, speaking broadly, those who have the power to grant
are the whole people; and the minds and manners of the people as a
whole are of necessity below those of the chosen few who have risen
above the average level by gifts of nature or happy opportunity. Every
social class everywhere has always had its own standards of morals,
manners, and culture. When such classes are separated by wide social
or economic chasms, the only influences they exert upon one another
are apt to be negative. Each lives in a world of its own, supported
by the only public opinion for which it cares, that of its own class.
Each also tends to react against the manners or morals of the other.
The aristocrats of an earlier day looked down upon the common people
and were more than ever satisfied with their own codes. The common
people, in turn, feeling themselves despised, bolstered up their egos
by despising the manners and morals of the class which looked down
upon them. Much of the Puritan movement in England and elsewhere has
here its roots. By no possibility could an ordinary laborer attain to
the manners, social ease, or knowledge of the world of a duke. Ergo,
the laborer, by unconscious mental processes well understood by modern
psychology, asserted his own worth by denying worth to the qualities
of the classes above him. He could not have the manners of a duke;
therefore, those manners were undesirable anyway. He could not travel
and he could not gain the most valuable sort of education, that of
association with great or cultivated men; therefore, such things were
of no importance. So long as the classes remain separated, as I said
above, their influence upon one another is largely negative, but when
class distinctions disappear in a democracy the mutual influences of
members of those former classes or their vestiges in later generations
become as complex in their action as the currents where tide and river
meet.
The effects of democracy in America have been emphasized by three
factors not present in any of the great democracies of Europe. In the
first place, the Americans started almost wholly fresh. Here were no
thousand-year-old institutions and forms of government and society
to be reckoned with as impediments. America was a clean slate. The
settlers did indeed bring with them habits, information, and memories
gained in the Old World, but they brought them to a wilderness.
In the second place, America has been built up exclusively by the
middle and lower classes, from which practically all of us have
descended. Scarcely a man has ever come and settled here who did
not belong to one or the other; and the most distinguished American
families form no exceptions. Every class in history has had its good
and bad attributes which have varied with class, country, and period.
The English middle class, upper and lower, from which the character
of America, with some modifications, has essentially been built
up, had admirable qualities, but it lacked some of those enjoyed
by the aristocracy. For our purpose here we need mention only one.
The genuine aristocrat insists upon being himself and is disdainful
of public opinion. The middle class, on the other hand, has always
been notoriously timid socially. It rests in terror not only of
public but even of village opinion. If the religious refugees of
New England be held an exception, it may be noted that the genuine
ones were far fewer than used to be supposed, and that as a whole
the New England immigration may be considered as part of the great
economic exodus from England which took thirty thousand Englishmen to
Barbados and little St. Kitts while only twelve thousand were settling
Massachusetts. Religious refugees have formed an infinitesimal part of
American immigration as compared with the economic ones.
The third great influence upon American democracy has been the
frontier, whose line was lapped by the waves of the Atlantic in 1640
and after retreating three thousand miles to the Pacific was declared
officially closed only in 1890. In the hard, rough life of the frontier
manners and culture find no home. As Pastorius, the most learned man
who came to America before 1700, said, “never have metaphysics or
Aristotelian logic earned a loaf of bread.” When one is busy killing
Indians, clearing the forest, and trekking farther westward every
decade, a strong arm, an axe, and a rifle are worth more than all the
culture of all the ages. Not only has the frontiersman no leisure
or opportunity to acquire manners and culture but, because of their
apparent uselessness, and in true class spirit, he comes to despise
them. They are effete, effeminate, whereas he and his fellows are the
“real men.” The well-dressed, cultivated gentleman becomes the “dude,”
object of derision, who, so far from exerting any ameliorating social
or intellectual influence, is heartily looked down upon; and culture
itself is relegated to idle women as something with which no real man
would concern himself.
These are some of the special attributes of American democracy, and of
any democracy in a new land, which it shows in addition to those it
would show in any case merely as a democracy. In America it was slow
in gathering into its hands the reins of power. For many generations
the English aristocratic tradition in part survived, and it may be
recalled that we were a part of the British Empire for a longer period
than we have been independent. In general, the “appeal to the people”
throughout the colonial period and the years of the early republic
was an appeal to “the best people” only. The first two presidents,
Washington and Adams, were as little democratic in doctrine as they
were by nature. Jefferson’s doctrinal democracy was largely offset in
practice by his being an aristocrat to his finger tips by nature, and
it was not until Andrew Jackson that “the people” in the democratic
sense came into their own. At his inaugural reception in the White
House his followers climbed upon the silken chairs in their muddy
boots to get a look at him, rushed the waiters to grab champagne,
broke the glasses, and in the joy of victory gave a number of ladies
bloody noses, and even the President himself had to be rescued from his
admirers and hurried out through a back door. This historic episode may
be taken to mark the turning-point in American manners. These people
had made a President. Thereafter their tastes would form one of the
national influences.
IV
It is this new democracy, a hundred times richer and a shade less
raw, which is in the saddle to-day. What has it done in the way of
influencing manners and thought? Leaving all else aside, even at the
risk of drawing a false picture, we shall consider only those points
which may help to answer our first question. For one thing, then, it
has knocked the dignity of its elected officials into a cocked hat.
Leaving out of the scene many of its chosen, such as the mayor of
Chicago or its favorite, Bryan, it forces a man to play the mountebank
and, whatever the character of the man himself, to appear as one of
“the people.” Washington was a very human man but he never forgot that
he was a gentleman. He was adored by his soldiers, but he won their
deep affection without ever for a moment losing the dignity of his
character and manner. One has only to imagine what would have happened
had a group of his men shouted “Atta Boy, Georgie!” to realize the
gulf between his day and ours. When John Quincy Adams was President,
he declined to attend a county fair in Maryland, remarking privately
that he did not intend that the President of the United States should
be made a sideshow at a cattle fair. To-day, the people insist that the
President be a sideshow; and Roosevelt, with amused understanding, in
his cowboy suit and his Rough rider uniform, used his “properties” as
does an actor. Even the supremely conventional Coolidge had to dress
up in a ten-gallon hat and chaps, although utterly out of character,
and looking so. Just as I write these lines, my attention is called to
an announcement in large type in this morning’s _New York Times_ that
it will publish next Sunday “photographs of Herbert Hoover in workaday
clothes and a panorama of his ranch.” So he, too, is cast for the
comedy. Democracy cracks the whip, and even the most conservative of
candidates and officials must dance. In the campaign of 1916 it is said
that Hughes was politely asked to shave his beard to suit the people.
He balked and consented only so far as to trim it. But then he lost the
election.
The people want officials in their own image. Such men as Elihu Root,
Joseph Choate, or John Hay are rarely elected, only appointed. To get
anywhere in elective politics one must be a “good mixer,” and to be a
good mixer one must shed a good part of one’s culture and a good part
of one’s manners. Dignity to a considerable degree must be discarded.
One must conceal one’s knowledge of English and learn the vernacular,
except for “orations.” Henry Adams, when he became a newspaper
correspondent in Washington, said that he had to “learn to talk to
Western congressmen and to hide his own antecedents.” It is what every
gentleman who desires to take part in elective public life on a large
or small stage in the country to-day has to do to some extent except
for happy accidents.
Our democracy has fostered education, at least to the extent of almost
fabulously increasing the numbers of the reading public. What has been,
for the purpose of the present argument, the effect of that? There has
been one effect, at least, germane to this discussion. It has greatly
lowered the tone of our public press. Such newspaper men as I know
agree with me that there has been a most marked decline even in the
last twenty years, and they agree with me as to the cause. In the old
days a newspaper was largely a personal organ, and what appeared in it
reflected for good or ill upon the editor, who was known by name to all
its readers. In New York the _Sun_ was Charles A. Dana. The _Tribune_
was Horace Greeley. To-day we know no editors, only owners. The
newspaper of to-day aims only at circulation, and with every increase
in circulation the quality has to be lowered. The case is well known
of the purchaser a few years ago of what had been one of the country’s
most distinguished journals, who told his staff that thereafter they
would have to “cut the highbrow” and write down to the level of the
increased public he intended to go after. First the “yellow press,”
then the tabloids, taught the older newspapers what fortunes awaited
those who would stoop to pick them up by catering to the masses. A
newspaper depends on its advertising for its profits. Advertising
quantity and rates depend on circulation. Increased circulation spells
decreased quality. There is the vicious circle which has been drawn for
us by the huge mob which has become literate but not educated.
The discovery of the possibilities of mass circulation has caused the
advertisers to raise their demands. Some will not advertise at all in
journals with a circulation of less than half a million. Advertising
is withdrawn from those journals which heroically venture to maintain
their quality at the expense of not increasing their circulation.
Financial ruin usually results. The people are evidently getting the
kind of papers they want, but in doing so they are depriving the
cultured class of the sort _they_ want, and used to get before America
became so “educated.” We get foreign cables about the Prince of Wales
dancing with Judy O’Grady, or the doings of sex perverts in Berlin,
and the treatment of our domestic news is beneath contempt. The other
night I examined what used to be one of the leading papers not only
in New York but in the whole country and I found no headline on three
consecutive pages which did not refer to scandal or to crime. It has
been said that the new reading public has not interfered with the old,
that there are simply vast numbers of new readers of a different type
who are being supplied with what they want. That is not wholly true,
and the competition of the new market has had a heavily detrimental
influence on the older journals. To-day if a man wishes to succeed in a
journalistic career on the daily press he has to scrap even more of his
qualities as a gentleman and a scholar than he has to in a career of
politics.
The democratic spread of education has also had detrimental effects
in other ways. The necessity of finding instruction for the enormous
numbers who now go to school, high school, and college has caused a
demand for teachers which has far outrun the supply of those qualified
to teach. Great numbers of these teachers have even less social and
cultural background than have their students. Under them the students
may learn the facts of some given subject, but they gain nothing in
breadth of culture or even in manners. It is an old story that Charles
Eliot Norton once began a lecture at Harvard by saying, “I suppose
that none of you young men has ever seen a gentleman.” The remark was
hyperbolic, as was intended, but it is only too likely to-day that many
young men can go through some of our newer “institutions of learning”
without seeing at least what used to be called a gentleman. In the
professions, more particularly medicine and law, complaint is rampant
that they are being swamped by young men who know only the facts of
the profession (when they know those) and have no cultural, ethical,
or professional standards. A few such could be ignored. When they
come, as they are coming now, in shoals, they lower the tone of the
whole profession and, without standards themselves, force an unfair
competition upon those who try to maintain them.
V
Perhaps the greatest pressure on the individual to force him to be
wary of how he appears to others is in business, for the overwhelming
mass of Americans are in the varied ranks of business of some sort or
another. One who has reached the top and “made his pile” may, perhaps,
do more or less as he pleases, subject only to milder forms of social
pressure; but for those on the way the road is beset with pitfalls.
Nearly every man wants to make himself popular with his employers, his
fellow-workers, his office superiors, or his customers. These are made
up of all sorts of men, but the sprinkling of gentlemen and scholars
among them is so slight as to be almost negligible for the purpose of
helping one’s advancement. In America, to an extent known nowhere else,
organization is used for every purpose. It is hardly too much to say
that there can hardly be an American who is not a member of from one to
a dozen organizations, ranging from Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Red Men,
Masons, Mechanics, the Grange, and dozens more, to Bar Associations,
Bankers’ Clubs, and social and country clubs innumerable. Some of the
larger corporations, notably the banks and trust companies in New York,
now have clubs made up entirely of members of their own staffs, with
obvious intent. In many lines of business the effect produced by one’s
personality at the annual “convention” is of prime importance. For
business reasons it is essential that men should be at least moderately
popular at all such organizations or meetings. On an unprecedented
scale, tacitly understood but not openly acknowledged, there is
competition for personal popularity. In many lines, such as stock
brokerage where the service is almost wholly personal, it is needful to
“play with your customers,” the necessity varying not with their social
congeniality but with the size of their account. In salesmanship of all
sorts the results of the “personal approach” are, of course, of the
first importance.
In order to gain popularity with a very large proportion of business
men, many of whom have to-day risen from nothing to riches since the
War, one thing is fundamentally necessary. You must never appear to
be superior even if you are. Not long ago one of the New York banks
added a new vice-president. He was chosen not for his ability but for
his hearty vulgarity, so that he could “make contacts” with the bank’s
new sort of customers! Too perfect an accent in English may be almost
as dangerous in business as a false one in Latin used to be in the
House of Lords. To display a knowledge or taste in art or literature
not possessed by your “prospect” may be fatal. On the whole, it is
safest to plump yourself down to his level at once whatever that may
be, to talk his talk, and only about what he talks. This pressure of
the majority on one’s personal tastes was amusingly exemplified to me
one day when I was looking for a house to rent in a pleasant Jersey
suburb. In the house shown me—as is the case in all the suburbs of
New York I know—there was nothing to mark where my lawn might end and
my neighbor’s begin. All was as open to the public gaze as the street
itself. I thought of delightful English or French gardens, surrounded
by hedge or wall, screened from the public, where one could putter
absurdly over one’s plants, read one’s book, or have one’s supper as
much to one’s self as in the house. In fact they are outdoor rooms,
infinitely more attractive than the American “sun parlor.” I knew well
that no such attempt could be made here, but, nevertheless, I remarked
to the “realtor” that it would be pleasant to have a hedge and privacy
but I supposed it could not be done on account of the neighbors. “I
say No,” he answered with pained surprise, “if you are going to be
‘high hat’ you won’t last long here.” Just so, and so many things in
this country are “high hat” which in other lands simply make for sane
and cultivated living that it is no wonder that the business man whose
car and cellarette, if not bread and butter, depend so often on his
popularity, has to walk warily.
Just why having a garden-wall, speaking one’s native tongue correctly,
or being able to discriminate in matters of art or literature should be
the Gallic equivalent of “high hat” would puzzle a Frenchman, but so it
often is in the land of the free. And no one knows his way about the
land of the free better than the business man. The pressure may vary
with his position and the kind of business he is in, but in general he
will soon discover that in any business where personal contact is a
factor, the people with whom he deals and upon whose good will he has
to lean will insist upon his not being too different from themselves.
In Greenwich Village a man may wear a flowing tie and a Spanish hat,
but it would be suicidal for a bond broker. One has to conform or
one is lost. Our two most successful business men are perhaps John
D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Rockefeller says it is a “religious
duty” to make as much money as you can, and Ford has informed us
that “history is bunk.” The one standard of success in business—and
perhaps its stark and easily grasped simplicity is what attracts
many Americans—is the amount of money you make from it. There are
no foolish nuances. Most Americans are business men. Whatever ideals
they may have had in college, and to a considerable extent whatever
manners they may have inherited or acquired, they begin to shed, unless
their niche is an unusually sheltered one, when the real nature of
the excoriating modern business competition dawns upon them. Little
by little as they “learn the game” they conform to their customers or
associates.
