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Title: Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

Editor: Harold Stearns

Release date: June 23, 2022 [eBook #68385]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Harcourt, Brace and Company

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN INQUIRY BY THIRTY AMERICANS ***





Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_; boldface
text is enclosed in =equals signs=; Small-Caps text is shown as
ALL-CAPS. Other notes will be found following the Index.




                          CIVILIZATION IN THE
                             UNITED STATES

                    _AN INQUIRY BY THIRTY AMERICANS_


                      EDITED BY HAROLD E. STEARNS


                             [Illustration]


                                NEW YORK
                      HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




                          COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
                    HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC


                       PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
                       THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
                             RAHWAY, N. J.




PREFACE


This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation. If it
were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gathered together to make
the conventional symposium, it would have only slight significance.
But it has been the deliberate and organized outgrowth of the common
efforts of like-minded men and women to see the problem of modern
American civilization as a whole, and to illuminate by careful
criticism the special aspect of that civilization with which the
individual is most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct
overemphasis, and slow and careful selection of the members of a group
which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given to this work a unity
of approach and attack which it otherwise could not possibly have had.

The nucleus of this group was brought together by common work,
common interests, and more or less common assumptions. As long ago
as the autumn of last year Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and I discussed the
possibility of several of us, who were engaged in much the same kind
of critical examination of our civilization, coming together to
exchange ideas, to clarify our individual fields, and to discover
wherein they coincided, overlapped, or diverged. The original desire
was the modest one of making it possible for us to avoid working at
cross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, which a few of
us did, and since that time until the delivery of this volume to the
publishers we have met every fortnight. Even at our first meeting we
discovered our points of view to have so much in common that our desire
for informal and pleasant discussions became the more serious wish to
contribute a definite and tangible piece of work towards the advance
of intellectual life in America. We wished to speak the truth about
American civilization as we saw it, in order to do our share in making
a real civilization possible--for I think with all of us there was a
common assumption that a field cannot be ploughed until it has first
been cleared of rocks, and that constructive criticism can hardly exist
until there is something on which to construct.

Naturally the first problem to arise was the one of ways and means. If
the spirit and temper of the French encyclopædists of the 18th century
appealed strongly to us, certainly their method for the advancement of
knowledge was inapplicable in our own century. The cultural phenomena
we proposed to survey were too complicated and extensive; besides, we
wished to make a definite contribution of some kind or another while,
so to speak, there was yet time. For the cohesiveness of the group,
the good-humoured tolerance and cheerful sacrifice of time, were to
some extent the consequence of the intellectual collapse that came
with the hysterical post-armistice days, when it was easier than in
normal times to get together intelligent and civilized men and women
in common defence against the common enemy of reaction. We wished to
take advantage of this strategic situation for the furtherance of our
co-operative enterprise, and decided, finally, that the simplest plan
would be the best. Each of us was to write a single short essay on the
special topic we knew most thoroughly; we were to continue our meetings
in order to keep informed of the progress of our work and to see that
there was no duplication; we were to extend the list of subjects to
whatever legitimately bore upon our cultural life and to select the
authors by common agreement; we were to keep in touch with each other
so that the volume might have that inner consistency which could come
only from direct acquaintance with what each of us was planning.

There were a few other simple rules which we laid down in the
beginning. Desirous of avoiding merely irrelevant criticism and of
keeping attention upon our actual treatment of our subjects rather
than upon our personalities, we provided that all contributors
to the volume must be American citizens. For the same reason, we
likewise provided that in the list there should be no professional
propagandists--except as one is a propagandist for one’s own ideas--no
martyrs, and no one who was merely disgruntled. Since our object was to
give an uncompromising, and consequently at some points necessarily
harsh, analysis, we desired the tone to be good-natured and the temper
urbane. At first, these larger points of policy were decided by common
agreement or, on occasion, by majority vote, and to the end I settled
no important question without consultation with as many members of the
group as I could approach within the limited time we had agreed to have
this volume in the hands of the publisher. But with the extension of
the scope of the book, the negotiations with the publisher, and the
mass of complexities and details that are inevitable in so difficult an
enterprise, the authority to decide specific questions and the usual
editorial powers were delegated as a matter of convenience to me, aided
by a committee of three. Hence I was in a position constantly to see
the book as a whole, and to make suggestions for differentiation, where
repetition appeared to impend, or for unity, where the divergence was
sharp enough to be construed by some as contradictory. In view both of
the fact that every contributor has full liberty of opinion and that
the personalities and points of view finding expression in the essays
are all highly individualistic, the underlying unity which binds the
volume together is really surprising.

It may seem strange that a volume on civilization in the United States
does not include a specific article on religion, and the omission is
worth a paragraph of explanation. Outside the bigger cities, certainly
no one can understand the social structure of contemporary American
life without careful study of the organization and power of the church.
Speaking generally, we are a church-going people, and at least on the
surface the multiplicity of sects and creeds, the sheer immensity of
the physical apparatus by which the religious impulse is articulated,
would seem to prove that our interest in and emotional craving for
religious experience are enormous. But the omission has not been due
to any superciliousness on our part towards the subject itself; on the
contrary, I suppose I have put more thought and energy into this essay,
which has not been written, than into any other problem connected with
the book. The bald truth is, it has been next to impossible to get any
one to write on the subject; most of the people I approached shied
off--it was really difficult to get them to talk about it at all.
Almost unanimously, when I did manage to procure an opinion from them,
they said that real religious feeling in America had disappeared, that
the church had become a purely social and political institution, that
the country is in the grip of what Anatole France has aptly called
Protestant clericalism, and that, finally, they weren’t interested
in the topic. The accuracy of these observations (except the last) I
cannot, of course, vouch for, but it is rather striking that they were
identical. In any event, the topic as a topic has had to be omitted;
but it is not neglected, for in several essays directly--in particular,
“Philosophy” and “Nerves”--and in many by implication the subject is
discussed. At one time Mr. James Harvey Robinson consented to write
the article--and it would have been an illuminating piece of work--but
unfortunately ill health and the pressure of official duties made the
task impossible for him within the most generous time limit that might
be arranged.

I have spoken already of the unity which underlies the volume. When
I remember all these essays, and try to summon together the chief
themes that run through them, either by explicit statement or as a
kind of underlying rhythm to all, in order to justify the strong
impression of unity, I find three major contentions that may be said to
be basic--contentions all the more significant inasmuch as they were
unpremeditated and were arrived at, as it were, by accident rather than
design. They are:

First, That in almost every branch of American life there is a sharp
dichotomy between preaching and practice; we let not our right hand
know what our left hand doeth. Curiously enough, no one regards
this, and in fact no one consciously feels this as hypocrisy--there
are certain abstractions and dogmas which are sacred to us, and if
we fall short of these external standards in our private life, that
is no reason for submitting them to a fresh examination; rather are
we to worship them the more vociferously to show our sense of sin.
Regardless, then, of the theoretical excellence or stupidity of these
standards, in actual practice the moral code resolves itself into
the one cardinal heresy of being found out, with the chief sanction
enforcing it, the fear of what people will say.

Second, That whatever else American civilization is, it is not
Anglo-Saxon, and that we shall never achieve any genuine nationalistic
self-consciousness as long as we allow certain financial and social
minorities to persuade us that we are still an English Colony. Until
we begin seriously to appraise and warmly to cherish the heterogeneous
elements which make up our life, and to see the common element running
through all of them, we shall make not even a step towards true
unity; we shall remain, in Roosevelt’s class-conscious and bitter but
illuminating phrase, a polyglot boarding-house. It is curious how a
book on American civilization actually leads one back to the conviction
that we are, after all, Americans.

Third, That the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of
America to-day is emotional and æsthetic starvation, of which the
mania for petty regulation, the driving, regimentating, and drilling,
the secret society and its grotesque regalia, the firm grasp on the
unessentials of material organization of our pleasures and gaieties are
all eloquent stigmata. We have no heritages or traditions to which to
cling except those that have already withered in our hands and turned
to dust. One can feel the whole industrial and economic situation
as so maladjusted to the primary and simple needs of men and women
that the futility of a rationalistic attack on these infantilisms of
compensation becomes obvious. There must be an entirely new deal of
the cards in one sense; we must change our hearts. For only so, unless
through the humbling of calamity or scourge, can true art and true
religion and true personality, with their native warmth and caprice and
gaiety, grow up in America to exorcise these painted devils we have
created to frighten us away from the acknowledgment of our spiritual
poverty.

If these main contentions seem severe or pessimistic, the answer must
be: we do not write to please; we strive only to understand and to
state as clearly as we can. For American civilization is still in the
embryonic stage, with rich and with disastrous possibilities of growth.
But the first step in growing up is self-conscious and deliberately
critical examination of ourselves, without sentimentality and without
fear. We cannot even devise, much less control, the principles
which are to guide our future development until that preliminary
understanding has come home with telling force to the consciousness
of the ordinary man. To this self-understanding, this book is, in
our belief, a genuine and valuable contribution. We may not always
have been wise; we have tried always to be honest. And if our attempt
will help to embolden others to an equally frank expression of their
beliefs, perhaps in time wisdom will come.

I am glad that, however serious, we are never solemn in these essays.
Often, in fact, we are quite gay, and it would be a humourless person
indeed who could not read many of them, even when the thrusts are at
himself, with that laughter which Rabelais tells us is proper to the
man. For whatever our defects, we Americans, we have one virtue and
perhaps a saving virtue--we still know how to laugh at ourselves.

                                                            H. E. S.

New York City, July Fourth, 1921.




CONTENTS


                                                                PAGE
  PREFACE                        _The Editor_                    iii

  THE CITY                       _Lewis Mumford_                   3

  POLITICS                       _H. L. Mencken_                  21

  JOURNALISM                     _John Macy_                      35

  THE LAW                        _Zechariah Chafee, Jr._          53

  EDUCATION                      _Robert Morss Lovett_            77

  SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM      _J. E. Spingarn_                 93

  SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE        _Clarence Britten_              109

  THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE          _Harold E. Stearns_             135

  SCIENCE                        _Robert H. Lowie_               151

  PHILOSOPHY                     _Harold Chapman Brown_          163

  THE LITERARY LIFE              _Van Wyck Brooks_               179

  MUSIC                          _Deems Taylor_                  199

  POETRY                         _Conrad Aiken_                  215

  ART                            _Walter Pach_                   227

  THE THEATRE                    _George Jean Nathan_            243

  ECONOMIC OPINION               _Walter H. Hamilton_            255

  RADICALISM                     _George Soule_                  271

  THE SMALL TOWN                 _Louis Raymond Reid_            285

  HISTORY                        _H. W. Van Loon_                297

  SEX                            _Elsie Clews Parsons_           309

  THE FAMILY                     _Katharine Anthony_             319

  THE ALIEN                      _Frederic C. Howe_              337

  RACIAL MINORITIES              _Geroid Tanquary Robinson_      351

  ADVERTISING                    _J. Thorne Smith_               381

  BUSINESS                       _Garet Garrett_                 397

  ENGINEERING                    _O. S. Beyer, Jr._              417

  NERVES                         _Alfred B. Kuttner_             427

  MEDICINE                       _Anonymous_                     443

  SPORT AND PLAY                 _Ring W. Lardner_               457

  HUMOUR                         _Frank M. Colby_                463


  AMERICAN CIVILIZATION FROM THE FOREIGN POINT OF VIEW

    I  AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT      _Henry L. Stuart_           469

   II  AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT        _Ernest Boyd_               489

  III  AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT         _Raffaello Piccoli_         508


  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES                                          527

  WHO’S WHO OF THE CONTRIBUTORS                                  557

  INDEX                                                          565




CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES




THE CITY


Around us, in the city, each epoch in America has been concentrated
and crystallized. In building our cities we deflowered a wilderness.
To-day more than one-half the population of the United States lives in
an environment which the jerry-builder, the real estate speculator, the
paving contractor, and the industrialist have largely created. Have
we begotten a civilization? That is a question which a survey of the
American city will help us to answer.

If American history is viewed from the standpoint of the student of
cities, it divides itself roughly into three parts. The first was
a provincial period, which lasted from the foundation of Manhattan
down to the opening up of ocean commerce after the War of 1812. This
was followed by a commercial period, which began with the cutting of
canals and ended with the extension of the railroad system across
the continent, and an industrial period, that gathered force on the
Atlantic seaboard in the ’thirties and is still the dominant economic
phase of our civilization. These periods must not be looked upon as
strictly successive or exclusive: the names merely express in a crude
way the main aspect of each era. It is possible to telescope the
story of America’s colonial expansion and industrial exploitation by
following the material growth and the cultural impoverishment of the
American city during its transformations.

The momentum of the provincial city lasted well on to the Civil War.
The economic basis of this period was agriculture and petty trade: its
civic expression was, typically, the small New England town, with a
central common around which were grouped a church--appropriately called
a meeting-house--a school, and perhaps a town hall. Its main street
would be lined with tall suave elms and bordered by reticent white
houses of much the same design as those that dotted the countryside. In
the growing towns of the seaboard this culture was overthrown, before
it had a chance to express itself adequately in either institutions
or men, and it bloomed rather tardily, therefore, in the little towns
of Concord and Cambridge, between 1820 and the Civil War. We know
it to-day through a largely anonymous architecture, and through a
literature created by the school of writers that bears the name of the
chief city. Unfortunately for the further development of what we might
call the Concord culture, the agricultural basis of this civilization
shifted to the wheat-growing West; and therewith channels of trade
were diverted from Boston to ports that tapped a richer, more imperial
hinterland. What remained of the provincial town in New England was a
mummy-case.

The civilization of the New England town spent itself in the settlement
of the Ohio Valley and the great tracts beyond. None of the new centres
had, _qua_ provincial towns, any fresh contribution to make. It had
taken the culture of New England more than three centuries before it
had borne its Concord fruit, and the story of the Western movement
is somehow summed up in the legend of Johnny Appleseed, who planted
dry apple seeds, instead of slips from the living tree, and hedged
the roads he travelled with wild apples, harsh and puny and inedible.
Cincinnati and Pittsburgh jumped from a frustrate provincialism into
the midst of the machine era; and so for a long time they remained
destitute of the institutions that are necessary to carry on the
processes of civilization.

West of the Alleghanies, the common, with its church and school, was
not destined to dominate the urban landscape: the railroad station and
the commercial hotel had come to take their place. This was indeed the
universal mark of the new industrialism, as obvious in 19th-century
Oxford as in Hoboken. The pioneer American city, however, had none of
the cultural institutions that had been accumulated in Europe during
the great outbursts of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, and as a
result its destitution was naked and apparent. It is true that every
town which was developed mainly during the 19th century--Manchester as
well as Milwaukee--suffered from the absence of civic institutes. The
peculiarity of the New World was that the facilities for borrowing
from the older centres were considerably more limited. London could
export Madox Brown to Manchester to do the murals in the Town Hall: New
York had still to create its schools of art before it had any Madox
Browns that could be exported.

With the beginning of the 19th century, market centres which had at
first tapped only their immediate region began to reach further back
into the hinterland, and to stretch outward, not merely for freight
but for immigrants, across the ocean. The silly game of counting
heads became the fashion, and in the literature of the ’thirties one
discovers that every commercial city had its statistical lawyer who
was bold enough to predict its leadership in “population and wealth”
before the century was out. The chief boast of the American city was
its prospective size.

Now the New England town was a genuine community. In so far as the
New England community had a common social and political and religious
life, the town expressed it. The city which was representative of the
second period, on the other hand, was in origin a trading fort, and
the supreme occupation of its founders was with the goods life rather
than the good life. New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis have
this common basis. They were not composed of corporate organizations
on the march, as it were, towards a New Jerusalem: they were simply a
rabble of individuals “on the make.” With such a tradition to give it
momentum it is small wonder that the adventurousness of the commercial
period was exhausted on the fortuities and temptations of trade. A
state of intellectual anæsthesia prevailed. One has only to compare
Cist’s _Cincinnati Miscellany_ with Emerson’s _Dial_ to see at what a
low level the towns of the Middle West were carrying on.

Since there was neither fellowship nor social stability nor security
in the scramble of the inchoate commercial city, it remained for a
particular institution to devote itself to the gospel of the “glad
hand.” Thus an historian of Pittsburgh records the foundation of a
Masonic lodge as early as 1785, shortly after the building of the
church, and in every American city, small or big, Odd Fellows, Mystic
Shriners, Woodmen, Elks, Knights of Columbus, and other orders without
number in the course of time found for themselves a prominent place.
(Their feminine counterparts were the D.A.R. and the W.C.T.U., their
juniors, the college Greek letter fraternities.) Whereas one will
search American cities in vain for the labour temples one discovers
to-day in Europe from Belgium to Italy, one finds that the fraternal
lodge generally occupies a site of dignity and importance. There
were doubtless many excellent reasons for the strange proliferation
of professional fraternity in the American city, but perhaps the
strongest reason was the absence of any other kind of fraternity. The
social centre and the community centre, which in a singularly hard and
consciously beatific way have sought to organize fellowship and mutual
aid on different terms, are products of the last decade.

Perhaps the only other civic institution of importance that the
commercial towns fostered was the lyceum: forerunner of the elephantine
Chautauqua. The lyceum lecture, however, was taken as a soporific
rather than a stimulant, and if it aroused any appetite for art,
philosophy, or science there was nothing in the environment of the
commercial city that could satisfy it. Just as church-going became
a substitute for religion, so automatic lyceum attendance became a
substitute for thought. These were the prayer wheels of a preoccupied
commercialism.

The contrast between the provincial and the commercial city in America
was well summed up in their plans. Consider the differences between
Cambridge and New York. Up to the beginning of the 19th century New
York, at the tip of Manhattan Island, had the same diffident, rambling
town plan that characterizes Cambridge. In this old type of city layout
the streets lead nowhere, except to the buildings that give onto them:
outside the main roads the provisions for traffic are so inadequate as
to seem almost a provision against traffic. Quiet streets, a pleasant
aspect, ample domestic facilities were the desiderata of the provincial
town; traffic, realty speculation, and expansion were those of the
newer era. This became evident as soon as the Empire City started to
realize its “manifest destiny” by laying down, in 1808, a plan for its
future development.

New York’s city plan commissioners went about their work with a
scarcely concealed purpose to increase traffic and raise realty values.
The amenities of city life counted for little in their scheme of
things: debating “whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear
and rectangular streets, or whether they should adopt some of those
supposed improvements, by circles, ovals, and stars,” they decided, on
grounds of economy, against any departure from the gridiron design. It
was under the same stimulus that these admirable philistines had the
complacency to plan the city’s development up to 155th Street. Here we
are concerned, however, with the results of the rectangular plan rather
than with the motives that lay behind its adoption throughout the
country.

The principal effect of the gridiron plan is that every street becomes
a thoroughfare, and that every thoroughfare is potentially a commercial
street. The tendency towards movement in such a city vastly outweighs
the tendency towards settlement. As a result of progressive shifts in
population, due to the changes to which commercial competition subjects
the use of land, the main institutions of the city, instead of cohering
naturally--as the museums, galleries, theatres, clubs, and public
offices group themselves in the heart of Westminster--are dispersed
in every direction. Neither Columbia University, New York University,
the Astor Library, nor the National Academy of Design--to seize but
a few examples--is on its original site. Yet had Columbia remained
at Fiftieth Street it might have had some effective working relation
with the great storehouse of books that now occupies part of Bryant
Park at Forty-second Street; or, alternatively, had the Astor Library
remained on its old site it might have had some connection with New
York University--had that institution not in turn moved!

What was called the growth of the commercial city was really a
manifestation of the absence of design in the gridiron plan. The
rectangular parcelling of ground promoted speculation in land-units
and the ready interchange of real property: it had no relation
whatever to the essential purposes for which a city exists. It is not
a little significant that Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, each
of which had space set aside for public purposes in their original
plans, had given up these civic holdings to the realty gambler before
half of the 19th century was over. The common was not the centre of
a well-rounded community life, as in New England, but the centre of
land-speculation--which was at once the business, the recreation, and
the religion of the commercial city. Under the influence of New York
the Scadders whom Martin Chuzzlewit encountered were laying down their
New Edens throughout the country.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was during the commercial period that the evolution of the
Promenade, such as existed in New York at Battery Park, took place.
The new promenade was no longer a park but a shop-lined thoroughfare,
Broadway. Shopping became for the more domesticated half of the
community an exciting, bewildering amusement; and out of a combination
of Yankee “notions,” Barnum-like advertisement, and magisterial
organization arose that _omnium gatherum_ of commerce, the department
store. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the part that Broadway--I
use the term generically--has played in the American town. It is not
merely the Agora but the Acropolis. When the factory whistle closes the
week, and the factory hands of Camden, or Pittsburgh, or Bridgeport
pour out of the buildings and stockades in which they spend the more
exhausting half of their lives, it is through Broadway that the greater
part of their repressions seek an outlet. Both the name and the
institution extend across the continent from New York to Los Angeles.
Up and down these second-hand Broadways, from one in the afternoon
until past ten at night, drifts a more or less aimless mass of human
beings, bent upon extracting such joy as is possible from the sights in
the windows, the contacts with other human beings, the occasional or
systematic flirtations, and the risks and adventures of purchase.

In the early development of Broadway the amusements were adventitious.
Even at present, in spite of the ubiquitous movie, the crowded street
itself, at least in the smaller communities, is the main source of
entertainment. Now, under normal conditions, for a great part of
the population in a factory town one of the chief instincts to be
repressed is that of acquisition (collection). It is not merely that
the average factory worker cannot afford the luxuries of life: the
worst is that he must think twice before purchasing the necessities.
Out of this situation one of Broadway’s happiest achievements has
arisen: the five and ten cent store. In the five and ten cent store
it is possible for the circumscribed factory operative to obtain the
illusion of unmoderated expenditure--and even extravagance--without
actually inflicting any irreparable rent in his purse. Broadway is
thus, in more than one sense, the great compensatory device of the
American city. The dazzle of white lights, the colour of electric
signs, the alabaster architecture of the moving-picture palaces, the
æsthetic appeals of the shop windows--these stand for elements that are
left out of the drab perspectives of the industrial city. People who
do not know how to spend their time must take what satisfaction they
can in spending their money. That is why, although the five and ten
cent store itself is perhaps mainly an institution for the proletariat,
the habits and dispositions it encourages are universal. The chief
amusement of Atlantic City, that opulent hostelry-annex of New York
and Philadelphia, lies not in the beach and the ocean but in the shops
which line the interminable Broadway known as the Boardwalk.

Broadway, in sum, is the façade of the American city: a false front.
The highest achievements of our material civilization--and at their
best our hotels, our department stores, and our Woolworth towers are
achievements--count as so many symptoms of its spiritual failure. In
order to cover up the vacancy of getting and spending in our cities,
we have invented a thousand fresh devices for getting and spending. As
a consequence our life is externalized. The principal institutions of
the American city are merely distractions that take our eyes off the
environment, instead of instruments which would help us to mould it
creatively a little nearer to humane hopes and desires.

The birth of industrialism in America is announced in the opening of
the Crystal Palace in Bryant Park, Manhattan, in 1853. Between the
Crystal Palace Exhibition and the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 lies a
period whose defects were partly accentuated by the exhaustion that
followed the Civil War. The debasement of the American city during
this period can be read in almost every building that was erected.
The influence of colonial architecture had waned to extinction during
the first half of the century. There followed a period of eclectic
experiment, in which all sorts of Egyptian, Byzantine, Gothic, and
Arabesque ineptitudes were committed--a period whose absurdities we
have only in recent years begun to escape. The domestic style, as
the century progressed, became more limited. Little touches about
the doors, mouldings, fanlights, and balustrades disappeared, and
finally craftsmanship went out of style altogether and a pretentious
architectural puffery took its place. The “era of good feeling” was an
era of bad taste.

Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago give perhaps the most naked
revelation of the industrial city’s characteristics. There were two
institutions that set their mark upon the early part of this period.
One of them was the Mechanics’ Hall. This was usually a building of red
brick, structural iron, and glass, whose unique hideousness marks it as
a typical product of the age of coal-industrialism, to be put alongside
the “smoke-halls” of the railroad termini. The other institution was
the German beer-garden--the one bright spot on the edge of an urban
landscape that was steadily becoming more dingy, more dull, and more
depressing. The cities that came to life in this period had scarcely
any other civic apparatus to boast of. Conceive of Pittsburgh without
Schenley Park, without the Carnegie Institute, without the Library or
the Museum or the Concert Hall, and without the institutions that have
grown up during the last generation around its sub-Acropolis--and one
has a picture of Progress and Poverty that Henry George might have
drawn on for illustration. The industrial city did not represent the
creative values in civilization: it stood for a new form of human
barbarism. In the coal towns of Pennsylvania, the steel towns of the
Ohio and its tributaries, and the factory towns of Long Island Sound
and Narragansett Bay was an environment much more harsh, antagonistic,
and brutal than anything the pioneers had encountered. Even the fake
exhilaration of the commercial city was lacking.

The reaction against the industrial city was expressed in various ways.
The defect of these reactions was that they were formulated in terms
of an escape from the environment rather than in a reconstruction of
it. Symptomatic of this escape, along one particular alley, was the
architecture of Richardson, and of his apprentices, McKim and White.
No one who has an eye for the fine incidence of beautiful architecture
can avoid a shock at discovering a monumental Romanesque building at
the foot of Pittsburgh’s dingy “Hump,” or the hardly less monstrous
beauty of Trinity Church, Boston, as one approaches it from a waste
of railroad yards that lie on one side of it. It was no accident, one
is inclined to believe, that Richardson should have returned to the
Romanesque only a little time before Henry Adams was exploring Mont St.
Michel and Chartres. Both men were searching for a specific against
the fever of industrialism, and architects like Richardson were taking
to archaic beauty as a man who was vaguely ill might have recourse to
quinine, in the hope that his disease had sufficient similarity to
malaria to be cured by it.

The truth is that the doses of exotic architecture which Richardson and
his school sought to inject into the American city were anodynes rather
than specifics. The Latin Renaissance models of McKim and White--the
Boston Public Library and Madison Square Garden, for example--were
perhaps a little better suited to the concrete demands of the new
age; but they were still a long way from that perfect congruence
with contemporary habits and modes of thought which was recorded in
buildings like Independence Hall. Almost down to the last decade the
best buildings of the industrial period have been anonymous, and
scarcely ever recognized for their beauty. A grain elevator here, a
warehouse there, an office building, a garage--there has been the
promise of a stripped, athletic, classical style of architecture in
these buildings which shall embody all that is good in the Machine
Age: its precision, its cleanliness, its hard illuminations, its
unflinching logic. Dickens once poked fun at the architecture of
Coketown because its infirmary looked like its jail and its jail like
its town hall. But the joke had a sting to it only because these
buildings were all plaintively destitute of æsthetic inspiration.
In a place and an age that had achieved a well-rounded and balanced
culture, we should expect to find the same spirit expressed in the
simplest cottage and the grandest public building. So we find it, for
instance, in the humble market towns of the Middle Age: there is not
one type of architecture for 15th-century Shaftesbury and another for
London; neither is there one style for public London and quite another
for domestic London. Our architects in America have only just begun
to cease regarding the Gothic style as especially fit for churches
and schools, whilst they favour the Roman mode for courts, and the
Byzantine, perhaps, for offices. Even the unique beauty of the Bush
Terminal Tower is compromised by an antiquely “stylized” interior.

With the beginning of the second decade of this century there
is some evidence of an attempt to make a genuine culture out of
industrialism--instead of attempting to escape from industrialism into
a culture which, though doubtless genuine enough, has the misfortune
to be dead. The schoolhouses in Gary, Indiana, have some of the better
qualities of a Gary steel plant. That symptom is all to the good. It
points perhaps to a time when the Gary steel plant may have some of
the educational virtues of a Gary school. One of the things that has
made the industrial age a horror in America is the notion that there is
something shameful in its manifestations. The idea that nobody would
ever go near an industrial plant except under stress of starvation
is in part responsible for the heaps of rubbish and rusty metal, for
the general disorder and vileness, that still characterize broad
acres of our factory districts. There is nothing short of the Alkali
Desert that compares with the desolateness of the common American
industrial town. These qualities are indicative of the fact that we
have centred attention not upon the process but upon the return; not
upon the task but the emoluments: not upon what we can get out of our
work but upon what we can achieve when we get away from our work. Our
industrialism has been in the grip of business, and our industrial
cities, and their institutions, have exhibited a major preoccupation
with business. The coercive repression of an impersonal, mechanical
technique was compensated by the pervasive will-to-power--or at least
will-to-comfort--of commercialism.

We have shirked the problem of trying to live well in a régime that is
devoted to the production of T-beams and toothbrushes and TNT. As a
result, we have failed to react creatively upon the environment with
anything like the inspiration that one might have found in a group of
mediæval peasants building a cathedral. The urban worker escapes the
mechanical routine of his daily job only to find an equally mechanical
substitute for life and growth and experience in his amusements. The
Gay White Way with its stupendous blaze of lights, and Coney Island,
with its fear-stimulating roller coasters and chute-the-chutes, are
characteristic by-products of an age that has renounced the task of
actively humanizing the machine, and of creating an environment in
which all the fruitful impulses of the community may be expressed.
The movies, the White Ways, and the Coney Islands, which almost every
American city boasts in some form or other, are means of giving jaded
and throttled people the sensations of living without the direct
experience of life--a sort of spiritual masturbation. In short, we have
had the alternative of humanizing the industrial city or de-humanizing
the population. So far we have de-humanized the population.

       *       *       *       *       *

The external reactions against the industrial city came to a head in
the World’s Fair at Chicago. In that strange and giddy mixture of
Parnassus and Coney Island was born a new conception of the city--a
White City, spaciously designed, lighted by electricity, replete with
monuments, crowned with public buildings, and dignified by a radiant
architecture. The men who planned the exposition knew something about
the better side of the spacious perspectives that Haussmann had
designed for Napoleon III. Without taking into account the fundamental
conditions of industrialism, or the salient facts of economics,
they initiated what shortly came to be known as the City Beautiful
movement. For a couple of decades Municipal Art societies were rampant.
Their programme had the defects of the régime it attempted to combat.
Its capital effort was to put on a front--to embellish Main Street and
make it a more attractive thoroughfare. Here in æsthetics, as elsewhere
in education, persisted the brahminical view of culture: the idea that
beauty was something that could be acquired by any one who was willing
to put up the cash; that it did not arise naturally out of the good
life but was something which could be plastered on impoverished life;
in short, that it was a cosmetic.