VI
Another characteristic of American life is its extreme mobility. People
move up and down in the social scale and round about the country
like bubbles in a boiling kettle. Social life everywhere here is in
a constant flux. I left Wall Street, where I was in business, and
a certain suburb where I then lived, fifteen years ago. To-day the
personnel of “the Street” as I remember it is almost as completely
changed as are the symbols on the ticker. In the suburb where I
once knew everyone, at least by name, I know scarcely half a dozen
households. People are forever making or losing money, arriving in new
social sets, living in Pittsburgh or a mining camp one year and in
Los Angeles or St. Paul the next. This has a marked effect on social
independence. When a family has lived for many generations in the same
place, or, as have many county families in England, for centuries,
they acquire a social position almost wholly independent of their
individual members at a given time. Indeed, a member is almost an
accident and may be as erratic and independent as he pleases. He still
remains a so-and-so of so-and-so, known to all the countryside. An old
hereditary title accomplishes the same result. Here and there in New
England villages or in the South there are families who approximate
this happy condition, but in the constant movement of the life of most
Americans it is necessary for them to depend wholly upon the effect of
their personalities and bank accounts. A man whose family has lived
in the “big house” in a small Massachusetts town for a century or
two is sufficiently “somebody” there almost to be independent; but
should business require him to move to Kalamazoo he is nobody until
he “shows them.” The social reputation, immunity, and freedom which
long residence in one place gives without effort or thought has to be
built again from the ground up, and warily, when one moves to another
town where they know not Joseph. One joins the organizations in the
new town, and, again, one conforms. To begin in a new place by being
“different” is dangerous; to begin by being too superior, even if
actually, unconsciously, and with no wish to appear so, may be fatal.
Like myself, had I gone to that Jersey suburb and made a little privacy
round my garden, the newcomer might be voted “high hat” and not “last
long.”
In assuming the “mucker pose” the gentleman and scholar does not, of
course, descend as low as the “mucker”; but he does, in self-defense,
for the sake of peace and quiet, for business success, and for the
sake of not offending the motley crowd of all sorts whom his neighbors
are apt to be in the seething, changing society everywhere today, shed
enough of his own personality not to offend the average. He avoids
whatever others may think “high hat” in manners or culture as he
would the plague. Like Henry Adams he will find himself hiding his
antecedents if they happen to be better than the neighbors’.
This possible answer to my friends’ question does not necessarily
indict democracy and American life. Both have brought new values into
the world of other sorts. I am merely pointing to one of the possible
losses. For it _is_ a loss when a man deliberately uses worse manners
than he knows how to use, when he tries to cover up his intellectual
abilities, or when he tries to be average when he is above it. A
business-democracy has accomplished a great task in levelling up the
material condition of its people. It may be asked, however, whether
there is no danger of a levelling down of manners and culture. Perhaps
the new values gained offset the old ones in some danger of being lost,
but it may, even in America, be left to one to question, to ponder, and
to doubt. Is the mucker pose really forced on one? People adopt it,
evidently, because they think it is the thing to do and essential to
make them quickly popular. It does not always work, even in business.
A dignified man of science was recently explaining to an applicant for
a position some new research work he had been doing. The young Ph.D.
was intensely interested. When the scientist concluded, he asked the
flower of our highest university training what he thought of it. “Hot
Dog!” was the immediate and enthusiastic answer, which, in this case,
promptly blasted the young man’s career in _that_ laboratory. It would
not have done so generally, however, and we come back to business as
conducted to-day, and the character and background of our business
leaders as, perhaps, the main contributing cause of forcing the mucker
pose.
We can prate as we like about the idealism of America, but it is
only money success which really counts. What are ideals or culture
or charming manners as compared with business? What in the last
presidential campaign did two leaders of opinion tell us, one from
the Pacific and the other from the Atlantic coast? Mr. Hoover, in
his address replying to the welcome given him by the people of San
Francisco, told them that the most precious possession of their great
city was—what?—_their foreign trade_! In New York, the _Sun_ in its
editorial explaining its intention to support the Republican party,
admitted that the Prohibition question was “a live campaign topic,”
and that present conditions might be “intolerable” and “a morass of
lawbreaking,” but asked whether it was well to risk loss of prosperity
for the possible reform of those conditions. In America to-day business
life is not the basis for a rational social life, but social life is
manipulated as the basis for an irrational business one. One makes
acquaintances and tries for popularity in order to get ahead downtown.
To an unprecedented extent the people who have money in all lines of
business are newcomers from far down in the social scale, men with no
culture and no background, and often no manners. We may note our new
class of multi-millionaire landlords who have built fortunes out of
shoe-strings since the War. Two of our now greatest industries have
been wholly evolved in the last two decades, and one certainly does
not look for culture among the kings in the motor and moving-picture
trades. The “people” who came into political power under Jackson made a
huge grab at economic power under Grant, but it has been reserved for
the present to “make the world safe for democracy.” The old class which
had inherited manners and culture as essential to an ordered life
has abdicated mainly for mere lack of funds. In business for the last
decade it has been for the most part the conservatives, who had much to
lose, who have lost, and the reckless who have won.
Business may explain the mucker pose, but it may be asked whether those
who adopt it are not traitors to all that is best in the world and
which has been so hardly built up. An impoverished aristocrat may sell
his title in marriage for one generation to rehabilitate his house, but
Americans who sell their culture and their breeding to truckle to the
unbred in business, who shed these things of the spirit for motor cars
and all the rest of the things of the body, are taking refuge in a yet
more ignominious surrender. They may thus pick up some of the golden
drippings from the muckers’ tables, but they do not gain the respect of
the muckers whom they imitate, and may yet awake to the fact that they
have properly forfeited even their own.
CHAPTER X
MAY I ASK?
MAY I ASK?
Our critics have often assured us that the dollar sign is the symbol of
America. I am coming to the conclusion that our more characteristic one
is the question mark. I have just typed them side by side on my Corona
and have been looking at them. $ and ?. We may read the dollar sign as
two parallel lines with a swirl trying to bring them together. One of
these lines, as I see it, is expense and the other income. Parallel
lines never meet in a Euclidean world. The S imposed on them represents
the frantic effort of the individual to refute this geometrical
finance. In this respect my present wanderings over a post-war world
show me that there is nothing typically American about this symbol.
The striving, the manifold tragedy, the wrung soul of an era concealed
in this new swastika is universal. In England, France, Italy, Austria,
Czecho-Slovakia, Holland, Belgium,—I find it wherever I have lately
been, even when the expense line does not, as at home, insist upon
describing a hopeless tangential curve away from its parallel. Once,
however, one has finally escaped from the smoking room of the liner,
landed at Southampton or Havre, Hamburg or Genoa and lost one’s self
among the “foreigners,” one does escape from the question mark in its
typical American repetitive usage.
One does not, it is true, escape entirely. The mails still function,
and a good part of this long sunny afternoon which should have been
devoted to work on my book, a stroll in the sunshine, or letters to
old friends has been spent in my study typing answers to letters from
strangers asking questions which any local librarian or even a little
intelligent thought and work on the part of the questioners should
have been able to answer for them. “Where can I find such-and-such a
quotation?” “Ought I to encourage my son to become a teacher?” “What
would be a good list of books to read?” “How can I make my boy take
an interest in history?” As I respond as courteously as I can to this
constant questioning from my native land, a usual part of my week’s
chores, I wonder what sort of minds ask all these and innumerable other
questions. (One thing I know, and that is, I shall never be thanked,
for it is a sad statistical fact that in ten years of answering
questions from American strangers I have never but twice had even the
courtesy of an acknowledgement of my reply. But that is beside the
present point.)
That I am not alone in my pondering over this American question mark
is indicated by another letter, lately received, from a man with a
very different type of mind from the correspondents just noted. “A six
weeks’ lecture tour,” he writes, “including Texas, California, and
Colorado, brings me back to New York with the major impression that
all America is asking questions. Healthy mental curiosity is not a
thing to be condemned in children, but it is a healthier sign in adults
when they occasionally take the trouble to think out the answers for
themselves. My limited experience in France has convinced me that the
average Frenchman is ashamed to ask a question without volunteering at
least part of the answer. In England questions are apt to be either
rhetorical or veiled in the form of statements open to correction. I am
told the problem is the decay of conversation in America but I doubt
whether we ever had any conversations to decay. Sophisticated New York
is no exception.”
Questions and converse are closely linked but it is easier in our
social history to trace the continuance of the former than of the
latter. We have, indeed, an occasional comment, such as that of John
Adams who noted in his Diary when passing through New York in 1774 on
his way to the Continental Congress that in spite “of all the opulence
and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be
found” and “no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty,
no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast, and all
together.” Alexander Hamilton, not the celebrated statesman but a
Baltimore doctor, is the only man I know who tried to report colonial
conversations verbatim, as may be found in his little-known but
immensely entertaining _Itinerarium_. With almost complete unanimity,
however, all travelers for a couple of centuries comment on the, to
them, curious American habit of asking questions in every part of the
country. It begins as early as 1710, perhaps earlier, and becomes
marked as the travel literature rapidly increases after the French
and Indian War. It is a habit, therefore, which obviously has a long
history behind it and for which the first explanation sought must be an
historical one.
The frontier, that omnipresent though often unrecognized influence in
so many departments of American life, is probably at the bottom of it.
In a sparsely settled section there are two good reasons for putting
a stranger through his catechism,—danger and paucity of intellectual
interest. Even today, in the remoter parts of the Carolina mountains,
to quote a bit of personal experience, the opening of conversation is
still stereotyped when a mountaineer meets a stranger on the road.
“Howdy.” Then, with no show of diffidence, “what mought your name be?”,
and when this has been satisfactorily answered, comes inevitably next,
“whar mought you be goin’?”.
Thus far the opening of the conversational game is evidently a
cautious play for safety, so well understood that it is assumed no
offence could possibly be taken. What, however, so many of the early
American tourists complained of in New England and elsewhere, was the
merciless catechising that followed,—questions as to one’s age, married
state, one’s relatives, every imaginable detail of a personal sort by
which the stranger’s mind, history, circumstances and opinions were
ruthlessly explored so long as he continued to submit. The American
jaw possesses an idiosyncratic restlessness, which has been the
foundation and prime cause of the rise of the Beeman, Adams, Wrigley
and other gum fortunes, but I am inclined to trace the source of the
second type of American questioning less to the extreme irritability
of the maxillary muscles than to a psychological vacuity. The trick of
questioning, instead of conversing, which developed among the dwellers
in the towns, villages and frontier fringes of colonial America and
which so disturbed the horde of French tourists who came to look us
over following the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars, and the English
who came from 1820 to 1850, was merely the rude effort of a primitive,
predatory and half-starved brain to grab at food. The spider simply
sucked the blood out of any insect that got caught in his web.
The community mental life of any village or provincial town for
most folk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was hardly
stimulating but, as compared with those in Europe, that of the American
towns, villages and lonely clearings became a good deal like what
the landscape must have looked like after the last great thaw of the
Ice Age revealed it under the melted glacier. As I have pointed out
elsewhere, a struggle for life under primitive, even savage conditions
does not preclude the growth of an artistic and intellectual life,
as the arts and mythologies of any primitive people from the African
negroes to the Pacific Islanders testify. What saps the white man
and empties his mind of all cultural elements when he struggles to
subdue a wilderness is the effort to maintain a civilized standard,
as far as possible, of material comfort under wilderness opposition.
Something has to be jettisoned from his cargo or he sinks. He always
naturally elects to throw culture overboard until such time as, the
storm weathered, he thinks he may salvage it again. Hard as the life
has been in the old lands from which our first immigrants came, English
in New England, German in Pennsylvania, there had been many means of
self-expression and leisure, and a social consciousness that made such
self-expression natural. For example, among other things they brought
with them their arts and crafts. They carved the end beams of their
houses, painted designs on the overhang, designed, carved and painted
their furniture. Little by little all this was dropped. The struggle
proved too hard. A negro who lived in a grass hut in the jungle had
time to carve wooden sculpture, play music, weave legends, but the
white man who wanted in a few years to make a European homestead
out of a patch of the American primeval forest had no leisure or
surplus energy for anything else. On the other hand, the struggle
against new conditions sharpened his wits just at the time that he
was throwing overboard everything that they could work on. They began
to be ingrowing. In these new communities there was practically no
diversification of labor or interest. Everyone was doing everything for
himself, and almost all were doing just the same thing. On the voyages
across from the old countries in the eighteenth century, the food
supply frequently ran out and in some cases the immigrants actually ate
each other. In the new communities to which they came, the mental food
supply also ran out. There was often no food for conversation. It is
not strange that they ate the strangers, mentally.
We thus have developed a working hypothesis as to where the question
mark originated in American life. We will now consider its persistence.
Why _does_ it persist, and why, in the rich and diversified America of
today, does not conversation takes its place?
For one thing, there is the inheritance from the past. The man who
lived in a clearing or even a small village with no public library,
newspapers, magazines or scarcely neighbors in the eighteenth century
had some excuse for not giving his mind good food, and letting it get
so starved that it would chew on anything that came its way. There can
be literally scarcely an American today who has any such excuse for
mental under-nourishment; but habits were formed. The American mind
is full of the quaintest and most curious anomalies. In business, for
example, it is the most radical and innovating mind (within the limits
of the capitalistic system) in existence. Politically it is eighteenth
century if not earlier. In the same way, the average American youth of
either sex, though self-reliant socially to a marked and even startling
degree, intellectually lacks, almost as markedly, all initiative.
He, or she, studies his lessons and recites them, even in college,
like good little grade boys and girls. The habit of wide-ranging
intellectual curiosity and of self-reliance in satisfying it has been
lost. The habit of asking questions has persisted. Everyone wants to be
told what to read (mark the success of the book-clubs), what he should
think, what is good and what is bad. Perhaps the most encouraging part
of the Prohibition muddle is that it shows that at least he will kick
and balk when told what he must drink. The first factor, then, is
that the American mind has behind it no long habit of indulgence in
intellectual curiosity, understood in the best sense. Through a long
period it got out of the way of being interested in things other than
those of the daily environment of work and play, or of the rag-tag and
bob-tail of disconnected facts that might turn up with any stranger.
There could be no more coherency among these than among the stray items
one picks up by glancing through a popular magazine and a village
newspaper. They kept the mind from eating into its own fibres, perhaps,
but did nothing to train it as an instrument of thought.
Moreover, to a great extent, America is still provincial and frontier.
I am not speaking solely of the international aspect of this. For the
most part, it is, of course, utterly ignorant of the rest of the world.
I am speaking generally and not of select groups. It is one of the
quaint anomalies of which I spoke above, that the nation whose public
mind is the least international of any of the great nations, should
publish the best journal dealing solely with international affairs.
That, however, has nothing to do with the case. The magazine is not
self-supporting and has a limited circulation. The editor of several
magazines of extremely wide circulation told me that they could publish
nothing that did not directly deal with America, that their readers
were interested in nothing else. The editor of another magazine,
one of the best in the country, told me that, although for his own
intellectual satisfaction he did occasionally publish an article on a
foreign country, there was no reaction to it among his readers and as
far as circulation went the pages might as well have been left blank.
It is not, however, in this sense only that I mean we are still
provincial and frontier. In this sense, America is still in the
frontier stage and it is becoming questionable if it will ever be
anything else. The difference between the Indian and the Englishman was
that the Englishman wanted all the physical comforts of old England
set up in the wilderness in his own generation as fast as they could
be. He measured his own minimum standard of living by that to which
he had been accustomed or which he had seen. The attainment of this
absorbing all his energy, he let the rest go. Could the first settlers
of Boston in 1630 have seen the comfortable town of 1800, they would
have believed that a settled, orderly and comely cultural life must
surely by then have been attained. The trouble is that America never
has attained. This, I well know, is by many considered as a virtue and
I am discussing it here only from the standpoint of the main topic of
this chapter.
The seaboard was soon comfortably settled, but the frontier kept
extending and extending and absorbing the interest and energies of the
people. In 1890 even the physical frontier was officially declared
closed and ended by the government, but it made no difference, for
the people were as busy and worn out as ever settling themselves in
a wholly new country, the country of “the high standard of living.”
The settlers who two centuries ago had to jettison their cultural
heritage and interests in order to cut down trees and snipe at Indians
skulking behind those that had not yet been cut, have been replaced
by the settlers in the Country of the High Standard who have to
jettison their cultural tastes (the heritage has gone) in order to
pay rent, get a cook, have two or three bathrooms and a motor car or
two in this new frontier country of the Standard. They are just as
pressed, hard-working and weary as their forefathers, and from the
same reason,—trying to attain a standard of physical well-being to
which they think they ought to attain in their own generation in an
environment in which the old physical difficulties have merely been
replaced by economic ones.
I have not, as yet, had a chance to read Mr. and Mrs. Lynd’s
_Middletown_, but it is, I understand, a very careful and not
exaggerated study of a town of forty thousand people in the Middle
West, yet a review says that it shows that “literature and art have
virtually disappeared as male interests.” It is what always happens
in any frontier life, and America has replaced the old geographical
frontier by the Living-standard one. In the old days, we used to tell
critical foreigners that we had been so busy settling and subduing a
continent that we had had no time for culture. Well, we have jolly well
settled and subdued it. We have roped it, and thrown it, and eaten a
good part of it up. But before we had time to get our breath we have
gone off on a gold rush to this new land of the High Standard. Because
it is on no map, there is no telling how big it is or how long it
will take to settle and subdue it. Meanwhile the total energies of a
good many of us are absorbed in “sawing wood” like our ancestors and
protecting ourselves from the savages under the changed conditions
imposed by settling this new country that can be found in no atlas.
When the old frontier ended at the Pacific Ocean we had at least some
limit set to the physical and mental energy necessary to make it
habitable for civilized men, but one wonders to-day, as one swings
one’s economic axe and turns one’s back on the shelf of books one would
like to have time to read, where in heck is the Pacific Coast of this
new country we have started to subdue.
This new country is a rushing, busy, hustling restless one. Not long
ago I dined in America with an old friend I had not seen in some years.
After dinner we walked into the library to have our coffee before the
open fire. After we had sipped it and had a puff or two of our cigars,
my host said, with the inevitability of after dinner New Yorkers,
“Where do you want to go now?” I suggested that as I had not seen him
for a long time I would much prefer to sit just where I was before the
fire and talk to him. His reply was, “Thank Heaven. I haven’t had a
good talk with anybody in ages.” Last year when home, a New York boy of
about seventeen, a thoughtful lad, complained of his inability to find
any men to talk with. “They always want to go somewhere or turn on the
radio,” he commented. “How is a boy to learn if he can never talk to a
man?” At least for ordinary conversation, there used to be the home,
the piazza in the evenings or the tramp through the country. The motor
car, the small apartment and the rest of the factors in the new high
standard have largely done away with such opportunities. But I think
that, as far as good conversation, and not mere talk, is concerned,
these are surface symptoms, secondary influences.
Many elements are necessary for good conversation. For one thing
there must be a sense of leisure. The talk may last only an hour, but
an absence of any sense of hurry is essential. We may get through a
business interview in five minutes, like rushing a bucket to a fire,
but good talk should be like a stream on which we can float leisurely
without knowing what may appear beyond the next bend. In order that
there should be bends, however, each mind must have many interests. It
is by no means necessary that the major interest of each of the talkers
should be the same or even similar. As a rule, indeed, for the best of
talk, it is just as well that they should not be. If they are, the talk
is too apt to become and stay mere “shop.” The talkers, however, must
have backgrounds that afford ample points of contact. One must be able
to range over fields of fact and thought without having forever to be
adding interpretative footnotes.
It is the lack of this background that accounts in good part for the
lack of conversation in America in the European sense, even among the
professional and university classes. Too often in America as long
as one keeps to a man’s “subject” one may get a good deal that is
interesting, even if it is imparted too much like a lecture, but once
get off that and one is lost. It is like getting off a road in the
dark. In contrast, I well recall an evening spent with a Frenchman,
whose “subject” happens to be American history. As we had both written
books known to the other on the topic, we started on that, and I
very soon found that he was better founded in it than many American
professors. There was not a source to which I referred with which he
was not well acquainted and which he did not quickly and accurately
appraise. Soon the talk wandered to other matters. In a very amateurish
way I had been interested in the Minoan civilization of Crete and had
been to the Ashmolean Museum to hunt up some pottery. In a casual
way he took up the question and discussed the various stages of the
civilization and the changes in pottery design; and as we drifted
from that to Greece and philosophy and literature, the talk flowed on
and on, without effort or pedantry until we found it was one in the
morning. He was, of course, a far abler and better educated man than
myself, but outside of American history, perhaps, we were both amateurs
in all we discussed. What I enjoyed was the breadth of the discussion,
the wealth of background he had, the ability to illustrate some point
by another in a wholly different field. It is just this that is
lacking for the most part in American talk, which is apt to be narrow,
professional, and all too often pedantic.
The European mind at its best is both fuller and more flexible than
ours, though in many practical ways the American is perhaps the more
flexible. It is not simply the number of facts absorbed but the play
of mind and the fields covered. We have had our own examples of the
scholar in politics, for example—the man of fairly wide interests, such
as Wilson, Lodge, Roosevelt, to name three very different types; but
they have been, so to speak, practical minds, working in history, law
or natural science. We note the intrinsic difference when we run over
the English list, Morley, Balfour, Haldane, Smuts and others. In all
of them, Morley least, philosophy has been a major interest, and it
is in the philosophical outlook that we find another essential factor
in good conversation. It cannot be sustained long on mere facts. The
philosophy need not—indeed, should not—be technical, but there must be
a philosophical attitude, an ability and willingness to see all round a
subject and to trace its implications.
Talk, in fact, should never be exclusively technical, any more than
it should deal solely in facts. Talk is to facts much like wine to
grapes. They should be there as a foundation, but the aroma and full
flavor of a rich Burgundy are far from the individual grapes that were
crushed in order that the wine might flow and slowly mature. There is
one factor that has played a large part in the de-specializing of talk
in Europe, and that is responsible for good talk everywhere, which has
been curiously lacking in America—woman. Talk is possibly best between
socialized, civilized men, but the process of socializing, civilizing
and de-specializing them has been largely the task of woman, a task in
which she has signally failed in America.
This topic is complex enough to call for a paper wholly devoted to it,
but I think it cannot be denied that woman in America has failed in
her age-long duty of civilizing her man. She has merely appropriated
leisure and culture to herself. Woman has never made anything of
culture without man. As a result of the complete social dichotomy
in America, the women have developed an anæmic, uncreative cultural
atmosphere, and the social life of both sexes has become uncivilized
in a very real sense. A broadly humane culture has suffered in the
hands of the women until it has come to be regarded as effeminate
dilettantism, and the man, engrossed in his office, shop, study or
laboratory, leading his social life by talking shop, whether business,
art or profession, to his fellow male workers, has narrowed also into
specialism and one-track interests. Yet, on the whole, I think today,
in spite of all the Women’s Clubs with their papers, the Browning
Societies and the rest of the feminine cultural flub-dub, there is
more chance for the growth of a genuine cultivated life among the men
than among the women of America. Woman having failed to socialize and
humanize her man, it may yet be his job to civilize _her_.
I am very far from meaning that good talk must deal with Shakespeare
and the musical glasses. What I mean is that good conversation is
something quite different from obtaining verbal instruction. We may
get an amazing amount of interesting information from a specialist
discoursing on his subject, but so can we from the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Good talk affords, perhaps, the best instruction in the
world, but it is not the instruction of a text book. A scientist who
knew all there was to know about the common house-fly might give us an
extremely interesting evening, but if it were solely limited to the
objective aspects of this one subject it obviously would not be good
conversation in any civilized sense. For that, as we have said, a wide
background of knowledge and experience, and a completely de-specialized
attitude of mind are required.
There is, perhaps, one other point about American talk that may be
noted. There seems to be rather a widespread fear that to indulge in
intelligent conversation is to make one’s self suspect in a nation
of go-getters and he-men. The dominance of business interests and
the business type undoubtedly has much to do with this; but tracing
it back, I think we meet the influences of both the frontier and of
the American woman again. He-men, of course, are at a premium on the
frontier. Moreover, the experience to be derived in a frontier life,
if intensive, is extremely narrow. Like a small farm, it may be a
good place to start from but it is intellectually killing to remain
on it. Not only does the frontier stunt the intellectual life but
it makes it suspect. A frontier is essentially democratic, and in
all democracies, it is damning to be highbrow. In this respect the
influence of the frontier has been deeply felt in American life since
the days of Andrew Jackson. But if for this reason good conversation
is more or less taboo, so it is for another. By failing to civilize
her man and make him a part of any real social life, woman has, as
we have said, feminized American culture and conversation to such an
extent as to make anything beyond shop-talk appear as effeminate. For
this double reason a certain atmosphere has been created in America
that is inimical to good talk. There are, of course, many men who can
talk well under the right conditions, but the social atmosphere in
America all too often does not provide them. Thus Henry Adams, when
teaching at Harvard, in spite, as he said, of the “presence of some of
the liveliest and most agreeable of men who would have made the joy of
London or Paris,” found that Cambridge offered only “a social desert
that would have starved a polar bear.” Even Russell Lowell, William
James, the Agassiz’s, John Fiske and Francis Child could not make it
blossom.
Conversation is distinctly a social art, and it can flourish only
where society itself has come to be something of a practised art.
It cannot succeed, any more than an orchestra can, with one or two
competent players amid a lot of others with no ear for music. One
has got to be able to count upon all the members of the group having
a certain background and attitude, even when the major interests and
occupations of every member of the group are different. For various
reasons, the old type of society, in which, from a social point of
view, such counting upon could be made with certainty, is breaking
down everywhere, but in America the social mixture has always been
more heterogeneous than in Europe. I am not speaking in a snobbish
sense, any more than it would be snobbish to object to a saxophone and
a bass drum taking part in a piece prepared solely for strings. The
mental backgrounds, even when there are any that deserve the name, of
any ordinarily gathered group of men in America are so different that
within their circumscribed spheres they offer but narrow range for talk
to wander in. It is continually being brought up against this wall and
that. When the right group gets together in America there can be as
good talk as anywhere; but it rarely happens, and for the most part
even those capable of it have learned to hold their tongues and play
safe.
Coming back to what seems to me to be the main point the question mark
is likely to continue to be the symbol of the United States so long as
its men remain frontiersmen, so long as they continue to devote all
their time and strength to subduing a wilderness instead of living in
it, whether the wilderness is one of woods and Red Indians or of the
stony fields of ever increasing economic wants. If the new land of the
High Standard proves to be illimitable, with a frontier retreating
further and further ahead of each succeeding generation, the question
mark, sign of hungry and empty frontier minds, is not soon to be
replaced by civilized conversation. The discussion of an endless
succession of things, motors, radios, aeroplanes, or of facts, is not
conversation. A full mind, a philosophic outlook, a disinterested
interest so to speak, a broad and varied background, are not frontier
products. Here and there in America a settler has decided that he will
move no further, that he will content himself with the patch he has
already cleared, and begin really to live instead of always getting
ready to. He has ceased to be a frontiersman and begun to build the
next stage of civilization. His talk is apt to be good. Conversation
will begin when we cease to expand and begin to concentrate. I read
today in a European newspaper that “what Denmark thinks today, Europe
thinks tomorrow.” Look for little Denmark on the map, and think that
over. But, you say, “May I ask...?” Go to!
CHAPTER XI
IS AMERICA YOUNG?
IS AMERICA YOUNG?
I
In 1719 an anonymous New England author who signed himself, rather
oddly, “your friend among the Oakes and Pines,” gave voice to the
doctrine that America was young. Speaking for his day, he said, “The
Plow-Man that raiseth Grain is more serviceable to Mankind than the
Painter who draws only to please the Eye.... The Carpenter who builds a
good house to defend us from Wind and Weather is more serviceable than
the curious Carver, who employs his Art to please the Fancy.” Only, he
continues, after further praise of labor, “when a People grow numerous,
and part are sufficient to raise necessaries for the whole, then ’tis
allowable and laudable, that some should be imployed in innocent Arts
more for ornament than Necessity; any innocent business that gets an
honest penny, is better than Idleness.”
When this anonymous social critic made his comments on the needs of
America there was but little more than a fringe of settlement along
the Atlantic coast. Boston, with a population of eleven thousand, was
about twice as populous as either of its two rivals, Philadelphia
and New York. The entire white population of North America was
considerably under half a million people. There were scarcely any roads
and no public means of transportation. Beyond the scattered coastal
settlements, the wilderness stretched three thousand miles to the
Pacific. Inhabited by savages and almost interminable in extent, the
work of subduing it to the needs of civilized man seemed to call, not
for centuries, but for millennia of physical effort.
Owing partly to the indomitable courage and partly to the insatiable
greed of the American people, but even more to the inventions of
science, what seemed a task for the ages has been accomplished in six
generations. On the Pacific coast to-day there are cities as populous
as were the greatest in Europe when our New Englander promulgated
his doctrine that America was young. Yet that doctrine is as firmly
embedded in the popular mind as ever. This is so obvious as hardly to
need emphasizing by example, but I may mention what I have noted within
a few three days.
When speaking to an American boy of seventeen in regard to certain
aspects of American life, he countered immediately with: “But America
is young. We are really only about a _hundred and fifty_ years old.”
In the course of conversation only yesterday with an Englishman, the
son of one of the great friends America had in England during our Civil
War, he said: “Of course you are _young_. We must wait.” In a letter
just received from a friend at home I find the same idea reiterated.
“We are _three hundred_ years old,” he writes, “England a thousand
years old. Will you venture the prophecy that in seven hundred more
years, when people have a competency, we shall not educate our sons and
daughters for service that does not have immediate economic returns?”
It is worth while to analyze such a persistent and almost universal
conception. Just what do we mean when we say that America is young?
Has the idea any validity, and what is the effect on the minds of those
who so easily use it?
By America, of course, we must mean the American people or the American
nation. It is obvious, however, that we cannot use the word nation in
this connection in a purely political sense. So rapidly does the loom
of history weave that we can now be ranked as among the older nations
of western civilization. As an independent and unified nation we long
antedate, for example, Italy, which was created only in 1860, or
Germany, which was first welded into a nation in 1870, to say nothing
of many of even later growth.
II
It is possible that in some minds the idea stems from that popular
analogy which would identify a nation or a society with an organism.
This analogy, however, like most analogies, is extremely dangerous.
It may illuminate certain likenesses between society and a physical
organism, but it is not a safe instrument with which to try to discover
new likenesses. Because we may fancy that certain functions of society
resemble those of an organism, it by no means follows that we can
interpret one in terms of the other. In spite of many sociologists
and writers on history, like Spengler, there is nothing to prove that
a society has its birth, growth, and death in the same way as has a
physical organism. Such a metaphor is merely suggestive, and is not
only unscientific but may be disastrously misleading. The individual
appears in his personal development to repeat the broad stages of
our racial development, but I fail to find any law supported by the
facts of history indicating that nations infallibly do the same.