Until the Pittsburgh Survey of 1908 pricked a pin through superficial
attempts at municipal improvement, those who sought to remake the
American city overlooked the necessity for rectifying its economic
basis. The meanness, the spotty development, and the congestion of the
American city was at least in some degree an index of that deep disease
of realty speculation which had, as already noted, caused cities like
Chicago to forfeit land originally laid aside for public uses. Because
facts like these were ignored for the sake of some small, immediate
result, the developments that the early reformers were bold enough to
outline still lie in the realms of hopeless fantasy--a fine play of the
imagination, like Scadder’s prospectus of Eden. Here as elsewhere there
have been numerous signs of promise during the last decade; but it is
doubtful whether they are yet numerous enough or profound enough to
alter the general picture.

At best, the improvements that have been effected in the American city
have not been central but subsidiary. They have been improvements, as
Aristotle would have said, in the material bases of the good life: they
have not been improvements in the art of living. The growth of the
American city during the past century has meant the extension of paved
streets and sewers and gas mains, and progressive heightening of office
buildings and tenements. The outlay on pavements, sewers, electric
lighting systems, and plumbing has been stupendous; but no matter what
the Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce may think of them, these
mechanical ingenuities are not the indices of a civilization. There is
a curious confusion in America between growth and improvement. We use
the phrase “bigger and better” as if the conjunction were inevitable.
As a matter of fact, there is little evidence to show that the vast
increase of population in every urban area has been accompanied
by anything like the necessary increase of schools, universities,
theatres, meeting places, parks, and so forth. The fact that in
1920 we had sixty-four cities with more than 100,000 population,
thirty-three with more than 200,000, and twelve with more than 500,000
does not mean that the resources of polity, culture, and art have been
correspondingly on the increase. The growth of the American city has
resulted less in the establishment of civilized standards of life than
in the extension of Suburbia.

“Suburbia” is used here in both the accepted and in a more literal
sense. On one hand I refer to the fact that the growth of the
metropolis throws vast numbers of people into distant dormitories
where, by and large, life is carried on without the discipline of
rural occupations and without the cultural resources that the Central
District of the city still retains in its art exhibitions, theatres,
concerts, and the like. But our metropolises produce Suburbia not
merely by reason of the fact that the people who work in the offices,
bureaus, and factories live as citizens in a distant territory, perhaps
in another state: they likewise foster Suburbia in another sense. I
mean that the quality of life for the great mass of people who live
within the political boundaries of the metropolis itself is inferior to
that which a city with an adequate equipment and a thorough realization
of the creative needs of the community is capable of producing. In
this sense, the “suburb” called Brookline is a genuine city; while the
greater part of the “city of Boston” is a suburb. We have scarcely
begun to make an adequate distribution of libraries, meeting places,
parks, gymnasia, and similar equipment, without which life in the
city tends to be carried on at a low level of routine--physically
as well as mentally. (The blatantly confidential advertisements of
constipation remedies on all the hoardings tell a significant story.)
At any reasonable allotment of park space, the Committee on Congestion
in New York pointed out in 1911, a greater number of acres was needed
for parks on the lower East Side than was occupied by the entire
population. This case is extreme but representative.

It is the peculiarity of our metropolitan civilization, then, that in
spite of vast resources drawn from the ends of the earth, it has an
insufficient civic equipment, and what it does possess it uses only
transiently. Those cities that have the beginnings of an adequate
equipment, like New York--to choose no more invidious example--offer
them chiefly to those engaged in travelling. As a traveller’s city
New York is near perfection. An association of cigar salesmen or an
international congress of social scientists, meeting in one of the
auditoriums of a big hotel, dining together, mixing in the lounge, and
finding recreation in the theatres hard by, discovers an environment
that is ordered, within its limits, to a nicety. It is this hotel and
theatre district that we must charitably think of when we are tempted
to speak about the triumphs of the American city. Despite manifold
defects that arise from want of planning, this is the real civic centre
of America’s Metropolis. What we must overlook in this characterization
are the long miles of slum that stretch in front and behind and
on each side of this district--neighbourhoods where, in spite of
the redoubtable efforts of settlement workers, block organizers,
and neighbourhood associations, there is no permanent institution,
other than the public school or the sectarian church, to remind the
inhabitants that they have a common life and a common destiny.

Civic life, in fine, the life of intelligent association and common
action, a life whose faded pattern still lingers in the old New England
town, is not something that we daily enjoy, as we work in an office or
a factory. It is rather a temporary state that we occasionally achieve
with a great deal of time, bother, and expense. The city is not around
us, in our little town, suburb, or neighbourhood: it lies beyond us,
at the end of a subway ride or a railway journey. We are citizens
occasionally: we are suburbanites (_denizens_, _idiots_) by regular
routine. Small wonder that bathtubs and heating systems and similar
apparatus play such a large part in our conception of the good life.

Metropolitanism in America represents, from the cultural angle,
a reaction against the uncouth and barren countryside that was
skinned, rather than cultivated, by the restless, individualistic,
self-assertive American pioneer. The perpetual drag to New York, and
the endeavour of less favourably situated cities to imitate the virtues
and defects of New York, is explicable as nothing other than the
desire to participate in some measure in the benefits of city life.
Since we have failed up to the present to develop genuine regional
cultures, those who do not wish to remain barbarians must become
metropolitans. That means they must come to New York, or ape the ways
that are fashionable in New York. Here opens the breach that has begun
to widen between the metropolis and the countryside in America. The
countryman, who cannot enjoy the advantages of the metropolis, who has
no centre of his own to which he can point with pride, resents the
privileges that the metropolitan enjoys. Hence the periodical crusades
of our State Legislatures, largely packed with rural representatives,
against the vices, corruptions, and follies which the countryman
enviously looks upon as the peculiar property of the big city.
Perhaps the envy and resentment of the farming population is due to a
genuine economic grievance against the big cities--especially against
their banks, insurance companies, and speculative middlemen. Should
the concentration of power, glory, and privilege in the metropolis
continue, it is possible that the city will find itself subject to an
economic siege. If our cities cannot justify their existence by their
creative achievements, by their demonstration of the efficacy and grace
of corporate life, it is doubtful whether they will be able to persuade
the country to support them, once the purely conventional arrangements
by means of which the city browbeats the countryside are upset. This,
however, brings us to the realm of social speculation; and he who would
enter it must abandon everything but hope.

       *       *       *       *       *

Metropolitanism is of two orders. At its partial best it is exhibited
in New York, the literal mother city of America. In its worst aspect
it shows itself in the sub-metropolises which have been spawning
so prolifically since the ’eighties. If we are to understand the
capacities and limitations of the other great cities in America, we
must first weigh the significance of New York.

The forces that have made New York dominant are inherent in our
financial and industrial system; elsewhere those same forces, working
in slightly different ways, created London, Rome, Paris, Berlin,
Vienna, Petrograd, and Moscow. What happened in the industrial towns
of America was that the increments derived from land, capital, and
association went, not to the enrichment of the local community, but to
those who had a legal title to the land and the productive machinery.
In other words, the gains that were made in Pittsburgh, Springfield,
Dayton, and a score of other towns that became important in the
industrial era were realized largely in New York, whose position
had been established, before the turn of the century, as the locus
of trade and finance. (New York passed the 500,000 mark in the 1850
census.) This is why, perhaps, during the ’seventies and ’eighties,
decades of miserable depression throughout the industrial centres,
there were signs of hope and promise in New York: the Museums of Art
and Natural History were built: _Life_ and _Puck_ and a batch of
newspapers were founded: the Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall
were established: and a dozen other evidences of a vigorous civic life
appeared. In a short time New York became the glass of fashion and
the mould of form, and through the standardization, specialization,
and centralization which accompany the machine process the Metropolis
became at length the centre of advertising, the lender of farm
mortgages, the distributor of boiler-plate news, the headquarters of
the popular magazine, the publishing centre, and finally the chief
disseminator of plays and motion pictures in America. The educational
foundations which the exploiter of the Kodak has established at
Rochester were not characteristic of the early part of the industrial
period--otherwise New York’s eminence might have been briskly
challenged before it had become, after its fashion, unchallengeable.
The increment from Mr. Carnegie’s steel works built a hall of music for
New York long before it created the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
In other words, the widespread effort of the American provincial to
leave his industrial city for New York comes to something like an
attempt to get back from New York what had been previously filched from
the industrial city.

The future of our cities depends upon how permanent are the forces
which drain money, energy, and brains from the various regions in
America into the twelve great cities that now dominate the countryside,
and in turn drain the best that is in these sub-metropolises to New
York. To-day our cities are at a crossing of the ways. Since the 1910
census a new tendency has begun to manifest itself, and the cities
that have grown the fastest are those of a population from 25,000 to
100,000. Quantitatively, that is perhaps a good sign. It may indicate
the drift to Suburbia is on the wane. One finds it much harder,
however, to gauge the qualitative capacities of the new régime; much
more difficult to estimate the likelihood of building up, within the
next generation or two, genuine regional cultures to take the place
of pseudo-national culture which now mechanically emanates from New
York. So far our provincial culture has been inbred and sterile:
our provincial cities have substituted boosting for achievement,
fanciful speculation for intelligent planning, and a zaniacal optimism
for constructive thought. These habits have made them an easy prey
to the metropolis, for at its lowest ebb there has always been a
certain amount of organized intelligence and cultivated imagination
in New York--if only because it is the chief point of contact between
Europe and America. Gopher Prairie has yet to take to heart the fable
about the frog that tried to inflate himself to the size of a bull.
When Gopher Prairie learns its lessons from Bergen and Augsburg and
Montpellier and Grenoble, the question of “metropolitanism versus
regionalism” may become as active in America as it is now in Europe.

Those of us who are metropolitans may be tempted to think that the
hope for civilization in America is bound up with the continuance
of metropolitanism. That is essentially a cockney view of culture
and society, however, and our survey of the development of the city
in America should have done something to weaken its self-confident
complacence. Our metropolitan civilization is not a success. It is a
different kind of wilderness from that which we have deflowered--but
the feral rather than the humane quality is dominant: it is still a
wilderness. The cities of America must learn to remould our mechanical
and financial régime, for if metropolitanism continues they are
probably destined to fall by its weight.

                                                       LEWIS MUMFORD




POLITICS

    No person shall be a Representative who ... shall not, when
    elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be
    chosen.... No person shall be a Senator who ... shall not, when
    elected, be an inhabitant of that State for which he shall be
    chosen.


Specialists in political archæology will recognize these sentences:
they are from Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of the constitution of the
United States. I have heard and forgotten how they got there; no doubt
the cause lay in the fierce jealousy of the States. But whatever the
fact, I have a notion that there are few provisions of the constitution
that have had a more profound effect upon the character of practical
politics in the Republic, or, indirectly, upon the general colour of
American thinking in the political department. They have made steadily
for parochialism in legislation, for the security and prosperity of
petty local bosses and machines, for the multiplication of pocket and
rotten boroughs of the worst sort, and, above all, for the progressive
degeneration of the honesty and honour of representatives. They have
greased the ways for the trashy and ignoble fellow who aspires to
get into Congress, and they have blocked them for the man of sense,
dignity, and self-respect. More, perhaps, than any other single
influence they have been responsible for the present debauched and
degraded condition of the two houses, and particularly of the lower
one. Find me the worst ass in Congress, and I’ll show you a man they
have helped to get there and to stay there. Find me the most shameless
scoundrel, and I’ll show you another.

No such centripedal mandate, as far as I have been able to discover,
is in the fundamental law of any other country practising the
representative system. An Englishman, if ambition heads him toward
St. Stephen’s, may go hunting for a willing constituency wherever the
hunting looks best, and if he fails in the Midlands he may try again
in the South, or in the North, or in Scotland or Wales. A Frenchman of
like dreams has the same privilege; the only condition, added after
nineteen years of the Third Republic, is that he may not be a candidate
in two or more _arrondissements_ at once. And so with a German, an
Italian, or a Spaniard. But not so with an American. He must be an
actual inhabitant of the State he aspires to represent at Washington.
More, he must be, in all save extraordinary cases, an actual inhabitant
of the congressional district--for here, by a characteristic American
process, the fundamental law is sharpened by custom. True enough,
this last requirement is not laid down by the constitution. It would
be perfectly legal for the thirty-fifth New York district, centring
at Syracuse, to seek its congressman in Manhattan, or even at Sing
Sing. In various iconoclastic States, in fact, the thing has been
occasionally done. But not often; not often enough to produce any
appreciable effect. The typical congressman remains a purely local
magnifico, the gaudy cock of some small and usually far from appetizing
barnyard. His rank and dignity as a man are measured by provincial
standards of the most puerile sort, and his capacity to discharge the
various and onerous duties of his office is reckoned almost exclusively
in terms of his ability to hold his grip upon the local party machine.

If he has genuine ability, it is a sort of accident. If he is
thoroughly honest, it is next door to a miracle. Of the 430-odd
representatives who carry on so diligently and obscenely at Washington,
making laws and determining policies for the largest free nation ever
seen in the world, there are not two dozen whose views upon any subject
under the sun carry any weight whatsoever outside their own bailiwicks,
and there are not a dozen who rise to anything approaching unmistakable
force and originality. They are, in the overwhelming main, shallow
fellows, ignorant of the grave matters they deal with and too stupid
to learn. If, as is often proposed, the United States should adopt
the plan of parliamentary responsibility and the ministry should be
recruited from the lower house, then it would be difficult, without a
radical change in election methods, to fetch up even such pale talents
and modest decencies as were assembled for their cabinets by Messrs.
Wilson and Harding. The better sort of congressmen, to be sure, acquire
after long service a good deal of technical proficiency. They know the
traditions and precedents of the two houses; they can find their way in
and out of every rathole in the Capitol; they may be trusted to carry
on the legislative routine in a more or less shipshape manner. Of such
sort are the specialists paraded in the newspapers--on the tariff, on
military affairs, on foreign relations, and so on. They come to know,
in time, almost as much as a Washington correspondent, or one of their
own committee clerks. But the average congressman lifts himself to
no such heights of sagacity. He is content to be led by the fugelmen
and bellwethers. Examine him at leisure, and you will find that he is
incompetent and imbecile, and not only incompetent and imbecile, but
also incurably dishonest. The first principles of civilized law-making
are quite beyond him; he ends, as he began, a local politician,
interested only in jobs. His knowledge is that of a third-rate country
lawyer--which he often is in fact. His intelligence is that of a
country newspaper editor, or evangelical divine. His standards of
honour are those of a country banker--which he also often is. To demand
sense of such a man, or wide and accurate information, or a delicate
feeling for the public and private proprieties, is to strain his parts
beyond endurance.

The constitution, of course, stops with Congress, but its influence
is naturally powerful within the States, and one finds proofs of the
fact on all sides. It is taking an herculean effort everywhere to break
down even the worst effects of this influence; the prevailing tendency
is still to discover a mysterious virtue in the office-holder who was
born and raised in the State, or county, or city, or ward. The judge
must come from the bar of the court he is to adorn; the mayor must be
part and parcel of the local machine; even technical officers, such
as engineers and health commissioners, lie under the constitutional
blight. The thing began as a belief in local self-government, the
oldest of all the sure cures for despotism. But it has gradually taken
on the character of government by local politicians, which is to say,
by persons quite unable to comprehend the most elemental problems of
State and nation, and unfitted by nature to deal with them honestly
and patriotically, even if they could comprehend them. Just as
prohibition was forced upon the civilized minorities collected in the
great cities against their most vigorous and persistent opposition,
so the same minorities, when it comes to intra-state affairs, are
constantly at the mercy of predatory bands of rural politicians. If
there is any large American city whose peculiar problems are dealt
with competently and justly by its State legislature, then I must
confess that twenty years in journalism have left me ignorant of it. An
unending struggle for fairer dealing goes on in every State that has
large cities, and every concession to their welfare is won only at the
cost of gigantic effort. The State legislature is never intelligent;
it represents only the average mind of the county bosses, whose sole
concern is with jobs. The machines that they represent are wholly
political, but they have no political principles in any rational sense.
Their one purpose and function is to maintain their adherents in the
public offices, or to obtain for them in some other way a share of
the State funds. They are quite willing to embrace any new doctrine,
however fantastic, or to abandon any old one, however long supported,
if only the business will promote their trade and so secure their power.

This concentration of the ultimate governmental authority in the hands
of small groups of narrow, ignorant, and unconscionable manipulators
tends inevitably to degrade the actual office-holder, or, what is
the same thing, to make office-holding prohibitive to all men not
already degraded. It is almost impossible to imagine a man of genuine
self-respect and dignity offering himself as a candidate for the lower
house--or, since the direct primary and direct elections brought it
down to the common level, for the upper house--in the average American
constituency. His necessary dealings with the electors themselves,
and with the idiots who try more or less honestly to lead them, would
be revolting enough, but even worse would be his need of making terms
with the professional politicians of his party--the bosses of the local
machine. These bosses naturally make the most of the constitutional
limitation; it works powerfully in their favour. A local notable, in
open revolt against them, may occasionally beat them by appealing
directly to the voters, but nine times out of ten, when there is any
sign of such a catastrophe, they are prompt to perfume the ticket by
bringing forth another local notable who is safe and sane, which is
to say, subservient and reliable. The thing is done constantly; it
is a matter of routine; it accounts for most of the country bankers,
newspaper owners, railroad lawyers, proprietors of cement works, and
other such village bigwigs in the lower house. Here everything runs
to the advantage of the bosses. It is not often that the notable in
rebellion is gaudy enough to blind the plain people to the high merits
of his more docile opponent. They see him too closely and know him too
well. He shows none of that exotic charm which accounts, on a different
plane, for exogamy. There is no strangeness, no mysteriousness, above
all, no novelty about him.

It is my contention that this strangle-hold of the local machines
would be vastly less firm if it could be challenged, not only by
rebels within the constituency, but also by salient men from outside.
The presidential campaigns, indeed, offer plenty of direct proof of
it. In these campaigns it is a commonplace for strange doctrines and
strange men to force themselves upon the practical politicians in
whole sections of the country, despite their constant effort to keep
their followers faithful to the known. All changes, of whatever sort,
whether in leaders or in ideas, are opposed by such politicians at
the start, but time after time they are compelled to acquiesce and to
hurrah. Bryan, as every one knows, forced himself upon the Democratic
party by appealing directly to the people; the politicians, in the
main, were bitterly against him until further resistance was seen to
be useless, and they attacked him again the moment he began to weaken,
and finally disposed of him. So with Wilson. It would be absurd to say
that the politicians of his party--and especially the bosses of the
old machines in the congressional districts--were in favour of him in
1912. They were actually against him almost unanimously. He got past
their guard and broke down their resolution to nominate some more
trustworthy candidate by operating directly upon the emotions of the
voters. For some reason never sufficiently explained he became the heir
of the spirit of rebellion raised by Bryan sixteen years before, and
was given direct and very effective aid by Bryan himself. Roosevelt
saddled himself upon the Republican party in exactly the same way. The
bosses made heroic efforts to sidetrack him, to shelve him, to get rid
of him by any means short of homicide, but his bold enterprises and
picturesque personality enchanted the people, and if it had not been
for the extravagant liberties that he took with his popularity in later
years he might have retained it until his death.

The same possibility of unhorsing the machine politicians, I believe,
exists in even the smallest electoral unit. All that is needed is
the chance to bring in the man. Podunk cannot produce him herself,
save by a sort of miracle. If she has actually hatched him, he is far
away by the time he has come to his full stature and glitter--in the
nearest big city, in Chicago or New York. Podunk is proud of him, and
many other Podunks, perhaps, are stirred by his ideas, his attitudes,
his fine phrases--but he lives, say, in some Manhattan congressional
district which has the Hon. Patrick Googan as its representative by
divine right, and so there is no way to get him into the halls of
Congress. In his place goes the Hon. John P. Balderdash, State’s
attorney for five years, State senator for two terms, and county judge
for a brief space--and always a snide and petty fellow, always on the
best of terms with the local bosses, always eager for a job on any
terms they lay down. The yokels vote for the Hon. Mr. Balderdash, not
because they admire him, but because their only choice is between
him and the Hon. James Bosh. If anything even remotely resembling a
first-rate man could come into the contest, if it were lawful for them
to rid themselves of their recurrent dilemma by soliciting the interest
of such a man, then they would often enough rise in their might and
compel their parish overlords, as the English put it, to adopt him.
But the constitution protects these overlords in their business, and
in the long run the voters resign all thought of deliverance. Thus the
combat remains one between small men, and interest in it dies out. Most
of the men who go to the lower house are third-raters, even in their
own narrow bailiwicks. In my own congressional district, part of a
large city, there has never been a candidate of any party, during the
twenty years that I have voted, who was above the intellectual level
of a corner grocer. No successful candidate of that district has ever
made a speech in Congress (or out of it) worth hearing, or contributed
a single sound idea otherwise to the solution of any public problem.
One and all, they have confined themselves exclusively to the trade in
jobs. One and all, they have been ciphers in the house and before the
country.

Well, perhaps I labour my point too much. It is, after all, not
important. The main thing is the simple fact that the average
representative from my district is typical of Congress--that, if
anything, he is superior to the normal congressman of these, our days.
That normal congressman, as year chases year, tends to descend to
such depths of puerility, to such abysses of petty shysterism, that
he becomes offensive alike to the intelligence and to the nose. His
outlook, when it is honest, is commonly childish--and it is very seldom
honest. The product of a political system which puts all stress upon
the rewards of public office, he is willing to make any sacrifice, of
dignity, of principle, of honour, to hold and have those rewards. He
has no courage, no intellectual _amour propre_, no ardent belief in
anything save his job, and the jobs of his friends. It was easy for
Wilson to beat him into line on the war issue; it was easy for the
prohibitionists to intimidate and stampede him; it is easy for any
resolute man or group of men to do likewise. I read the _Congressional
Record_ faithfully, and have done so for years. In the Senate debates,
amid oceans of tosh, I occasionally encounter a flash of wit or a gleam
of sense; direct elections have not yet done their work. But in the
lower house there is seldom anything save a garrulous and intolerable
imbecility. The discussion of measures of the utmost importance--bills
upon which the security and prosperity of the whole nation depend--is
carried on in the manner of the Chautauqua and the rural stump. Entire
days go by without a single congressman saying anything as intelligent,
say, as the gleams that one sometimes finds in the New York _Herald_,
or even in the New York _Times_. The newspapers, unfortunately, give no
adequate picture of the business. No American journal reports the daily
debates comprehensively, as the debates in the House of Commons are
reported by the London _Times_, _Daily Telegraph_, and _Morning Post_.
All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and only too often
the action taken, even when it is reported fairly, is unintelligible
without the antecedent discussion. If any one who reads this wants to
know what such a discussion is like, then I counsel him to go to the
nearest public library, ask for the _Record_ for 1918, and read the
debate in the lower house on the Volstead Act. It was, I believe, an
average debate, and on a subject of capital importance. It was, from
first to last, almost fabulous in its evasion of the plain issue,
its incredible timorousness and stupidity, its gross mountebankery
and dishonesty. Not twenty men spoke in it as men of honour and
self-respect. Not ten brought any idea into it that was not a silly
idea and a stale one.

That debate deserves a great deal more study than it will ever get
from the historians of American politics, nearly all of whom, whether
they lean to the right or to the left, are bedazzled by the economic
interpretation of history, and so seek to account for all political
phenomena in terms of crop movements, wage scales, and panics in Wall
Street. It seems to me that that obsession blinds them to a fact of
the first importance, to wit, the fact that political ideas, under a
democracy as under a monarchy, originate above quite as often as they
originate below, and that their popularity depends quite as much upon
the special class interests of professional politicians as it depends
upon the underlying economic interests of the actual voters. It is,
of course, true, as I have argued, that the people can force ideas
upon the politicians, given powerful leaders of a non-political (or,
at all events, non-machine) sort, but it is equally true that there
are serious impediments to the process, and that it is not successful
very often. As a matter of everyday practice the rise and fall of
political notions is determined by the self-interest of the practical
politicians of the country, and though they naturally try to bring the
business into harmony with any great popular movements that may be in
progress spontaneously, they by no means wait and beg for mandates when
none are vociferously forthcoming, but go ahead bravely on their own
account, hoping to drag public opinion with them and so safeguard their
jobs. Such is the origin of many affecting issues, later held dear by
millions of the plain people. Such was the process whereby prohibition
was foisted upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay
of the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the minority
in favour of it.

What lay under the sudden and melodramatic success of the
prohibitionist agitators was simply their discovery of the incurable
cowardice and venality of the normal American politician--their shrewd
abandonment of logical and evidential propaganda for direct political
action. For years their cause had languished. Now and then a State
or part of a State went dry, but often it went wet again a few years
later. Those were the placid days of white-ribbon rallies, of wholesale
pledge-signings, of lectures by converted drunkards, of orgiastic
meetings in remote Baptist and Methodist churches, of a childish
reliance upon arguments that fetched only drunken men and their wives,
and so grew progressively feebler as the country became more sober.
The thing was scarcely even a nuisance; it tended steadily to descend
to the level of a joke. The prohibitionist vote for President hung
around a quarter of a million; it seemed impossible to pull it up to
a formidable figure, despite the stupendous labours of thousands of
eloquent dervishes, lay and clerical, male and female. But then, out
of nowhere, came the Anti-Saloon League, and--sis! boom! ah! Then came
the sudden shift of the fire from the people to the politicians--and
at once there was rapid progress. The people could only be wooed and
bamboozled, but the politicians could be threatened; their hold upon
their jobs could be shaken; they could be converted at wholesale and
by _force majeure_. The old prohibition weepers and gurglers were
quite incapable of this enterprise, but the new janissaries of the
Anti-Saloon League--sharp lawyers, ecclesiastics too ambitious to pound
mere pulpits, outlaw politicians seeking a way back to the trough--were
experts at every trick and dodge it demanded. They understood the
soul of the American politician. To him they applied the economic
interpretation of history, resolutely and with a great deal of genial
humour. They knew that his whole politics, his whole philosophy, his
whole concept of honesty and honour, was embraced in his single and
insatiable yearning for a job, and they showed him how, by playing
with them, he could get it and keep it, and how, by standing against
them, he could lose it. Prohibition was rammed into the constitution by
conquering the politicians; the people in general were amazed when the
thing was accomplished; it may take years to reconcile them to it.

It was the party system that gave the Anti-Saloon League manipulators
their chance, and they took advantage of it with great boldness and
cleverness. The two great parties divide the country almost equally;
it is difficult to predict, in a given year, whether the one or
the other musters the most votes. This division goes down into the
lowest electoral units; even in those backward areas where one party
has divine grace and the other is of the devil there are factional
differences that amount to the same thing. In other words, the average
American politician is never quite sure of his job. An election (and,
if not an election, then a primary) always exposes him to a definite
hazard, and he is eager to diminish it by getting help from outside
his own following, at whatever cost to the principles he commonly
professes. Here lies the opportunity for minorities willing to trade
on a realistic political basis. In the old days the prohibitionists
refused to trade, and in consequence they were disregarded, for their
fidelity to their own grotesque candidates protected the candidates
of both the regular parties. But with the coming of the Anti-Saloon
League they abandoned this fidelity and began to dicker in a forthright
and unashamed manner, quickly comprehensible to all professional
politicians. That is, they asked for a pledge on one specific issue,
and were willing to swallow any commitment on other issues. If
Beelzebub, running on one ticket, agreed to support prohibition, and
the Archangel Gabriel, running on another, found himself entertaining
conscientious doubts, they were instantly and solidly for Beelzebub,
and they not only gave him the votes that they directly controlled, but
they also gave him the benefit of a campaign support that was ruthless,
pertinacious, extraordinarily ingenious, and overwhelmingly effective.
Beelzebub, whatever his swinishness otherwise, was bathed in holy oils;
Gabriel’s name became a thing to scare children.

Obviously, the support thus offered was particularly tempting to
a politician who found himself facing public suspicion for his
general political practices--in brief, to the worst type of machine
professional. Such a politician is always acutely aware that it is
not positive merit that commonly gets a man into public office in the
United States, but simply disvulnerability. Even when they come to
nominate a President, the qualities the two great parties seek are
chiefly the negative ones; they want, not a candidate of forceful and
immovable ideas, but one whose ideas are vague and not too tenaciously
held, and in whose personality there is nothing to alarm or affront the
populace. Of two candidates, that one usually wins who least arouses
the distrusts and suspicions of the great masses of undifferentiated
men. This advantage of the safe and sane, the colourless and
unprovocative, the apparently stodgy and commonplace man extends to the
most trivial contests, and politicians are keen to make use of it. Thus
the job-seeker with an aura of past political misdemeanour about him
was eager to get the Christian immunity bath that the prohibitionists
offered him so generously, and in the first years of their fight they
dealt almost exclusively with such fellows. He, on his side, promised
simply to vote for prohibition--not even, in most cases, to pretend to
any personal belief in it. The prohibitionists, on their side, promised
to deliver the votes of their followers to him on election day, to cry
him up as one saved by a shining light, and, most important of all,
to denounce his opponent as an agent of hell. He was free, by this
agreement, to carry on his regular political business as usual. The
prohibitionists asked no patronage of him. They didn’t afflict him with
projects for other reforms. All they demanded was that he cast his vote
as agreed upon when the signal was given to him.

At the start, of course, such scoundrels frequently violated their
agreements. In the South, in particular, dry legislature after dry
legislature sold out to the liquor lobby, which, in those days, still
had plenty of money. An assemblyman would be elected with the aid of
the prohibitionists, make a few maudlin speeches against the curse
of drink, and then, at the last minute, vote wet for some thin and
specious reason, or for no avowed reason at all. But the prohibition
manipulators, as I have said, were excellent politicians, and so they
knew how to put down that sort of treason. At the next election they
transferred their favour to the opposition candidate, and inasmuch as
he had seen the traitor elected at the last election he was commonly
very eager to do business. The punishment for the treason was condign
and merciless. The dry rabble-rousers, lay and clerical, trumpeted
news of it from end to end of the constituency. What was a new and
gratifying disvulnerability was transformed into a vulnerability of the
worst sort; the recreant one became the county Harry Thaw, Oscar Wilde,
Captain Boy-Ed, and Debs. A few such salutary examples, and treason
became rare. The prohibitionists, indeed, came to prefer dealing with
such victims of their reprisals. They could trust them perfectly,
once the lesson had been learned; they were actually more trustworthy
than honest believers, for the latter usually had ideas of their own
and interfered with the official plans of campaign. Thus, in the end,
the professional politicians of both parties came under the yoke. The
final battle in Congress transcended all party lines; democrats and
republicans fought alike for places on the band-wagon. The spectacle
offered a searching and not unhumorous commentary on the party system,
and on the honour of American politicians no less. Two-thirds, at
least, of the votes for the amendment were cast by men who did not
believe in it, and who cherished a hearty hope, to the last moment,
that some act of God would bring about its defeat.