To force the attempt to make any such law is to glide blindly over
such innumerable exceptions as would certainly invalidate any law in
scientific thinking. Not only do certain manifestations of cultural
life—æsthetic, intellectual, and other—appear in some nations and not
in others, but there seems to be no definite sequence in which they
appear when they appear at all. We may speak of a human being as young,
middle-aged, or old, but such terms lose all meaning when applied to a
nation as an organism.
Let us take Greece for example. Was Athens old or young in 450 B.C.?
It is not fair to say that she had just reached full maturity because
within a half century her architecture flowered in the completion of
the Parthenon, her sculpture in the works of Phidias, her poetry in
Æschylus, or her philosophy in Socrates and Plato. That is a mere
begging of the question. It is estimating the age by the achievement,
whereas, when we say that America is young, we are deferring the
possibility of achievement upon the score of age.
How old was England in the age of Elizabeth? How are we to estimate
the answer? Are we to date her birth in the period of the savage
Britons, the Roman conquest, the Saxon or Norman conquests, or when?
Are we to calculate her age by some stage of culture attained, by some
infusion of new racial blood, by the formation of a unified language,
government, or sense of nationality? How old England was in 1558 when
Elizabeth came to the throne is as insoluble as “How old is Ann?” Yet
if certain manifestations of culture go with certain national ages,
it ought to be easy to date a nation in such a marked phase as the
days of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Byrd, and the whole
galaxy of stars of the first magnitude. Nor was the spiritual heaven
of that time dotted only with such. One writer tells us that “the
young gentleman of Sidney’s day was as deft at turning a sonnet as his
present-day successor at stopping an approach to the green.” Another
says that music and song “were not the affair solely of intellectual
circles but the creation and inheritance of the whole people.” Poetry,
music, drama, philosophy, architecture—all the arts, as well as the
energy of practical life—were at full flood.
The very first foundation stones were being laid in the building of the
British Empire which was to continue to rise and grow until it covers a
quarter of the globe. We often hear the period spoken of as gloriously
_young_. Was England young or old? If she was young then, was she a
baby when the work of building cathedrals was in full swing in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries? If she was old and mature in 1600 was
she doddering in old age when another great outburst of art and thought
came in the years of Victoria? In one sense we may date the birth of
England in the age of Elizabeth. It was then that the seed was planted
of the great empire that was to be. Of practical activity there was
enough, it would seem to absorb the whole energies of any people: wars
by sea and land; business being pushed into new quarters of the world
in every direction; new commodities being found, new methods of doing
business being developed, new trade routes being opened up; attempts at
colonizing North and South America; a rebuilding of a large part of the
domestic architecture of the whole nation to meet altered conditions
of life—all these and other aspects of feverish business activity were
evident on every hand. Was it youth, maturity, or old age?
How old, again, is Italy? From one point of view she is to-day a
new nation, throbbing with new life, occupied with the problems of a
“new” country, developing a national consciousness and her national
material resources, as “young” as America. From another, she was old
when Cæsar lay in his blood. I have recently been in Czechoslovakia.
As a political nation she is only ten years old. As I passed through
her villages on the way from Dresden, they looked newer than Kansas,
the whole countryside having been rebuilt while the peasants were
afraid to put their money into anything but building on account of the
steady fall in the currency. In Prague I was told that the nation was
new, that the task of building it would absorb all the energies of its
people, that the work of developing its resources was overwhelming,
that for the present it “did not want learned men, artists, or writers,
but business men, engineers, practical men. Later,” my informant
continued, “the rest may come, but not now.” It was the New England
voice “from the Oakes and Pines” of 1719. Yet here and there one saw
on hilltops castles ten centuries old. In the fields one saw men in
the furrows following yoked white oxen as in the days of Virgil. Is
Czechoslovakia young or, from the standpoint of America, very, very old?
Does age mean the accumulation of resources from the past—old
buildings, cathedrals, picture galleries, and all the valuable
opportunities to see and to study? All these doubtless help, but
how much of all such did the common people of Athens have when they
crowded as multitudinously to hear the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides as the modern _hoi polloi_ of America crowd to see the latest
sex film on the screen? In 1787 we were nearly a century and a half
“younger” than we are now, but if we held a constitutional convention
in 1930 should we be able to send any better thinkers or more broadly
cultured men than those who drew up our first constitution? Would
the discussion and propaganda regarding a political problem to-day
show any advance in maturity and power of thought on the part of both
writers and readers over the papers of the _Federalist_? It may well be
that not only an outburst of art and literature, such as has happened
now and again in the world’s history, but the degree of a cultured
civilization to which a nation as, say the French, comes to attain,
have no ascertainable cause, that they come from combinations deep
in human nature too inscrutable to be observed or predicted. That is
probably the case, but if so why claim that they are the products or
accompaniments of a given age, and that we cannot expect them before a
certain period any more than in the human body we can look for puberty
or the growth of a beard or the coming of the wisdom teeth?
This question of national age becomes more puzzling the more we think
about it, but in trying to solve it let us turn to America, the land
that everyone says is young. We may, as we have seen, dismiss at once,
I think, certain interpretations of age. We may discard the thought
of any analogy with an organism. We can date a human being as five,
fourteen, twenty-one, or three score and ten years of age, and have
it mean something. We cannot date a nation as one century, five, or
twenty, and have it mean anything with scientific accuracy. Again, we
may discard the thought of independence or political nationhood. My
young friend, probably taught by his elders, evidently had that point
in mind. Arguing that way, we should be a century older than Italy or
Germany, but those who argue that America is young would not accept
that conclusion.
We have got, again, to dismiss as a criterion the stage of culture
which a people has arrived at—the arts, inventions, knowledge which
they have inherited from the past. Every settler who came to America
had behind him all the past just as much as did his family or neighbors
who remained behind. The seventeenth century English, Scotch, Germans,
Swedes, Dutch, and others who came here in our first century were not
barbarians. They had the entire inheritance from the past. They were
heirs of Greece and Rome, of the Reformation and the Renaissance, as
much as those who continued in the old countries; and every man who has
come here since has been of the same national age as those he has left
behind.
III
In analyzing this idea of our being a young nation, I cannot see that
there is any valid way in which to date ourselves as compared with
others, and I believe that the constant insisting upon this misleading
way of putting the truth (for there _is_ a truth about our case which I
shall elaborate in a moment) is beginning to do us deep hurt. I believe
that it would be far better for the development of our best selves,
individually and nationally, if instead of consistently thinking and
speaking of the American people as “young,” we should think and say
the clear truth, which is that we are an old people, the same age as
our European cousins, who _moved into an unsettled world_. Not only
is the content of these two ideas very different, but so also are the
inferences often very loosely and carelessly drawn from them.
The moving into a new country was bound to have important consequences.
Even the moving of a family into a new house usually marks a change.
The mere move itself is apt to bring about a feeling of excitement and
exhilaration if the move is for the better, or depression and sorrow
if it is for the worse. For a while after the move, also, there is
much to be done of a purely physical sort. One has to rearrange one’s
furniture, get “shaken down,” as we say; perhaps do all sorts of things
to house and garden; get used to a new neighborhood; find new shops;
learn new ways of doing old things; in a word, the whole routine of
daily life is altered for the time being, and our habits and the
enjoyment of our tastes are apt to be broken in upon until we get over
the pressing work of settling into the new place.
In moving into America there was much more involved, mentally and
physically, than in such a move as we have just described. Not only was
the break with the old home and the old associations more complete,
but everything, literally, from the ground up had to be done in the
new. The savages had to be fought; the land had to be cleared; the
houses had to be constructed; a new life, socially and institutionally,
had to be built up. I have pointed out elsewhere the effect of this
on the minds of the settlers. It is also, of course, a fact of great
significance for American cultural life that, speaking comparatively,
almost without exception all the immigrants who have ever come here
have been men of the lower middle and laboring classes. There was
nothing in America to attract any of the wealthy or professional ones.
With the exception of a few religious refugees, virtually all who have
come here have been “practical” men, who have come to better their
economic positions. They did not include in their numbers aristocrats,
scholars, poets, dramatists, artists, any of the classes who were
carrying on and developing the European cultural tradition. But in some
respects the arts were more diffused in their practice and enjoyment
among the lower classes in the Europe from which our earlier settlers
came than they are to-day. Many brought books and many a love and taste
for music and the various handicrafts, such as weaving, woodcarving of
houses and furniture, and other things, no less truly arts because they
were folk-arts.
The effort, however, to establish a European standard of living in the
wilderness was too great. The intellectual and æsthetic enjoyments of
life had to be laid aside until the practical duties of subduing the
wilderness had been fulfilled. All this is well enough understood.
But let us suppose for a moment that the North American continent had
consisted of that strip of land between the ocean and the Appalachian
range of mountains, beyond which we will place the Pacific. By 1776
practically all of this territory was settled as peacefully as was
England itself. In fact, much of it looked like England. Boston was
to all intents and purposes identical with an English provincial
town. Travelers reported that much of the New England countryside was
indistinguishable from that of old England. Wealth had accumulated;
colleges had been erected; the arts were beginning to flourish. In
the 1750’s the theater in New York offered a better repertoire than
could be found in any English provincial city of the time, and I am
not sure but as good as that of London itself, certainly better than
can be heard some years in New York now. Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, actors
of note in London, arrived in the colonies with their company and
remained twenty years. They acted in plays of Shakespeare, Addison,
Rowe, Congreve, Farquhar, Steele, and others; and in 1754 New York had
a season in which twenty-one different plays, the cream of English
dramatic literature up to that time, were heard by the public.
Such plays were also given in such a surprising list of places as
Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Hobb’s Hole, Port Tobacco, Upper
Marlborough, Petersburg, and Fredericksburg. The theatrical and musical
life of Charleston could hardly have been excelled, if it was, in any
provincial town in England.
In 1757 the first exhibition of paintings by colonial artists was held
in New York. Before long, Copley, Peale, Benjamin West, who later
became president of the Royal Academy, and Stuart were painting and,
with lesser figures, were in the way of establishing an American school
of art. Colonial architecture, domestic and public, was so good that
we do our best to reproduce it to-day, as was likewise the furniture.
Merchants in the North, country gentlemen in the South, lived much the
same lives as did their contemporaries of similar standing in the old
country. The ablest men of the colonies in innumerable instances held
legislative and judicial offices. There was no titled aristocracy,
there were no cathedrals or ruined castles from the past, life was
a little freer, less formal, considerably more open to economic
opportunity than in England; but so far from excusing themselves on the
ground of being a new people the colonials rather prided themselves on
living the same life and indulging the same tastes as their cousins
overseas. America was indeed provincial, but then, so also was all
England outside the one center of London. Much not only of the
talent but the genius of England had always been recruited from the
provinces, and America had made a good beginning two centuries ago in
contributing, among other types, men whose paintings hang to-day on the
walls of London galleries. Franklin’s fame was European. When Berkeley,
the English philosopher, was temporarily living in Rhode Island he
found no lack of agreeable society and intelligent conversation in the
circle in which he moved. The lower grades had permanently lost their
folk-arts and had taken on some frontier characteristics, but there was
every indication that a new civilization, following the main cultural
interests, values, and trends of the old, was arising rapidly after the
break due to the task of subduing the wilderness. Had the continent
been limited, as I suggested, to the seaboard strip, or had the people
chosen to expand gradually, there is no reason to suppose that the
cultural tendencies noted above as on the upward trend through the
eighteenth century would not have continued.
The continent, however, was not so limited. It stretched nearly
three thousand miles further. It was incredibly rich. Following the
Revolution, piece after piece of it, at intervals, came into the hands
of the descendants of those eighteenth century colonials, men quite
as much as women, who had begun to interest themselves in painting,
literature, drama, and music. The wealth to be made out of the West, a
constantly retreating West for more than a century, began to act as a
magnet on men’s minds and ambitions. Following the poorer classes who
went as hunters and settlers, there appear the agents of merchants,
bankers, and speculators. Astor made a fortune in furs. Others in
lands. Others in yet more ways. The craze for getting fabulously rich
quickly spread. The perpetual boom, broken only by sharp crises, in
which America has since lived, began. The nascent civilization on
the seaboard became violently deflected from its course. Scientific
inventions succeeded one another, and with every new method of
transportation—canal, good roads, steamboat, railroad—every new method
of mining, every new product to be utilized, every new foreign market
opened, the rush to win riches by raping a continent became madder and
madder.
It was not a question of preparing a continent for habitation. It
was one of money-maddened men furiously wrenching wealth from it in
every way their ingenuity and greed could devise—from the land, from
the forests above it, from the mines below it. Like hogs at a trough,
each man guzzled as hard as he could, regardless of all else, lest
some other hog should get ahead of him. In Germany they have been
rafting logs for a thousand years. The carefully tended and replanted
forests may well last for a thousand more. Rafting on the Mississippi
began, flourished, and was finished in seventy years. About 1840 the
American people as a nation owned forty billion feet of standing lumber
contiguous to the river and its tributaries. In seventy years private
individuals and companies had stripped the land of this magnificent
heritage without replacing a single tree. This was not “the task of
subduing a wilderness to make it habitable.” It was the madness of
lust—the meanest of all lusts, the lust for money.
To-day America is fairly glutted with wealth. It is useless to
enumerate the statistics—an advertising expenditure of a billion
dollars a year, savings deposits of twenty-eight billions, two hundred
and twenty-eight individuals reporting incomes of over a million a year
each, a national income of ninety billions.
IV
Is America still young? Is it not rather, perhaps, if we _must_ use
such figures of speech, that she was born at Jamestown in 1607, grew
to promising maturity by the second half of the eighteenth century,
and then, abandoning herself to the desire for expansion and sudden
wealth, deliberately turned her back on the way in which she had been
going? Those who say that America is young, still point to the future
as the time when we may be expected to begin to devote ourselves to
other things than “subduing a continent and accumulating the necessary
material resources on which to build a civilization.” In the name of
every high ideal that man has ever cherished, _when_ are we going to be
rich enough to begin as a nation, if we are not now, now that we have
gutted our heritage, piled up the greatest accumulation of wealth in
the world, accumulated the most stupendous material basis for living
that man has ever known?
I think it is at this point that the dangerous evil of our being
forever told by friendly or hostile critics that we are young comes
in. A boy who is really young realizes that there are some things he
cannot do until he is a man. He waits, but at the same time he prepares
himself. If we tell a child he is too young to do this or that, the
child is justified in believing it and in refraining from trying to
do it. Is there not danger in telling our people, young and old, that
America is young? Will it not merely serve to make them contented to
go on piling up wealth, to do what they have been doing for a hundred
years, and to keep them from playing the part of men as they should?
Many critics have pointed to the immaturity of the American mind.
There is a time to stop telling a boy he is young. There comes a time
when we must tell him to be a man, to do a man’s work and try to think
a man’s thoughts. If we keep on coddling him and telling him he is a
child of whom nothing is expected, we are not likely ever to make a man
of him.
Why should we be content to wait a hundred, two hundred, or seven
hundred years more before we think we shall be old enough to do
something besides provide the material foundation for a civilization
which we are told will somehow come of itself when we are grown up? If
we are told and come to believe that no matter what we do we cannot
lead a more spiritual life or have the culture of an “old” country in
less than so many centuries, any more than a boy of fourteen can make
himself twenty by trying, are we not giving ourselves an excuse to go
on piling up riches and exploiting the world without making an effort
to attain to a spiritual instead of a material plane of civilization?
On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as an old race, heirs of
all the ages, which was temporarily set back by having to move into a
new home, and that now we have not only got that home in order but have
added to it and become incredibly rich, and that therefore it is high
time we turned to something else, I believe it would be far better for
our self-respect and for our spiritual growth. To say that we are too
young is to put off the time of manhood beyond our power to attain, and
to stultify any hopes of our own day and generation. To say, on the
other hand, that we have made our move, got settled, and become rich
is to stir us to something better than spending our days devising more
means to get richer yet.
I do not believe we _are_ young. We are a century and a half older than
when a political gathering could include such minds as John Adams,
Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Marshall, and others. We are nearly
a century older than when in one corner of our land alone we could
have a group like Holmes, Whittier, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Emerson. I
believe in many ways we have already added much to the spiritual wealth
of the world. In our library systems, in our scientific foundations for
research, in a number of other ways, we have led the modern nations.
Why, then, still preach this debilitating doctrine that we are young
and nothing must be expected of us? Is it not time that we stopped
using that as an excuse to cover all our shortcomings, the desire not
to stop hunting after material gain, the refusal to stir our minds and
play a man’s part in the new world? Is it not time to proclaim that
we are not children but men who must put away childish things; that
we have overlooked that fact too long; that we have busied ourselves
overmuch with fixing up the new place we moved into three hundred years
ago, with making money in the new neighborhood; and that we should
begin to live a sane, maturely civilized life? To keep on telling our
children that they cannot expect this and that of America because she
is too young is to make self-indulgent, self-excusing mollycoddles of
them and of her. To say that we cannot yet turn to the spiritual things
of life because we still have material work to do, when we contrast our
own gorged state of material well-being with that of any other nation,
is sheer hypocrisy. If we merely want to continue to grow richer and
richer, and softer and softer, let us say so straight out and not
hide the truth under the plea of having to “develop the continent,”
that continent which Jefferson fondly hoped would leave us room for
expansion for a thousand years. Everything may be hoped from the child
who tries to be a man. Nothing can be hoped from the man who cloaks his
shortcomings or material selfishness or spiritual indolence under the
pretense of being a child.
CHAPTER XII
HOME THOUGHTS FROM
ABROAD
HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD
I
After some months at “home” in America and a couple spent in rambling
over Italy and France, I returned recently once more to London. The
first thing that struck me, happily, was that its perennial and
inexhaustible charm was as fresh and unchanged as ever. It is true
that changes in detail, mainly architectural, are to be observed as
plentiful enough by one who has long known it and who has now been
an annual visitor for some years. Devonshire House, never a thing of
beauty, but nevertheless of a certain antique dignity, has given place
to a glaringly white palace of smart flats and shops. The yet newer
but equally glaring hotel in Park Lane is regarded with many shakings
of heads as a possible portent for what may be in store for the entire
length of that aristocratic street. Dorchester House, most beautiful of
all the great houses in town, has been sold in spite of efforts to save
it from the auctioneer’s hammer and probable destruction. Burlington
Arcade, beloved of all shopping tourists, has also changed hands and
its fate is unknown. The Adelphi, with its dignified houses above and
its gloomy and mysterious “arches” below, is about to be disposed of.
The dark passageways, lit at midday by flaring gas lamps, and housing,
besides memories of David Copperfield, the largest and perhaps choicest
collections of wines in the world, are probably doomed. I hesitate to
say too much about it for American readers, but there are estimated to
be between three and four hundred thousand dozen of priceless vintages
stored in the vaults which will soon have to be moved. At least,
although the fate of the buildings still hangs in the balance, Bernard
Shaw, who has lived there for thirty years, has taken, with Celtic
impatience, a flat elsewhere, and Sir James Barrie, another tenant,
is, with more British calm, “waiting,” as he says, “to see.” As for
the complete transformation of lower Regent Street, in progress for
several years, the alterations are now practically completed and the
new buildings will require many months of damp and soot to mellow into
harmonious tone with their surroundings.
Yes, in some external features London is undoubtedly changing, and
changing rapidly. But then, it always has been changing since it was
founded by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. Here and there we
may lament some particular manifestation of the law of life and growth,
but as a whole one finds the life of the town singularly unaltered,
and London still seems to me in most ways the most civilized, as it is
unquestionably the greatest, of the cities of men.
Coming from the Continent, a “citizen of the world” feels at once that
he has come from the backwaters into a great centre of human interest.
London is not only in sheer extent and population the largest city in
the world, so that Paris, and even New York in the restricted limits of
its only interesting portions, seem quickly exhaustible in comparison,
but it is the centre as yet of the greatest and most widely scattered
empire the world has ever seen. The dweller in it feels that he is at
the crossroads of all the world’s chief highways. One can survey the
world from here as from no other one centre. France, it is true, has
a scattered empire also, but the average Frenchman has, for the most
part, as little interest in the world at large as has the American
of the Middle West. Italy’s empire and interests are almost wholly
confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, to say nothing of the iron
censorship of speech and press. Except for international sport and the
spectacular, the average city in America is as unconscious of what is
being said and done in other countries as is a man of the radio waves
carried on the ether. By “listening in” he may at once pick up a whole
world of sound and thought of which he is otherwise unconscious. In the
same way a man at home may “listen in” to the international world by
using special apparatus in the way of foreign journals or by personal
relations, but these opportunities are limited to comparatively small
groups.
Here, on the other hand, that world is, so to say, in the air and not
the ether, and one does not have to make a special effort or acquire
exceptional apparatus to share in it. There are certain types of the
stay-at-home smaller business Englishman who are as hopelessly narrow
and provincial as Babbitt. But, even if one is not a Joshua to fell
the walls of high society or the higher political circles, one is more
apt here to meet all the time people who have just come from China or
the Cape, or almost any part of the world, than one is at home to meet
strayers from Dayton or Houston or Los Angeles. Moreover, if one picks
up a dozen English magazines on the news stand and contrasts them with
a dozen American ones, the wider range of interests at once becomes
apparent. Of course, there are reasons for this. The main business of
England, both in merchandising and banking, is international. The
larger business man has a direct interest in almost all quarters of
the globe. Again, speaking broadly, there is scarcely a family of the
better-magazine-reading classes which has not a member of it living in
some remote corner of the Empire or of the world outside. Cape Town,
Calcutta, and Peking are not merely far-off foreign cities which creep
into the news occasionally as centres of political disturbance, but
places where “Tom” or “Dick” or “Harry” is stationed.
But another and perhaps one of the chief charms of London is that, if
it is the greatest of all great cities, it is also the most homelike
and, one might almost say, rural. The low sky line, and the fact that
the architectural unit for most of the town yet remains the small
house as contrasted with the vast “apartment houses” and skyscrapers
of American cities, account for part of this “homey” atmosphere for a
generation which still feels that a home means a house and not a slice
of some costly communal barracks. Then there are the parks everywhere,
affording not only the welcome relief of lawns and trees, but
opportunities for cricket and golf and tennis within walking distance
of one’s house almost wherever it may be. Apart from the innumerable
larger parks there are the endless “squares” and “gardens,” so that one
may walk in almost any direction not more than a few minutes without
the eye’s encountering the restful green of trees and shrubs. Cheek by
jowl with the busiest thoroughfares there are village-seeming streets
or quiet nooks which are as retired and peace-bringing as any cathedral
close. One steps out of Piccadilly to find one’s self surrounded by
the flowers and country atmosphere of the Albany, or one passes from
the confusion of High Holborn under an archway to rest in the charming
old-world garden of Staple Inn, where the lilacs and iris bloom and
a fountain plashes with the cool serenity of the garden sanctuary of
some country house. Again, one may pass from the Strand, busiest of
the streets of men, under another archway to the perfect sylvan peace
of the Temple, where lawns stretch to the river and boys and girls
are playing tennis and one feels a brooding calm under the shade of
almost immemorial trees. One of the loveliest rural views in England
is looking up the water in St. James Park, only three minutes from
what, with the Abbey and Parliament Buildings, may be called the very
centre of Empire. Starting there, one may walk for miles over grass and
under the trees, keeping all the time in the heart of London. I know in
America no country club to compare in sheer rural beauty with Ranelagh,
with its superb gardens, its flowers, water views, tennis courts, golf
course, and polo grounds, yet this, like Hurlingham, is not an hour or
so out of town by train, but on one of the busiest arteries of traffic
within the city itself.
All these open spaces, all this green and the scent of flowers, give
one the impression that everywhere the country is overflowing into the
city. One hears the syrinx rather than the riveter, and Pan and Flora
yet hold the field against Midas and Vulcan. Nowhere in London, with
the exception of the Mall and perhaps one or two other instances, do we
find any such planned architectural vistas as so delight the French.
London, vast as a primeval forest, has just naturally grown without
elaborate city planning, but unlike New York and the larger American
cities it has managed to keep itself green and homelike and beautiful.
Nature has not been banished, but welcomed in a thousand nooks and
corners prepared for her to enter. The difference seems to depend on
national taste and a different scale of values. In America the sole
“value” of a piece of city real estate is considered to be what it
will yield when built upon, and every inch is made to produce as much
as possible by building on it. Here—although, Heaven knows, London
land is costly enough—open spaces, irises and daffodils, hawthorns
and lawns, have their values also for the human life of the town. The
Bank of England is at present erecting a huge new building for its
needs, but it is being so constructed as to preserve the small patch
of shaded green where daffodils bloom in gay disregard of the swirling
traffic a few feet away in one of the most congested centers of the
world. Imagine a great bank in Wall Street having a garden! Anyone who
suggested it would be thought mad, but in London it is this sense of
human values, in private properties as well as public parks, maintained
in spite of the need and lure of money in the world’s most densely
populated city, which again gives one a sense of its civilized attitude
toward life.
Yet another element in its civilization is the almost perfect quiet
that reigns in it. As contrasted with the insane tooting of horns day
and night in Paris and New York, one rarely hears a motor, and although
these warm days the parks are filled with children and older persons
of all grades of society, walking about or playing games, one never
hears any such “catcalling,” yelling, and general racket as one would
in American city parks with such masses of people. Civilization is of
necessity a colossal compromise between impulses of self-expression in
an individual and his strength of will in controlling such impulses as,
indulged in by many others, would make life less possible or agreeable
for all. When one motorist, dashing through a street at night, gives
vent to his self-expression by a shriek of his horn which awakens with
a start perhaps a hundred people, he is a being who has not learned
the very rudiments of civilization—that is, of harmonizing his own
instincts with the good of all.
Perhaps the highest test of whether a city or a people is civilized
is just this one of how far it has gone in learning what things can
and cannot be done in order to attain to the most perfect balance
between expression and restraint. This, of course, is most obviously
manifested in the nature and character of the laws, in the speed and
impartiality with which they are enforced, and in the attitude of the
people at large to them. One feels here that, whether by centuries of
training or by some political instinct, this people can govern itself
as no other can. There are comparatively few laws interfering with the
liberty of the individual to do as he likes, but they are enforced
with a swiftness, an impartiality, and a completeness that leave an
American green with envy. To note merely two examples since my arrival:
About three weeks ago a woman’s body was found in a trunk which had
been checked at Charing Cross Station. There was no apparent clue to
the mystery. At the end of a week the newspapers were much perturbed
by what they called the “unique” and most disturbing fact that after
seven days the police had not yet caught the unknown murderer. A few
days later, however, he had been run down, had confessed, and is now
in jail. Shortly after this a most outrageous blackmailing scheme
was brought to the attention of the police. Within a fortnight the
ringleaders had been caught, tried, convicted, and sent to prison for
terms ranging up to life.
It may be said that good enforcement of the law might also be had under
an autocracy, but what strikes one here as a test of civilization is
not merely the enforcement of law by the authorities, but the attitude
of the people themselves toward it in a democracy. Take the case of
the regulation of the liquor traffic. We tried it ourselves at home
for years; but, on the one hand, the authorities proved themselves
too incompetent and venal to enforce any laws regulating the saloon,
and, on the other, the people as a whole were too lawless to make the
problem a small one. From this we went on to Prohibition, with the
resulting farcical but no less disgraceful mess we are in to-day. Over
here, ever since the war, the traffic has been regulated by permitting
sales only at certain hours of the day, and it is illuminating to see
how the law is everywhere enforced by the people themselves. The hours
vary slightly in different towns so that not infrequently in the past
five years I have found myself asking for a drink in a public house
or hotel a few minutes ahead of the particular opening time in that
locality. In all these years I have never yet witnessed a single case
in which the law has been infringed by the fraction of a second on my
behalf or that of anyone else. As a result, the law has been entirely
successful. The possibility of prohibition, with all its evils, has
been put off indefinitely, and on the other hand drunkenness has
ceased, as far as my observation has gone. I have seen only one case of
even semi-intoxication, that of a man who had that afternoon received
a decree of divorce and was either drowning his sorrows or celebrating
his luck, I never knew which. Over the Whitsuntide holiday, I might
add, some two hundred and fifty thousand persons went to Blackpool, and
there was not a single instance of drunkenness or disorderly conduct.
II
Certainly if we judge the degree of civilization by the completeness
with which a people governs itself, combined with the completeness with
which it retains all possible liberty of individual action, I know no
other leading country of European civilization which can compete with
England. As for liberty of speech, thought, and action in America, it
is notorious that in many ways they are being maintained only by a
direct disobeying of or winking at innumerable laws.
To some extent we may attribute some of our difficulties of this sort
to the extremely heterogeneous population we now have, but that is due
to the “native” American’s dislike of physical work and his desire to
get rich as quickly as possible by exploiting with the greatest speed
and with alien labor the resources of the continent. At home there is
no use blinking the fact any longer that we are not an Anglo-Saxon
country. Our language may be English, the framework of our government
may be mainly derived from English precedents, and the old stock
may still give the leaders, for the most part, in culture, but the
population figures tell another story. In New York City alone there
are two million foreign born and two hundred thousand negroes, to say
nothing of foreigners of the second generation. In all England there
are only three hundred thousand aliens, and this racial solidarity
gives one a sense of being at home and among one’s own kind.
The figures in _Who’s Who_ are suggestive. That volume is supposed
to list some twenty-six thousand Americans who have achieved enough
distinction to win a place there. Of those twenty-six thousand, as
I recall it, ten per cent were foreign born, but of that ten per
cent one-half came to us from the British Empire, leaving only five
per cent, or some thirteen hundred persons in all America, who have
achieved distinction from among the millions of all other races who
have been immigrants in the last generation. For the most part, we get
the lowest and not the best from foreign countries, and, apart from a
few notable individuals, their purely cultural contribution to American
life has been small. The types of civilization evolved by various
races all have their good and bad points, but each has been fitted to
racial idiosyncrasies. The world would be poorer without either the
Anglo-Saxon or the Latin; but, to mention only one point, when we study
what the Latins have everywhere made of parliamentary government of
the English type it is evident that it is utterly unsuited to them. It
is not one of the least satisfactions of living in England that one
is surrounded by English people. In America one is also surrounded
by “Americans,” but “American” has utterly ceased to have any racial
connotation. In the colonial days, in spite of a considerable admixture
of Germans, Dutch, Scotch, and Irish, the social fabric was still
English, and it is not surprising if an American of English descent
whose family had been in America for many generations before the
separation took place should still prefer an English attitude and
outlook on life to that of the Semites or Slavs or Armenians, however
interesting he may find certain aspects of their self-expression in
literature or art.