Such holocausts of frankness and decency are certainly not rare in
American politics; on the contrary, they glow with normalcy. The
typical legislative situation among us--and the typical administrative
situation as well--is one in which men wholly devoid of inner
integrity, facing a minority that is resolutely determined to get
its will, yield up their ideas, their freedom, and their honour
in order to save their jobs. I say administrative situation as
well; what I mean is that in these later days the pusillanimity of
the actual law-maker is fully matched by the pusillanimity of the
enforcing officer, whether humble assistant district attorney or
powerful judge. The war, with its obliteration of customary pretences
and loosening of fundamental forces, threw up the whole process
into high relief. For nearly two long years there was a complete
abandonment of sense and self-respect. Rowelled and intimidated by
minorities that finally coalesced into a frantic majority, legislators
allowed themselves to be forced into imbecility after imbecility, and
administrative officers, including some of the highest judges in the
land, followed them helter-skelter. In the lower house of Congress
there was one man--already forgotten--who showed the stature of a
man. He resigned his seat and went home to his self-respect. The rest
had no self-respect to go home to. Eager beyond all to hold their
places, at whatever cost to principle, and uneasily conscious of their
vulnerability to attack, however frenzied and unjust, they surrendered
abjectly and repeatedly--to the White House, to the newspapers, to
any group enterprising enough to issue orders to them and resolute
enough to flourish weapons before them. It was a spectacle full of
indecency--there are even congressmen who blush when they think of
it to-day--but it was nevertheless a spectacle that was typical. The
fortunes of politics, as they now run, make it overwhelmingly probable
that every new recruit to public office will be just such a poltroon.
The odds are enormously in favour of him, and enormously against the
man of honour. Such a man of honour may occasionally drift in, taken
almost unawares by some political accident, but it is the pushing,
bumptious, unconscionable bounder who is constantly _fighting_ to get
in, and only too often he succeeds. The rules of the game are made to
fit his taste and his talents. He can survive as a hog can survive in
the swill-yard.

Go to the Congressional Directory and investigate the origins and
past performances of the present members of the lower house--our
typical assemblage of typical politicians, the cornerstone of our
whole representative system, the symbol of our democracy. You will
find that well over half of them are obscure lawyers, school-teachers,
and mortgage-sharks out of almost anonymous towns--men of common
traditions, sordid aspirations, and no attainments at all. One and
all, the members of this majority--and it is constant, no matter what
party is in power--are plastered with the brass ornaments of the
more brummagem fraternal orders. One and all, they are devoid of any
contact with what passes for culture, even in their remote bailiwicks.
One and all their careers are bare of civilizing influences.... Such
is the American _Witenagemot_ in this 146th year of the Republic. Such
are the men who make the laws that all of us must obey, and who carry
on our dealings with the world. Go to their debates, and you will
discover what equipment they bring to their high business. What they
know of sound literature is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Fifth
Reader. What they know of political science is the nonsense preached
in the chautauquas and on the stump. What they know of history is the
childish stuff taught in grammar-schools. What they know of the arts
and sciences--of all the great body of knowledge that is the chief
intellectual baggage of modern man--is absolutely nothing.

                                                       H. L. MENCKEN




JOURNALISM


According to the _World Almanac_ for 1921 the daily circulation of
newspapers in the big cities of the United States in 1914 (evidently
the most recent year for which the figures have been compiled) was
more than forty million. For the six months ending April 1, 1920,
the average daily circulation of five morning newspapers and eleven
evening newspapers in Greater New York City was, as shown by sworn
statements, more than three and a third million. These statistics cover
only daily newspapers, not weekly or monthly journals; and the figures
for New York do not include papers in languages other than English.
The American certainly buys newspapers. To what extent he reads them
it is impossible to determine. But we may fairly assume that the great
majority of literate inhabitants of the United States of all ages are
every day subjected in some measure to the influence of the newspaper.
No other institution approaches the newspaper in universality,
persistence, continuity of influence. Not the public school, with all
other schools added to it, has such power over the national mind; for
in the lives of most people formal schooling is of relatively short
duration, ceasing with adolescence or earlier. The church? Millions of
people never go to church, and the day when the clergy dominated human
thought is gone for ever. If we add to the daily press the weekly and
monthly periodicals, with a total circulation per issue of two hundred
million (for the year 1914), we shall not be far wrong in saying that
the journalist, with the powers behind him, has more to do, for good
or for evil, than the member of any other profession, in creating and
shaping the thoughts of the multitude. Compared with him the teacher,
the preacher, the artist, the politician, the man of science, are
restricted, interrupted, indirect in reaching the minds of their
fellow-men.

So that in estimating the capacities and contents of the American
mind, which we have no means of lining up in its hundred million
individual manifestations and examining directly, an analysis of the
American newspaper is a fair rough-and-ready method. What everybody
reads does not tell the whole story of what everybody is, but it tells
a good deal. Moreover, it is not necessary to analyze any one newspaper
or to separate its clientèle from that of any other newspaper. For
though everybody knows that the New York _Tribune_ and the New York
_World_ have distinct qualities which differentiate them from each
other, that some papers are better and some are worse, yet on the whole
the American newspaper is amazingly uniform from Portland, Maine, to
Portland, Oregon. It is, indeed, a more or less unified institution fed
by the same news services and dominated by kindred financial interests.
If you travel much, as actors do, without interest in local affairs,
when you go to the hotel news-stand in the morning, you cannot tell
from the general aspect of the newspaper you pick up what city you
are in; and in a small city it is likely to be a metropolitan paper
that has come a hundred miles or more during the night. Indeed, this
is the first thing to be learned about the American from a study of
his newspapers, that he lacks individuality, is tediously uniform, and
cut according to one intellectual pattern. He may have his “favourite”
newspaper, and with no sense that his confession of habitude is
shameful he may write the editor that he has read it constantly for
forty years. But if it goes out of existence, like his favourite brand
of chewing-gum or cigarettes, there is no aching void which cannot be
comfortably filled by a surviving competitor. Editors, except those in
charge of local news, move with perfect ease from one city to another;
it is the same old job at a different desk.

The standardization of the newspaper reader and the standardization
of the journalist are two aspects of the same thing. As a citizen, a
workman, a human being, the journalist is simply one of us, a victim of
the conformity which has overwhelmed the American. When we speak of the
influence of the journalist, we are not speaking of an individual, but
of “the powers behind him,” of which he is nothing but the wage-earning
servant, as impotent and unimportant, considered as an individual, as
a mill-hand. Journalism in America is no longer a profession, through
which a man can win to a place of real dignity among his neighbours. If
we had a Horace Greeley to-day, he would not be editor of a newspaper.
He would not wish to be, and he would not be allowed to be. Certainly
his vigorous integrity would not be tolerated in the modern unworthy
successor of the newspaper which he founded. The editor of a newspaper
is no doubt often a man of intelligence and experience and he may be
well paid, like the manager of a department store; but he is usually
submerged in anonymity except that from time to time the law requires
the newspaper to publish his name. His subordinates, assistant editors,
newswriters, reporters, and the rest, are as nameless as floor-walkers,
shipping clerks, salesladies, and ladies engaged in more ancient forms
of commerce.

It is true that during the last generation there has been a tendency in
the newspaper to “feature” individuals, such as cartoonists, conductors
of columns, writers on sport, dramatic critics, and so on. But these
men are artists, some of them very clever, who have nothing to do with
the news but contribute to the paper its vaudeville entertainment.
During the war there was a great increase in the amount of signed
cable matter and correspondence. This was due to the necessity of the
prosperous newspaper to show its enterprise and to cajole its readers
into believing that it had men of special ability in close touch with
diplomats and major-generals collecting and cabling at great expense
intimate information and expert opinion. The circumstances were so
difficult that the wisest and most honest man could not do much, except
lose his position, and nobody will blame the correspondents. But it
is significant that not a single American correspondent emerged from
the conflict who is memorable, from the point of view of a more or
less careful reader, as having been different from the rest. If from a
miscellaneous collection of clippings we should cut off the dates, the
alleged place of origin and the names of the correspondents, nobody
but an editor with a long and detailed memory could tell t’other from
which, or be sure whether the despatch was from Mr. Jones, the special
correspondent of the _Christian Science Monitor_ (copyright by the
Chicago _News_) or an anonymous cable from the London office of the
Associated Press. And even the editor, who may be assumed to know the
names of hundreds of his colleagues and competitors, would begin his
attempt at identification by examining the style of type to see if it
looked like a column from the _Sun_ or from the _World_. Almost all the
war news was a hopeless confusion of impressions, of reports of what
somebody said somebody else, “of unquestionable authority,” had heard
from reliable sources, and of sheer mendacity adapted to the momentary
prejudices of the individual managing editor, the American press as
a whole, and the American people. And this is a rough recipe for all
the news even in times of peace, for the war merely aggravated the
prevalent diseases of the newspapers.

Since the purpose of this book is to discuss peculiarly American
characteristics, it should be said at once that the tendency of
the newspaper to obliterate the journalist as a person immediately
responsible to the public is not confined to America. Economic
conditions in Europe and America are fundamentally alike, and the
modern newspaper in every country must be a business institution,
heavily capitalized, and conducted for profit. In England the decline
of journalism as a profession and the rise of the “stunt” press has
been noted and deplored by Englishmen. Years ago it meant something
to be editor of the London _Times_, and the appointment of a new man
to the position was an event not less important than a change in the
cabinet. Who is editor of the _Times_ now is a matter of no consequence
except to the man who receives the salary check. English journalism
is in almost as bad a case as American. In England, however, there
is at least one exception which has no counterpart in America, the
Manchester Guardian; this admirable newspaper has the good fortune to
be owned by people who are so rich that they are not obliged, and so
honest that they are not willing, to sell out. It is this fact which
has afforded Mr. Scott, the editor-in-chief for nearly half a century,
an opportunity adequate to his courage and ability. There are few such
opportunities in England, and none in America. Even the Springfield
_Republican_ has largely lost its old character.

As for the continental papers, one who does not read any of them
regularly is in no position to judge. In 1900 William James, a shrewd
observer, wrote in a letter: “The Continental papers of course are
‘nowhere.’ As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal
classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into
journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be
got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the ‘dark ages’
being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He
means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal,
are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight
is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to ‘organs of
publicity.’” This is only a passing remark in an informal letter. But
it is a partial explanation of American yellow journalism which in
twenty years has swamped the whole press, including papers that pretend
to be respectable, and it suggests what the state of things was, and
is, in France.

It should be noted, however, that personal journalism has not entirely
disappeared in France, that the editor can still be brought to account,
sometimes at the point of a pistol, for lies and slander, and that a
young French _littérateur_, before he has won his spurs in poetry,
drama, or fiction, can regard journalism as an honourable occupation in
which it is worth while to make a name.

With the decadence in all countries, certainly in America, of the
journalist as a professional man in an honourable craft, there might
conceivably have been a gain in objectivity, in the right sort of
impersonality. Anonymity might have ensured a dispassionate fidelity
to facts. But there has been no such gain. Responsibility has been
transferred from the journalist to his employers, and he is on his
mettle to please his employers, to cultivate whatever virtues are
possible to journalism, accuracy, clearness of expression, zeal in
searching out and interpreting facts, only in so far forth as his
employers demand them, only as his livelihood and chances of promotion
depend on them. The ordinary journalist, being an ordinary human
being, must prefer to do honest work; for there is no pleasure in
lying, though there is a temptation to fill space with unfounded or
unverified statements. And if his manager orders him to find a story
where there is no story, or to find a story of a certain kind where
the facts lead to a story of another kind, he will not come back
empty-handed lest he go away empty-handed on pay-day. Any one who has
worked in a newspaper office knows that the older men are likely to be
weary and cynical and that the younger men fall into two classes, those
who are too stupid to be discontented with any aspect of their position
except the size of their salaries, and those who hope either to rise to
the better paid positions, or to “graduate,” as they put it, from daily
journalism to other kinds of literary work.

The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the faults of
journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane little book, “Liberty
and the News”: “Resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy
to the institution, and willingness to be fired rather than write what
you do not believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage.” That
is a little like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing
to ply her trade--which is indeed the attitude of some people in
comfortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have written
just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his dinner on pleasing
a managing editor, if he had not been from very early in his brilliant
career editor of a liberal endowed journal in which he is free to
express his beliefs. Most newspaper men are poor and not brilliant. The
correspondents whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as “eminences on a rather
flat plateau” are nearly all men who have succeeded in other work
than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper in the world
would hire them, most of them could afford to thumb their noses at the
Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. Personal courage is surely a personal
matter, and it can seldom be effective in correcting the abuses of an
institution, especially when the institution can hire plenty of men of
adequate if not equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn
integrity. I know one journalist who lost his position as managing
editor of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New York,
in the first instance because he refused to print a false and cowardly
retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the editor-in-chief desired
to serve, in the second instance because he refused to distort war
news. But what good did his single-handed rebellion do, except to make
a few friends proud of him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful
subscriber? Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another
man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of more
conformable temperament. The muddy waters of journalism did not show a
ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is the one man who can do little
or nothing to improve journalism. Mr. Lippmann’s suggestion that our
salvation lies “ultimately in the infusion of the news-structure by
men with a new training and outlook,” is, as he knows, the expression
of a vague hope, too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on
the actual situation. The man of training and outlook, especially
of outlook, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His
salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and
applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does not
discourage precisely the merits which an honest institution should
foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical layman but
represents accurately if not literally the advice given to me by a
successful editor and writer of special articles. “In this game,” he
said, “you lose your soul.”

The stories of individuals who have tried to be decent in newspaper
work and have been fired might be valuable if they were collated and
if the better journalists would unite to lay the foundation in fact of
more such stories. But a profession, a trade, which has so little sense
of its own interest that it does not even make an effective union (to
be sure, the organization of newspaper writers met with some success,
especially in Boston, but to-day the organization has practically
disappeared) to keep its wages up can never be expected to unite in the
impersonal interests of truth and intellectual dignity. The individual
who charges against an enormous unshakable institution with the weapons
of his personal experience is too easily disposed of as a sore-head and
is likely to be laughed at even by his fellow-journalists who know that
in the main he is right.

This has happened to Mr. Upton Sinclair. I have studied “The Brass
Check” carefully for the selfish purpose of getting enough material
so that the writing of this chapter should be nothing but a lazy man’s
task of transcription, not to speak of the noble ethical purpose of
reforming the newspaper by exposing its iniquities. I confess I am
disappointed. “The Brass Check” is a mixture of autobiography, valuable
in its way to those who admire Mr. Sinclair, as I do most sincerely,
and of evidence which, though properly personal, ought to be handled
in an objective manner. I am puzzled that a man of “training and
outlook,” who has shown in at least one of his novels an excellent
sense of construction, could throw together such a hodge-podge of valid
testimony, utterly damning to his opponents, and naïve trivialities,
assertions insecurely founded and not important if they were well
founded. I am so sure that Mr. Sinclair is on the whole right that I am
reluctant to criticize him adversely, to lend a shadow of encouragement
to the real adversary, who is unscrupulous and securely entrenched.
But as a journalist of “training and outlook” I lament that another
journalist of vastly more ability, experience, and information should
not have done better work in selecting and constructing his material.
As a lawyer said to his client, “You are a saint and you are right,
but a court-room is no place for a saint and you are a damn bad
witness.” Mr. Sinclair’s evidence, however, is all there to be dug out
by whoever has the will and the patience. If one-tenth of it is valid
and nine-tenths of doubtful value, the one-tenth is sufficient to show
the sinister forces behind the newspapers and to explain some of the
reasons why the newspapers are untrustworthy, cowardly, and dishonest.

Though Mr. Sinclair tells some damaging stories about the sins of
anonymous reporters and of the prostitution of writers like the late
Elbert Hubbard, who had no excuse for being anything but honest and
independent, yet Mr. Sinclair on the whole would agree with me that the
chief responsibility for the evils of journalism does not rest upon
the journalist. He tries to place it squarely where it belongs on the
owners of the press and the owners of the owners. But it is difficult
to determine how the weight of guilt is distributed, for the press is a
monster with more than two legs.

Part of the responsibility rests upon the reader, if indeed the
reader is to blame for being a gullible fool and for buying shoddy
goods. Mr. Lippmann says: “There is everywhere an increasingly angry
disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and
misled.” And Mr. Sinclair says: “The people want the news; the people
clamour for the news.” Both these statements may be true. But where
do the learned doctors find the symptoms? A few of us who have some
special interest in the press, in publicity, in political problems,
are disillusioned and resentful. Probably everybody has said or heard
somebody else say: “That’s only a newspaper story,” or “You cannot
believe everything you read.” But such mild scepticism shows no promise
of swelling to an angry demand on the part of that vague aggregate, the
People, for better, more honest newspapers, to such an angry demand as
you can actually hear in any house you enter for cheaper clothes and
lower taxes.

If we make a rough calculation of the number of papers sold and of
the number of people in the main economic classes, it is evident
that papers of large circulation must go by the million to the
working-people. Well, is there any sign of growing wrath in the breasts
of the honest toilers against the newspapers, against Mr. Hearst’s
papers, which throw them sops of hypocritical sympathy, not to speak of
papers which are openly unfair in handling labour news? Or consider the
more prosperous classes. In the smoking-car of any suburban train bound
for New York some morning after eight o’clock, look at the men about
you, business men, the kind that work, or do something, in offices.
They are reading the _Times_ and the _Tribune_. There may be some
growls about something in the day’s news, something that has happened
on the stock-market, or a stupid throw to third base in yesterday’s
game. But is there any murmur of discontent with the newspaper itself?
I fail to find any evidence of widespread disgust with the newspaper as
it is and a concomitant hunger for something better. The Reader, the
Public is mute, if not inglorious, and accepts uncritically what the
daily press provides. The reader has not much opportunity to choose
the better from the worse. If he gives up one paper he must take
another that is just as bad. He is between the devil and the deep sea,
as when he casts his ballot for Democrat or Republican. And if he
votes Socialist he gets the admirable New York _Call_, which is less
a newspaper than a vehicle of propaganda. When one paper is slightly
more honest and intelligent than its rivals, the difference is so
slight that only those especially interested in the problems of the
press are aware of it. For example, in discussing these problems with
newspaper men, with critical readers of the press, persons for any
reason intelligently interested in the problems, I have never found
one who did not have a good word to say for the New York _Globe_. It
is so appreciably more decent than the other New York papers that I
can almost forgive it for thrusting Dr. Frank Crane under my nose
when I am looking at the amusing pictures of Mr. Fontaine Fox--the
newspaper vaudeville has to supply stunts for all juvenile tastes.
Yet the _Globe_ does not find a clamorous multitude willing to reward
it for its superiority to its neighbours, which I grant is too slight
for duffers to discern. The American reader of newspapers, that is,
almost everybody, is a duffer, so far as the newspaper is concerned,
uncritical, docile, only meekly incredulous. It may be that “the
people” get as good newspapers as they wish and deserve, just as they
are said to get as good government as they wish and deserve. Certainly
if the readers of newspapers seem to demand nothing better, the
manufacturers of newspapers have no inducement to give them anything
better. But this does not get us any nearer a solution of the problem
or do more than indicate that some vaguely indeterminate part of the
responsibility for the evils of the newspapers must rest on the people
who buy them.

From the buyer to the seller is the shortest step. The newspaper is
a manufacturing concern producing goods to sell at a profit; it is
also a department store, and it has some characteristics that suggest
the variety show and the brothel. But the newspaper differs from all
other commodities in that it does not live by what it receives from
the consumer who buys it. Three cents multiplied a million times does
not support a newspaper. The valuable part of a newspaper from the
manufacturer’s point of view, and also to a great extent from the
reader’s point of view, is the advertisements. The columns of “reading
matter,” so called, are little more than bait to attract enough readers
to make the paper worth while as a vehicle for advertisements. It is
of no importance to the management whether a given column contain news
from Washington or Moscow, true or false, or a scandal or a funny
story, as long as it leads some thousands of human eyes to look at it
and so to look at adjacent columns in which are set forth the merits of
a safety razor or an automobile tire or a fifty-dollar suit of clothes
at thirty-nine dollars and a half. There has to be a good variety and a
certain balance of interest in the columns of reading matter to secure
the attention of all kinds of people. This accounts for two things, the
great development in the newspaper of pure, or impure, entertainment,
of more or less clever features, at the expense of space that might be
devoted to news, and also the tendency to accentuate narrative interest
above all other kinds of interest. A reporter is never sent out by his
chief to get information, but always, in the lingo of the office, to
get a “story.” This is sound psychology. Everybody likes a story, and
there are only a few souls in the world who yearn at breakfast for
information. To attack the newspaper for being sensational is to forget
that all the great stories of the world, from the amatory exploits
of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to the scandalous adventures of Mrs.
Black, the banker’s wife, are sensational and should be so treated. The
newspaper manager is indifferent to every quality in his news columns
except their power to attract the reader and so secure circulation
and so please the advertiser. And the advertiser has as his primary
interest only that of bringing to the attention of a certain number of
people the virtues of his suspenders, shoes, and soothing syrup.

But the advertiser has a secondary interest. The newspaper willy-nilly
deals with ideas, such as they are. No idea inimical to the
advertiser’s business or in general to the business system of which
he is a dependent part must be allowed in the paper. Therefore all
newspapers are controlled by the advertising department, that is, the
counting-room. They are controlled negatively and positively. We are
discussing general characteristics and have not space for detailed
evidence. But one or two cases will suffice.

An example of the coercion of the newspaper by the advertiser was
recently afforded by the Philadelphia press. The Gimbel Brothers,
owners of a department store, were charged by United States Government
officials with profiteering. The only Philadelphia paper that made
anything of the story was the _Press_, which was owned by Mr. Wanamaker
of the rival department store. The other papers ignored the story or
put it in one edition and then withdrew it. If there is an elevator
accident in a general office building, it is reported. If there is a
similar accident in a department store, it is usually not reported.
When the New York _Times_ (April 25, 1921) prints a short account
of the experience of four Wellesley college students who disguised
their intellectual superiority and got jobs in department stores, the
head-line tells us that they “Find They Can Live on Earnings,” though
the matter under the head-line does not bear this out. Perhaps it does
no harm to suppress, or fail to publish, news of accidents and to make
out a good case for the living and working conditions of shop-girls.
These are minor matters in the news of the world and their importance
would appear only if they were accumulated in their tediously
voluminous mass.

The positive corruption of the newspaper by the advertiser goes deeper
and proceeds from larger economic powers than individual merchants.
There is all over the world a terrific economic contest between
the employing classes and the wage-earning classes. The dramatic
manifestation of this contest is the strike. Almost invariably the
news of a strike is, if not falsified, so shaped as to be unfavourable
to the workers. In the New York _Nation_ of January 5, 1921, Mr.
Charles G. Miller, formerly editor of the Cleveland _Plain Dealer_,
exposes the lies of the Pittsburgh papers during the steel strike.
In two weeks the Pittsburgh papers published more than thirty pages
of paid advertisements denouncing the leadership of the strike and
invoking “Americanism” against radicalism and syndicalism. The news
and editorial attitude of the papers coincided with the advertisements
and gave the impression that the strikers were disloyal, un-American,
bolshevik. They were silent on the real questions at issue, hours, pay,
working conditions. And not only the Pittsburgh press but the press of
the entire country was poisoned. For the Associated Press and other
news services are not independent organizations feeding news to their
clients but simply interrelated newspapers swapping each other’s lies.
The Denver newspapers control all the news that is read in Boston about
the Colorado coal mines. The Boston newspapers control all the news
that is read in San Francisco about the New England textile mills. The
head of a local bureau of the Associated Press is not a reporter; he is
merely a more or less skilful compiler and extracter who sends to the
nation, to the whole world, matter which is furnished him by the papers
of his district. So that he can usually hold up his hand and swear to
the honesty of his service; he is like an express agent who ships a
case of what he thinks is canned corn, and it is not his fault if there
is opium concealed in the case.

The power of the advertiser to make the newspaper servile and right
in its opinions is not confined to the local department store or the
special industry operating through a district press. Nor is it confined
to the negative punishment of withdrawing advertising of commodities
like hosiery, chewing gum, and banking service from papers that offend
their masters. There is another method of exerting this power, and that
is to buy advertising space in which to set forth ideas calculated
to influence public opinion. Here is a full page from a New York
paper containing a cartoon and text, the main idea of which is that
Labour and Capital should pull together. It is signed by “‘America
First’ Publicity Association” and is Bulletin No. 115 in a series--“be
sure to read them all.” This full-page bulletin, of which there have
already been more than a hundred, appeared in many newspapers--I do
not know how many; and a full page costs a good deal of money. What
is the object of this patriotic association? The prevailing theme of
the bulletins which I have seen is “Labour be good! Fight Bolshevism!
Beware the Agitator!” Who is going to be influenced by these bulletins?
Not the workingman. He knows what he wants, and if he is the dupe of
agitators and false theories, these sermons can never rescue him.
Not the capitalist. He knows what he wants, and gets it. Perhaps the
little middle-class fellow may swallow such buncombe on his daily
journey between his office and his home in the suburbs. But he is
already an intellectually depraved servant of the employing classes,
and it is not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete and
confirm his corruption. The primary object of the advertisement is to
keep the newspaper “good,” to encourage its editorial departments,
through the advertising department, not to fall below 99 and 44/100%
pure Americanism or admit ideas inimical to the general interests of
chambers of commerce, manufacturers’ associations, and other custodians
of the commonweal. I suspect that some clever advertising man has stung
the gentlemen who supply the money for this campaign of education, but
what is a few million to them? The man who can best afford to laugh is
the business manager of the newspaper when he looks at the check and
meditates on the easy money of some of his advertising clients and the
easy credulity of some of his reading clients.

It may be argued that the newspaper, which is a business, ought to
be controlled, directly and indirectly, by business interests; and
certainly if we allow the commercial powers to manage our food supply,
transportation, and housing, it is a relatively minor matter if the
same powers dominate our press. In like manner if we tolerate dishonest
governments, we are only dealing with an epiphenomenon when we consider
the dishonest and inefficient treatment by the press of public affairs,
national and international. All the news of politics, diplomacy, war,
world-trade emanates from government officials or from those who are
interested in turning to their own advantage the actions of officials.
Business is behind government, and government is behind business;
which comes first is unimportant like the problem of the chicken and
the egg. It is a partnership of swindle, and though the details of
the relation are infinitely complicated, the relation in itself is
easy to understand and accounts quite simply for the fact that world
news is the most viciously polluted of all the many kinds of news.
The efforts of a merchant to keep up the good name of his department
store, or of a group of manufacturers to break a strike are feeble and
even reasonable, so far as they use the newspapers, compared to the
audacious perversion of truth by the combination of arch criminals,
government and international business.

The star example in modern times is the current newspaper history of
Russia. The New York _Nation_ of March 6, 1920, published an article
showing that in the columns of the New York Times Lenin had died once,
been almost killed three times, and had fallen and fled innumerable
times. The _New Republic_ published August 4, 1920, a supplement by
Lippmann and Merz summarizing the news which the _Times_ printed about
Russia during the three years preceding March 1920. The analysis shows
an almost unbroken daily misrepresentation of the programme, purposes
and strength of the Russian government and continuous false “optimism,”
as the writers gently call it, about the military exploits of Russia’s
enemies, the “white hopes,” Kolchak and Denekin. The writers expressly
state that they did not select the _Times_ because it is worse than
other papers but, on the contrary, because it “is one of the really
great newspapers of the world.” “Rich” or “powerful” would have been a
better word than “great.” The sources of error in the Times were the
Associated Press, the special correspondents of the Times, government
officials and political factions hostile to the present Russian
régime. Among the offenders was the United States Government or the
journalistic fake-factory in or adjacent to the Department of State. At
this writing the article in the _New Republic_ has been out nearly a
year, that in the _Nation_ more than a year. It is fair to assume that
they have been seen by the managers of the _Times_ and other powerful
journalists, that if there was any misstatement the weekly journals
would have been forced to recant, which they have not done, and that if
the Ochses of the newspaper world had any conscience they would have
been at least more careful after such devastating exposures. But the
game of “Lying about Lenin” goes merrily on.

The American government and the American press have not been more
mendacious in their treatment of Russia than the governments and the
press of other nations, but they have been more persistently stupid
and unteachable in the face of facts. The British government has been
engaged in an agile zigzag retreat from its first position of no
intercourse with Russia, and when the London _Labour Herald_ exposed
the trick of Lloyd George which consisted of printing and sending out
_from Russia_ propaganda against the Soviet government, the prince of
political liars was obliged to stop that fraud. On the other hand one
of the first acts of our new administration was Mr. Hughes’s idiotic
confirmation of the attitude held by the old administration, and he
furnished the newspapers real news, since the Secretary’s opinions,
however stupid, are real news, to add to their previous accumulation
of ignorance and lies, and thereby encouraged them in their evil ways.
If a government is composed of noodles and rogues, the press which
reports the activities of the government and the opinions of its
officials is only secondarily responsible for deceiving the public.
The editors might be more critical in sifting the true from the false.
But the newspaper has no motive for trying to correct the inherent
vices of business and government; it does not originate those vices but
merely concurs in them and reflects them. The newspaper is primarily
responsible only for the stupidity and mendacity of its correspondents
and editors. It is not an independent institution with its own ethic,
with either will or full opportunity to serve the truth, but is only
the symptom and expression of the vast corruption that lies behind it
and of the dense popular ignorance that stands gaping before it.

The _Dunciad_ of the Press does not end in quite universal darkness.
There is a little light over the horizon. A new organization called
The Federated Press, which endeavours to “get the news in spite of
the newspapers and the great news agencies,” announces that already
two hundred editors all over the world are using its service. It is
too soon to tell how successful this enterprise will be, but it is a
ray of promise, because it is an association of working journalists
and not a vague aspiration of reformers and uplifters. Until some
such organization does become powerful and by practical labour
make an impression on the daily paper, we shall have to depend for
enlightenment on a few weekly and monthly periodicals of relatively
small circulation. Most of the popular weeklies and monthlies are
as bad in their way as the newspapers, but they aim chiefly at
entertainment; their treatment of the news in special articles
and editorials is a subordinate matter, and their chief sin is not
dishonesty but banality. The periodicals which do handle the news,
always honestly, usually with intelligence, the _Nation_, the _New
Republic_, the _Freeman_ and one or two others, must have an influence
greater than can be measured by their circulation; for though the
giant press laughs at the cranky little Davids with their vicious
radical ideas, and though it is too strong to be slain or even severely
wounded, yet it cannot be quite insensible to the stones that fly from
those valorous slings. It is, however, an indication of the low mental
level of America that the combined circulation of these journals, which
are, moreover, largely subscribed for by the same readers, is less than
that of a newspaper in a second-rate city. Two of them are endowed
or subsidized by liberal men of means and none of them is shiningly
prosperous. An intelligent populace would buy them by the million. So
we leave the responsibility where, after all, it belongs. The American
press is an accurate gauge of the American mind.