I have mentioned the charm of the flowers in London, but the children,
dainty and flowerlike, are no less charming, and these warm days the
parks and squares and streets are full of them. As great numbers of
the boys of the better classes are away at school, the girls are most
in evidence, with their skirts so short as to be mere flounces on the
bottom of abbreviated waists. One can study childish legs from ankle
to hip here by the thousand, and one comes to the conclusion that they
are among the most beautiful things the world has to offer. These
youngsters, arrayed in a way to make Main Street gasp, have also a
gentleness, a modesty, and a quietness of demeanor that are equally
beyond the ken of that thoroughfare.
One could continue to write indefinitely of the charms of London,
but already many readers have undoubtedly been giving vent to that
characteristic remark whenever one praises foreign lands or suggests
anything lacking in “God’s Country”: “Why don’t you go there to live if
you think it’s so much better?”—with an inflection of annoyance that
makes the sentence much more of an imperative than an interrogative.
Over here, year after year, as one’s life passes so easily and
humanely, one asks one’s self that question, especially as one reads
that marvelously fascinating last page of the morning _Times_ with
its illustrated advertisements, veritable “magic casements,” of
country houses for sale at fabulously low prices according to American
standards. Also one knows one can be sure of a cook. Why not stay here
and live? And yet one doesn’t—or, at least, one has not yet.
As for the mere matter of changing one’s residence, American opinion
has always been irrational. Americans think it laudable that a citizen
of any other nation should come to America to better his condition,
but shameful that an American should emigrate to Europe for the same
purpose. Let an Astor or a Henry James or an Edwin Abbey transfer
himself to England and, in the American vernacular, “a howl goes
up” as though he had been a Benedict Arnold. But life after all is
not rational, and one hesitates. The advantages of this country are
all rational. The reasons for not packing up forthwith are largely
irrational and usually they win, though they are not easy to describe.
There is at bottom that largely modern and perhaps hardest of all
passions to analyze, the love of one’s country, even in America where
in many neighborhoods one’s neighbors have ceased to be of one’s
own race or even, perhaps, capable of speaking one’s own tongue. As
one looks at the beautiful English landscape, more beautiful in its
well-tended charm and utter peacefulness than any other I know in
the whole world, a sudden nostalgia will come over one for a rough,
neglected bit of some Vermont hillside or the familiar ugliness of some
fishing village on the shore. One murmurs to one’s self, “Beautiful,
beautiful,” in Devon or Warwickshire, and then may unaccountably be
seized with a sudden desire to “muss it all up.” All Englishmen have
to some extent this love of the wild and the unfinished, and perhaps
those of us whose families have been in America for centuries—and mine,
counting South as well as North America, was here for two generations
before even the Mayflower sailed—have “gone native” a bit, have become
a little more uncivilized, a little savage. Something revolts in us at
living too continuously too perfect, too orderly, too civilized a life.
Perhaps the scale has something to do with it. Mere bigness, so much
worshiped at home, has no value in itself Many a tiny insect is more
beautiful than an elephant. But there is a sense in which size when
translated into scale has a legitimate influence. A miniature, an easel
painting, and a mural decoration differ in something more than mere
size. So far as I know, no attempt has been made to study the effect of
the size of a man’s habitation upon him, though as the average man’s
grows smaller and smaller it is a subject not without interest. What
are all the psychological effects of living in two rooms and a bath as
compared with the old roomy house of two generations ago? Over here
one feels at times that sense of being “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d.”
One recalls the picture in _Punch_ of an American motorist driving
his car at seventy miles an hour while a man by the roadside calls
out, “Remember this is an island!” Even if one has lived only on the
Atlantic seaboard, he has felt that there were three thousand miles
of open sea in front of him and three thousand miles of his own land
behind him, and it has done something, very lasting but very hard to
define, to him.
But perhaps most of all there is the feeling that at home one is
watching one of the greatest experiments in history, an experiment that
is somehow partly one’s own responsibility as an American. If one loses
one’s way in the subway because the conductor can talk only Hungarian,
if some negroes are burned at the stake as though it were the year 800,
if a bricklayer gets twenty dollars a day and a professor of economics
gets ten, if a town can find no better way to express its enthusiasm
for a native son than by running the fire engines up and down the main
street, if twenty thousand school children are assembled to see which
has the most freckles, if any one of the hundred unaccountable and
fantastic things in the American press come true daily, one wonders
what it all signifies and where it is all going to end. But that is
just it. One wonders and one wants to wait just a little longer and
see. Perhaps the small boy has never lost his love for the circus.
III
In speaking with American friends at home I find that there is a
widespread opinion that the English do not like us and that a tourist
or resident here is acutely made aware of the fact. I have spent part
of each of the last six years in England and have found very little of
this alleged hostility to ourselves.
There is no other human relationship more apt to breed bad blood and
misunderstanding than that between debtor and creditor, as the entire
history of our country proves in the relations between East and West.
The trouble is apt to be greatly emphasized when such a relation is
suddenly reversed and the formerly rich creditor finds himself in turn
in the rôle of poor debtor. The debt of the now comparatively poor
England to the enormously prosperous America might well have been
expected to have bred ill feeling of the deepest sort, but it has not
done so to anything like the degree which it has on the continent of
Europe. In the first place, there has been the long-ingrained respect
in England for business ethics. She has been called a nation of
shopkeepers, but the very conditions that have called forth that name
have bred in her a sense of commercial honor that is notably lacking
in certain other countries. The war debt has therefore been regarded
here much more than in any other debtor country in the same light in
which the business man in America has regarded it—that is, as a purely
financial transaction the terms of which should be complied with as far
as possible. Also the English are good sports and believe in “playing
cricket.”
It is true that England would have been glad to see all debts canceled
for the good of all, and in this she was not as selfish as has been
claimed, for the debts owing her by other nations are much more
than she owes and she would have lost heavily on balance by such an
all-round cancellation. This balance she has, as a matter of fact,
relinquished by canceling all debts due her except enough to pay us,
provided she can collect it, which is not by any means yet certain.
English business, including manufactures, commerce, and banking, has
always been international, whereas American has been almost wholly
domestic. The average American has little or nothing to do with the
complicated problems of foreign exchange, and the English can see far
more clearly the future difficulties involved for the entire business
of the world in these enormous annual payments by Europe to a country
which already has half the world’s gold supply. The task of paying
international debts raises problems which are entirely different from
the mere transfer of domestic credits, and the securing of funds to
be transferred annually to America is far from being solely a matter
of taxation, however staggering. When, in addition to insisting that
the debts be paid to the uttermost farthing possible, according to our
standard of the debtors’ “capacity to pay,” we raise a tariff wall
which prohibits the sale of foreign goods to us, an almost impossible
situation is created. We already have the gold, so they cannot pay us
in that. We refuse to let them pay us in goods. We prohibit the import
of wool, for example, one of England’s chief exports, by raising the
duty to sixty per cent. As a personal experience, last year on the dock
I found the duty on my suits to be the figure just named, on embroidery
seventy-five per cent, on jewelry eighty per cent, and on lace ninety
per cent. In the old days we used to imprison debtors who could not
pay. We gradually learned that shutting a man in jail and depriving him
of the means of making a livelihood was a foolish way to expect him
to pay his debt. By our tariff wall we are imprisoning our European
debtors in much the same way. This phase of the problem is resented to
some extent here because the situation is much better understood than
at home, where most business men have had experience only with domestic
debts, with no training in international finance.
On the whole, however, one hears comparatively little here now about
the debt. In responsible quarters there is a great desire to let the
matter rest and to continue to make the annual payments without further
comment unless the ultimate impossibility of the situation may become
clearly apparent on both sides of the water. It does hurt and annoy
them here when Mr. Mellon tells the American people that the debt is
not costing England anything and is not hurting her. If Englishmen
are not given either to whimpering or to welshing, they do believe in
fair play. They may or may not eventually receive from other nations
what they are already paying us. They have not received it yet, and
may never do so. They are engaged in delicate negotiations with France
about the matter now. Meanwhile they have signed the note to us and are
paying it in cash. Therefore, when they are bleeding themselves white
in their private and corporate incomes to pay their own taxes (the
lowest income-tax rate is twenty per cent), and are paying the debt to
us on a scale which we have not exacted from any other debtor, they
feel it is unfair to say they are not going into their own pockets at
all. But even so, there was much criticism here of Churchill’s note as
tending to start afresh a controversy which Englishmen feel is settled
and which it is beneath their dignity to reopen of themselves.
Among people of all classes I would say that there is far less feeling
against the United States here than there is against England even now
at home, with all the improvement that there has been in sentiment
there. Perhaps the most absurd opinion which many people in the smaller
communities in America hold is that England hates us because she has
never forgotten the Revolution. As for the loss of a major part of her
earlier empire, several points must be remembered which Americans are
apt to forget. One is that for many decades in the nineteenth century
public opinion in England was not imperialistic at all, and, so far
from regretting the loss of the United States, the country was in favor
of divesting itself as soon as possible of the rest of its imperial
possessions. The imperialism of to-day is of comparatively recent
growth, with a long interval of anti-imperial feeling between the loss
of the old empire and the present day. Again, England has no grievance
or rankling soreness from being defeated by Americans. There is a
simple reason for this, usually ignored at home. It is that she never
was so defeated. She was beaten not by her colonies, but by a coalition
of European Powers that came to their aid. Washington admitted that
the game was lost and that the only salvation was to have France, at
least, enter the fight. Not only did France do so, but Spain also,
and England was fighting all over the world as well as in America, and
continued to do so a year and more after Cornwallis surrendered. She
was beaten only by the combined power of nearly half the civilized
world.
As a matter of fact, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Revolution, and all the
rest of our history, so familiar either in fact or legend to American
children, are to a great extent not known at all here. It was only
about four years ago that the first chair of American history in any
English university was founded. The cultural contributions of America
to civilization had been comparatively slight, and until we became a
world power, owing to our wealth and numbers, there was little more
reason for Europe’s being interested in our history than there is for
us to study the local historical details of South Africa or Australia.
The situation is well illustrated by a story which I heard Lord Lee
of Fareham, who has an American wife, tell the other day. She thought
she would make a pious pilgrimage to Plymouth to see the place from
which her ancestors had sailed. Trying to find the dock,—where, by
the way, there is a commemorative tablet,—she asked a man if he could
tell her where the Pilgrims had sailed from. He looked puzzled and
finally replied: “I really do not recall them, madam. Did they sail
recently?” The Standard Life Assurance Company is at present running
a series of advertisements in one of the best-known English weeklies
using “historical incidents” as texts. Last week they inserted one on
the sailing of the Mayflower. Explaining briefly for English readers
who the Pilgrim Fathers were, the notice says that “after a short stay
in Holland they sailed for America, where they founded a colony at
New Plymouth in 1621” [_sic_]. This is evidently all new and requiring
explanation to English people, although any American child could point
out the several errors of fact in that one sentence.
Far from discovering any feeling of antagonism here on the score of
history, an American is constantly amazed to find how the greater men
on either side of the ocean are considered to belong to one common
race. It would be a delicate if not an impossible matter to set up the
statue of an English king in America, though Alfred and Edward and all
the others down to George the Third are as much figures in our history
as in England’s. It would also be difficult to erect the statue of any
great Englishman of recent days. But here one is becoming surrounded
with Americans. If one goes into the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral one
finds a bust of Washington gazing at the tomb of Nelson, and there are
many tablets there commemorating American artists. I was surprised by
finding one there to my own American cousin, Edwin A. Abbey, which is
more than I ever did in his native land. In Westminster Abbey Americans
abound. Not only are there the bust of Longfellow, the window to
Lowell, the tablet to Page, but many lesser men are represented and
honored. When one steps outside the door one is confronted with the
statue of Lincoln. In front of the National Gallery is a statue of
Washington. At St. Saviour’s is a bust of John Harvard, an Englishman,
but honored thus for his services to America. In the Bodleian Library
at Oxford yesterday I found busts of Washington and Franklin.
Incidentally, in a number of English histories which I have just been
reading, all for English readers and some for English children, the
Revolution is treated with such a spirit of fairness and with so
little hostility as to raise the question whether the authors have made
out as good a case for their ancestors as they well might.
IV
There are some aspects of the personal contact of the two races which,
it must be confessed, have unfortunate consequences. As for the
appraisal of Americans by the English, the fact that we both speak
the same language has its drawbacks. The tongue of every Frenchman,
whether gentleman or boor, proclaims his nationality. The best as well
as the worst are known for what they are—French. But there is nothing
to proclaim so obviously the wellbred, cultivated, quiet-mannered
American as American. Unless that fact transpires in some other way,
he naturally is considered to be English. On the other hand, there is
no mistaking the noisy, underbred American, and, it must be confessed,
a most appalling number turn up over here. Nor is it always those
without money or apparently any social background who give the English
cause to wonder at us as uncultured barbarians. In the quiet English
hotel where I always stay in London one is never disturbed by having
to overhear the conversation of any English group either in the dining
room or in the drawing-rooms. But in every case this winter when an
American family has arrived the place has been thrown into a turmoil at
once. To cite a specific instance or two: The other day an evidently
well-to-do family appeared—father, mother, and son of about fifteen. At
dinner the boy came into the dining room ahead of his parents, stood
in the middle, and from that vantage point shouted out a conversation
to his father, still in the drawing-room, to the consternation of
the English diners. A few nights afterward another family, evidently
of considerable wealth and speaking with an excellent accent, took
possession of the drawing-room. The rest of us, quite uninterested,
were informed in loud tones of what a new camp in the Adirondacks was
like, where the son had been big-game hunting on two continents, and
many other personal details, until in despair of being able to read or
talk quietly one group of English after another got up and left the
room to my fellow citizens. It is evident that this sort of thing does
not endear us to the hearts of the quiet and privacy-loving British.
On the other hand, many American tourists, accustomed to the freedom
of the Pullman smokers at home and the general atmosphere of Rotarian
“glad hand” in America, go back with rankling spirits because the
English do not talk to them in railway carriages or hotel lobbies. They
do not realize, first, that most Englishmen are shy, and, secondly,
that the Englishman, prizing quiet and privacy himself above all else,
feels that he has no right to intrude upon others and that, unless
obviously called for, it is bad form for him to do so. If, however, he
feels justified, or if he thinks he can really be of use to a stranger,
not even an American is more ready to make himself agreeable. The other
day my wife and I were lost for the moment in some of the winding
streets in Chelsea and were studying the map. An Englishwoman at once
came up, asked if she could guide us, and walked several blocks to do
so. The same thing occurred at Lincoln a few days later.
There is, however, a real fear and dislike of America on the part
of some thoughtful people—a reasonable fear and dislike, I think,
based on something far deeper, more subtle, and more important than a
war of a hundred and fifty years ago, the precise terms of the debt
settlement, or the abominable manners of many American tourists. It is
the fear of the Americanization of Europe. For there are many changes
going on here and they are not all due to the European situation in
itself. What these people fear is not that they are facing years of
comparative poverty, of the rise of the new rich, and of the painful
reëstablishment of a bad economic situation, but the loss of the ideals
and values of what has hitherto constituted their civilization. This
the thoughtful traveler also broods over as he sees the changes that
have come and the portents of more.
Mass-production in America, the use of advertising to standardize the
desires and taste of the public and so standardize production, the
consequent lowering of production costs and the increase in wages, have
all created a stupendous rise in the scale of American living from
the purely material standpoint. With a population of over a hundred
millions, undivided by tariff barriers, with most of the raw materials
produced at home, with a people singularly lacking in individuality,
more than willing to live and have everything exactly like everyone
else, the leaders of industry have been able to achieve their ideal of
standardized production. But the achievement of this result has brought
about the surrender of certain values that the European still thinks of
vital importance. What the cultured European desires above all else is
to be an individual, to be able to express his own unique personality
in work and play. The dreary sameness of American life throughout an
entire and vast continent appalls him. Of what use to travel three
thousand miles from New York to San Francisco if for the most part
one sees only the same sort of people, reads the same comic strips and
syndicated news columns, talks the same “shop”, and sees the same city
architecture?
In Devonshire the other day I was looking from my window at a bit of
new garden wall, already beginning to weather and take on beauty in
the damp climate. Most skillfully, and without any sense of patchwork,
various materials had been put together in it—some gray stone, some of
the red Devon sandstone, concrete, and different sorts of brick, with
the effect of variety and interest. An American might have done if
more “efficiently” of one material, but then no one would have cared
to give it a second glance. The old cottages also gain much of their
charm from the variety of materials employed—brick, old oak, stucco,
shingles, and clapboards. That evening I happened to read that the
American Department of Commerce, coöperating with manufacturers in the
interests of “efficiency,” had reduced the varieties of bricks to be
produced from sixty-six to seven, two hundred and ten different shapes
of bottles to twenty, and so on, and that the suggestions had been
received “with enthusiasm.” Nothing could better display the difference
in the ideals of the two countries. After all, if we are all to have
more and more things, but only on the condition that they shall be
exactly like everyone else’s, what becomes of the joy of individual
living, of expressing your own personality—provided you have one—in
work and play? Is it worth while to gain the whole material world and
lose your own soul?
America, overwhelmed like a child on Christmas morning with all its new
toys, does not yet seem to give a thought as to where it is all going
to end. The average business man resents as almost impious, certainly
“unpatriotic,” any suggestion that all is not for the best, so long as
his profits pile up annually. If anyone tries to discuss soberly the
possible pitfalls of present tendencies, he is apt to have thrown at
him, even by university men at home, some such remark as “Get over your
grouch” or “America has no place for kickers,” for the average business
man, though he takes himself most seriously, is incredibly naive and
immature. The average American, so far from resenting the fact that
Big Business is out to limit his choice of things more and more while
increasing their number, that it is utilizing all the resources of
science in psychological advertising to train him to submerge his
individuality in order to simplify business for the manufacturer, to
make him a mere “consumer” and not a man, seems to welcome it. In
itself that is a sign of immaturity. The schoolboy above all else
dreads being “different.” It is only as one grows to maturity that he
insists on being himself and expressing himself in his own way.
Europe is mature if it is poor. It has come to know that there are
better values in life than a host of material conveniences and
possessions. But it _is_ poor. It owes to America the greatest money
debt that the world has ever dreamed of. America, with its vast
resources, its boiling prosperity, half of the world’s gold, is sucking
Europe into the maelstrom of its own whirling industrial life. Europe
feels itself slipping against its will, and clings desperately to the
shore. It is possible that the present economic régime in America
cannot last forever. When overproduction gluts the home market, when
manufacturers have to enter into foreign competition for new markets,
the story may be different, though the time may be far off. But in the
mean time what may happen to the older and the more civilized ideals
of the value of individuality and craftsmanship and artistic products?
Even now we have to go to Europe for such things as require individual
talent. We still have brains and skill at the top, but are killing
them off at the bottom. During the war we had to get Austrians to make
our maps because there were no skilled American draftsmen for the
work. In one of the finest churches in America the architect designed
the carved stone—though in the Middle Ages the workmen would do that
themselves—and then had to import workmen from Italy to execute it.
Meanwhile Europe owes the debts and we insist they must be paid. The
masses heavily taxed look toward American prosperity and methods. Here
and there mass production is being tried, although Europe, with its
limited and highly differentiated markets, can never fully compete. It
is not, as many Americans think, merely a matter of national jealousies
or tariff barriers, but of an individualism that makes the world more
interesting and richer.
If Europe is sucked into the whirlpool, if her form of civilization
gives way to the American, and if we are at last world-standardized to
one bottle and one brick and one dress and one bath and one car and one
book and one idea, it may be that we shall regret the day when every
Englishman could pride himself on being singular and “a little mad.”
And so one wonders as one walks about this old city of London—where
tulips and irises dot lawns of inestimable “real estate” value, where
one feels a complete liberty to express one’s individuality, where one
is not limited to one brick in seven or one bottle in twenty, where
one feels complete personal liberty within a framework of reasonable
and observed law—how long it will last; and, if from poverty and the
pressure of American gold it all falls to the low level of American
efficiency, mass production, and controlled and standardized lives,
what one will do for ideas and ideals and all the possible varied
interest and charm of human life. It is not impossible that the world
of men may eventually be infinitely poorer because of our colossal and
unthinking prosperity.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ART OF LIVING
THE ART OF LIVING
It is an easy phrase, “the art of living,” and one which, like any
cliché, is rather of the tongue than of the mind, yet in a general way
we know well enough what we mean to signify by it. It means primarily
an intelligent ordering of experience, and, to that end, an intelligent
ordering of the relations between ourselves and the outer world of
things or the inner world of possible emotions and thoughts. As one
moves about the world in order to test life in its great foci, in New
York or Washington, London or Paris, Prague or Vienna, one cannot
but be struck by the differing degrees in which various peoples have
attained to the practice of this most difficult of all the arts. In
America, indeed, there seems to be hardly any appreciation at all on
the part of most people that such an art exists. Any discussion of it
is relegated by them to that sphere of nonsensical moonshine that may
be indulged in by billionaires or by those inefficient Europeans who do
not realize that time is money. It is not without significance that in
Europe the ordering of our existence is spoken of as “the art of life,”
whereas when any such discussion takes place in America it is usually
under the caption, “the business of life.”
There is, of course, a business of life. A man must have some financial
means of support; he must have some sort of shelter; some sort of
clothing; he must put a certain amount of food into his body daily.
The business of life, however, is much the same for man as it is for
the animals, although it may be more complicated. It is only when
man attempts to rise above the mere business of life, and order the
experiences of his life, that he becomes man. An architect cannot do
without bricks and steel, but the workman who spends his life puddling
molten steel in the furnace or putting clay in the ovens is not an
architect. Machines will some day do the work as well, but no machine
will ever design a cathedral of Amiens, arrange the glass in a rose
window of Chartres or daringly raise the choir at Beauvais. Just as the
art of building is utterly different from the business of building, so
does the art of life differ from the business of life. The difference
extends throughout the whole domain of experience. It is not concerned
merely with the highbrow. Eating at a lunch counter in New York belongs
to the business of life; eating at a café in France belongs to the art
of life; though one may put as many calories into one’s body in the one
as in the other.
The primary concern of every artist of every sort must be a vision
of that to which he would attain, of that which he would make. The
sculptor sees the finished statue before he begins to mould the clay;
the painter sees his picture before he adds touch to touch of color
upon his canvas; the poet knows what he would say before he begins to
weave the magic of his words; and the composer has heard his symphony
before he struggles with the writing of his notes. Obviously, if
there is a parallel art of living, the artist in life must have some
conception of his finished product, of what sort of life he is trying
to make.
For any artist, again, there are the materials and tools with which he
works, and just as the material of the musician is sound, that of the
sculptor marble or bronze, that of the poet words, so the material
with which the artist in life deals must be thought and emotion,
using the terms in their very widest senses. The range of these is
practically unlimited, infinitely more so than the materials available
to any other artist. So again we find a far more varied assortment
among what we may call the tools with which the artist in life may work
as compared with those of other artists.
Any art is circumscribed by its technique. Marble must be chiselled
with a limited number of tools in certain ways, sound must be produced
by a similarly limited number of instruments, and so in the other arts.
But the artist in life is confronted by an almost infinite number of
“tools” which for him consist of all those things by which thought and
emotion can be brought into being. For example, he has the finished
product of every other art—statues, poems, music, paintings. There
is also the whole world of practical appliances—houses, clothes,
automobiles, money, telephones, all the innumerable contrivances for
man’s comfort or ostentation. There are, further, the endless forms
of activity of work or play—business, the professions, travel, sport.
There are the individualized relationships of parenthood, acquaintance,
friendship, love. In a word, everything, tangible and intangible, is a
“tool” with which the artist in life may produce thought or emotion,
and so modify the life itself conceived as a product of art. It is
evident that whoever would practice an art of living is likely to be
overwhelmed by the wealth of his material and by the unlimited choice
of tools with which to mould it into specific forms.
For centuries past the problem for professing Christians at least
was theoretically simple. This life did not count at all save as a
preparation for an eternal one, entrance to the happiness of which was
possible only by following certain rules of conduct. Today, however,
the problem for most people is what is the most perfect or satisfying
life for our few years on earth, with no fixed rules to guide. Just as
the breaking down of so many barriers of thought at the time of the
Renaissance freed all the other arts and allowed them to flower, so
the breaking down of barriers today would seem to give the art of life
its opportunity as never before. As far as the tyranny of old ideas is
concerned we are freer than at any other period of history to order our
lives according to art. Moreover, we have infinitely more tools to do
it with. They are being thrust into our hands with amazing rapidity,
though we play with them without thinking what we are doing or making.
The result, it must be confessed, is a haphazard existence instead of
an art of living.
Indeed, it may be asked if this sudden wealth of new tools has not
overwhelmed us. Are not most of us in the position of being provided
with undreamed of resources for an artist but with no ideas and no
technique? It is a platitude to say that we are at the beginning of a
new era facing a wholly altered world. If there is no art of living,
then all we can do is to bungle along. But if there is any such art,
then evidently the first thing of all is to decide what we want to
make, what sort of life is worth while, what sort of thoughts and
emotions. What with the lack of time, the pressure of community opinion
and the insistence of standardized advertising, most of us take the
easiest way by thinking that what we want is what our neighbors have.
But just as standardized machine production has killed the arts of the
old crafts, so standardized living quickly kills any art of living.
If there can be any art of living, any ordering of life to yield us
the richest and deepest experiences from this strange adventure into
self-consciousness, it is evident that the individual has got to decide
what for him or her are the abiding values in life. As it is, our minds
are apt to be like the first page of a newspaper in which a home run
by Babe Ruth may get the same space as the fall of an empire. If we
stopped to consider sanely what for each of us are the real values in
life, ranging them in order of significance and importance for _us_,
might not many of us find that they do not consist at all in the things
we are striving for? Might we not throw away many of the tools which
everyone is using thoughtlessly and habitually merely because everyone
else is? We would have seen that they do not produce any such thought
or emotion as should fit into that unique production which is our own
individual life. For one of the fundamental differences between a
work of art and a machine product is that the former is unique. All
art involves a selection according to a scale of values. The camera
may render the total detail of a landscape with more exactitude than
a painter, but the latter selects the details and then through his
technique and his own personality he produces a work of art which has a
unique and artistic quality.
Is it, perhaps, that the material for an art of life is so vast and
our tools have become so numerous that there is no possibility of an
artistic ordering of our experience? Has it all become too complex
and are we reduced to a chaotic and disordered succession of thoughts
and emotions? If not, then the artist in life must do just as any
other does, learn his technique of production, the proper use of his
tools and material to produce a definite result at which he aims, and
rigidly reject all which does not contribute to the one work of art of
which he has seen the vision.
That is, perhaps, one of the greatest difficulties in the way of
an art of life in America. We mix up our money and motor cars and
relationships and all the rest of our “tools” as thoughtlessly as a
painter might squeeze all his tubes of color onto his canvas, and we
get as a result the same sort of daub, in terms of life. Or we are like
children striking the notes of a piano at random and achieving the same
jangle in life that they do in sound. We select and reject mainly as
governed by income. We do so because we have no scale of values, and we
have no values because we have no idea what sort of life we really wish
to live to express our individuality.
But we cannot select unless we can place comparative values on the
various things life offers us, and we cannot value them unless we have
arrived at some _standard_ of value. The only standard is what we
consider a worthwhile life for each of us individually. For various
reasons the tyranny of crowd opinion has always been greater in America
than in most civilized countries, but it is, of course, one of the
great dangers of democracy everywhere. Many people seem to believe that
the life of the savage is one of delightful independence, of doing
what suits himself all day long. No idea could be further from the
truth. The savage is hemmed and circumscribed at almost every point
in his personal life by the _mores_ of his tribe. Liberty, freedom of
speech and action, the right and opportunity for free self-expression,
are among the highest products of civilization, not of savagery, and
the belief that the reverse is the case is merely an example of the
present day tendency to exalt the ideal of savagery and to return on
our tracks, evident in all the arts.
Democracy, a certain weariness of the complexities of that very process
of civilization that has made freedom possible, and the misunderstood
teachings of scientific research, all three are tending to make the
tyranny of the crowd greater and an art of life more difficult. In a
recent American prize contest for definitions of morality, for example,
one of the three which won prizes was as follows: “Morality is that
form of human behavior conceded to be virtuous by the conventions of
the group to which the individual belongs,” and we are told that among
all the definitions submitted there was little disagreement as to the
general concept. Of course this is the muddiest sort of thinking. The
particular social forms which morality takes among the crowd at any
given time is confused with morality itself, and, if the definition
were true, any advance in moral concepts on the part of either society
or the individual would become impossible, as no society ever changed
its “moral” opinions unanimously overnight. That such a definition
should have become the general one in America is merely an interesting
example of the difficulty amongst us of disentangling one’s individual
self from the glutinous mass of all one’s compatriots and fellow
Rotarians and Christian Endeavorers.
To practise an art of living it is essential, as I have said, to arrive
at some standard of values for ourselves. If we may judge from this
contest, and from other evidences, the standard of value arrived at by
the American people in the broad sphere of ethics or morality is merely
the standard of what the overwhelming mass of Americans of all sorts
consider applicable to themselves. There can be no individuality in
conforming to such a standard so arrived at. Moreover, such a standard
is bound to be beastly low. The mass of men has never risen without
individuals to make it rise any more than a mass of dough will rise
without the tiny bit of yeast in it. Our concern here, however, is
with the individual who would manage his life with art, not with the
mass, and for him no art of life is possible if he is merely going to
make his life conform to the opinions of the majority. It is as absurd
as it would be to think of Keats, preparing to write an “Ode to a
Nightingale,” taking a vote of all his fellow apothecary apprentices as
to what they thought he ought to say about a nightingale.