                                                           JOHN MACY




THE LAW


“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This outcry of
Jack Cade’s followers that the disappearance of the whole profession
was the initial step in man’s progress toward a better world would be
echoed in the United States by the revolutionists of to-day, and also
by not a few solid business men who have nothing else in common with
the mediæval agitator except perhaps the desire to see the fountains
run wine and make it a felony to drink near-beer. Indeed almost every
one takes his fling at the law. Doctors and ministers can be avoided if
we dislike them, but the judge has a sure grip upon us all. He drags
us before him against our will; no power in the land can overturn
his decision, but defeated litigants, disappointed sociologists, and
unsuccessful primary candidates all join in a prolonged yell, “Kill the
umpire.”

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Underneath all this agitation
is a deep-seated suspicion and dissatisfaction aroused by the legal
profession and the whole machinery of justice. It exists despite the
fact observed by Bryce, that our system of written constitutions has
created a strongly marked legal spirit in the people and accustomed
them to look at all questions in a legal way--a characteristic
exemplified when other peoples judged the Covenant of the League of
Nations as an expression of broad policies and the aspirations of a
hundred years, while we went at it word by word with a dissecting knife
and a microscope as if it had been a millionaire’s will or an Income
Tax Act. Moreover, although lawyers as a class are unpopular, they are
elected to half the seats in the legislatures and in Congress. The
profession which cannot boast a single English Prime Minister in the
century between Perceval and Asquith, has trained every President who
was not a general, except Harding. Perhaps this very fact that lawyers
receive public positions out of all proportion to their numbers
partially accounts for the prejudice felt against them by men in other
professions and occupations.

Hostility to lawyers and case-law is no new phenomenon in this country.
Puritans and Quakers arrived with unpleasant memories of the English
bench and bar, who had harried them out of their homes. To them, law
meant heresy trials, and the impression that these left on the minds of
their victims has been set down forever by Bunyan in the prosecution
of Faithful at Vanity Fair. The Colonists were no more anxious to
transplant some Lord Hate-good, his counsellors, and his law books to
our shores, than Eugene V. Debs would strive to set up injunctions and
sedition statutes if he were founding a socialistic commonwealth in
the South Seas. The popular attitude toward lawyers was re-inforced
by the clergy who were naturally reluctant to have their great moral
and intellectual influence disputed by men who would hire themselves
out to argue either side of any question. The ministers who ruled
Massachusetts and Connecticut by the Law of Moses, wanted no rivals to
challenge their decisions upon the authority of Bracton and Coke. And
everywhere, except perhaps on the Southern plantations, the complicated
structure of feudal doctrines, which constituted such a large part of
English law well into the 18th century, was as unsuited to Colonial
ways and needs as a Gothic cathedral in the wilderness. Life was so
pressing, time was so short, labour so scarce, that the only law
which could receive acceptance must be so simple that the settlers
could apply it themselves. Although Justice Story has spread wide the
belief that our ancestors brought the Common Law to New England on
the _Mayflower_, the truth is that only a few fragments got across.
These were rapidly supplemented by rules based on pioneer conditions.
Much the same phenomenon occurred as in the California of 1849, where
the miners ignored the water-law of the Atlantic seaboard which gave
each person bordering on a stream some share of the water, and adopted
instead the custom better suited to a new country of first come, first
served. Almost the earliest task of the founders of a Colony was the
regulation of the disputes which arise in a primitive civilization by
a brief legislative code concerning crimes, torts, and the simplest
contracts, in many ways like the dooms of the Anglo-Saxon kings.
Gaps in these codes were not filled from the Common Law, as would be
the case to-day, but by the discretion of the magistrate, or in some
Colonies, in the early days, from the Bible. Land laws and conveyances
were simple,--the underlying English principle of primogeniture was
abolished outright by several Colonial charters, and disputes of title
were lessened by the admirable system of registering deeds. Such
law did not require lawyers, and it is not surprising that even the
magistrates were usually laymen. The chief justice of Rhode Island as
late as 1818 was a blacksmith. Oftentimes a controversy was taken away
from the court by the legislature and settled by a special statute.
Thus, instead of the English and modern American judge-made law, the
Colonists received for the most part executive and legislative justice,
and lived under a protoplasmic popular law, with the Common Law only
one of its many ingredients.

The training of the few Colonists who did become lawyers may be judged
from that of an early attorney general of Rhode Island:

“When he made up his mind to study law, he went into the garden
to exercise his talents in addressing the court and jury. He then
selected five cabbages in one row for judges, and twelve in another
row for jurors. After trying his hand there a while, he went boldly
into court and took upon himself the duties of an advocate, and a
little observation and experience there convinced him that the same
cabbages were in the court house which he thought he had left in the
garden,--five in one row and twelve in another.”

The natural alienation of such attorneys from the intricacies of
English law was increased by occasional conflicts between that
system and Colonial statutes or conceptions of justice. An excellent
Connecticut act for the disposal of a decedent’s land was declared void
by the Privy Council in London as contrary to the laws of England,
and the attempt of the New York governor and judges to enforce the
obnoxious English law of libel in the prosecution of Peter Zenger in
order to throttle the criticism of public officials by the press, would
have succeeded if the jury had not deliberately rejected the legal
definitions given by the court.

The Common Law became somewhat more popular when the principles of
individual rights which had blocked Stuart oppression were used
against George III. After the Revolution, however, it suffered with
all things English. Many lawyers had been Loyalists. The commercial
depression turned the bar into debt collectors. The great decisions of
Lord Mansfield which laid the foundations of modern business law were
rejected by Jefferson and many other Americans because of that judge’s
reactionary policy towards the Colonies. Many States actually passed
legislation forbidding the use of English cases as authorities in our
courts. The enforcement of the Common Law of sedition and criminal
libel by judges, many of whom had been educated in England, identified
the Common Law with the suppression of freedom of speech. Nevertheless,
the old simple Colonial rules were insufficient to decide the complex
commercial questions which were constantly arising, especially in
maritime transactions. Aid had to be obtained from some mature system
of law.

At this moment a rival to the Common Law presented itself in the
Napoleonic code of 1804, attractive to the populace just because it
was French, and to many of the bar because of its logical arrangement
and because unlike English lawyers they were widely read in Roman and
modern Continental law. For a time it was actually doubtful whether
the legal assistance which American judges needed would be drawn
from England or France. French writers were cited in the courts and
Livingston drafted a code on the Napoleonic model for Louisiana. The
English law had, however, one great advantage. It was written in our
own language. Furthermore, a group of exceptionally able judges such
as Joseph Story and James Kent, by their decisions and writings,
virtually imported the great bulk of the Common Law into this country
and reworked it to meet American conditions. Nevertheless, this law was
something that came from outside and had not grown up altogether from
the lives and thoughts of our own people, so that it has never meant to
Americans what English law means to Englishmen, for whom it is as much
a product of their own land as parliamentary government or the plays of
Shakespeare.

Another reason for American hostility to law was found at the frontier.
The pioneer, imbued with the conviction that he was entitled to the
land which he had cleared, ploughed and sown, often thrown by crop
failures into debt to the tradesmen in the town, resented law as
something which was forced upon him by people who led easy lives, who
took his land away for some technical defect of title, foreclosed
mortgages, compelled him to pay for goods of high prices and low
quality, suppressed hereditary feuds, and substituted a mass of book
learning which he was too ignorant or too busy to read, for the simple
principles of fair play which seemed sufficient to him. Habitual
obedience to law was a spirit which could not develop in men who were
largely squatters, and who, from the outset of our national history,
disregarded the Congressional statutes which required that public
lands must be surveyed before they were settled. Sometimes, as in this
instance, the settler’s resistance to law was successful. More often
they were overpowered by the strength of civilization and submitted to
the law sullen and unconvinced.

The old frontier is gone, a new frontier has arisen. The meeting
place of unfriendly races has moved Eastward from the Missouri to
the Merrimac. The pioneers of to-day came often from autocratic
lands where law was something imposed on them from above, and they
were slow to regard our law as different in kind. It was not a part
of themselves. Moreover, they did not find in America the energetic
police organization which had compelled their obedience in Europe.
The men who framed our system of laws were taught by Puritanism that
duties declared by those lawfully in authority should be voluntarily
performed. A statute once on the books got much vitality from this
spirit and from the social pressure of the homogeneous settled
communities, whatever the difficulties of enforcement at the frontier.
These forces behind law became weaker when the population was split
into numerous and diverse races by the great tide of immigration.
Obedience to law, never automatic among us, now became liable to cease
altogether whenever a person thought the law unreasonable or felt
fairly certain that he would not be found out.

This belief that a law ceases to have obligation when it becomes
inexpedient to obey it, extends far beyond the recently arrived
elements in our population. For instance, a wealthy man with several
American generations behind him, who was serving on the jury in an
accident case, stood up on a chair as soon as the jury got into the
consultation-room and urged them to disregard everything which the
judge had instructed them about the inability of the plaintiff to
recover if he, as well as the defendant, was negligent. “This doctrine
of contributory negligence,” said this educated juryman, “is not the
law of France or Germany or any country on the Continent of Europe. A
number of eminent writers agree that it is a thoroughly bad law. Let’s
have nothing to do with it.” Needless to say, the plaintiff recovered.
This conception of a higher law than that on the books may owe
something to the Abolitionists’ belief that they were not bound by the
laws protecting the inhuman institution of slavery. Many conscientious
persons still hold that a man ought not to be punished for disobeying
a law which he believes to be morally wrong. Fortunately, a corrective
to this dangerous doctrine of the inner legal light is found in the
words of a leading Abolitionist, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, in
charging the Grand Jury on riotous resistance to the fugitive slave
law, although he himself regarded it as vicious legislation:

“A man whose private conscience leads him to disobey a law recognized
by the community must take the consequences of that disobedience. It
is a matter solely between him and his Maker. He should take good care
that he is not mistaken, that his private opinion does not result from
passion or prejudice, but, if he believes it to be his duty to disobey,
he must be prepared to abide by the result; and the laws as they are
enacted and settled by the constituted authorities to be constitutional
and valid, must be enforced, although it may be to his grievous harm.
It will not do for the public authorities to recognize his private
opinion as a justification of his acts.”

Disrespect for law has been aggravated by the changing function of
the lawyer since the Civil War. In the forties and fifties, he stood
out as a leader in his community, lifted by education above the mass
of citizens, often before the public gaze in the court-room and
chosen because of his forensic eloquence to deliver many of those set
orations which Americans constantly demand, brought forward by the
litigation of those days as the avenger of crime, the defender of
those unjustly imprisoned, the liberator of the escaping slave, or
upholding some great public right on behalf of his city or State--the
construction of a toll-free bridge across the Charles, the maintenance
of the charter of Dartmouth College. After 1870, this pre-eminence was
challenged by the new captains of industry, and their appearance was
accompanied by an alteration in the work of many an able lawyer, which
soon obscured him to the popular imagination. The formation of large
businesses required more and more the skill which he possessed. Rewards
for drafting and consultation became greater than for litigation,
which was growing tedious and costly, so that his clients avoided it
whenever possible. Consequently, he changed from an advocate into a
“client care-taker,” seldom visible to the people and often associated
in their minds with the powerful and detested corporations which he
represented. Much of the prejudice against “corporation lawyers”
was unjust, and the business development of to-day would have been
impossible without the skill in organization and reorganization of
great enterprises which they displayed during the last half century.
However, popular opinion of a class is inevitably based, not on all
its members, but on a conspicuous few, and the kind of legal career
described in Winston Churchill’s “Far Country” was common enough to
furnish data for damaging generalizations. In any case, the decline in
the public influence of the bar was inevitable, especially as certain
businesses retained the exclusive legal services of a staff of men, so
that it could be said: “Lawyers used to have clients; now, clients have
lawyers.”

Of course, during this period there were many lawyers who made a
notable success by conducting cases against corporations. These
accident lawyers were, however, no more popular than their opponents,
even with the workingmen whom they represented. The small means of
their clients made any remuneration from them improbable unless damages
were recovered. Consequently, the lawyer agreed to take nothing if
defeated, but to even matters up insisted on a large fraction of the
amount awarded, usually one-third or even more, if he won. Therefore,
he fought not merely for justice and his client, but for his own fee,
and the temptation to win by every possible means was great. Business
men were quick to label him unscrupulous, while workingmen resented it
when a large slice of the money which the jury gave to them as a just
measure for suffering a lifelong disability vanished into some lawyer’s
pockets.

No satisfactory substitute for the contingent fee was suggested, but
the prejudice created by the system and by the dislike of corporation
lawyers was too great to be dispelled by the many members of the bar
whose practice lay in neither of these two fields. And indeed, the
profession as a whole cannot free itself from blame for some very
definite evils, soon to be discussed. Unfortunately, the long-standing
antagonism between lawyers and laymen has distracted the thoughts
of both sides from wrongs which ought to be and can be cured, and
turned them to never-ending disputes on problems of relatively small
importance. For instance, almost any layman will open a discussion of
the function of the lawyer by condemning the profession because it
defends criminals who are known to be guilty. The solution of this
problem is not easy, but it is not worth a hundredth of the attention
it receives, for it hardly ever arises. The criminal law is a small
part of the whole law, and lawyers who have spent their whole lives in
that field have declared that they were not certain of the guilt of a
single client. A far more important problem is whether a lawyer should
advocate the passage of legislation which he personally considers
vicious. Indeed, the underlying question, to which lawyers and laymen
ought to be devoting themselves, is this. How far can the State
ascertain the proper course of action by limiting itself to hearing
paid representatives of the persons directly interested, financially
or otherwise; or should the State also call in and pay trained men to
investigate the question independently? The solution of this question
will affect not only lawyers, but other professions as well. Medical
experts, for instance, might cease to be hired by millionaires to prove
them insane, or by the prosecuting attorney with the opposite purpose,
but might be employed by the court to make an impartial inquiry into
the mental condition of a prisoner. In short, it may be that we have
carried the notion of litigation as a contest of wits between two
sides so far that the interests of society have not been adequately
safeguarded.

If laymen have erred in concentrating on minor points, lawyers have
been far too ready to deny laymen any right to discuss law at all.
It is just as if school-teachers should maintain that parents and
citizens in general have no concern in the problems of education. The
time has come to close the gulf in American life between the legal
profession and the people who are ruled by laws. Law is the surface
of contact where the pressure of society bears upon the individual.
Doubtless, he attributes to the law many of the features in this
pressure to which he objects, whereas they actually result from the
social structure itself. The man who feels wronged by a prosecution
for bigamy, or for stealing bread when he is starving for lack of
employment, cannot expect to change the law without also changing the
views of the community on monogamous marriage and the organization of
industry. These institutions of society show themselves in the law
just as the veins in a block of marble show themselves at the surface,
but it is as futile for him to blame the law for “capitalism,” private
property, or our present semi-permanent marriages as to try to get
rid of the veins by scraping the surface of the marble. On the other
hand, there are aspects of law which do not correspond to any existing
social requirements or demands, and the layman has good cause to offer
his opinion. And it may be worth listening to. The onlooker often sees
most of the game. Although the layman may lack technical knowledge,
he can appreciate the relation of law to his own department of human
activity--business, social service, health--in ways that are difficult
for the lawyer who is absorbed in the pressing tasks of each day.
Moreover, the lawyer’s habitual and necessary obligation to conform
to existing laws naturally inclines him to overlook their defects,
which are obvious to those who can spend in detached criticism the
same time which he requires for practical application. Modern medicine
was created by Pasteur, who was not a doctor; modern English law by
Bentham, who was a lawyer to the extent of arguing one case and who was
edited by Mill, a philosopher and economist.

Knowledge is no longer a matter of water-tight compartments. “All good
work is one,” says Wells in “Joan and Peter.” Law touches psychology
in its treatment of the defective and insane, medicine and surgery
in industrial accidents and disease, political science in municipal
corporations, economics in taxation, philosophy in its selection of the
purposes it should strive to accomplish. And this is a meagre list.
The greatest need of American law is the establishment of means for
intelligent mutual understanding and effective co-operation, not merely
between lawyers and experts in such other fields as those mentioned,
but between lawyers and the mass of our population, who fill the jails,
pay the taxes, drink city water, get hurt in factories, buy, sell,
invest, build homes, and leave it all to their children when they die.

For these men and women have a right to complain of our law. Its evils
are not those commonly decried, lawyers to defend the guilty, reliance
on precedents instead of common sense, bribed judges. The real defect
is failure to keep up to date. Many existing legal rules have the same
fault as New York surface-cars before the subway or Hoboken Ferries
before the tubes. They were good in their day, but it has gone by and
they cannot handle the traffic. The system formulated by Story and
Kent worked well for the farms, small factories, and small banks of
their time, but the great development of national resources and crowded
cities presented new situations unsuited to the old legal rules, and
kept men too busy for the constructive leisure necessary for thinking
out a new system. The law became a hand-to-mouth affair, deciding each
isolated problem as it arose, and often deciding it wrong. Yet lawyers
were satisfied with law, just as business men with business. Then came
the agitation of the last fifteen years, which has at least made us
discontented about many things. The next task is to stop calling each
other names, sit down together, think matters through to a finish,
and work together to complete the process which is farther along than
we realize, of making over the common law system of an agricultural
population a century ago to meet the needs of the city-dwelling America
of to-day.

A first step toward co-operation would be more discussion of law in
the press. Several years ago Charles E. Hughes in a public address
said that one reason why courts and lawyers were so unpopular in this
country was the unfamiliarity of the people with what they were doing.
Outside of criminal prosecutions, divorces, and large constitutional
cases, newspapers give very little attention to legal questions, and
even these cases are presented fragmentarily with almost no attempt
to present their historical background and the general principles
at issue. There is nothing to compare with the resumé of trials
and decisions which appears from day to day in the London _Times_,
no popular exposition of legal problems such as Woods Hutchinson
has done for medicine or numerous writers for the achievements of
Einstein. Surely law can be made as intelligible and interesting to
the ordinary educated reader as relativity. It enters so intimately
into human relationships that some knowledge of it is very important,
not as a guide in specific transactions as to which a lawyer ought
to be consulted, but as part of the mental stock-in-trade of the
well-informed citizen. Wider realization of the difficulties of the
work of judges and lawyers would bring about a friendlier and more
helpful popular attitude.

The public might understand, for example, why law does not progress
so conspicuously and rapidly as medicine or engineering. Part of the
blame rests, no doubt, upon lawyers, who have been less active than
other professions in discussing and applying new ideas, but the very
nature of the subject is an obstacle to quick change. In law, progress
requires group action; the individual can accomplish little. The
physician who discovers a new antitoxin, the surgeon who invents a new
method of operating for gastric ulcer, can always, if his reputation be
established, find some patient upon whom to test his conception. Its
excellence or its faults can be rapidly proved to his own mind and
that of any skilled onlooker. And new ideas, if sound, mean a larger
practice and money in his pocket. The lawyer gets no such rewards for
improving the law, and has no such opportunities for experiment. If
he is convinced by observation, wide reading, and long thinking, that
arrest for debt should be abolished, or the property of a spendthrift
protected by law from his creditors, or trial by jury abandoned
except in criminal trials, he cannot try out these theories upon some
client. He must sacrifice days from his regular work to persuade a
whole legislature to test his idea upon thousands of citizens, and if
the idea is a bad one, the experiment will be a widespread disaster.
Consequently law reform always faces an instinctive and discouraging
legislative opposition. Even after every State except two had adopted
the Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law, the Georgia legislature refused
to do so because the Act abolished days of grace, the old custom
allowing a debtor three days beyond the time of payment named in his
note. They said that when a man had promised to pay a debt on May 1,
it was un-American not to let him wait till May 4. Again, a committee
of very able New York lawyers recently drew a short Practice Act
setting forth the main requirements for the conduct of a law-suit, and
leaving the details to the judges, who may be supposed to know more
about their own work than the legislature. Similar laws have long been
in successful operation in England, Massachusetts, and Connecticut,
whereas the existing New York Code of Civil Procedure with its
thousands of sections has been a vexatious source of delay and disputes
in the press of urban litigation. The new measure was an admirable and
thorough piece of work, endorsed by the Bar Associations of New York
City and the State. Yet it was killed by the age-long opposition of the
country to the town. Upstate lawyers, less harassed by the old Code
because of uncrowded rural dockets, objected to throwing over their
knowledge of the existing system and spending time to learn a new and
better one. The legislature hated to give more power to the courts. As
a result, the new bill was scrapped, and nothing has been done after
years of agitation except to renumber the sections of the old Code with
a few improvements.

Another factor in law reform is the existence of fifty legal systems
in one nation. Even if the law is modernized in one State, the
objectionable old rule will remain in the other forty-seven until
their legislatures are persuaded by the same tedious process. On the
other hand, this diversity has its merits. Some of the progressive
Western States serve as experiment stations for testing new legal
and governmental schemes. Still more important, the limitations on
legal experimentation are somewhat offset by the opportunities for
observation of the workings of different legal rules in neighbouring
States. The possibilities of this comparative method for judging the
best solution of a legal problem have not yet been fully utilized. For
example, a dispute has long raged whether it is desirable to compel a
doctor to disclose professional secrets on the witness-stand without
the patient’s consent. About half the States require him to keep
silent. The reasons given are, that patients will seek medical aid
less freely if their confidences may be disclosed; doctors would lie
to shield their patients; some doctors are hired by employers to treat
workmen injured in accidents and will try to get evidence on behalf of
the employers if they are allowed to testify. So far, the discussion
has turned on the probability or improbability that these arguments
represent the facts, and neither side has collected the facts. The
discussion could be brought down to earth by an investigation in New
York which has the privilege, and Massachusetts, where secrecy is
not maintained. Are doctors less consulted in Massachusetts, do they
perjure themselves, do they ingratiate themselves with workmen to
defeat subsequent accident suits? Statistics, personal interviews with
judges and physicians, and examination of the stenographic records of
trials ought to give valuable assistance in determining which half of
the States has the better rule.

Since law reform requires highly organized group action, some
individual should be charged with the responsibility of organization.
At present, it is everybody’s business. Judges are hearing cases
all day and writing opinions at night, and they have no legislative
position as in England, where they can draft bills and present them in
the House of Lords. Individual lawyers carry little weight. The Bar
Associations have accomplished much, but the work of their members
is done without pay in the intervals of practice, and they have no
official standing. The Attorney General is necessarily a partisan,
representing the State’s side in litigation, with neither the time
nor the duty to improve the law in general. The United States and
the larger States badly need a Minister of Justice. All complaints
of legal inefficiency would come to him, and he would be constantly
collecting statistics of the cases in the courts and their social
consequences, observing procedure personally, or through a corps of
expert assistants, conferring with the judges and the Bar Associations,
drafting or examining measures affecting the administration of justice
and giving his opinion about them to the legislature, and charged
with the general duty of ascertaining whether every person can find
a certain remedy from the laws for all injuries or wrongs, obtaining
right and justice freely and without purchase, completely and without
denial, promptly and without delay.

Until we establish such an official, we can rely on three instruments
of legal advance, each of which may be a point of co-operation between
lawyers and laymen. Of the first, the Bar Associations, something has
already been said. The second is the judiciary. Unfortunately, the
tendency of the American antagonism to law to concentrate on personal
topics has warped the prolonged discussion of this branch of our
government during the last ten years, and, indeed, since 1789. Charges
of corruption and incompetency against individual judges, and methods
of getting a bad judge off the bench, have entirely obscured the
problem of getting good judges on the bench. The power of judges to
declare statutes unconstitutional and void makes them the controlling
factor in our government, yet there is no country where less attention
is paid to their selection and training. It is of no use to recall
a poor judge by popular vote if the people are eager to put one of
the same type in his place. Nothing need be added to the estimate in
Bryce’s “Modern Democracies” of the unevenness of judicial personnel.
The most obvious need, if the inferior judges are to be brought up to
the level of the best men, is for higher salaries. But that alone is
not enough to induce leaders of the bar to become judges. No salary
could be so high as the income of successful metropolitan lawyers.
The time has come for greater willingness on their part to retire from
a large practice in middle life and devote their talents to judicial
work. And even this will be useless, unless selection is based on
merit. Our system of an elective judiciary is probably too deeply
rooted to be entirely abandoned, though it is clear that legal talent
is not a quality, like executive ability, readily capable of being
appraised by the electorate. On the other hand, it is not altogether
certain that State governors would appoint judges without regard to
partisan considerations. An interesting compromise plan has been
suggested, that there should be a Chief Justice, elected by the people,
who should be in effect the Minister of Justice already described.
All the other judges would be appointed by him, for life or for long
terms, while his responsibility for wise selections would be secured
by a short term or even by the recall. A governor does so many tasks
that his judicial appointments do not play a large part in the popular
judgment of his record, but the Chief Justice would stand or fall on
the merits of the administration of law under his management.

Moreover, we do not deal fairly by the judges chosen under existing
systems. After they have been selected, they should have more
opportunity to study the special duties of their position before
beginning work, and more leisure amid trials and opinions for general
legal reading and for observation of the complexities of modern
life which are inevitably involved in their decisions, especially
on constitutional questions. Most litigation grows out of urban and
industrial conditions, with which State supreme court judges may easily
get out of touch, if they remain continuously in the State House in a
small upstate city like Springfield, Albany, or Sacramento, with little
opportunity to visit the factories and tenements of Chicago, New York,
and San Francisco. It may also be doubted whether our usual system
which restricts some judges to trials and others to appellate work is
wise; an occasional change from one to the other is both refreshing
and instructive. Judges frequently complain of the monotony of their
work, cooped up with a few associates of similar mental interests, so
that the atmosphere may acquire the irritability of a boarding-house.
It is not generally understood how much judges are cut off from other
men. Close intimacy with their former friends at the bar or with
wealthy business men who may have cases before them, is sure to cause
talk. Graham Wallas’s suggestion of an occasional transfer to active
work of a semi-judicial character, like Judge Sankey’s chairmanship of
the English Coal Commission, seems valuable. Our Interstate Commerce
Commission would provide such an opportunity. Finally, the existing
gulf between courts and law schools might be narrowed by summer
conferences on growing-points in the law, where each side could give
much out of its experience to the other.

The remaining instrument of progress is the law schools. “Legal
education,” says Bryce, “is probably nowhere so thorough as in the
United States.” The chief reasons for this success are two, the
professional law teacher, who has replaced the retired judge and the
practising lawyer who lectured in his spare hours; and the case-system
of instruction. This method is not, as is popularly believed, the
memorization by the students of the facts of innumerable cases.
It imparts legal principles, not on the say-so of a text-book or
a professor, but by study and discussion of the actual sources of
those principles, the decisions of the courts. The same method in the
Continental Law would result in a class-room discussion of codes and
commentators, which are there the sources. One of the most interesting
signs of its success is its spread from law into other sciences such as
medicine. Books based on the study of concrete situations are used in
public schools for the study of geography and hygiene, and charitable
societies work out the general needs of the community from the problems
of individual families. This system has superseded in all the leading
law schools the old methods of lecturing and reading treatises. Its
most conspicuous service is, of course, vocational, the training of
men whose advice a client can safely accept. Already some States
have required a law-school degree as a condition of admission to the
bar, and the old haphazard law-office apprenticeship will eventually
disappear, although the question of how far a man who is earning his
living should be allowed to study law in his spare hours at a night law
school whose standards must usually be lower than a full-time school
remains as a difficult problem in a democratic country. Efficiency
of training conflicts with equality of opportunity. A second service
of the leading law schools is the modernization of the law through
the production of books. A great example of this is the “Treatise on
Evidence,” by John H. Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law School, which
is every day influencing courts and renovating the most antiquated
portion of the common law.

Of late years, the need for fresh changes in method has become plain.
Christopher Columbus Langdell, the inventor of the case-system, laid
down two fundamental propositions: “First, that law is a science;
second, that all the available materials of that science are contained
in printed books.” Experience has proved that he was right in believing
that attendance in a lawyer’s office or at the proceedings of courts
was not essential to a legal education. But the scope of legal study
must now extend beyond printed books, certainly beyond law books.
Since law is not an isolated department of knowledge, but a system
of rules for the regulation of human life, the truth of those rules
must be tested by many facts outside the past proceedings of courts
and legislatures. Not only law in books but law in action has to be
considered, and after learning the principles evolved by a process of
inclusion and exclusion in the decisions or by intermittent legislative
action, the scholar must find how those principles actually work in
the bank, the factory, the street, and the jail. The problem is still
debated, whether this can better be done in the pre-legal college
course or by the use of non-legal experts in the law schools, or
whether the necessary material should be assimilated and presented by
the law teachers themselves. Yet this widening of the content of legal
study does not in the least impair the validity of Langdell’s method,
the systematic investigation of the sources of law at first hand,
whether those sources be found in the reports and statutes which he had
in mind, or in the economic, social, and psychological facts which have
demanded attention in recent years.

Something must be said in closing of those portions of the law where
change has been most necessary. Of these our criminal law is easily
the most disgraceful. Its complete inability to perform its task has
been exhaustively demonstrated by the opening chapter of Raymond
Fosdick’s “American Police Systems.” The lawyers and judges are
only partly to blame, for their work forms only the middle of three
stages in the suppression of crime. The initial stage of arrest and
the final stage of punishment are in the hands of administrative
officials, beyond the control of the bench and bar. Many criminals
are never caught, and the loss of public confidence in the justice or
effectiveness of prisons makes juries reluctant to convict. Yet the
legal profession is sorely at fault for what takes place while the
prisoner is in the dock. The whole problem calls for that co-operation
between lawyers, other experts, and laymen, of which I have already
spoken. Unless something is soon done, we may find crime ceasing to be
a legal matter at all. Even now, many large department stores have so
little belief in the criminal courts and prisons that they are trying
embezzlers and shoplifters in tribunals of their own, and administering
a private system of probation and restitution. The initial step is a
reformulation of the purpose of punishment. Twenty-five years ago,
Justice Holmes asked, “What have we better than a blind guess to show
that the criminal law in its present form does more good than harm?”

One serious reason for its breakdown has been the creation of
innumerable minor offences, which are repeatedly committed and almost
impossible to suppress. The police are diverted from murders and
burglaries to gambling and sexual delinquencies, while the frequent
winking at such breaches of law destroys the essential popular
conviction that a law ought to be obeyed just because it is law. The
Chief of Police of New Orleans told Raymond Fosdick, “If I should
enforce the law against selling tobacco on Sunday, I would be run out
of office in twenty-four hours. But I am in constant danger of being
run out of office because I don’t enforce it.” So they were hanging
green curtains, which served the double purpose of advertising the
location of the stands and of protecting the virtue of the citizens
from visions of evil.

At the present time we have thrown a new strain on the criminal law by
the enactment of nation-wide prohibition. The future will show whether
the main effect of this measure will be an increase in disrespect and
antagonism for law, or the ultimate removal of one of the chief causes
of lawlessness and waste. Unfortunately, the perpetual discussion
of home-brew receipts and hidden sources of supply has prevented a
general realization that we are witnessing one of the most far-reaching
legislative experiments of all time. What we ought to be talking
about is the consequences of prohibition to health, poverty, crime,
earning-power, and general happiness. It is possible, for instance,
that total abstinence for the working classes coupled with apparently
unlimited supplies of liquor for their employers may have the double
consequence of increasing the resentful desire of the former to wrest
the control of wealth from those who are monopolizing a time-honoured
source of pleasure, and of weakening the ability of the heavy-drinking
sons of our captains of industry to stand up in the struggle against
the sober brains of the labour leaders of the future. Prohibition may
thus bring about a striking shift of economic power.

The delays, expense, and intricacies of legal procedure demand reform.
The possession of a legal right is worthless to a poor man if he cannot
afford to enforce it through the courts. The means of removing such
obstacles have been set forth by Reginald H. Smith in “Justice and
the Poor.” For instance, much has already been accomplished by Small
Claims Courts, where relief is given without lawyers in a very simple
manner. When a Cleveland landlady was sued by a boarder because she
had detained his trunk, she told the judge that he had set fire to
his mattress while smoking in bed and refused to pay her twenty-five
dollars for the damage. The judge, instead of calling expert witnesses
to prove the value of the mattress, telephoned the nearest department
store, found he could buy another for eight dollars, and the parties
agreed to settle on that basis. Again, family troubles are now
scattered through numerous courts. A father deserts, and the mother
goes to work. The neglected children get into the Juvenile Court.
She asks for a separation in the Probate Court. A grocer sues her
husband for food she has bought, before a jury. She prosecutes him
before a criminal court for non-support, and finally secures a divorce
in equity. One Court of Domestic Relations should handle all the
difficulties of the family, which ought to be considered together. Much
of the injustice to the poor has been lessened by legal aid societies,
which have not only conducted litigation for individuals but have also
fought test-cases up to the highest courts, and drafted statutes in
order to protect large groups of victims of injustice. The injury done
to the poor by antiquated legal machinery is receiving wide attention,
but it is also a tax on large business transactions which is ultimately
paid by the consumer. Reform is needed to secure justice to the rich.

The substantive law which determines the scope of rights and duties has
been more completely overhauled, and many great improvements have been
accomplished. Relations between the public and the great corporations
which furnish transportation and other essential services are no longer
left to the arbitrary decisions of corporate officers or the slow
process of isolated litigation. Public service commissions do not yet
operate perfectly, but any one who doubts their desirability should
read a contemporary Commission Report and then turn to the history of
the Erie Railroad under Jim Fiske and Jay Gould as related in “The Book
of Daniel Drew.” The old fellow-servant rule which threw the burden of
an industrial accident upon the victim has been changed by workmen’s
compensation acts which place the risk upon the employer. He pays for
the injured workman as for a broken machine and shifts the expense
to his customers as part of the costs of the business. The burden is
distributed through society and litigation is rapid and inexpensive.
Unfortunately, no such satisfactory solution has been reached in the
law of labour organizations, but its chaotic condition only corresponds
to the general American uncertainty on the proper treatment of such
organizations. It is possible that just as the King, in the Middle
Ages, insisted on dragging the Barons into his courts to fight out
their boundary disputes there, instead of with swords and battleaxes
on the highway, so society which is the victim of every great
industrial dispute will force employers and workmen alike to settle
their differences before a tribunal while production goes on. The
Australian Courts of Conciliation have lately been imitated in Kansas,
an experiment which will be watched with close interest.

Less importance must be attached, however, to the development of
particular branches of the law than to the change in legal attitude.
The difference between the old and the new is exemplified by two
extracts from judicial decisions which were almost contemporaneous.
Judge Werner, in holding the first New York Workmen’s Compensation Act
unconstitutional, limited the scope of law as follows:

“This quoted summary of the report of the commission to the
legislature, which clearly and fairly epitomizes what is more fully set
forth in the body of the report, is based upon a most voluminous array
of statistical tables, extracts from the works of philosophical writers
and the industrial laws of many countries, all of which are designed
to show that our own system of dealing with industrial accidents
is economically, morally, and legally unsound. Under our form of
government, however, courts must regard all economical, philosophical
and moral theories, attractive and desirable though they may be, as
subordinate to the primary question whether they can be moulded into
statutes without infringing upon the letter or spirit of our written
constitutions.... With these considerations in mind we turn to the
purely legal phases of the controversy.” (Ives _v._ South Buffalo Ry.
Co., 201 N. Y. 271, 287, 1911.)

A different attitude was shown by the Supreme Court of the United
States in its reception of the brief filed by Mr. Louis D. Brandeis
on behalf of the constitutionality of an Oregon statute limiting
woman’s work to ten hours a day. Besides decisions, he included the
legislation of many States and of European countries. Then follow
extracts from over ninety reports of committees, bureaus of statistics,
commissioners of hygiene, inspectors of factories, both in this country
and in Europe, to the effect that long hours of labour are dangerous
for women, primarily because of their special physical organization.
Following them are extracts from similar reports discussing the general
benefits of shorter hours from the economic aspect of the question.
Justice Brewer said:

“The legislation and opinions referred to in the margin may not
be, technically speaking, authorities, and in them is little or
no discussion of the constitutional question presented to us for
determination, yet they are significant of a widespread belief
that woman’s physical structure, and the functions she performs in
consequence thereof, justify special legislation restricting or
qualifying the conditions under which she should be permitted to
toil. Constitutional questions, it is true, are not settled by even
a consensus of present public opinion, for it is a peculiar value of
a written constitution that it places in unchanging form limitations
upon legislative action, and thus gives a permanence and stability
to popular government which otherwise would be lacking. At the same
time, when a question of fact is debated and debatable, and the extent
to which a special constitutional limitation goes is affected by the
truth in respect to that fact, a widespread and long continued belief
concerning it is worthy of consideration. We take judicial cognizance
of all matters of general knowledge.” (Muller _v._ Oregon, 208 U. S.
412, 420, 1907.)

The decision displays two qualities which are characteristic of the
winning counsel since his elevation to the bench; it keeps its eye
on the object instead of devoting itself to abstract conceptions,
and it emphasizes the interest of society in new forms of protection
against poverty, disease, and other evils. To these social interests,
the property of the individual must often be partly sacrificed and in
recent years we have seen the courts upholding the guarantee of bank
deposits, State regulation of insurance rates, and suspension of the
right of landlords to recover unreasonable rents or dispossess their
tenants. All this would have been regarded as impossible fifty years
ago.

These extensions of governmental power over property have been
accompanied by legislation severely restricting freedom of discussion
of still more radical types of State control. It is argued that the
right of free speech must face limitation like the right of the
landlord. The true policy is exactly the opposite. Not only is it
unjust for the State to carry out one form of confiscation while
severely punishing the discussion of another form, but in an age of
new social devices the widest liberty for the expression of opinion
is essential, so that the merits and demerits of any proposed plan may
be thoroughly known and comparisons made between it and alternative
schemes, no matter how radical these alternatives may be. A body of law
that was determined to stand still might discourage thought with no
serious damage; but law which is determined to move needs the utmost
possible light so that it may be sure of moving forward.

No one has expressed so well the new importance of social interests,
and the value of freedom of speech; no one, indeed, has expressed so
nobly the task and hopes of American Law, as the man of whom it is said
that among the long list of American judges, he seems “the only one
who has framed for himself a system of legal ideas and general truths
of life, and composed his opinions in harmony with the system already
framed.” (John H. Wigmore, “Justice Holmes and the Law of Torts,” 29
Harv. L. Rev. 601.) Yet no one has been more cautious than Justice
Holmes in warning us not to expect too much from law.

“The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has
been called, the government of the living by the dead. It cannot be
helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times. As law
embodies beliefs that have triumphed in the battle of ideas and then
have translated themselves into action, while there is still doubt,
while opposite convictions still keep a battle front against each
other, the time for law has not come; the notion destined to prevail is
not yet entitled to the field.” (“Collected Legal Papers,” 138, 294.)

It is the work of the present generation of American lawyers to be sure
that the right side wins in the many conflicts now waging. We cannot
be certain that the law will make itself rational, while we remain as
inactive as in the past, absorbed in our own routine, and occasionally
pausing to say, “All’s right with the world”; for, to quote Holmes
once more, “The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through
effort.”

                                               ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.




EDUCATION


If Henry Adams had lived in the 13th century he would have found
the centre of a world of unity in the most powerful doctrine of the
church, the cult of the Virgin Mary. Living in the 19th century he
sums up his experience in a world of multiplicity as the attempt to
realize for himself the saving faith of that world in what is called
education. Adams was not the first to be struck with the similarity of
the faiths of the mediæval and the modern world. This comparison is
the subject of an article by Professor Barrett Wendell published in
the _North American Review_ for 1904 and entitled “The Great American
Superstition”:

    “Undefined and indefinite as it is, the word education is
    just now a magic one; from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it
    is the most potent with which you can conjure money out of
    public chests or private pockets. Let social troubles declare
    themselves anywhere, lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigration,
    racial controversies, whatever you chance to hold most
    threatening, and we are gravely assured on every side that
    education is the only thing which can preserve our coming
    generations from destruction. What is more, as a people we
    listen credulously to these assurances. We are told, and we
    believe and evince magnificent faith in our belief, that our
    national salvation must depend on education.”

Professor Wendell goes on trenchantly to compare this reigning modern
faith with that in the mediæval church. He calls attention to the
fact that whereas the dominant architectural monuments of the Old
World are great cathedrals and religious houses, implying the faith
that salvation could be assured by unstinted gifts to the church,
in our modern times the most stately and impressive structures are
our schools, colleges, and public libraries, many of them, like the
cathedrals, erected by sinners of wealth in the pursuit of individual
atonement and social salvation. “Ask any American what we shall do to
be saved, and if he speak his mind he will probably bid us educate our
fellow-men.” He might have extended his comparison to the personal
hierarchy of the two institutions, for at the time of his article
the President of Harvard spoke to the people of the United States
with the voice of Innocent III, surrounded by his advisers among
university presidents and superintendents gathered like Cardinal
Archbishops, in the conclave of the National Education Association,
of which the Committee of Ten was a sort of papal curia. Although
the educational papacy has fallen into schism, the cities are still
ruled by superintendents like bishops, the colleges by president and
deans, like abbots and priors, and the whole structure rests on a vast
population of teachers holding their precarious livings like the parish
priests at the will of their superiors, tempered by public opinion.
Indeed, Professor Wendell is struck by the probability that as European
society was encumbered by the itinerant friars, so America will have
“its mendicant orders of scholars--the male and female doctors of
philosophy.” But it is his main theme which concerns us here, that “the
present mood of our country concerning education is neither more nor
less than a mood of blind, mediæval superstition.”

The difference between faith as religion and as superstition may be
hard to define, the terms having become somewhat interchangeable
through controversy, but in general we should doubtless use the
pragmatic test. A vital and saving faith which actually justifies
itself by results is religion; a faith which is without constructive
effect on character and society, and is merely fanciful, fantastic,
or degrading we call superstition. The old education which America
brought from England and inherited from the Renaissance was a
reasonable faith. It consisted of mathematics, classics, and theology,
and while it produced, except in rare instances, no mathematicians,
classical scholars, or theologians, it trained minds for the learned
professions of those days and it gave the possessors of it intellectual
distinction, and admitted them to the society of cultivated men
everywhere. Its authority was largely traditional, but it worked in
the world of that day much as the thirty-three Masonic degrees do in
the world of Masonry. It may properly be called a religion, and in its
rigid, prescribed, dogmatic creed it may be compared to the mediæval
theology. At any rate, it suffered the same fate and from the same
cause. Its system was too narrow for the expanding knowledge and the
multiplying phenomena of the advancing hour. It failed to take account
of too many things. The authority of tradition, by which it maintained
its position, was challenged and overthrown, and private judgment was
set in its place.

Private judgment in education is represented by the elective system;
President Eliot was the Luther of this movement and Harvard College his
Wittenberg. Exactly as after the Reformation, however, the attitudes of
assertion and subservience in spiritual matters continued to manifest
themselves where the pope had been deposed, in Geneva and Dort and
Westminster, so in spite of the anarchy of the elective system the
educational function continues to impose itself in its traditional
robes of authority, and to be received with the reverence due to long
custom. And in this way education in America from being a saving faith
has become an illusion. The old education, its authority challenged,
its sway limited, and nobody caring whether its followers can quote
Latin or not, is in the position of the Church of Rome; the so-called
new education, uncertain in regard to material and method, direction
and destination, is like the anarchic Protestant sects. Neither
possesses authority; the old system has lost it, and the new ones have
never had it. They are alike in depending upon the blindness of the
masses which is superstition.

Although the generalization remains true that the mood of America
toward education is a mood of superstition, there are certain forms
of education operative in America to-day which approve themselves by
performance and justify the reasonable faith in which they are held.
The argument in favour of the elective system, by force of which it
displaced the prescribed classical course, was that it was necessary to
give opportunity for specialization. This opportunity it has given, and
in certain directions the results produced by American institutions
are of high value. Our scientific education is the most advanced, and
in the professions which depend upon it, engineering and medicine, our
product doubtless “compares favourably” with that of Europe. These
facts cannot be cited, however, as a valid reason for the American
faith in education as a whole. It is recognized to-day that progress
in natural science has far outrun that in politics, social life,
culture--therein lies the tragedy of the world. A few men of science
have a knowledge of the means by which the human race can be destroyed
in a brief space--and no statesmen, philosophers, or apostles of
culture have the power to persuade the human race not to permit it to
be done.

In another direction a great increase of specialization has taken
place--in the preparation for business. Our colleges of business
administration rival our scientific schools in the exactness of their
aim, and the precision of their effort. Here again, however, it may
be questioned whether their success is one to justify belief in the
educational process as a whole. The result of such specialization
upon the business organization of society can hardly be to arouse a
critical, and hence truly constructive, attitude in regard to the
whole economic problem; it is nearly certain to promote a disposition
to take advantage of the manifest shortcomings of that organization
for individual successful achievement. Whether society as a whole will
profit by the efforts of such experts as our business colleges are
turning out remains to be seen. Whether we are wise in strengthening
the predatory elements which put a strain on the social organization,
at a time when the whole structure is trembling, is open to question.
Here again the faith of America in education as social salvation is not
justified by individual results, however brilliant and fortunate.

The value of the specialist to society is unquestionable, but he
alone will not save it. Such salvation must come from the diffusion
and validity of the educational process as a whole, from the men and
women of active intelligence, broad view, wide sympathy, and resolute
character who are fitted as a result of it to see life steadily and
see it whole, reason soundly to firm conclusions in regard to it, and
hold those decisions in the face of death. The specialist indeed may
be considered a necessary subtraction from the general social army, a
person set apart for special duty, whose energies are concentrated and
loyalties narrowed. We expect him to die, if need be, in maintaining
that the world moves, but not for freedom of thought in the abstract.
It is by the generally trained, all-round product of our education that
the system must be judged. And what do we find?

The general student, it appears, tends to be the product of as narrow
a process as the specialist, but not as deep. As the demands of
specialization become more exacting, its requirements reach farther and
farther back into the field of general education, and more and more of
the area is restricted to its uses. The general student in consequence
becomes a specialist in what is left over. Moreover, he exercises his
right of private judgment and free election along the path of least
resistance. Laboratory science he abhors as belonging to a course of
specialization which he has renounced. The classics and mathematics, to
which a good share of our educational machinery is still by hereditary
right devoted, he scorns as having no _raison d’être_ except an outworn
tradition. With the decline of the classics has gone the preliminary
training for modern languages, which the general student usually
finds too exacting and burdensome, and from the obligation of which
colleges and secondary institutions also are now rapidly relieving
him. We boasted in the late war that we had no quarrel with the German
language, and yet by our behaviour we recognized that one of the fruits
of victory was the annihilation of at least one foreign speech within
our borders. The general student is thus confined, by right of private
judgment of course, to his own language and literature, and such
superficial studies in history and social science as he can accomplish
with that instrument alone. His view is therefore narrow and insular.
His penetration is slight. He is, in short, a specialist in the obvious.

Not only does the general student tend to be as restricted in
subject-matter as the specialist, but he lacks the training in
investigation, reasoning, and concentration which the latter’s
responsibility for independent research imposes. The definition of
the aim of general education on which Professor Wendell rested his
case for the old curriculum in the article quoted above, is “such
training as shall enable a man to devote his faculties intently to
matters which of themselves do not interest him.” Now clearly if the
student persistently chooses only the subjects which interest him,
and follows them only as far as his interest extends, he escapes all
training in voluntary attention and concentration. In his natural
disposition to avoid mental work he finds ready accomplices in his
instructors and text-book writers. They realize that they are on trial,
and that interest alone is the basis of the verdict. Accordingly they
cheerfully assume the burden of preliminary digestion of material,
leaving to the student the assimilation of so much as his queasy
stomach can bear. One way in which the study of English literature or
history can be made a matter of training in criticism and reasoning
is to send the student to the sources, the original material, and
hold him responsible for his conclusions. He may gain a wrong or
inadequate view, but at any rate it is his own, and it affords him a
solid basis for enlargement or correction. Instead of this the student
is invited to a set of criticisms and summaries already made, and is
usually discouraged if by chance he attempts a verification on his own
account. The actual reading of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Swift, Burke
will give the student at least a certain training in concentration;
but this is hard, slow, and dry work. It is much easier and more
comprehensive, instead of reading one play of Shakespeare, to read
_about_ all the plays, including the life of the author, his dramatic
art, and some speculations in regard to the Elizabethan stage. It
was William James who pointed out the difference between _knowledge
about_ and _acquaintance with_ an author. The extent to which we have
substituted for the direct vision, with its stimulating appeal to
individual reaction, the conventional summary and accepted criticism,
the official formula and the stereotyped view, is the chief reason for
the ready-made uniformity of our educated product.

The pioneer democracy of America itself is responsible for a method of
instruction typically American. The superstitious faith in education
was the basis of a system whereby many busy, middle-aged persons whose
early advantages had been limited, by means of attractive summaries,
outlines, and handbooks, could acquaint themselves with the names of
men, books, and events which form the Binet-Simon test of culture,
and enable the initiate to hold up his head in circles where the best
that has been thought or said in the world is habitually referred to.
This method is carried out in hundreds of cultural camp-meetings every
summer, by thousands of popular lectures, in countless programmes of
study for women’s clubs. Unfortunately it is coming to be not only the
typical but the only method of general education in America. Chautauqua
has penetrated the college and the university. Better that our fathers
had died, their intellectual thirst unsatisfied, than that they had
left this legacy of mental soft drinks for their children.

Thus far I have had the college chiefly in mind, but the same
observations apply equally to the secondary school. The elective system
has made its way thither, and indeed one of the chief difficulties of
organizing a college curriculum for the general student which shall
represent something in the way of finding things out, of reasoning from
facts to conclusions, and of training in voluntary attention, is that
of determining any common ground on the basis of previous attainment.
Not only the elective system but the Chautauqua method has largely
permeated our high schools. The teachers, often on annual appointment,
more than the college instructors, with comparative security of tenure,
are dependent on the favour of pupils, a favour to be maintained in
competition with dances, movies, and _The Saturday Evening Post_, by
interesting them. It is therefore a common thing for teachers to repeat
in diluted form the courses which they took in college--and which in
the original were at best no saturate solutions of the subject. The
other day, on visiting a class in Shakespeare at a Y.M.C.A. school,
I ventured to suggest to the teacher that the method used was rather
advanced. “Ah, but my daughter at high school,” he said, “is having
Professor Blank’s course in the mediæval drama.” Now such a course
intended for graduate students investigating sources, influences,
and variations among saints’ plays and mystery plays, could have no
educational value in material or method for a high-school pupil, but
it was, no doubt, as interesting as a Persian tale.

Inasmuch as the colleges and the secondary schools are both uncertain
as regards the meaning and aim of general education, it is not
surprising to find the grade schools also at sea, their pupils the
victims both of meaningless tradition and reckless experiment. The
tradition of our grade schools, educational experts tell us, was
brought by Horace Mann from Prussia. There the _Volkschule_ was
designed for the children of the people, who should be trained with a
view to remaining in the station in which they had been born. At least,
it may be conceded, the German designers of the system had a purpose
in mind, and knew the means to attain it; but both purpose and means
are strangely at variance with American conditions and ideals. Other
experts have pointed out the extraordinary retarding of the educational
process after the first years, when the child learns by a natural
objective method some of the most difficult processes of physical
life, accomplishing extraordinary feats of understanding and control;
and some of the most hopeful experiments in primary education look
toward continuing this natural method for a longer time. At present the
principle of regimentation seems to be the most important one in the
grade school, and as the pace is necessarily that of the slowest, the
pupils in general have a large amount of slack rope which it is the
problem of principals and teachers to draw in and coil up. Altogether
the grade school represents a degree of waste and misdirection which
would in itself account for the tendencies toward mental caprice or
stagnation which are evident in the pupils who proceed from it.

Thus the parallel which Professor Wendell established between our
educational system and the mediæval church would seem to have a certain
foundation. In the colleges, as in the monasteries, we have a group
of ascetic specialists, sustained in their labours by an apocalyptic
vision of a world which they can set on fire, and in which no flesh can
live; and a mass of idle, pleasure-loving youth of both sexes, except
where some Abbot Samson arises, with strong-arm methods momentarily
to reduce them to order and industry. In the high schools, as in the
cathedrals, we have great congregations inspired by the music, the
lights, the incense, assisting at a ceremony of which the meaning is
as little understood as the miracle of the mass. In the grade schools,
as in the parish churches, we have the humble workers, like Chaucer’s
poor parson of the town, trying with pathetic endeavour to meet the
needs and satisfy the desires of their flocks, under conditions of
an educational and political tyranny no less galling than was the
ecclesiastical.

But, we may well enquire, whence does this system draw its power to
impose itself upon the masses?--for even superstition must have a sign
which the blind can read, and a source of appeal to human nature.
The answer bears out still further Professor Wendell’s parallel.
The mediæval church drew its authority from God, and to impose that
authority upon the masses it invented the method of propaganda. It
claimed to be able to release men from the burden which oppressed them
most heavily, their sins, and in conjunction with the secular power
it enforced its claims against all gainsayers, treating the obstinate
among them with a series of penalties, penance, excommunication, the
stake. Education finds its authority in the human reason, and likewise
imposes that authority by propaganda. It too claims the power of
salvation from the evils which oppress men most sorely to-day--the
social maladjustments, “lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigration,
racial controversies”--and it is in alliance with the secular power
to preserve its monopoly of social remedies from the competition of
anything like direct action. Now it is clear that in the religion
of Christ in its pure form the church had a basis for its claims to
possess a power against sin, and a means of salvation. Similarly
it may be maintained that human reason, allowed to act freely and
disinterestedly, would be sufficient to cope with the evils of our
time and bring about a social salvation. Indeed, it is curious to
remark how nearly the intellectual conclusions of reason have come to
coincide with the intuitive wisdom of Jesus. The church was faithless
to its mission by alliance with temporal power, by substituting its
own advancement for the will of God, by becoming an end in itself.
Education likewise is by way of being faithless to itself, by alliance
with secular power, political and financial, by the substitution of its
own institutional advancement for disinterested service of truth, by
becoming likewise an end in itself.

In one of the most remarkable pronouncements of the present
commencement season, President Hopkins of Dartmouth College summarized
the influences which make against what he calls Verihood. They are
first, Insufficiency of mentality, or over-professionalization of
point of view; second, Inertia of mentality or closed mindedness; and
third, False emphasis of mentality or propaganda. The late war and
its evil aftermath have put in high relief the extent of this third
influence. President Hopkins speaks as one of the Cardinal Archbishops
of Education, and I quote his words with the authority which his
personality and position give them:

    “Now that the war is passed, the spirit of propaganda still
    remains in the reluctance with which is returned to an
    impatient people the ancient right of access to knowledge
    of the truth, the right of free assembly, and the right of
    freedom of speech. Meanwhile the hesitancy with which these
    are returned breeds in large groups vague suspicion and
    acrimonious distrust of that which is published as truth, and
    which actually is true, so that on all sides we hear the query
    whether we are being indulged with what is considered good for
    us, or with that which constitutes the facts. Thus we impair
    the validity of truth and open the door and give opportunity
    for authority which is not justly theirs to be ascribed to
    falsehood and deceit.”

The war was a test which showed how feeble was the hold of American
education upon the principle which alone can give it validity. Nowhere
was the suppression of freedom of mind, of truth, so energetic, so
vindictive as in the schools. Instances crowd upon the mind. I remember
attending the trial of a teacher before a committee of the New York
School Board, the point being whether his reasons for not entering
with his class upon a discussion of the Soviet government concealed
a latent sympathy with that form of social organization. The pupils
were ranged in two groups, Jews and Gentiles, and were summoned in
turn to give their testimony--they had previously been educated in
the important functions of modern American society, espionage, and
mass action. Another occasion is commemorated by the New York _Evening
Post_, the teacher being on trial for disloyalty and the chief count in
his indictment that he desired an early peace; and his accuser, one Dr.
John Tildsley, an Archdeacon or superintendent of the diocese of New
York under Bishop Ettinger:

    “Are you interested in having this man discharged?”

    “I am,” said Dr. Tildsley.

    “Do you know of any act that would condemn him as a teacher?”

    “Yes,” said Dr. Tildsley, “he favoured an early peace.”

    “Don’t you want an early, victorious peace?”

    “Why ask me a question like that?”

    “Because I want to show you how unfair you have been to this
    teacher.”

    “But Mr. Mufson wanted an early peace without victory,” said
    Dr. Tildsley.

    “He didn’t say that, did he? He did not say an early peace
    without victory?”

    “No.”

    “Then you don’t want an early peace, do you?”

    “No.”

    “You want a prolongation of all this world misery?”

    “To a certain extent, yes,” said Dr. Tildsley.

Nor did the sabotage of truth stop with school boards and
superintendents. A colleague of mine writing a chapter of a text-book
in modern history made the statement that the British government
entered the war because of an understanding with France, the invasion
of Belgium being the pretext which appealed to popular enthusiasm--to
which a great publishing house responded that this statement would
arouse much indignation among the American people, and must therefore
be suppressed.

We need not be surprised that since the war education has not shown
a disinterested and impartial attitude toward the phenomena of human
affairs, a reliance on the method of trial and error, of experiment
and testimony, which it has evolved. Teachers who are openly, or even
latently, in sympathy with a form of social organization other than
the régime of private control of capital are banned from schools and
colleges with candle, with book, and with bell. Text-books which do not
agree with the convenient view of international relations are barred.
Superintendents like Ettinger and Tildsley in New York are the devoted
apologists for the system to which they owe their greatness. To its
position among the vested interests of the world, to the prosperity of
its higher clergy, education has sacrificed its loyalty to that which
alone can give it authority.

The prevention of freedom of thought and enquiry is of course necessary
so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than
to stimulate thought. The belief which it is the function of education
to propagate is that in the existing order. Hence we find the vast
effort known as “Americanization,” which is for the most part a
perfect example of American education at the present day. The spirit
of “Americanization” is to consider the individual not with reference
to his inward growth of mind and spirit, but solely with a view to his
worldly success, and his relation to the existing order of society,
to which it is considered that the individual will find his highest
happiness and usefulness in contributing. This programme naturally
enough finds a sponsor in the American Legion, but it is truly
disconcerting to find the National Education Association entering into
alliance with this super-legal body, appointing a standing committee
to act in co-operation with the Legion throughout the year, accepting
the offer of the Legion to give lectures in the schools, and endorsing
the principle of the Lusk Law in New York, which imposes the test of an
oath of allegiance to the Government as a requirement for a teacher’s
certificate.

We have now the chief reason why education remains the dominant
superstition of our time; but one may still wonder how an institution
which is apparently so uncertain of its purpose and methods can
continue to exercise such influence on the minds and hearts of men.
The answer is, of course, that education is not in the least doubtful
of its purpose and methods. Though the humble and obscure teacher,
like the Lollard parson, may puzzle his brains about the why and how
and purpose of his being here, his superiors, the bishops, the papal
curia, know the reason. Education is the propaganda department of the
State, and the existing social system. Its resolute insistence upon
the essential rightness of things as they are, coupled with its modest
promise to reform them if necessary, is the basis of the touching
confidence with which it is received. It further imposes itself upon
the credulity of the people by the magnificence of its establishment.
The academic splendour of the commencement season when the hierarchs
bestow their favours, and honour each other and their patrons by higher
degrees, is of enormous value in impressing the public. Especially
to the uneducated does this majesty appeal. That an institution
which holds so fair an outlook on society, which is on such easy and
sympathetic terms with all that is important in the nation, which
commands the avenues by which men go forward in the world, should be
able to guarantee success in life to its worshippers is nothing at
which to be surprised. Hence we find the poor of different grades
making every sacrifice to send sons and daughters through high school,
through college, in the same pathetic faith with which they once burned
candles to win respite for the souls of their dead.

There are reasons, however, for thinking that the superstition is
passing. In the first place, nowhere do we find more scepticism in
regard to the pretensions of education than among those who have been
educated, and this number is rapidly increasing. In the second place,
the alliance between education and a social system depending on private
capital is too obvious, and the abrogation of the true functions of the
former is too complete. The so-called Americanization campaign is so
crude an attempt to put something over that even the unsophisticated
foreigner whom it is intended to impress watches the pictures or reads
the pamphlets which set forth the happy estate of the American workman,
with his tongue in his cheek. The social groups which feel aggrieved
under the present order are marking their defection by seceding from
the educational system and setting up labour universities of their own.
So serious is this secession that New York has passed the Lusk Law,
designed to bring the independent movement under State control. In the
third place, the claim of education to be an open sesame to success in
life is contradicted by the position of its most constant votaries, the
teachers. The prestige which used to attach to the priests of learning
and which placed them above the lure of riches has vanished; their
economic station has declined until even college professors have fallen
into the servantless class, which means the proletariat. Truly for such
as they to declare that education means success in life is a dismal
paradox.

Another sign of approaching reformation in the educational system is
to be found in the frankly corrupt practices which infest it. Here the
parallel to the mediæval church is not exact, for in the latter it was
the monasteries and religious houses that were the chief sources of
offence, while the colleges and private institutions of higher learning
which correspond to them are singularly free from anything worse
than wasteful internal politics. It is the public educational system
which by reason of its contact with political government partakes
most palpably of the corruption that attends the democratic State.
It is unnecessary to mention the forms which this corruption takes
where a school board of trustees by political appointment is given
the exploitation of the schools--the favouritism in appointments and
promotions, the graft in text-books and equipment, the speculation in
real estate and building contracts, the alienation of school property.
There is scarcely a large city in the country in which pupils and
teachers alike are not shamefully and scandalously defrauded by action
of school trustees which can be characterized in the mildest terms as
wilful mismanagement conducing to private profit.