But we have also got to consider carefully what tools to use in our
art. Limiting ourselves for the moment to what are usually called
“things,” it is obvious, though generally overlooked, that the effect
upon ourselves of “things” is both varied and profound. This is a theme
which is rarely treated, but the reader will recall the effect upon
Lee Randon of the French doll on his mantelpiece in Hergesheimer’s
“Cytherea.” It is, perhaps, the best illustration I can offer of the
idea worked out to its conclusion in all completeness. The other day
I happened to be visiting the exhibition of the _Arts Decoratifs_ at
the _Grand Palais_ in Paris. The new art in France, and elsewhere over
here in Europe, is producing a wholly new form of interior decoration
and furnishing, sometimes of great beauty and nearly always of much
interest. As I stood in one bedroom in which the bed of ivory and
ebony of indescribable design had its covering of leopard skins, I
could not help musing on what subtle differences in one’s spiritual
and intellectual character would come from living one’s life amid such
furnishings, as contrasted, we will say, with bedrooms of complete
and perfect Queen Anne or Louis Quatorze. In the room I mention, the
atmosphere, due to the furnishing, was an almost maleficent blending of
the perfection of twentieth century civilization with the savagery of
the jungle. As one stood there, in a room designed as the last word in
French art and craftsmanship for a millionaire of 1929, one was aware
in part of one’s soul of the faint booming of tom-toms and of the odor
of black and sweaty jungle flesh. A man could not live in that room
without strange things happening in the depths of his being.
This, perhaps, may be said to be an extreme example, as was
Hergesheimer’s, but is it? Do not all our surroundings and things
affect us? The social effects of such things as automobiles, radios
and so on have now become commonplaces, but what of the effects on
the individual? In many ways a man or woman with a motor car is a
different creature from one without one. Think how many lives have been
altered by the reading of a single book. The laboring man who lives
in a Sixth Avenue room in New York facing on the elevated railroad is
a different man from one who lives in a cottage and garden in Devon
or amid quiet and roses in the Vaucluse. All this would seem to be
so self-evident as to call for no elaboration, and yet do we pay any
attention to it? When we try to live as everyone else does, when we buy
something because “everybody has one,” are we not using our tools with
an utter lack of discrimination? There is a similar decadence in some
directions in the arts other than that of life, a tendency to put “any
old thing” on canvas, to clutter up a novel with irrelevant details on
the plea of realism. We might as well try to eat everything as have
everything, regardless of our own taste or the idiosyncrasies of our
own digestions. A painter does not use his scarlet or blue or orange
brushes regardless of the effect, merely because they are “there.” He
selects his colors as he does his objects, for their final influence
on his work, or he merely produces a daub. If we are to have an art
of life, must we not exercise equal care in trying to discriminate
between the influences and values of all the tools that we use in
making the infinitely more complex work, an individual human life of
significance and happiness and worth? We have got to think what all
these tools—things, situations, surroundings, relationships—may mean
for our own individual selves, for our own private lives, regardless
of the standards of the majority, before we can begin to live as human
beings and develop an art of life. Otherwise we are mere telephone
switchboards, like animals, receiving stimuli and sending out reactions.
Until we have given thought to this, we can use all our tools and
material only at random and with no idea of the result we are
producing. If we can decide what we want to make of ourselves and what
tools will best assist the result, then we can vastly simplify our
lives by a wholesale rejection of all those things which may be well
enough for our neighbors but do not conduce to the one desired end
for ourselves. We would then no longer wear ourselves out in the mere
living of standardized lives and keeping up with the Joneses. We would
not only simplify our lives but we would introduce variety into the
deadly monotony of the national life. No two artists would have exactly
the same conception of a subject or treat it in exactly the same way.
If it is true that our lives are increasingly frustrate and commonplace
and standardized because we do not take time and trouble to think
out what is the worthwhile life and achieve a scale of values is it
not because we lack the courage to be different from the Joneses and
to give to our lives that precise quality of uniqueness which is
characteristic of the products of art?
The three qualities, therefore, which would seem to be essential to any
artistic ordering of our lives are courage, thought and will. We have
got to acquire that rarest form of courage in America, the courage to
be considered different from our neighbors and the rest of our set.
If Mrs. Jones’s greatest joys in life are the perfectly appointed
dinners she delights in being known to give, and riding in her
Rolls-Royce, then let her have them if she can afford them. But if
your greatest joys are simple hospitality and the good talk around
the board, and if you care far more for books than the sort of car
that affords you transportation, then in the name of Art give simple
dinners, line your shelves with books and drive a Ford.
If you love Elizabethan drama and detest the current fiction, read
your drama; and when someone asks you if you have read _The Mauve
Petticoat_, tell him candidly that you have not and that you do not
intend to. If you are intelligent enough to be bored stiff with the
absurd social life of ninety-nine clubs in a hundred, refuse to join
the things and amuse yourself in your own way.
Americans pride themselves on their courage and individuality and brag
of the frontier virtues, but the fact is we are the most cowardly race
in the world socially. Read Emerson’s essay on _Self Reliance_ and
ask yourself honestly how much you dare to be yourself. He has been
called the most essentially American of our authors, but would he
be so today? The old phrases have a familiar ring. “Trust thyself:
every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Whoso would be a man
must be a nonconformist.” “My life is not an apology, but a life. It
is for itself and not for a spectacle.” “What I must do is all that
concerns me, not what the people think.” “Life only avails, not the
having lived.” “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” Every schoolboy
knows them, but how many mature Americans dare to practise them? Take
the matter of clothes as a simple touchstone of individuality. Every
American woman who goes to London is either shocked, interested or
amused by the variety of women’s dress there. Most of it, except sports
clothes, is, I admit, extremely bad, but the point is that a woman
dresses just as she pleases. Little girls may have long black stockings
or legs bare to their full length; older women may have skirts that
display the knee or drag the ground; hats of the latest mode from
Paris, or from Regent Street when Victoria was a girl. Watching the
passing crowd on the Broad Walk is like turning the pages of Punch for
half a century. A man may wear any headgear from a golf cap to a pearl
satin “topper.” Compare this, for example, with New York and the mass
antics of the Stock Exchange where if a man wears a straw hat beyond
the day appointed by his fellows they smash it down over his eyes,
and where he is not safe from similar moronic hoodlumism even in the
streets. I mention clothes not as a _Sartor Resartus_ but merely as a
simple instance of that mass-mindedness which permeates all American
life. One has to fight to be one’s self in America as in no other
country I know. Not only are most Americans anxious to conform to the
standards of the majority, but that majority, and the advertisers,
insist that they shall. I recall some years ago when living in a small
village and when I was spending many hundreds of dollars more than I
could well afford on books and also putting money into travel, that
more than one of the village people actually suggested to me that it
was rather disgraceful for a man in my position not to drive a better
car than a Ford. My answer, of course, was that I did not give a rap
about a car except as a means to get about, and I did care about books
and travel. Another man, one from the city, speaking of the same sore
point, said that _I_ could afford to use a Ford because everyone knew
who my grandfather was, but _he_ had to have something better to meet
his guests with. In another community, a moderately wealthy friend of
mine who had a large house, also a country place, and did a good deal
of traveling, was taken to task by a yet wealthier neighbor on the
score that, again, “a man in his position” owed it to his wife to give
her a better car than a Dodge sedan to make calls in, though both my
friend and the wife preferred to spend their money in other ways than
in running a Packard or a Cadillac. Spending one’s money in one’s own
way in America—that is, trying to use the tools of life with sanity and
discrimination—is a good deal like running the old Indian gauntlet. The
self-appointed monitors of society to tell other people how they should
live, ran, in the cases above, all the way from village store-keepers
to a successful New York business man worth many millions, but they are
merely typical of that pressure, express or implied, that is brought to
bear on any individual who attempts to think out and live his own life.
But if our lives are to be based on any art of living, if our souls are
not to be suppressed and submerged under a vast heap of standardized
plumbing, motor cars, crack schools for the children, suburban social
standards and customs, fear of group opinion, and all the rest of
our _mores_ and taboos, then the first and most essential factor is
courage, the simple courage to do what you really want to do with your
own life.
But if courage, especially in America, is essential to an art of
living, thought is fundamental. A man has got to think out what sort of
life he really wants, what life he is going to try to make for himself.
If he refuses to face that problem and merely drifts, he abandons
himself to the mould that his neighbors provide for him. He will become
both for himself and others the utterly uninteresting nonentity that so
many Americans are, simply because they have taken the line of least
resistance and become mere replicas of thousands of their fellows. When
you have seen one Ford car turned out any year, you have seen the whole
four million, or whatever the number is. They may be very good and very
useful and very sturdy, but they cannot have the slightest interest as
individual specimens for anyone.
You will not find it so easy a task as you may think to decide what
sort of life you really do want to make. To do so requires a clear
mind, independent thinking, and a knowledge of what the infinite
variety of goods and values in life are. Most people dream idly a good
deal of what they might like but few have either the ability or power
to think through what they really do want, given all the conditions
of their own selves and their possibilities. It is not only the young
girl who does not know what she wants, who dreams one day of becoming
an author because “it must be thrilling to live in Greenwich Village
and talk to real writers,” and another of becoming a clerk in a
store because “it must be wonderful to feel you are really _doing_
something.” The hardheaded business man who has fought his way up from
a shoestring to millions, knows often just as little what he wants,
as any number of rich men bored to death with power and leisure can
testify. Perhaps as useful a task of education as any would be to teach
young people what the possibilities of life are.
It may as well be confessed that most people cannot become artists in
living. That is not snobbery. It is simple truth. The day may come, if
democracy insists on continuing to debase all our spiritual coinage,
when anyone may aspire to call himself a poet or a musician or a
sculptor. However, that won’t make him one. There is no more reason
to expect that anyone can be a genuine artist in life than to expect
everyone to be an artist in words or sounds or colors. If we all cannot
aspire to become great artists of any sort, however, there is happily
room for us as amateurs in any art, if we care about it; and our own
happiness, as well as our interest for others, is greatly increased by
trying to express, in any art, our own individuality. The other arts
are merely tools for the great all-embracing art, that of living, and
we cannot refuse to become amateurs in that art without confession of
failure as civilized beings. If all this complex, delicate, and, it may
as well be confessed, burdensome thing we call civilization is merely
to be used to make us more intricate switchboards of automatic stimuli
and reactions, then we might as well smash it and be done with it. Its
only excuse is in increasing our liberty of choice, our chance to be
more individual among a wider range of goods than can the savage or the
barbarian.
Moreover, if one would practise the art of living, he must have the
artistic spirit. I do not mean the æsthetic in its narrower meaning,
but the spirit of the man who finds joy in his own creating of
something beautiful or noble or lovely. Life, as Emerson says, must be
for itself and not for a spectacle. Artists may get great pay for their
work, but if they have spent their lives with their minds on the pay
and not on the work, they have not been artists. It is the work, indeed
the working, that counts and that is its own best reward. Nor must we
defer the practice of our art. A poet or a painter or a musician does
not say to himself, “I will make a million first, and then I will write
poetry or paint pictures or compose music.” His art is life itself, the
best of life, for the genuine artist. Money and freedom may be pleasant
and useful but they are not the essence of any art, that of life any
more than any other. Keats did not postpone writing his poetry until he
could retire from mixing drugs and find a cottage in the country. If
he had, there would have been no poetry to make his name immortal. And
if anyone says of the art of life, that he will try to order his life
artistically when he has another five thousand a year, or when he is
vice-president instead of sales manager or when he can quit, he will
never so order it at all. He does not understand and has not got it in
him. He will simply take his place in the American procession with the
other four million Fords of the year.
If you decide that you have the courage to “be different,” if you
can decide what you really want of life, then you may achieve an art
of living if you have the will to see it through. And you will find,
incidentally, that in place of the sheep-like flocks of country-club
Joneses you will have as friends and guests a far more interesting
group, that your life will have attained to a depth and a richness of
experience that is denied to the standardized Joneses and all their
kith and kin, and that you are no longer an automaton with inhibitions
but a human being expressing your own unique personality: loving,
enjoying, experiencing, suffering perhaps, but _alive_. Your life will
not be a machine-made product identical with millions of others turned
out by the same firm, but a work of art which will give joy to yourself
and others because it is like no other.
But if you merely settle down, unthinkingly and uncourageously, in the
mould provided for you by your neighbors, if you accept as standards
and values merely those of the majority, you will not be an individual
or even the useful citizen you may think yourself though you attend
every meeting of your association in the year. America can count such
men, as she can her motor cars, by the tens of millions. What she needs
as useful citizens today are men and women who dare to be themselves,
who know with Emerson that “life only avails, not the having lived,”
who can conceive how rich and varied life can be, and who, with the
spirit of the artist and at least an amateur’s knowledge of tools and
technique, will defy the crowd and show what an art of living may be.
Americans have never lacked courage on the fields of battle. It is time
they showed some on the golf links. We are more afraid of what our best
customer may think or what Mrs. Umpty Bullmarket-Jones may say than our
ancestors ever were of what the redskins might do. If I thought mottoes
and slogans did any good, I would replace the “God bless our happy
home” of a generation or two ago, and the “say it quick” of our offices
today, with old Emerson’s “Be yourself.” That is what every artist,
every civilized man and woman has got to be, as the very foundation
of an art of living. It is, indeed, only the foundation but it is
essential. Every art is social. It is the result of a relation between
the artist and his time. Music could not have developed as a result of
a succession of individual musicians composing for a society of the
deaf, and before we can develop an art of living in America and adjust
our machinery of life to its practice as it is adjusted in many ways in
Europe, we must develop a taste for individual living in thousands of
Americans who will refuse to bow the knee to the crowd, whether city,
suburban or village, and insist upon being themselves. The road of
conformity is merely the road back to savagery.
BONIBOOKS
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5. ISRAEL Ludwig Lewisohn
6. THIS EARTH OF OURS Jean-Henri Fabre
7. AGAINST THE GRAIN J. K. Huysmans
8. OUR BUSINESS CIVILIZATION James Truslow Adams
9. THE HIGH PLACE James Branch Cabell
10. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MARRIAGE Hamilton and MacGowan
11. SOUTH WIND Norman Douglas
12. MICHELANGELO Romain Rolland
13. THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY H. G. Wells
14. TAR: A Midwest Childhood Sherwood Anderson
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From Confucius to Mencken
16. THE WORLD’S BEST POEMS Van Doren and Lapolla
17. BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES Carolyn Wells
18. GREAT DETECTIVE STORIES OF THE WORLD J. L. French
19. GREAT SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF ANCIENT TIMES Barrett H. Clark
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
20. GREAT SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN TIMES Barrett H. Clark
The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries
21. GREAT SHORT NOVELS OF THE WORLD, Volume I Barrett H. Clark
22. GREAT SHORT NOVELS OF THE WORLD, Volume II Barrett H. Clark
23. MOBY DICK (Illustrated) Herman Melville
24. THE STORY OF THE BIBLE Hendrik Willem Van Loon
25. INDIAN TALES Rudyard Kipling
26. AN OUTLINE OF HUMOR Edited by Carolyn Wells
27. WORLD ATLAS
28. MARDI Herman Melville
Transcriber’s Notes
pg vii Changed: ground of attack than that instead of sayng
to: ground of attack than that instead of saying
pg 21 Changed: countrysides where no physican can now be found
to: countrysides where no physician can now be found
pg 50 Changed: the most expensiye “things” to acquire
to: the most expensive “things” to acquire
pg 138 Changed: to organize an almost hopless crusade
to: to organize an almost hopeless crusade
pg 161 Changed: I was eighteen or ninteeen
to: I was eighteen or nineteen
pg 217 Changed: refuge in a yet more ignominous surrender
to: refuge in a yet more ignominious surrender
pg 251 Changed: exhibition of paintings by colonial artisst
to: exhibition of paintings by colonial artist
pg 251 Changed: colonies in innumeragle instances held legislative
to: colonies in innumerable instances held legislative
pg 305 Changed: our ancesters ever were of what the redskins
to: our ancestors ever were of what the redskins
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