There are two things necessary to the reform of education. One is
democratic control, that is, management of institutions of teaching by
the teachers. It is to be noted that this is the demand everywhere of
labour which respects itself--control of the means of production and
responsibility for the result. Surely the teachers should be one of the
first groups of toilers to be so trusted. Under democratic control the
spoliation of the schools by politicians, the sacrifice of education
to propaganda, the tyranny of the hierarchy can be successfully
resisted. Once the teachers are released from servile bondage to the
public through the political masters who control appointments and
promotions, they will deal with their problems with more authority,
and be independent of the suffrage of the pupils. Through joint
responsibility of the workers for the product they will arrive at that
_esprit de corps_ which consists in thinking in terms of the enterprise
rather than of the job, and from which we may expect a true method of
education. Already the movement toward democratic control of teaching
is taking form in school systems and colleges. There are a hundred and
fifty unions of teachers affiliated with the American Federation of
Labour. But the true analogy is not between teachers and labour, but
between education and other professions. To quote Dr. H. M. Kallen:

    “To the discoverers and creators of Knowledge, and to its
    transmitters and distributors, to these and to no one else
    beside belongs the control of education. It is as absurd
    that any but teachers and investigators should govern the
    art of education as that any but medical practitioners and
    investigators should govern the art of medicine.”

The other thing needful to restore education to health and usefulness
is that it should surrender its hold upon the superstitious adoration
of the public, by giving up its pretensions to individual or social
salvation, by ceasing its flattery of nationalistic and capitalistic
ambitions, and by laying aside its pomps and ceremonies which conduce
mainly to sycophancy and cant. Education has shown in special lines
that it can be thoroughly scientific, disinterested, devoted. It is
its task to translate these virtues of the specialist into the general
field. It is not the business of education to humbug the people in
the interest of what any person may think to be for their or for his
advantage. It is its business to deal frankly and honestly with them,
accepting in the most literal sense the responsibility and the promise
contained in the text: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free.”

                                                 ROBERT MORSS LOVETT




SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM


It is natural for the musician to think any land barbarous if it
has produced no great composers, the painter if it has produced no
great painters, the critic or the scholar if it has produced no great
scholars and critics, and so on for all the other arts and sciences.
But it is idle to insist that every race should express itself in the
same way, or to assume that the genius of a nation can be tested by
its deficiencies in any single field of the higher life. Great critics
are rare in every age and country; and even if they were not, what
consolation is there for the clash and diversity of races and nations
except the special and diverse gifts which each may furnish to the
spiritual whole? England has achieved greatness without great music,
Germany without great sculpture, ancient Rome without great science or
philosophy, Judæa with little but poetry and religion; and it is not
necessary to lay too much stress on our own lack of great scholars and
great critics--yes, even on our lack of great poets and great painters.
They may come to-day or to-morrow, or we may be destined never to have
them. The idea that great national energy must inevitably flower in a
great literature, and that our wide-flung power must certainly find
expression in an immortal poem or in the “great American novel,” is
merely another example of our mechanical optimism. The vision of great
empires that have been both strong and silent, Assyria, Babylonia,
Egypt, haunts all history; Virgil or Camoens only fitfully expresses
the power that is summed up in Cæsar or Magellan.

But without insisting on impossible aims or illusory standards of
greatness, it is fair to ask some flow of spiritual activity, some
general spirit of diffused culture,--in a word, the presence of a soul.
For though we must eat (and common sense will cook better dinners than
philosophy), though we must work (and the captain of industry can
organize trade better than the poet), though we must play (and the
athlete can win more games than the scholar), the civilization that
has no higher outlets for its intellect and imagination will show at
least some marks of spiritual starvation. You may see the signs of its
restless gnawing on the face of almost any American woman beyond the
first flush of youth; you may see some shadow of its hopeless craving
on the face of almost any mature American man.

The same signs are to be seen in American scholarship and American
criticism. If scholarship were what most people think it, the dull
learning of pedants, and criticism merely the carping and bickering
of fault-finders, the fact would hardly be worth recording. But since
they are instruments which the mind of man uses for some of its keenest
questionings, their absence or their weakness must indicate something
at least in the national life and character which it is not unimportant
to understand.


I

The tradition of scholarship, like so many other things, comes to us
from what used to be called the Renaissance, the period (it may not
be ironical to be reminded) in which the Americas were discovered
and explored; and whatever savour of distinction inheres in the idea
of “the gentleman and the scholar” was created then. Scholarship at
first meant merely a knowledge of the classics, and though it has
since widened its scope, even then the diversity of its problems was
apparent, for the classical writers had tilled many fields of human
knowledge, and the student of Homer and Virgil was really faced with a
different problem from the student of Plato or Thucydides. Scholarship
has never been a reality, a field that could be bounded and defined
in the sense in which poetry, philosophy, and history can be. It is
a point of view, an attitude, a method of approach, and, so far as
its meaning and purpose can be captured, it may be said to be the
discipline and illumination that come from the intellectual mastery of
a definite problem involved in the growth of the human spirit.

Scholarship, conceived in this sense, has no history (though dull and
learned hodge-podges have served as such), for it is a spirit diffused
over various fields of study; and in America this spirit has scarcely
even come into existence. American Universities seem to have been
created for the special purpose of ignoring or destroying it. The
chief monuments of American scholarship have seldom if ever come from
men who have been willing to live their whole lives in an academic
atmosphere. The men whom we think of as our foremost literary scholars,
Gildersleeve, Norton, and the rest, acquired their fame rather through
their personalities than their scholarly achievements. The historians,
Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, Parkman, Rhodes, Lea, Fiske, Mahan, were
not professors; books like Taylor’s “Mediæval Mind,” Henry Adams’s
“Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,” Thayer’s “Cavour,” Villard’s “John
Brown,” and Beveridge’s “John Marshall,” even Ticknor’s “History of
Spanish Literature,” were not written within University walls, though
Ticknor’s sixteen years of teaching tamed the work of a brilliant
man of the world until there is little left save the characteristic
juiceless virtue of an intelligent ordering of laborious research. It
would seem as if in the atmosphere of our Universities personality
could not find fruitage in scholarly achievement worthy of it, and
learning can only thrive when it gives no hostages to the enemy,
personality.

Of the typical products of this academic system, the lowest is
perhaps the literary dissertation and the highest the historical
manual or text-book. It may be because history is not my own special
field of study that I seem to find its practitioners more vigorous
intellectually than the literary scholars. Certainly our historians
seem to have a special aptitude for compiling careful summaries of
historical periods, and some of these have an ordered reasonableness
and impersonal efficiency not unlike that of the financial accounting
system of our large trusts or the budgets of our large universities.
To me most of them seem feats of historical engineering rather than of
historical scholarship; and if they represent a scholarly “advance” on
older and less accurate work, written before Clio became a peon of the
professors, it can only be said that history has not yet recovered from
the advance. Nor am I as much impressed as the historians themselves
by the more recent clash between the “old” school and the “new,” for
both seem to me equally lacking in a truly philosophic conception
of the meaning of history. Yet there is among the younger breed a
certain freshness of mind and an openness to new ideas, though less to
the problems of human personality or to the emotional and spiritual
values of man’s life. This deficiency is especially irritating in the
field of biography. Not even an American opera (_corruptio optimi_)
is as wooden as the biographies of our statesmen and national heroes;
and if American lives written by Englishmen have been received with
enthusiasm, it was less because of any inherent excellence than because
they at least conceived of Hamilton or Lincoln as a man and not as an
historical document or a political platitude.

But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Universities.
No great work of classical learning has ever been achieved by an
American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest comparison with men like
Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamowitz; but how can we be persuaded
by the professors or even by a dean that all culture will die if we
forget Greek and Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that
they themselves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate,
but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few nomadic
professors wander aimlessly. As to the literatures in the modern
European tongues, Dante scholarship has perhaps the oldest and most
respectable tradition, but on examination dwindles into its proper
proportions: an essay by Lowell and translations by Longfellow and
Norton pointed the way; a Dante Society has nursed it; and its modern
fruits, with one or two honourable exceptions, are a few unilluminating
articles and text-books. Ticknor’s pioneer work in the Spanish field
has had no successors, though Spanish America is at our doors; the
generous subsidies of rich men have resulted as usual in buildings
but not in scholarship. Of the general level of our French and German
studies I prefer to say nothing; and silence is also wisest in the
case of English. This field fairly teems with professors; Harvard has
twice as many as Oxford and Cambridge combined, and the University of
Chicago almost as many as the whole of England. Whether this plethora
of professors has justified itself, either by distinguished works of
scholarship or by helping young America to love literature and to write
good English, I shall not decide, but leave entirely to their own
conscience. This at least may be said, that the mole is not allowed
to burrow in his hole without disturbance; for in this atmosphere, as
a protest and counterfoil, or as a token of submission to the idols
of the market-place, there has arisen a very characteristic academic
product,--the professor who writes popular articles, sometimes clever,
sometimes precious, sometimes genteel and refined, sometimes merely
commonplace, but almost always devoid of real knowledge or stimulating
thought. Even the sober pedant is a more humane creature than the
professorial smart-Aleck.

Whence arises this inhibition of mediocrity, this fear of personality
and intellect, this deep antinomy of pedant and dilettante? The
“fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease” which affected the professors
of the Colleges of Unreason in “Erewhon” is mildly endemic in every
University in the world, and to a certain degree in every profession;
but nowhere else does it give the tone to the intellectual life of
a whole people. If I were a sociologist, confident that the proper
search would unearth an external cause for every spiritual defect, I
might point to any one of a dozen or more damning facts as the origin
and source of all our trouble,--to the materialism of a national
life directed solely toward practical ends, to the levelling and
standardizing influences of democracy, to Anglo-Saxon “Colonialism,”
to the influence of German erudition, or to the inadequate economic
rewards of the academic life. I should probably make much of that
favourite theme of critical fantasy, the habits derived from the “age
of the pioneers,” a period in which life, with its mere physical
discomforts and its mere demands on physical energy and endurance, was
really so easy and simple that Americans attempt to reproduce it on all
their holidays.

But in so far as they have any reality, all these are merely symptoms
of the same disease of the soul. The modern sanatorium may be likened
to the mediæval monastery without its spiritual faith; the American
University to a University without its inner illumination. It is an
intellectual refuge without the integration of a central soul,--crassly
material because it has no inner standards to redeem it from the idols
of the market-place, or timid and anæmic because it lacks that quixotic
fire which inheres in every act of faith. It is at one and the same
time our greatest practical achievement and our greatest spiritual
failure. To call it a compound of sanatorium and machine-shop may seem
grossly unfair to an institution which has more than its share of
earnest and high-minded men; but though the phrase may not describe the
reality, it does indicate the danger. When we find that in such a place
education does not educate, we cry for help to the only gods we know,
the restless gods of Administration and Organization; but scholarship
cannot be organized or administered into existence, even by Americans.

What can we say (though it seem to evade the question) save that
America has no scholarship because as yet it has a body but no soul?
The scholar goes through all the proper motions,--collects facts,
organizes research, delivers lectures, writes articles and sometimes
books,--but under this outer seeming there is no inner reality. Under
all the great works of culture there broods the quivering soul of
tradition, a burden sometimes disturbing and heavy to bear, but more
often helping the soul to soar on wings not of its own making. We think
hungrily that the freshness of outlook of a young people should be more
than compensation; but the freshness is not there. Bad habits long
persisted in, or new vices painfully acquired, may pass for traditions
among some spokesmen of “Americanism,” but will not breathe the breath
of life into a national culture. All is shell, mask, and a deep inner
emptiness. We have scholars without scholarship, as there are churches
without religion.

Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep inner
searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted and
frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high purpose and
special function, and the pride that comes from this realization,
can give the scholar his true place in an American world. For this
special function is none other than to act as the devoted servant
of thought and imagination and to champion their claims as the twin
pillars that support all the spiritual activities of human life,--art,
philosophy, religion, science; and these it must champion against all
the materialists under whatever name they disguise their purpose.
What matter whether they be scientists who decry “dialectics,” or
sociologists who sneer at “mere belles-lettres,” or practical men who
have no use for the “higher life”? Whether they be called bourgeois
or radical, conservative or intellectual,--all who would reduce life
to a problem of practical activity and physical satisfaction, all who
would reduce intellect and imagination to mere instruments of practical
usefulness, all who worship dead idols instead of living gods, all who
grasp at every flitting will-o’-the-wisp of theory or sensation,--all
these alike scholarship must forever recognize as its enemies, and its
chief tempters.


II

Scholarship, so conceived, is the basis of criticism. When a few years
ago I published a volume which bore the subtitle of “Essays on the
Unity of Genius and Taste,” the pedants and the professors were in the
ascendant, and it seemed necessary to emphasize the side of criticism
which was then in danger, the side that is closest to the art of
the creator. But the professors have been temporarily routed by the
dilettanti, the amateurs, and the journalists, who treat a work of the
imagination as if they were describing fireworks or a bull-fight (to
use a phrase of Zola’s about Gautier); and so it is necessary now to
insist on the discipline and illumination of scholarship,--in other
Words, to write an “Essay on the Divergence of Criticism and Creation.”

American criticism, like that of England, but to an even greater
extent, suffers from a want of philosophic insight and precision. It
has neither inherited nor created a tradition of æsthetic thought.
For it every critical problem is a separate problem, a problem in
a philosophic vacuum, and so open for discussion to any astute
mind with a taste for letters. Realism, classicism, romanticism,
imagism, impressionism, expressionism, and other terms or movements
as they spring up, seem ultimate realities instead of matters of
very subordinate concern to any philosophy of art,--mere practical
programmes which bear somewhat the same relation to æsthetic truth that
the platform of the Republican Party bears to Aristotle’s “Politics”
or Marx’s “Capital.” As a result, critics are constantly carrying
on a guerilla warfare of their own in favour of some vague literary
shibboleth or sociological abstraction, and discovering anew the
virtues or vices of individuality, modernity, Puritanism, the romantic
spirit or the spirit of the Middle West, the traditions of the pioneer,
and so on ad infinitum. This holds true of every school of American
criticism, “conservative” or “radical”; for all of them a disconnected
body of literary theories takes the place of a real philosophy of art.
“Find an idea and then write about it” sums up the American conception
of criticism. Now, while the critic must approach a work of literature
without preconceived notion of what that individual work should
attempt, he cannot criticize it without some understanding of what
all literature attempts. The critic without an æsthetic is a mariner
without chart, compass, or knowledge of navigation; for the question is
not where the ship should go or what cargo it should carry, but whether
it is going to arrive at any port at all without sinking.

Criticism is essentially an expression of taste, or that faculty of
imaginative sympathy by which the reader or spectator is able to
re-live the vision created by the artist. This is the soil without
which it cannot flourish; but it attains its end and becomes criticism
in the highest sense only when taste is guided by knowledge and
thought. Of these three elements, implicit in all real criticism, the
professors have made light of taste, and have made thought itself
subservient to knowledge, while the dilettanti have considered it
possible to dispense with both knowledge and thought. But even
dilettante criticism is preferable to the dogmatic and intellectualist
criticism of the professors, on the same grounds that Sainte-Beuve
is superior to Brunetière, or Hazlitt to Francis Jeffrey; for the
dilettante at least meets the mind of the artist on the plane of
imagination and taste, while the intellectualist or moralist is
precluded by his temperament and his theories from ever understanding
the primal thrill and purpose of the creative act.

Back of any philosophy of art there must be a philosophy of life, and
all æsthetic formulæ seem empty unless there is richness of content
behind them. The critic, like the poet or the philosopher, has the
whole world to range in, and the farther he ranges in it, the better
his work will be. Yet this does not mean that criticism should focus
its attention on morals, history, life, instead of on the forms into
which the artist transforms them. Art has something else to give us;
and to seek morals, or economic theories, or the national spirit in
it is to seek morals, economic theories, the national spirit, but not
art. Indeed, the United States is the only civilized country where
morals are still in controversy so far as creative literature is
concerned; France, Germany, and Italy liberated themselves from this
faded obsession long ago; even in England critics of authority hesitate
to judge a work of art by moral standards. Yet this is precisely what
divides the two chief schools of American criticism, the moralists and
the anti-moralists, though even among the latter masquerade some whose
only quarrel with the moralists is the nature of the moral standards
employed.

Disregarding the Coleridgean tradition, which seems to have come to
an end with Mr. Woodberry, and the influence of the “new psychology,”
which has not yet taken a definite form, the main forces that have
influenced the present clashes in the American attitude toward
literature seem to be three. There is first of all the conception of
literature as a moral influence, a conception which goes back to the
Græco-Roman rhetoricians and moralists, and after pervading English
thought from Sidney to Matthew Arnold, finds its last stronghold to-day
among the American descendants of the Puritans. There is, secondly,
the Shavian conception of literature as the most effective vehicle for
a new _Weltanschauung_, to be judged by the novelty and freshness of
its ideas, a conception particularly attractive to the school of young
reformers, radicals, and intellectuals whose interest in the creative
imagination is secondary, and whose training in æsthetic thought has
been negligible; this is merely an obverse of the Puritan moralism, and
is tainted by the same fundamental misconception of the meaning of the
creative imagination. And there is finally the conception of literature
as an external thing, a complex of rhythms, charm, beauty without
inner content, or mere theatrical effectiveness, which goes back
through the English ’nineties to the French ’seventies, when the idea
of the independence of art from moral and intellectual standards was
distorted into the merely mechanical theory of “art for art’s sake”;
the French have a special talent for narrowing æsthetic truths into
hard-and-fast formulæ, devoid of their original nucleus of philosophic
reality, but all the more effective on this account for universal
conquest as practical programmes.

The apparent paradox which none of these critics face is that the
_Weltanschauung_ of the creative artist, his moral convictions, his
views on intellectual, economic, and other subjects, furnish the
content of his work and are at the same time the chief obstacles to his
artistic achievement. Out of morals or philosophy he has to make, not
morals or philosophy, but poetry; for morals and philosophy are only
a part, and a small part, of the whole reality which his imagination
has to encompass. The man who is overwhelmed with moral theories and
convictions would naturally find it easiest to become a moralist,
and moralists are prosaic, not poetic. A man who has strong economic
convictions would find it easiest to become an economist or economic
reformer, and economics too is the prose of life, not the poetry. A
man with a strong philosophic bias would find it easiest to become a
pure thinker, and the poet’s visionary world topples when laid open
to the cold scrutiny of logic. A poet is a human being, and therefore
likely to have convictions, prejudices, preconceptions, like other men;
but the deeper his interest in them is, the easier it is for him to
become a moralist, economist, philosopher, or what not, and the harder
for him to transcend them and to become a poet. But if the genius of
the poet (and by poet I mean any writer of imaginative literature) is
strong enough, it will transcend them, pass over them by the power of
the imagination, which leaves them behind without knowing it. It has
been well said that morals are one reality, a poem is another reality,
and the illusion consists in thinking them one and the same. The poet’s
conscience as a man may be satisfied by the illusion, but woe to him
if it is not an illusion, for that is what we tell him when we say,
“He is a moralist, not a poet.” Such a man has really expressed his
moral convictions, instead of leaping over and beyond them into that
world of the imagination where moral ideas must be interpreted from
the standpoint of poetry, or the artistic needs of the characters
portrayed, and not by the logical or reality value of morals.

This “leaping over” is the test of all art; it is inherent in the very
nature of the creative imagination. It explains, for example, how
Milton the moralist started out to make Satan a demon and how Milton
the poet ended by making him a hero. It explains the blindness of the
American critic who recently objected to the “loose thinking” of a
poem of Carl Sandburg in which steel is conceived of as made of smoke
and blood, and who propounded this question to the Walrus and the
Carpenter: “How can smoke, the lighter refuse of steel, be one of its
constituents, and how can the smoke which drifts away from the chimney
and the blood which flows in the steelmaker’s veins be correlates in
their relation to steel?” Where shall we match this precious gem? Over
two centuries ago, Othello’s cry after the death of Desdemona,

              “O heavy hour,
      Methinks it should now be a huge eclipse
      Of sun and moon!”

provoked another intellectualist critic to enquire whether “the sun
and moon can both together be so hugely eclipsed in any one heavy hour
whatsoever;” but Rymer has been called “the worst critic that ever
lived” for applying tests like these to the poetry of Shakespeare.
Over a century ago a certain Abbé Morellet, unmoved by the music of
Chateaubriand’s description of the moon,--

    “She pours forth in the woods this great secret of melancholy
    which she loves to recount to the old oaks and the ancient
    shores of the sea,”--

asked his readers: “How can the melancholy of night be called a secret;
and if the moon recounts it, how is it still a secret; and how does she
manage to recount it to the old oaks and the ancient shores of the sea
rather than to the deep valleys, the mountains, and the rivers?”

These are simply exaggerations of the inevitable consequence of
carrying over the mood of actual life into the world of the
imagination. “Sense, sense, nothing but sense!” cried a great Austrian
poet, “as if poetry in contrast with prose were not always a kind of
divine nonsense. Every poetic image bears within itself its own certain
demonstration that logic is not the arbitress of art.” And Alfieri
spoke for every poet in the world when he said of himself, “Reasoning
and judging are for me only pure and generous forms of feeling.” The
trained economist, philosopher, or moralist, examining the ideas of a
poet, is always likely to say: “These are not clearly thought out or
logical ideas; they are just a poet’s fancy or inspiration;” and that
is the final praise of the poet. If the expert finds a closely reasoned
treatise we may be sure that we shall find no poetry. It is a vision of
reality, and not reality, imagination and not thought or morals, that
the artist gives us; and his spiritual world, with all that it means
for the soaring life of man, fades and disappears when we bring to it
no other test than the test of reality.

These are some of the elementary reasons why those who demand of the
poet a definite code of morals or manners--“American ideals,” or
“Puritanism,” or on the other side, “radical ideas”--seem to me to
show their incompetence as critics. How can we expect illumination
from those who share the “typical American business man’s” inherent
inability to live in the world of fantasy which the poets have created,
without the business man’s ability to face the external facts of life
and mould them to his will? These men are schoolmasters, pedants,
moralists, policemen, but neither critics nor true lovers of the
spiritual food that art provides. To the creative writers of America
I should give a wholly different message from theirs. I should say to
them: “Express what is in you, all that serene or turbulent vision of
multitudinous life which is yours by right of imagination, trusting
in your own power to achieve discipline and mastery, and leave
the discussion of ‘American ideals’ to statesmen, historians, and
philosophers, with the certainty that if you truly express the vision
that is in you, the statesmen, historians, and philosophers of the
future will point to your work as a fine expression of the ‘American
ideals’ you have helped to create.”

But it is no part of the critic’s duty to lay down laws for the
guidance of the creator, though he may have insight enough to foresee
some of the directions which literature is likely to take. He may even
point out new material for the imagination of poets to feed on,--the
beautiful folklore of our native Indians, the unplumbed depths of the
Negro’s soul, the poetry and wisdom of Asia (which it may be our chief
destiny to interpret for the nations of Europe), the myth and story
of the hundred races that are to make up the new America, and all the
undiscovered coigns and crannies of our national life. I shall not say
that these services are extraneous and unimportant, like furnishing
the fountain-pen with which a great poem is written; but incursions
into the geography of the imagination are incidental to the critic’s
main duty of interpreting literature and making its meaning and purpose
clear to all who wish to love and understand it.

The first need of American criticism to-day is education in æsthetic
thinking. It needs above all the cleansing and stimulating power of
an intellectual bath. Only the drenching discipline that comes from
intellectual mastery of the problems of æsthetic thought can train us
for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the future. The
anarchy of impressionism is a natural reaction against the mechanical
theories and jejune text-books of the professors, but it is a temporary
haven and not a home. The haphazard empiricism of English criticism and
the faded moralism of our own will serve us no more. We must desert
these muddy waters, and seek purer and deeper streams. In a country
where philosophers urge men to cease thinking, it may be the task of
the critic to revivify and reorganize thought. Only in this way can we
gain what America lacks, the brain-illumined soul.

The second need of American criticism can be summed up in the word
scholarship--that discipline of knowledge which will give us at one
and the same time a wider international outlook and a deeper national
insight. One will spring from the other, for the timid Colonial
spirit finds no place in the heart of the citizen of the world; and
respect for native talent, born of a surer knowledge, will prevent
us alike from overrating its merits and from holding it too cheap.
Half-knowledge is either too timid or too cocksure; and only out of
this spiritual discipline can come a true independence of judgment and
taste.

For taste is after all both the point of departure and the goal;
and the third and greatest need of American criticism is a deeper
sensibility, a more complete submission to the imaginative will of the
artist, before attempting to rise above it into the realm of judgment.
If there is anything that American life can be said to give least of
all, it is training in taste. There is a deadness of artistic feeling,
which is sometimes replaced or disguised by a fervour of sociological
obsession, but this is no substitute for the faculty of imaginative
sympathy which is at the heart of all criticism. When the social
historian is born, the critic dies; for taste, or æsthetic enjoyment,
is the only gateway to the critic’s judgment, and over it is a flaming
signpost, “Critic, abandon all hope when this gate is shut.”

      “To ravish Beauty with dividing powers
       Is to let exquisite essences escape.”

Only out of the fusion of these three elements of taste, intellect, and
knowledge can American criticism gain what in one of its manifestations
is called “personality” and in another “style.” Only in this way can
it win in the battle against the benumbing chaos and the benumbing
monotony of American art and life.

We are all cocksure but bewildered children in a world we cannot
understand. We are all parvenus--parvenus on a new continent, on the
fringes of which some have lived a little longer than others, but the
whole of which has been encompassed by none of us for more than two or
three generations; parvenus in a new world of steam and electricity,
wireless and aeroplane, machinery and industry, which none of us has
yet been able to subdue to a mould that satisfies our deepest cravings;
parvenus in our culture, which still seems like a borrowed garment
instead of flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. What is the good of
all the instruments that our hands have moulded if we have neither the
will nor the imagination to wield them for the uses of the soul? Not
in this fashion shall we justify our old dream of an America that is
the hope of the world. Here are hundreds of colleges and universities;
why not fill these empty barracks with scholars and thinkers? Here are
a hundred races; why not say to them: “America can give you generous
opportunity and the most superb instruments that the undisciplined
energy of practical life has ever created, but in the spiritual fields
of art, poetry, religion, culture, it has little or nothing to give
you; let us all work together, learning and creating these high things
side by side”? Here are more hearts empty and unfulfilled and more
restless minds than the world has ever before gathered together; why
not lead them out of their corrals, and find a fitting pasture for
their brains and souls?

                                                      J. E. SPINGARN


_GLOSSARY_

The English language, extraordinarily rich and expressive in everything
that concerns the practical or the imaginative life, suffers from the
poverty and lack of precision of English æsthetic thought. It may
therefore be useful to indicate briefly the special sense in which
certain terms are used in this essay.

    “_Spectator_: I should say that you have advanced a subtlety
    that is little more than a play on words.

    “_Friend_: And I maintain that when we are speaking of the
    operations of the soul, no words can be delicate and subtle
    enough.”--GOETHE.


    _Art_--Any creation of the imagination, whether in the form of
        imaginative literature or of painting, sculpture, music,
        etc.

    _Artist_--The creator of a work of art in any of its forms;
        not used in this essay in the narrower sense of painter or
        sculptor.

    _Taste_--The faculty of imaginative sympathy by which the
        reader or spectator is able to re-live the vision of the
        artist, and therefore the essential pre-requisite to all
        criticism.

    _Criticism_--Any expression of taste guided by knowledge
        and thought. (The critic’s training in knowledge is
        scholarship, and his special field of thought æsthetics.)

    _Æsthetics_--An ordered and reasoned conception of the meaning
        and purpose of art, intended for the guidance of the critic
        and not of the artist.

    _A Literary Theory_--An isolated “idea” or theory in regard to
        imaginative literature, without reference to any ordered
        and reasoned conception of its meaning and purpose.

    _Impressionist Criticism_--Any expression of taste without
        adequate guidance of knowledge or thought.

    _Intellectualist (or dogmatic) criticism_--Criticism based on
        the conception that art is a product of thought rather than
        of imagination, and that the creative fantasy of the artist
        can be limited and judged by the critic’s pre-conceived
        theories; or in the more ornate words of Francis Thompson,
        criticism that is “for ever shearing the wild tresses of
        poetry between rusty rules.”

    _The Intellectuals_--All who lay undue stress on the place of
        intellect in life, and assume that the turbulent flux of
        reality can be tied up in neat parcels of intellectual
        formulæ.

    _Poetry_--All literature in which reality has been transfigured
        by the imagination, including poetry in its narrower sense,
        the novel, the drama, etc.; used instead of “imaginative
        literature,” not merely for the sake of brevity, but as
        implying a special emphasis on creative power.

    _Poet_--A writer of imaginative literature in any of its forms;
        not used in this essay in the narrower sense of a writer of
        verse.

    _Learning_--The accumulation of certain forms of knowledge
        as a basis for scholarship, but no more the main purpose
        of scholarship than his preparatory training is the sole
        object of the athlete or soldier.

    _Scholarship_--The discipline and illumination that come from
        the intellectual mastery of a definite problem in the
        spiritual (as opposed to the practical) life of man.

    _Pedant_--Any one who thinks that learning is the whole of
        scholarship.

                                                            J. E. S.




SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE


Should we ever entertain an intelligent explorer from Mars, we should
of course importune him, in season and out, for his impressions of
America. And if he were candid as well as intelligent, he might
ultimately be interviewed somewhat as follows:

“At first I thought the most striking fact about you was your
passion for education. While I have been enjoying your so thorough
hospitality I have met a minority of Americans who express themselves
less complacently than the rest about your material blessings; I have
talked with a few dissidents from your political theory; and I have
even heard complaints that it is possible to carry moral enthusiasm
too far. But I have yet to meet that American who is sceptical about
education as such, though on the other hand I have found few of
your citizens quite content with the working of every part of your
educational establishment. And this very discontent was what clinched
my first impression that schooling is the most vital of your passionate
interests.

“Yet as I have travelled from one to another of your cities, a second
fact about you has struck me so forcibly as to contest the supremacy
of the first. You Americans more and more seem to me to be essentially
alike. Your cities are only less identical than the trains that ply
between them. Nearly any congregation could worship just as comfortably
in nearly any other church. The casts of almost any two plays, the
staffs of almost any two newspapers, even the faculties of almost any
two colleges could exchange ‘vehicles’ with about the same results that
would attend their exchanging clothes.

“And in nothing are you so alike as in your universal desire to be
alike--to be inconspicuous, to put on straw hats on the same day,
to change your clothes in Texas in accordance with the seasons in
New York, to read the books everybody else is reading, to adopt the
opinions a weekly digests for you from the almost uniform opinions of
the whole of the daily press, in war and peace to be incontestably and
entirely American.

“Now, I should scarcely make bold to be so frank about these
observations if some of my new friends had not reassured me with the
information that they are not novel, that a distinguished Englishman
has put them into what you have considered the most representative and
have made the most popular book about your commonwealth, that in fact
you rather enjoy having outsiders recognize the success of your efforts
in uniformity. There is, of course, no reason why you should not be
as similar to each other as you choose, and you must not interpret my
surprise to mean that I am shocked by anything except the contradiction
I find between this essential similarity and what I have called your
passion for education.

“On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the function of the
school is to put our youth in touch with what all sorts of Martians
have thought and are thinking, have felt and are feeling. I say ‘put
in touch’ rather than ‘teach,’ because it is not so much our notion
to pack their minds and hearts as to proffer samples of our various
cultures and supply keys to the storehouses--not unlike your libraries,
museums, and laboratories--that contain our records. We prefer to
think of schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our past and our
present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of as many as
possible of those innumerable differences between Martian and Martian,
those conflicting speculations and cogitations, myths and hypotheses
regarding our planet and ourselves that have gone into the warp and
woof of our mental history. Thus we have hoped not only to preserve
and add to the body of Martian knowledge, but also to understand
better and utilize more variously our present minds. So it seems to us
perfectly natural, and has rather pleased than distressed us, that our
students should emerge from their studies with a multitude of differing
sympathies, beliefs, tastes, and ambitions. We have thought that such
an education enriched the lives of all of us, lives that ignorance
could not fail to constrict and subject to hum-drum monotony.

“So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth’s most
favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great people,
a people that has carried the use of print and other means of
communication to a point we Martians have never dared dream about;
that this people has at once the most widely diffused enthusiasm for
education and the most comprehensive school equipment on Earth; and
finally that this people is at the same time the most uniform in its
life--well, I fear I shall not be believed.”

On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does who is
confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms of his paradox.

As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse his first
impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we have
had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization in
every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and telegraph,
the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising--all have scarcely
standardized themselves before they have set about standardizing
everything within their reach. Not even our provinces of the
picturesque are immune, the places and things we like to think of as
“different” (word that betrays our standard sameness!) and glamorous
of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birmingham loves to
call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our railroads have all but
hounded the packets from the Mississippi; it is notorious that our
apostles to the Indians, whether political, religious, or pedagogic,
wage relentless war on the very customs and traditions we cherish in
legend; the beautiful Missions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed
to them are repeated and cheapened in every suburb and village of the
land, under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fêtes of the
plains, the “Stampede” and the “Round-Up,” have been made so spurious
that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in
the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will
be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis and elsewhere.

As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important regional
differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarcation our people
have all along recognized as conditioning the give-and-take of American
life. The line between the East and the West, advancing from the
Alleghanies to the Rockies and then part of the way back, has never
stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has
always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many
things--wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, industry,
centralized finance--and the West has meant many things--hardship
and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-reliance, agriculture, vast
enterprise; but they have never been so close to meaning the same
things as to-day. To-morrow they will merge. Even now the geographical
line between them may be drawn anywhere in a belt two thousand miles
wide, in which it will be fixed according to the nativity of the critic
rather than by any pronounced social stigmata. East or West, there is
a greater gulf between the intelligent and the unintelligent of the
same parish than divides the intelligent of different parishes. East
or West, Americans think pretty much the same thoughts, feel about the
same emotions, and express themselves in the American tongue--that
is, in slang. If the slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably,
as they still do, there are not wanting signs that another generation
will obliterate these differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends
to concentrate in the East, though without impoverishing the West,
since all notable circulations have to be national to survive. The
very fact that the country’s publishing can be done from New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston demonstrates our national unanimity of opinion
and expression.

Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national unanimity
had wiped out every class distinction but one, which it has steadily
tended to entrench--the money line. Families may continue to hold their
place only on the condition that they keep their money or get more; and
a moderate fortune, no matter how quickly come by, has only to make a
few correct strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers, and it will found a
family by inadvertence. The process is so simple that clerks practise
it during their vacations at the shore.

Besides money, there is one other qualification--personal charm. Its
chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essentially monetary
character of American social life. At any rate, Americans are almost as
uniformly charming as they are uniformly acquisitive. For the most part
it is a negative charm, a careful skirting of certain national taboos:
it eschews frank egoism, unfavourable criticism, intellectual subtlety,
unique expressions of temperament, humour that is no respecter of
persons, anything that might disturb the _status quo_ of reciprocal
kindliness and complacent optimism. The unpopular American is unpopular
not because he is a duffer or a bore, but because he is “conceited,”
a “knocker,” a “highbrow,” a “nut,” a “grouch,” or something of that
ilk. We do not choose, as the Martian suggested, to be as similar as
possible; we choose _not_ to be dissimilar. If our convictions about
America and what is American sprang from real knowledge of ourselves
and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, disinterested
critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent humourists, instead of
suppressing them when we cannot mould them. That we do not relish them,
that we protect ourselves from them, is evidence that we fear them.
What reason should we have to fear them save a secret distrust of our
asseverated convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem to the Martian
to be an artificial substitute for some natural background we lack but
should like to have; and a most dangerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it
masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably become.
Far from being self-knowledge, Americanism would seem to him to be a
hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our determination
to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. The secret of
our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance.

At which point our critic would have to re-examine his earlier
impressions about our “passion for education,” and strive to understand
the uses to which we actually put our educational establishment, to
appraise its function in our life.

Beginning with the kindergarten, it provides us a few hours’ relief
from our responsibility toward our youngsters. Curiously, the Americans
most given to this evasion are the Americans most inveterately
sentimental about the “kiddies” and most loath to employ the nursery
system, holding it somehow an undemocratic invasion of the child’s
rights. Then somewhere in the primary grades we begin to feel that
we are purchasing relief from the burden of fundamental instruction.
Ourselves mentally lazy, abstracted, and genuinely bewildered by the
flow of questions from only one mouth, we blithely refer that awakening
curiosity to a harassed young woman, probably less well informed than
we are, who has to answer, or silence, the questions of from a score to
three score mouths. So begins that long throttling of curiosity which
later on will baffle the college instructor, who will sometimes write a
clever magazine essay about the complacent ignorance of his pupils.

A few years, and our expectation has shifted to the main chance. We
begin worrying over grade reports and knotting our brows over problems
in arithmetic by way of assisting our offspring to the practical
advantages of education. For the child, we now demand of his teachers
solid and lasting preparation in the things whose monetary value
our office or domestic payroll keeps sharply before us--figures,
penmanship, spelling, home economics. For us, the vicarious glory of
his “brightness.” But we want this brightness to count, to be in the
direct avenue to his career; so we reinforce the environment that
gently discourages him from the primrose paths of knowledge. Nothing
“practical” is too good for the boy at this moment--tool chests,
bicycles, wireless, what not. Thank God, we can give him a better start
than we had. As for arts and letters, well, we guess what was good
enough for his dad is good enough for him. Meanwhile we are rather
pleased than not at the athletics and the other activities in which the
grammar school apes the high school that apes the college.

The long spiral of repetitive schooling in study and sport has now
commenced its climb: year by year reviews and adds its fresh increment
to last year’s subject-matter in the classroom and on the field.
Is it so strange that when the boy meets his college professors he
is cock-sure of knowing to a hair the limits of what is normal and
important in life, beyond which lie the abnormal interests of the
grinds? That mediocre _C_ is a gentleman’s mark? Not his to question
the system that, in season and out, has borne down on passing instead
of on training, and that ends somewhere, soon or late, with a diploma
and, amid family plaudits, graduation from family control.

The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent. of their
charges for life and five per cent. for college. If our boy and girl
are of the ninety and five, we demand very early specialization toward
their precious careers, wax enthusiastic over the school’s model
mercantile and banking establishment, expand to know our children are
being dosed with a course in “Civics,” generously admire the history
note-books in which they have spread much tinted ink over a little
stereotyped information, and in what we fool ourselves into believing
are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them capture a class
numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for real estate signs that
have gone up in flame to celebrate some epochal victory, and bear with
their antics during hazings and initiations. It’s a democratic country,
and if the poor man’s son cannot go to college, why the college must
come to him. Nor are we without a certain undemocratic satisfaction in
the thought that he has stolen a four years’ march into business over
the rich man’s son, who spends his college hours, we assure ourselves,
acquiring habits that will leave him weak in the hour of competition.

Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other five with all
the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages which long and bitter
experience has demonstrated to be likeliest on entrance examinations.
From the classrooms, as term follows term with its endless iteration
of short advances and long reviews, there rises the bruit of rivalry:
masters decorously put forward the claims of their own colleges; pupils
rejoice when their future alma mater notches another athletic victory
to the well-remembered tally; the weak of heart are urging upon their
bewildered parents the superior merits of the “back-door” route to some
exacting university--by certificate to a small college and transfer at
the end of the first year.

There are high schools in whose cases all this is understatement;
and of course there are innumerable others, especially in these days
when the most rigorous colleges have lost a little of their faith in
entrance examinations, where it is absurd overstatement. Nevertheless
your son, if he goes to a representative Eastern college from a
representative high school, goes as a man steals second in the seventh.
And his subsequent instructors marvel at the airy nonchalance with
which he ignores “the finer things of life”!

The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly designed to
relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the public schools will have
no more of them, are pretty much without the ninety-five per cent. of
non-college men. Frequently they have their charges for longer periods.
So they are free to specialize in cramming with more singleness of
mind and at the same time to soften the process as their endowments
and atmospheres permit. But at bottom the demand you make of the “prep
school” is the same demand your bookkeeper puts on his son’s high
school: you want your boy launched into college with the minimum of
trouble for yourself and the maximum of practical advantage for him;
your bookkeeper wants his boy launched into business with a minimum of
frippery and a maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into
college, the other is experted into business. You are both among those
passionate believers in education who impressed the Martian on his
first visit.

Some educator has announced that the college course should not only
provide preparation for life but should itself be a satisfactory
portion of life. What college student so dull as not to know
that? For the most part, he trusts the faculty to provide the
preparation--sometimes it would seem that he dares it to--but he
takes jolly good care that the four years shall give him life more
abundantly. He has looked forward to them with an impatience not even
the indignity of entrance examinations could balk; he will live them
to the top of his bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even
sentimentally, as the purplest patch of his days. So the American
undergraduate is representative of the American temper at its best. He
is the flower of our youth at its moment of perfect bloom, its ideals
not yet corrupted, its aspirations unwithered. As he thinks and feels,
all America would think and feel if it dared and could.

At this point, therefore, the Martian’s inquiry into what we expect
from our educational establishment would have to shift its point of
view from the older to the younger generation. The Martian would be
much in demand at our colleges, both as a sure-fire lecturer and as
a shining target for degrees certain to attract wide publicity to
the donors. Let us imagine him setting aside a page in his notebook
for a scheme of undergraduate emphases, grouped and amended as his
triumphant progress permitted him to check up on his observations.

Athletics would of course head the list. Regarded as play--that is, as
they affect the spectator--college sports proffer a series of thrilling
Roman holidays extending from the first week or so of term-time to
the final base-ball game and crew race of Commencement week the next
June, and for some colleges there may be transatlantic sequels in
midsummer or later. It is by no means all play for the spectator,
whose loyalty to his institution makes it his duty to watch the teams
practise, follow the histories of the gladiators who are at once his
representatives and his entertainers, and drill himself in songs and
yells at noisy mass meetings; to bet on his college according to his
purse and without any niggardly regard for his sober judgment as to
the event; then to deck himself in the colours, march to the field,
and watch the fray from the cheering section, where his attention will
be perpetually interrupted by the orders and the abuse of a file of
insatiable marionettes who are there to dictate when he may and when
he may not give throat to his enthusiasm; and finally, if Providence
please, to be one of the snake-dancing celebrants of victory. If he
have the right physique or talent for one of the sports, he will
find himself conscripted by public opinion to enter upon the long
and arduous regimen that turns out the annual handful of athletic
heroes--to slave on freshman squads, class teams, scrub and third and
second teams, and finally perhaps, if he has been faithful, to play
a dull minute or two of a big game that is already decided and so
receive his coveted letter and side-line privilege as a charity. Or at
the dizziest pinnacle of success, a “star,” to endure the unremitting
discipline of summer practice, incessant training, eating with his
fellow-stars at the training table, in season and out to be the butt of
instruction and exhortation from all the experts of the entourage. As
they affect the participant, then, college sports are to be regarded as
work that differs from the work of professional sportsmen chiefly by
being unremunerated.

The student’s next most vivid concern is the organization of the social
life in the academic commonwealth of which he is a citizen. Every
American college has, or fancies it has, its own tone, its ideal
type of man; and good citizenship prescribes conformity to the spirit
of the place and observance of the letter of its unwritten code. For
the type is defined by a body of obligations and taboos transmitted
from generation to generation, sometimes through the mouthpiece of
the faculty, sometimes by way of the college “Bible” (to use the
slang name for those handy manuals of what to do and what to avoid
which the college Y.M.C.A. issues for the guidance of newcomers), but
most often by a rough process of trial and error which very speedily
convinces the freshman that the Fence is for seniors only, or that
it is impracticable to smoke his pipe in the Yard, or that it is
much healthier to take the air in a class cap than bareheaded. The
cherished “traditions” of a college are for the most part a composite
of just such privileges and prohibitions as these, clustering round the
notion of the type and symbolizing it; and, curiously, the younger the
institution, the more insistent it is likely to be about the sanctity
of its traditions--a college feels the need of a type in much the same
degree that a factory needs a trademark.

Conformity thus becomes an article in loyalty. Sometimes the mere
conformity is the desiderate virtue, as used (at least) to be the
case in Yale. Sometimes the type will go in for individualism, as at
Harvard a decade ago, where the thing to conform to was non-conformity.
One tradition is probably universal: is there anywhere in America a
college which does not boast that it is more “democratic” than others?
Democracy undergoes some engaging redefinition in support of these
conflicting claims, but at bottom it refers to an absence of snobs,
arrogant critics, incomprehensible intellectuals, bouncing wits,
uncomfortable pessimists--in short, the discouragement of just such
individual tastes and energies as the Martian found discouraged in our
social life at large. The money line remains. Theoretically, the poor
may compete in athletics and in other student enterprises and reap the
same social rewards as the rich: practically, they may compete and go
socially unrewarded, precisely as in the outside world. It is natural
and seemly that this should be the case, for the poor cannot afford
the avenues of association which are the breath of society to the
rich. There have been football heroes whom the well-to-do have put
in the way of acquiring wealth after they left college, but this is
patronage, not democracy. There are also colleges proud to be known as
poor men’s colleges, and for that very reason devoid of the democracy
they boast. Not long ago the president of Valparaiso had to resign, and
it developed that among the counts against him were the deadly facts
that he had attended the annual alumni dinner in dress clothes and
had countenanced “dances, athletics, fraternities, and such.” No, all
that we really mean by democracy in college is the equal opportunity
to invest one’s inoffensive charm and perfectly good money in a
transient society, to be neighbourly across geographical and family
lines, to cultivate the local twist of the universal ideal--to be a
“regular fellow.” Which is very much what we mean by democracy outside.
Whatever the precise type of man a college exalts, its characteristic
virtues are those that reflect a uniform people--hearty acceptance
of unexamined ideals, loyal conformity to traditional standards and
taboos, unassuming modesty in “playing the game,” and a wholesome
optimism withal.

But as for genuine democracy, the unrestricted interplay of free
spirits against a common background, what college can boast that its
social organization approaches even the measure of equality enjoyed
by its disinterested scholars? There was a modicum of it in the
free elective system that obtained in Dr. Eliot’s Harvard. There
was an indifference to seniority that sorely puzzled the graduates
of other colleges. Alas, freshman dormitories descended upon it,
treacherously carrying the banners of “democracy”; and a “group system”
of courses began to externalize intellectual interests to which the
elective system, abused as it was, had offered every opportunity
for spontaneity. It may be that the Amherst of Dr. Meiklejohn’s
experiments, or the Smith that President Neilson envisages, will
recapture opportunities now fled from Cambridge. These cases, after
all, are exceptional. For the typical American college, private or
public, marshals its students in two caste systems so universal and
so familiar that it never occurs to us to scrutinize the one and we
are liable to criticize the other only when its excesses betray its
decadence.

The former, the divisioning and tagging of every recruit with the
year of his graduation, looks to be an innocent convenience until
you have surveyed its regimental effect. Freshmen are green; so we
clap ridiculous caps on them, dub them “Frosh” or “Fish,” haze them,
confine them to a York Street of their kind or impound them in freshman
dormitories, where we bid them save themselves, the which they do in
their sophomore year at the expense of the next crop of recruits. It
is not so much the occasional brutality of hazing parties and “rushes”
that should arrest us here, nor yet such infrequent accidents as the
probably insane despair of that Harvard freshman whose phobia for
eggs drove him to suicide to escape the inflexible diet of his class
commons, as it is the remorseless mob invasion of personality and
privacy which either leaves the impressionable boy a victim of his
ingrowing sensibility or else converts him into a martinet who in his
turn will cripple others. In the case of the Cornell freshman who was
ducked for stubbornly refusing to wear the class cap and was saved
from more duckings by an acting president who advised him--“in all
friendliness,” said the newspapers!--to submit or to withdraw from
college for a year, it is not necessary to applaud what may have been
pig-headedness in the victim, or to flay what may have been wisdom in
the executive, in order to admire the single professor who stood ready
to resign in order to rebuke his college for her bigotry. What was
really significant here, however, and what is everywhere characteristic
of this sort of benevolent assimilation, was the tone of the university
daily’s editorial apologia:

    “Complete liberty of action has never been recognized by any
    but avowed anarchists; granted the validity of the law, there
    can be no charge of intolerance in the enforcement of it.”

The legal “validity” of an arbitrary tradition! No “intolerance” in its
enforcement by Judge Lynch! The editor of the _Cornell Sun_ went on
to say that the existence of the “law” in question is “no secret from
the prospective Cornellian,” implying, no doubt, that to offer oneself
for matriculation at Cornell is _ipso facto_ to accept the whole body
of Ithacan tradition and taboos, along with their interpretation and
enforcement according to the momentary caprice of the majority, as
a _contrat social_. Small wonder he called the refractory freshman
a “red.” The young editor’s reasoning should recommend his early
appointment to a place in the greater _Sun_.

The caste system of academic seniority, like all caste systems, is
worst at its base. Such customs as the sequestering of the upper
classes in their private quads or ovals, the jealous protection of
senior privileges, and the calendrical elaboration of the alumni
programme serve to import a picturesque if rather forced variety into
our drab monotony. That men should choose to organize themselves to
protect some more or less irrelevant distinction is of no special
importance to outsiders so long as they do not use their organization
to dragoon minorities or to bully individuals. Yet, speak out against
the exploitation, and you will be accused of attacking the fellowship.
Criticize the shackling of freshmen, and there will not be wanting
college editors to call you a fanatic who cannot bear the jolly sight
of cap and gown.

The other system of caste, to which we give sharp attention when it
goes badly wrong, is of course the club hierarchy. Wherever there are
clubs their social capital will necessarily fluctuate with the quality
of the members they take in. The reformers who deplore the institution
of “rushing” have of course exaggerated its evils, but the evils
are there. In young colleges, and wherever clubs are insecure, the
candidates are liable to be spoiled for any club purposes before their
destination is settled; wherever the candidates must do the courting,
either brazenly or subtly, they tend to debauch the club. The dilemma
holds, in one form or another, all the way from the opposed “literary”
societies of the back-woods college to the most powerful chapters of
the national fraternities; and it is particularly acute where the
clubhouse is also the student’s residence. Any remedy thus far advanced
by the reformers is worse than the disease.

In many of the older colleges the equilibrium has been stabilized by a
device similar to the gentlemen’s agreement in industry. The important
clubs have gradually adjusted themselves into a series through
which the clubman passes, or into which he penetrates as far as his
personality and money will carry him. So the initial competition for
untried material is done away with or greatly simplified; one or two
large freshman or sophomore clubs take in all the likely candidates;
the junior clubs do most of their choosing from among this number;
and the senior clubs in turn draw on the junior. Meanwhile the member
turnover is perhaps trebled, and initiations and other gay functions
multiply.

It is to be remembered, however, that not all the brethren shift onward
and upward year by year. Many have to content themselves with clubs
already won, and those who pass on are a narrowing band, whose depleted
ranks are by no means restored in the eleventh hour recruiting of
“elections at large,” deathbed gestures of democracy after a career
of ballotting to exclude candidates who had not taken all the earlier
degrees. Thus increasing distinction is purchased through the tried and
true method of decreasing numbers. To be sure, the same end could be
served if all would remain in one club and periodically drop groups of
the least likely members. Initiations might be reversed, and punches
be given to celebrate the lightening of the ship: it would be no more
fantastic than a good part of the existing ceremonial. But--it would be
undemocratic! And, too, the celebrations might be fatally hilarious.
The present pre-initiation discipline is one that tests for regularity
and bestows the accolade on the inconspicuous, so that the initiates
turn out pretty much of a piece and the entertainment they provide is
safely conventional. But reverse the process, assemble in one squad all
the hands suspected of being exceptional--all the queer fish and odd
sticks--and there’s no predicting what capers they might cut as they
walked the plank.

The real evil of the club caste is its taste for predictability,
its standardization of contacts, its faintly cynical sophistication
where life might be a riot of adventures and experiments and
self-discoveries--in one word, its respectability. Not that it does not
provide much good fellowship and a great deal of fun (including the
varieties that have distressed its moral critics). But that everything
it provides is so definitely provided _for_, so institutionalized, and
so protected from the enrichment different types and conditions of men
could bring to it that it is exclusive in a more sinister sense than
the one intended by the critics of its alleged snobbery.

Normally the club system is by no means so snobbish as it is thought
to be; it dislikes, and is apt to punish with the black ball, the
currying of social favour and the parade of special privilege. For
youth is youth, and in the last analysis the enemy of caste. It is
the glory of college life that the most unexpected friendships will
overleap the fences run by class and club regimentation. It is its
pity that the fences, which yield so easily to irregular friendships
once they have discovered themselves, should nevertheless be stout
enough to herd their victims past so many unrecognized opportunities
for spontaneous association. The graduate who looks back fondly on his
halcyon days is very likely passing over the Senior Picnic and his row
of shingles to recall haze-hung October afternoons of tobacco and lazy
reminiscence on the window-seat of somebody who got nowhere in class
or club, or is wistful for the midnight arguments he had with that
grind who lived in his entry freshman year--nights alive with darting
speculation and warm with generous combat. Of these clandestine sweets
he will say nothing; he is a regular fellow; but he affords one of the
proofs that the well-worn social channels are not deep enough to carry
off all the wine of free fellowship. And that even the moderate caste
of college, securely established as it seems, must defend itself from
youth (even from its own youth!) is demonstrated by two phenomena not
to be explained satisfactorily on any other hypothesis. What is all the
solemn mummery, the preposterous ritual, the pompous processions to and
from temples of nightmare architecture, the whole sacrosanct edifice
of the secret fraternities, if it be not an embroidery wherewith to
disguise from present and future devotees the naked matter-of-factness
of the cult? And, on the other hand, what are the too early maturity,
the atmosphere of politely blasé languor, the ubiquitous paraphernalia
for comfort and casual hospitality that characterize the non-secret
and citified clubs of the “indifferent” college but so many disarming
confessions of the predictability of everything--the predictability,
and the necessity for quiet acceptance? Under all the encouraging
variations and exceptions runs the regimental command of our
unanimity: if you are to belong, you must conform; you must accept the
limits of the conventional world for the bounds of your reality; and
then, according to the caprice of your _genius loci_, you will play
the game as if everything, even the minutiæ of the ritual your club
has inherited from freer spirits, were of tremendous moment, or you
will play it no less thoroughly but with the air of one who knows that
nothing is of any moment at all. The clubs, that have so often been
criticized for their un-American treason to democracy, are only too
loyally American.

The third emphasis would be corollary to these two--the political
management of athletic and class and club affairs. The politics are
those of personal popularity, the management is that of administration
rather than legislation, the spirit is the American flair for petty
regulation. Where issues are in question the tone is almost certain to
be propagandist, conservatives and radicals dividing a field littered
with hard names. College life has accumulated an abundance of machinery
for the expression of the managing instinct, and most of it works.
Nowadays the lines of representation finally knot in a Student Council,
which is at once the Cabinet, the Senate, and the Supreme Court of
the undergraduate commonwealth. The routine of its work is heavily
sumptuary, and such matters as the sizes and colours and seasons for
hatband insignia, the length of time students may take off to attend
a distant game, the marshalling of parades, are decided with taste
and tact. Then, abruptly, it is a tribunal for major cases, just if
severe: a class at Yale fails to observe the honour rule, and upon the
Council’s recommendation twenty-one students are expelled or suspended;
it was the Student Council at Valparaiso that secured the president’s
withdrawal; and at Cornell it was the Student Council that came to
the rescue of tradition when a freshman refused to wear the freshman
cap. Invariably, one concludes, its edicts and verdicts will support
righteousness, as its constituents understand righteousness.

The constituents themselves are ordinarily on the side of light, as
they see the light. Not so long ago the faculty of a small New England
college decided to dispense with compulsory chapel: the students voted
it back. Moral crusades spring up like mushrooms and command the
allegiance of all but the recalcitrant “rough-necks,” whom student
opinion is sometimes tempted to feel are beating their way through an
education for which they make no equivalent return in public spirit. A
typical campaign of the sort was recently put in motion by the student
daily at Brown: the editors discovered that “the modern age of girls
and young men is intensely immoral”; they penned sensational editorials
that evoked column-long echoes in the metropolitan press; they raised
a crusade against such abominations as petting parties, the toddle
(“Rome,” they wrote, “toddled before it fell”), and “parties continued
until after breakfast time”; almost immediately they won a victory--the
Mothers’ Club of Providence resolved that dances for children must end
by eleven o’clock....

And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a sharp line must
be drawn between study that looks forward merely to the A.B. degree as
the end of schooling and the beginning of business, and study that is a
part of professional training, that looks forward to some professional
degree at Commencement or to matriculation in a graduate school. Both
come under the head of preparation for life; but in the former case
the degree itself is the preparation, whereas in the latter case it is
recognized that one must master and retain at least a working modicum
of the subject-matter of the professional courses and of the liberal
courses preliminary to them.

The arts man, then, recognizes only the same necessity he has faced
all the way up the school ladder--to pass. If he have entrance
conditions, they are mortgages that must be paid off, perhaps in the
Summer School; he must keep off probation to protect his athletic or
political or other activity status; beyond this, he must garner enough
courses and half-courses, semester hours or points, to purchase the
indispensable sheepskin. Further effort is supererogatory so far as
concerns study _per se_: prizes and distinctions fall in the category
of “student activities,” hobbies, and belong of right to the “sharks”;
scholarships, which in America are for the poor only, have to do
with still another matter--earning one’s way through--and are mostly
reserved for the “paid marks men,” professional studiers, grinds.

Upon his programme of courses the student will often expend as much
mental energy as would carry him through an ordinary examination: he
will pore over the catalogue, be zealous to avoid nine o’clocks and
afternoon hours liable to conflict with games, make an elaborate survey
of the comparative competence of instructors, both as graders and as
entertainers and even (quaintly enough) as experts in their fields,
and enquire diligently after snap courses. Enrolled in a course, he
will speedily estimate the minimum effort that will produce a safe
pass, unless the subject happens to be one that commends itself to
his interest independently of academic necessity. In that case he
will exceed not only the moderate stint calculated to earn a _C_, but
sometimes even the instructor’s extravagant requirements. There is, in
fact, scarcely a student but has at least one pet course in which he
will “eat up” all the required reading and more, take gratuitous notes,
ask endless questions, and perhaps make private sallies into research.
The fact that he holds most of this labour to be self-indulgence will
not temper his indignation if he fails to “pull” an _A_ or _B_, though
it is a question whether, when the grade has sealed the course, he will
be much the wiser for it than for the others.

On the evils of the course system there is probably no new thing to
be said. Such devices as the “group system” at Harvard interfere with
liberty of election without appreciably correcting the graduate’s
ignorance of the courses he has passed and cashed in for his degree.
Recognizing this fact, certain faculties have latterly inaugurated
general examinations in the whole subject-matter studied under one
department, as notably in History, Government, and Economics; but
thus far the general examination affects professional preparation, as
notably for the Law School, much more than it affects the straight arts
career, where it provides just one more obstacle to “pass.”

This business of passing is a seasonal nuisance. The early weeks of
term-time are an Arcady of fetching lectures, more or less interesting
assigned reading, and abundant “cuts.” Across the smiling sky float
minatory wisps of cloud--exercises, quizzes, tests. Then up from the
horizon blow the “hour exams,” first breath of the academic weather
that later on will rock the earth with “mid-years” and “finals.” But
to be forewarned is, for the prudent student, to get armed, and
Heaven knows he is amply warned by instructor, registrar, and dean.
So he hies himself to the armourer, the tutor, one of the brotherhood
of experts who saw him through the entrance examinations; he provides
himself with bought or leased notebooks and summaries; he crams through
a few febrile nights of cloistral deprivations and flagellations; and
the sun shines again on his harvest of gentlemen’s _C_’s, the proud
though superfluous _A_ or _B_, and maybe a _D_ that bespeaks better
armour against the next onset. Or, of course, he may have slipped
into “probation,” limbo that outrageously handicaps his athletic
or political ambitions. Only if he have been a hapless probationer
before the examinations is there any real risk of his having to join
the exceedingly small company of living sacrifices whom a suddenly
austere college now “rusticates.” (For in America suspensions and
expulsions are the penalties rather of irregular conduct than of mental
incompetence or sloth.) In four years, after he has weathered a score
of these storms and concocted a few theses, the president hands him a
diploma to frame, he sells his other furniture, puts mothballs in his
cap and gown, and plunges into business to overtake his non-college
competitors.

Student opinion recognizes that the man enrolled in professional
courses or headed for a graduate school faces more stringent
necessities. He may devote himself to his more specific training
without the imputation of being a “grind,” and if he pursues honours
it will be in the line of business rather than of indoor sport. He
will be charier of cuts, more painstaking as regards his notes and
reading, and the professional manner will settle on him early. In
every college commons you can find a table where the talk is largely
shop--hypothetical cases, laboratory experiments, new inventions,
devices for circumventing the income tax. All this, however, is
really a quantitative difference, not a qualitative. Of disinterested
intellectual activity he is if anything more innocent than his fellow
in the arts school.

So much for the four great necessities of average student life--in
order of acknowledged importance: athletics, social life, politics,
study. Deans and other official but theoretical folk will tell
our Martian that the business of college is study and that all the
undergraduate’s other functions are marginal matters; but their own
conduct will already have betrayed them to him, for he will not have
missed the fact that most of their labour is devoted to making study
as dignified and popular as the students have made sports and clubs
and elections. These four majors hold their places at the head of the
list of student emphases because no representative undergraduate quite
escapes any of them; the next ones may be stressed more variously,
according rather to the student’s capricious private inclinations than
to his simpler group reactions.

Now, for instance, he is free to “go in for” some of the innumerable
“student activities,” avocations as opposed to the preceding vocations.
There are the minor sports which are not so established in popularity
that they may conscript players--lacrosse, association football, trap
shooting, swimming, and so on. There are the other intercollegiate
competitions--chess and debating and what not. The musical clubs,
the dramatic clubs, the magazines, and many semi-professional
and semi-social organizations offer in their degree more or less
opportunity to visit rival institutions. Then, too, there is in the
larger colleges a club for almost every religious cult, from Catholic
to Theosophist, whose devotees may crave a closer warmth of communion
than they realize in the chapel, which is ordinarily non-sectarian;
a club apiece for some of the great fraternal orders; a similar club
for each of the political parties, to say nothing of a branch of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, with another organization forming
to supply the colleges with associated Liberal Clubs. Moreover, all
the important preparatory schools, private and public, are certain
to be represented by clubs of their alumni, some of which maintain
scholarships but all of which do yeoman service scouting for athletes.
Frequently there is a Cosmopolitan Club for foreign students and
travelled Americans. And, finally, there are clubs to represent the
various provinces of knowledge--the classics, philosophy, mathematics,
the various sciences, and so on indefinitely. Then, in colleges in
or near cities, there are well-organized opportunities for students
who care to make a hobby of the Uplift and go in for social service.
While, for amateur and professional sharks and grinds, there is the
honour roll of prizes, scholarships, fellowships, distinctions, and
other academic honours. Verily a paradise for the joiner. Day by day,
the calendar of meetings and events printed in the university paper
resembles nothing so much as the bulletin board of a metropolitan hotel
which caters to conventions.

If at first glance all this welter of endeavour looks to be anything
but evidence of uniformity, at second will appear its significant
principle. Every part of it is cemented together by a universal
institutionalizing of impulses and values. There is scarcely a college
activity which can serve for a hobby but has its shingle and ribbon and
certificated niche in the undergraduate régime.

Even the undergraduate’s extra-collegiate social life, which would
probably stand next on the Martian’s list, is thoroughly regimented.
Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls at the nearest
girls’ college; and, speaking still more broadly, there is usually
one correct college whereat it is socially incumbent to pay devoirs.
In coeducational institutions the sex line is an exacting but
astonishingly innocent consumer of time and energy, of which the
greater part is invested in the sheer maintenance of convention. Along
both these social avenues the student practises a mimicry of what seems
to him to be the forms regnant in secular society and, intent on the
forms, tends to miss by a little what neighbourly ease really exists
there, so that he out-conventionalizes the conventional world. The
non-college American youth, of both sexes, would scarcely tolerate the
amount of formalism, chaperonage, and constraint that our college youth
voluntarily assumes.

The word “fussing” is the perfect tag for the visiting, the taking to
games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, and the incessant
letter-writing that are the approved communications across the sex
line. You make a fuss over a girl, and there it ends; or you make a
fuss over a girl and get engaged, and there it ends; or--and this is
frequent only in the large Western universities where well-nigh all the
personable youths of the State’s society are in college together--you
make a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due time you get
married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more decorous
among collegians than among their non-collegiate fellows of the same
ages and social levels. There is a place, of course, where it is
indecorous enough; but that place is next on the Martian’s list.

Which now shifts its weakening emphasis to recreation. You will have
thought that most of the foregoing attached to recreation and that all
play and no work is the undergraduate rule. You will have erred. Above
this point almost everything on the list is recognized by the student
to be in some sort an obligation, a serious concern, a plough on which
he finds his hand gently laid by custom but which he cannot decently
relinquish till he has gained the end of the furrow.

    “Nobody could be busier than the normal undergraduate. His
    team, his paper, his club, show, or other activity, sometimes
    several at once, occupy every spare moment which he can
    persuade the office to let him take from the more formal part
    of college instruction.”

The quotation is not from a baccalaureate sermon: it is from the
Harvard class oration of 1921.

The prime relaxation is talk, infinite talk--within its local range,
full of tang, flicking with deft satire the rumps of pompous asses,
burlesquing the comic (that is, the abnormal) in campus situations,
making of gossip a staccato criticism--and beyond that range, a rather
desultory patter about professional sport, shows, shallow books, the
froth of fashion, all treated lightly but taken with what a gravity!
For the other relaxations there are, according to taste, the theatre of
girls and music, the novel, bath-robed sessions at poker and bridge,
late afternoon tennis or golf or handball (very nearly the only sports
left to play for their own sake), and the bouts with Bacchus and Venus
which, though they attract fewer college men than non-college men, are
everywhere the moral holidays that insure our over-driven Puritanism
against collapse.

A favourite subject for college debates and Freshman themes argues
the case for and against going to college. You could listen to scores
of such debates, read thousands of such themes, without once meeting
a clear brief for education as a satisfaction of human curiosity.
Everywhere below the level of disinterested scholarship, education is
regarded as access to that body of common and practical information
without which one’s hands and tongue will be tied in the company of
one’s natural peers. “Institutions of learning,” as the National
Security League lately advised the Vice-President of the United States,
“are established primarily for the dissemination of knowledge, which is
acquaintance with fact and not with theory.” Consequently the universal
expectation of the educational establishment has little to do with any
wakening of appropriate if differing personalities, and has everything
to do with a standard patina, varying only in its lustre, its brighter
or duller reflection of the established scene.

Nevertheless, the essential Adam does break through and quiz the
scene. Though it come lowest in his scale of emphasis, the typical
underclassman knows the qualms and hungers of curiosity, experiments
a little with forbidden fruit, at some time fraternizes with a man
of richer if disreputable experience, perhaps strikes up a wistful
friendship with a sympathetic instructor. Then the world of normal
duties and rewards and certainties closes round him, and security in
it becomes his first concern. Sometime he intends really to read, to
think long thoughts again, to go to the bottom of things. Meanwhile
he falls into the easy habit of applying such words as “radical” or
“highbrow” to those infrequent hardier spirits who continue restless
and unappeased. Later in life you will catch him explaining that
radicalism is a perfectly natural manifestation of adolescence and the
soundest foundation for mature conservatism. Wise churchmen still talk
that way about religious doubt, and bide their time, and later refer to
the “death of doubt”--which has really been buried alive. The Martian
would conclude that the function of terrestrial education is to bury
curiosity alive.

But could he now feel that this educational establishment, this going
machine of assimilation, is responsible for our uniformity? Will not
American school and college life now seem too perfect a reflection
of American adult life to be its parent? Everything in that scale of
college values, from the vicarious excitements of football to what
Santayana has called the “deprivations of disbelief” has its exact
analogue in our life at large; and neither any college tradition nor
yet the “genteel tradition” is of so much significance as the will to
tradition that both reveal. The Martian will long since have suspected
himself guilty of a very human error, that of getting the cart before
the horse.

For we have made our schools in our own image. They are not our
prisons, but our homes. Every now and again we discipline a rash
instructor who carries too far his private taste for developing
originality; we pass acts that require teachers to sink their own
differences in our unanimity; and our fatuous faith in the public
school system as the “cradle of liberty” rests on the political
control we exercise over it. Far from being the dupes of education, we
ourselves dupe the educated; and that college men do not rebel is due
to the fact that inside a world our uniformity dominates as easily as
it dominates the school, the regimen works, college men really do get
ahead, and the “queer” really are frustrate.

Then, what is the origin of our “desperate need to agree”? There is a
possible answer in our history, if only we can be persuaded to give
our history a little attention. When we became a nation we were not a
folk. We were, in fact, so far from being alike that there were only
our common grievances and a few propositions on which we could be got
together at all, and the propositions were more like stubborn articles
of faith than like tested observations: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal ... certain inalienable
Rights ... Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... the consent
of the governed ... are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent
States.” That is not the tone of men who are partakers in a common
tradition and who share reasonable and familiar convictions. Thus under
the spur of our first national necessity we gave the first evidence of
our capacity to substitute an arbitrary and not too exacting lowest
common denominator to which men can subscribe, for the natural and
rigorous highest common multiple that expresses their genuine community
of interest. The device succeeded because we succeeded, but it was the
propositions that got the credit. The device has continued to succeed
ever since for the same reason that tradition succeeds in the modern
college--nobody who has had any reason to challenge the propositions
has been able to get at us.

Our proper job was to create a people, to get acquainted with each
other and develop a common background. But the almost miraculous
success of our lowest common denominator stood in the way of our
working out any highest common multiple. Instead of developing a common
background, we went on assimilating subscribers to the Declaration, our
arbitrary tradition, “Americanism.” We have been so increasingly beset
by aliens who had to be assimilated that their Americanization has
prevented our own.

We now believe our national job was the Conquest of the West, as if
scattering people over a continent were any substitute for creating a
People. But we have never been seriously challenged. If our good luck
should hold, the second or third generation after us will believe our
job was the subjugation of a hemisphere, including the assimilation of
genuine peoples who have done us less harm even than the Indians did.
But, whatever our practice, we shall never admit that our theory has
altered. Still lacking any common background, we shall still enclose
ourselves against the void in the painted scene of our tradition.

But our luck may not hold. We may be challenged yet.

                                                    CLARENCE BRITTEN




THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE


When Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women’s clubs by stating
that “women dominate the entire life of America,” and that “there are
cities with a million population, but cities suffering from terrible
poverty--the poverty of intellectual things,” he was but repeating a
criticism of our life now old enough to be almost a _cliché_. Hardly
any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the
extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he
has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the
intellectual anæmia or torpor that seems to accompany it. Naturally
this attitude is resented, and the indiscreet visitor is told that he
has been rendered astigmatic by too limited observation. He is further
informed that he should travel in our country more extensively, see
more people, and live among us longer. The inference is that this
chastening process will in due time acquaint him with a beauty and
a thrilling intellectual vitality coyly hidden from the superficial
impressionist.

Now the thesis of this paper is that the spontaneous judgment of the
perceptive foreigner is to a remarkable degree correct. But it is a
judgment which has to be modified in certain respects rather sharply.
Moreover, even long residence in the United States is not likely to
give a visitor as vivid a sense of the historical background that
has so largely contributed to the present situation as is aroused
in the native American, who in his own family hears the folklore of
the two generations preceding him and to whom the pioneer tradition
is a reality more imaginatively plausible than, say, the emanations
of glory from English fields or the aura of ancient pomp enwrapping
an Italian castle. The foreigner is too likely to forget that in a
young country, precisely because it is young, traditions have a social
sanction unknown in an older country where memory of the past goes so
far back as to become shadowy and unreal. It is a paradox of history
that from ancient cultures usually come those who “were born too soon,”
whereas from young and groping civilizations spring the panoplied
defenders of conventions. It is usually when a tradition is fresh that
it is respected most; it is only when it has been followed for years
sufficient to make it meaningless that it can create its repudiators.
America is a very young country--and in no respect younger than that of
all Western nations it has the oldest form of established government;
our naïve respect for the fathers is surest proof that we are still in
the cultural awkward age. We have not sufficiently grown up but that we
must still cling to our father and mother. In a word, we still _think_
in pioneer terms, whatever the material and economic facts of a day
that has already outgrown their applicability.

And it is the pioneer point of view, once thoroughly understood,
which will most satisfactorily explain the peculiar development of
the intellectual life in the United States. For the life of the mind
is no fine flower of impoverishment, and if the beginnings of human
reflection were the wayward reveries of seamen in the long watches
of the night or of a shepherd lying on his back idly watching the
summer clouds float past, as surely have the considered intellectual
achievements of modern men been due to the commercial and industrial
organization which, whether or not conducive to the general happiness,
has at least made leisure possible for the few. But in the pioneer
community leisure cannot exist, even for the few; the struggle is too
merciless, the stake--life itself, possibly--too high. The pioneer must
almost of necessity hate the thinker, even when he does not despise
thought in itself, because the thinker is a liability to a community
that can afford only assets; he is non-productive in himself and a
dangerously subversive example to others. Of course, the pioneer will
tolerate the minister, exactly as primitive tribes tolerated medicine
men--and largely for the same reasons. The minister, if he cannot bring
rain or ward off pestilence as the medicine man at least pretended
he could, can soften the hardness of the human lot and can show the
road to a future kingdom that will amply compensate for the drudgery
of the present world. He has, in brief, considerable utilitarian
value. The thinker _per se_, however, has none; not only that, he is
a reproach and a challenge to the man who must labour by the sweat of
his brow--it is as if he said, “For what end, all this turmoil and
effort, merely to live? But do you know if life is worth while on such
terms?” Questions like these the pioneer must cast far from him, and
for the very good reason that if they were tolerated, new communities
might never become settled. Scepticism is an expensive luxury possible
only to men in cities living off the fruit of others’ toil. Certainly
America, up to the end of the reconstruction period following the
Civil War, had little practical opportunity and less native impulse
for the cultivation of this tolerant attitude towards ultimate values,
an atmosphere which is a talisman that a true intellectual life is
flourishing.

Consider the terrible hardness of the pioneer’s physical life. I can
think of no better description of it than in one of Sherwood Anderson’s
stories, “Godliness,” in his book, “Winesburg, Ohio.” He is writing
of the Bentley brothers just before the Civil War: “They clung to old
traditions and worked like driven animals. They lived as practically
all of the farming people of the time lived. In the spring and through
most of the winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg were
a sea of mud. The four young men of the family worked hard all day in
the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept
like tired beasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little that
was not coarse and brutal, and outwardly they were themselves coarse
and brutal.” Naturally, this intense concentration upon work is not
the whole of the picture; there was gaiety and often there was romance
in the early days of pioneering, it ran like a coloured thread through
all the story of our _Drang nach Westen_. But on the whole the period
from our confederation into a Union until the expanding industrial era
following the Civil War--roughly the century from 1783 to 1883--was
a period in which the cardinal command was, “Be active, be bold, and
above all, work.” In that century we subdued and populated a continent.
There was no time for the distractions of art or the amenities of
literature.

To be sure, a short-range perspective seems to belie this last
generalization. The colonial times and the first part of the 19th
century witnessed a valid and momentous literary and intellectual
efflorescence, and it was then we contributed many names to the
biography of greatness. Yet it was a culture centred almost wholly in
New England and wholly East of the Alleghanies; it had its vitality
because it was not self-conscious, it was frankly derivative from
England and Europe, it made no pretensions to being intrinsically
American. The great current of our national life went irresistibly
along, ploughing, and tilling, and cutting down the trees and brush,
making roads and bridges as it filled the valleys and the plains.
That was the real America, a mighty river of life, compared with
which, for instance, Emerson and the Transcendentalists seemed a mere
backwater--not a stagnant or brackish one to be sure, often a pool
of quietude in which the stars, like Emerson’s sentences, might be
reflected. But the real America was still in the heart of the pioneer.
And in one sense, it still is to-day.

The “real America,” I say, because I mean the America of mind and
attitude, the inner truth, not the outer actuality. That outer
actuality has made the fact of the pioneer almost grotesque. The
frontier is closed; the nation is the most prosperous among the
harassed ones of the earth; there is no need for the old perpetual
preoccupation with material existence. In spite of trade depressions
and wars and their aftermaths, we have conquered that problem. But we
have not conquered ourselves. We must still go on in the old terms,
as if the purpose of making money in order to make more money were as
important as the purpose of raising bread in order to support life.
The facts have changed, but we have not changed, only deflected our
interests. Where the pioneer cleared a wilderness, the modern financier
subdues a forest of competitors. He puts the same amount of energy and
essentially the same quality of thought into his task to-day, although
the practical consequences can hardly be described as identical.

And what have been those practical consequences? As the industrial
revolution expanded, coincidently with the filling up of the country,
the surplus began to grow. That surplus was expended not towards
the enrichment of our life--if one omit the perfunctory bequests for
education--but towards the most obvious of unnecessary luxuries,
the grandiose maintenance of our women. The daughters of pioneer
mothers found themselves without a real job, often, indeed, the
chief instrument for advertising their husbands’ incomes. For years
the Victorian conception of women as ornaments dominated what we
were pleased to call our “better elements”--those years, to put it
brutally, which coincided with that early prosperity that made the
conception possible. If the leisure of the landed gentry class of
colonial times had been other than a direct importation, if there
had ever been a genuine _salon_ in our cultural history, or if our
early moneyed aristocracy had ever felt itself really secure from the
constant challenge of immigrant newcomers, this surplus might have
gone towards the deepening and widening of what we could have felt to
be an indigenous tradition. Or if, indeed, the Cavalier traditions of
the South (the only offshoot of the Renaissance in America) had not
been drained of all vitality by the Civil War and its economic and
intellectual consequences, this surplus might have enhanced the more
gracious aspects of those traditions. None of these possibilities
existed; and when prosperity smiled on us we were embarrassed. We were
parvenus--even to this day the comic series, “Bringing Up Father,” has
a native tang. We know exactly how Mr. Jiggs feels when Mrs. Jiggs
drags him away to a concert and makes him dress for a stiff, formal
dinner, when all his heart desires is to smoke his pipe and play poker
with Dinty and the boys. Indeed, this series, which appears regularly
in all the newspapers controlled by Mr. Hearst, will repay the social
historian all the attention he gives it. It symbolises better than most
of us appreciate the normal relationship of American men and women to
cultural and intellectual values. Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity
are revealing.

In no country as in the United States have the tragic consequences of
the lack of any common concept of the good life been so strikingly
exemplified, and in no country has the break with those common concepts
been so sharp. After all, when other colonies have been founded, when
other peoples have roved from the homeland and settled in distant
parts, they have carried with them more than mere scraps of tradition.
Oftenest they have carried the most precious human asset of all,
a heritage of common feeling, which enabled them to cling to the
substance of the old forms even while they adapted them to the new
conditions of life. But with us the repudiation of the old heritages
was complete; we deliberately sought a new way of life, for in the
circumstances under which we came into national being, breaking with
the past was synonymous with casting off oppression. The hopefulness,
the eagerness, the enthusiasm of that conscious attempt to adjudge all
things afresh found its classic expression in the eloquent if vague.
Declaration of Independence, not even the abstract phraseology of which
could hide the revolutionary fervour beneath. Yet a few short years
and that early high mood of adventure had almost evaporated, and men
were distracted from the former vision by the prospect of limitless
economic expansion, both for the individual and the nation as a whole.
The Declaration symbolized only a short interlude in the pioneer
spirit which brought us here and then led us forth to conquer the
riches nature, with her fine contempt of human values, so generously
spread before us. The end of the revolutionary mood came as soon as
the signing of the Constitution by the States, that admirable working
compromise in government which made no attempt to underscore democracy,
as we understand it to-day, but rather to hold it in proper check and
balance. Free, then, of any common heritage or tradition which might
question his values, free, also, of the troublesome idealism of the
older revolutionary mood, the ordinary man could go forth into the
wilderness with singleness of purpose. He could be, as he still is
to-day, the pioneer _toujours_.

Now when his success in his half-chosen rôle made it unnecessary for
him to play it, it was precisely the lack of a common concept of the
good life which made it impossible for him to be anything else. It is
not that Americans make money because they love to do so, but because
there is nothing else to do; oddly enough, it is not even that the
possessive instincts are especially strong with us (I think the French,
for instance, are naturally more avaricious than we), but that we
have no notion of a definite type of life for which a small income
is enough, and no notion of any type of life from which work has been
consciously eliminated. Never in any national sense having had leisure,
as individuals we do not know what to do with it when good fortune
gives it to us. Unlike a real game, we must go on playing _our_ game
even after we have won.

But if the successful pioneer did not know what to do with his own
leisure, he had naïve faith in the capacity of his women to know
what to do with theirs. With the chivalric sentimentality that often
accompanies the prosperity of the primitive, the pioneer determined
that his good luck should bestow upon his wife and sisters and mother
and aunts a gift, the possession of which slightly embarrassed himself.
He gave them leisure exactly as the typical business man of to-day
gives them a blank check signed with his name. It disposed of them,
kept them out of his world, and salved his conscience--like a check to
charity. Unluckily for him, his mother, his wife, his sisters, and his
aunts were of his own blood and breeding; they were the daughters of
pioneers like himself, and the daughters of mothers who had contributed
share and share alike to those foundations which had made his success
possible. Although a few developed latent qualities of parasitism,
the majority were strangely discontented (strangely, that is, from
his point of view) with the job of mere Victorian ornament. What more
natural under the circumstances than that the unimportant things of
life--art, music, religion, literature, the intellectual life--should
be handed over to them to keep them busy and contented, while he
confined himself to the real man’s job of making money and getting on
in the world? Was it not a happy and sensible adaptation of function?

Happy or not, it was exactly what took place. To an extent almost
incomprehensible to the peoples of older cultures, the things of the
mind and the spirit have been given over, in America, into the almost
exclusive custody of women. This has been true certainly of art,
certainly of music, certainly of education. The spinster school-marm
has settled in the impressionable, adolescent minds of boys the
conviction that the cultural interests are largely an affair of the
other sex; the intellectual life can have no connection with native
gaiety, with sexual curiosity, with play, with creative dreaming, or
with adventure. These more genuine impulses, he is made to feel, are
not merely distinguishable from the intellectual life, but actually at
war with it. In my own day at Harvard the Westerners in my class looked
with considerable suspicion upon those who specialized in literature,
the classics, or philosophy--a man’s education should be science,
economics, engineering. Only “sissies,” I was informed, took courses
in poetry out in that virile West. And to this day for a boy to be
taught to play the piano, for example, is regarded as “queer,” whereas
for a girl to be so taught is entirely in the nature of things. That
is, natural aptitude has nothing to do with it; some interests are
proper for women, others for men. Of course there are exceptions enough
to make even the boldest hesitate at generalizations, yet assuredly
the contempt, as measured in the only terms we thoroughly understand,
money, with which male teachers, male professors (secretly), male
ministers, and male artists are universally held should convince the
most prejudiced that, speaking broadly, this generalization is in
substance correct.

In fact, when we try to survey the currents of our entire national
life, to assess these vagrant winds of doctrine free from the
ingenuousness that our own academic experience or training may give
us, the more shall we perceive that the dichotomy between the cultural
and intellectual life of men and women in this country has been
carried farther than anywhere else in the world. We need only recall
the older women’s clubs of the comic papers--in truth, the actual
women’s clubs of to-day as revealed by small-town newspaper reports of
their meetings--the now deliquescent Browning Clubs, the Chautauquas,
the church festivals, the rural normal schools for teachers, the
women’s magazines, the countless national organizations for improving,
elevating, uplifting this, that, or the other. One shudders slightly
and turns to the impeccable style, the slightly tired and sensuous
irony of Anatole France (not yet censored, if we read him in French)
for relief. Or if we are so fortunate as to be “regular” Americans
instead of unhappy intellectuals educated beyond our environment,
we go gratefully back to our work at the office. Beside the stilted
artificiality of this world of higher ethical values the business
world, where men haggle, cheat, and steal with whole-hearted devotion
is at least real. And it is this world, the world of making money,
in which alone the American man can feel thoroughly at home. If the
French romanticists of the 18th century invented the phrase _la femme
mécomprise_, a modern Gallic visitor would be tempted to observe
that in this 20th century the United States was the land of _l’homme
mécompris_.

These, then, are the cruder historical forces that have led directly
to the present remarkable situation, a situation, of course, which I
attempt to depict only in its larger outlines. For the surface of the
contemporary social structure shows us suffrage, the new insights into
the world of industry which the war gave so many women for the first
time, the widening of professional opportunity, co-education, and, in
the life which perhaps those of us who have contributed to this volume
know best, a genuine intellectual camaraderie. Nevertheless, I believe
the underlying thesis cannot be successfully challenged. Where men
and women in America to-day share their intellectual life on terms of
equality and perfect understanding, closer examination reveals that
the phenomenon is not a sharing but a capitulation. The men have been
feminized.

Thus far through this essay I have by implication rather than direct
statement contrasted genuine interest in intellectual things with
the kind of intellectual life led by women. Let me say now that no
intention is less mine than to contribute to the old controversy
concerning the respective intellectual capacities of the two sexes.
If I use the adjective “masculine” to denote a more valid type of
intellectual impulse than is expressed by the adjective “feminine,” it
is not to belittle the quality of the second impulse; it is a matter of
definition. Further, the relative degree of “masculine” and “feminine”
traits possessed by an individual are almost as much the result of
acquired training as of native inheritance. The young, independent
college girl of to-day is in fact more likely to possess “masculine”
intellectual habits than is the average Y.M.C.A. director. I use
the adjectives to express broad, general characteristics as they are
commonly understood.

For a direct examination of the intellectual life of women--which,
I repeat, is practically the intellectual life of the nation--in
the United States shows the necessity of terms being defined more
sharply. Interest in intellectual things is first, last, and all the
time _disinterested_; it is the love of truth, if not exclusively
for its own sake, at least without fear of consequences, in fact
with precious little thought about consequences. This does not mean
that such exercise of the native disposition to think, such slaking
of the natural metaphysical curiosity in all of us, is not a process
enwrapped--as truly as the disposition to make love or to get
angry--with an emotional aura of its own, a passion as distinctive as
any other. It merely means that the occasions which stimulate this
innate intellectual disposition are of a different sort than those
which stimulate our other dispositions. An imaginative picture of
one’s enlarged social self will arouse our instincts of ambition or a
desire to found a family, whereas curiosity or wonder about the mystery
of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate nature of God (objects
of desire as truly as other objects) will arouse our intellectual
disposition. These occasions, objects, hypotheses are of necessity
without moral significance. The values inherent in them are the
values of satisfied contemplation and not of practical result. Their
immediate utility--although their ultimate, by the paradox that is
constantly making mere common sense inadequate, may be very great--is
only subjective. In this sense, they seem wayward and masculine; and,
cardinal sin of all, useless.

Perhaps the meaning of the “feminine” approach to the intellectual life
may be made somewhat clearer by this preliminary definition. The basic
assumption of such an approach is that ideas are measured for their
value by terms outside the ideas themselves, or, as Mrs. Mary Austin
recently said in a magazine article, by “her [woman’s] deep sense of
social applicability as the test of value.” Fundamentally, in a word,
the intellectual life is an instrument of moral reform; the real
test of ideas lies in their utilitarian success. Hence it is hardly
surprising that the intellectual life, as I have defined it, of women
in America turns out on examination not to be an intellectual life at
all, but sociological activity. The best of modern women thinkers in
the United States--and there are many--are oftenest technical experts,
keen to apply knowledge and skill to the formulation of a technique
for the better solution of problems _the answers to which are already
assumed_. The question of fundamental ends is seldom if ever raised:
for example, the desirability of the modern family, the desirability
of children glowing with health, the desirability of monogamy are not
challenged. They are assumed as ends desirable in themselves, and what
women usually understand by the intellectual life is the application of
modern scientific methods to a sort of enlarged and subtler course in
domestic science.

This attitude of contempt for mere intellectual values has of course
been strengthened by the native pioneer suspicion of all thought that
does not issue immediately in successful action. The remarkable growth
of pragmatism, and its sturdy offspring instrumentalism, where ideas
become but the lowly handmaidens of “getting on,” has been possible to
the extent to which we see it to-day precisely because the intellectual
atmosphere has been surcharged with this feminized utilitarianism.
We are deeply uncomfortable before introspection, contemplation, or
scrupulous adherence to logical sequence. Women do not hesitate to
call these activities cold, impersonal, indirect--I believe they have
a phrase for them, “the poobah tradition of learning.” With us the
concept of the intellect as a soulless machine operating in a rather
clammy void has acquired the force of folklore because we have so much
wished to strip it of warmth and colour. We have wanted to discredit
it in itself; we have respected it only for what it could do. If
its operations lead to better sanitation, better milk for babies,
and larger bridges over which, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, we might
cross more rapidly from one dismal, illiberal city to another dismal,
illiberal city, then those operations have been justified. That the
life of the mind might have an emotional drive, a sting or vibrancy of
its own, constituting as valuable a contribution to human happiness as,
say, the satisfied marital felicity of the bacteria-less suburbanite
in his concrete villa has been incomprehensible. Every science must be
an _applied_ science, the intellect must be _applied_ intellect before
we thoroughly understand it. We have created an environment in which
the intellectual impulses must become fundamentally social in quality
and mood, whereas the truth of the matter is that these impulses, like
the religious impulse, in their pristine spontaneity are basically
individualistic and capricious rather than disciplined.

But such individualism in thought, unless mellowed by contact with
institutions that assume and cherish it and thus can, without
patronizing, correct its wildnesses, inevitably turns into
eccentricity. And such, unfortunately, has too often been the history
of American intellectuals. The institutional structure that might
sustain them and keep them on the main track of the humanistic
tradition has been too fragile and too slight. The university and
college life, the educational institutions, even the discipline of
scholarship, as other essays in this volume show us, have been of
very little assistance. Even the church has provoked recalcitrance
rather than any real reorientation of religious viewpoint, and our
atheists--recall Ingersoll--have ordinarily been quite conventional
in their intellectual outlook. With educated Englishmen, for example,
whatever their religious, economic, or political views, there has been
a certain common tradition or point of departure and understanding,
i.e., the classics. Mr. Balfour can speak the same language as Mr.
Bertrand Russell, even when he is a member of a government that puts
Mr. Russell in gaol for his political opposition to the late war. But
it really is a strain on the imagination to picture Mr. Denby quoting
Hume to refute Mr. Weeks, or Vice-President Coolidge engaging in an
epistemological controversy with Postmaster-General Hays. There is no
intellectual background common to President Harding and Convict Debs or
to any one person and possibly as many as a hundred others--there are
only common social or geographical backgrounds, in which the absence of
a real community of interests is pathetically emphasized by grotesque
emphasis upon fraternal solidarity, as when Mr. Harding discovered that
he and his chauffeur belonged to the same lodge, regarding this purely
fortuitous fact as a symbol of the healing power of the Fathers and of
American Democracy!

In such an atmosphere of shadowy spiritual relationships, where the
thinness of contact of mind with mind is childishly disguised under the
banner of good fellowship, it might be expected that the intellectual
life must be led not only with that degree of individualistic isolation
which is naturally necessary for its existence, but likewise in a
hostile and unintelligent environment of almost enforced “difference”
from the general social type. Such an atmosphere will become as
infested with cranks, fanatics, mushroom religious enthusiasts, moral
prigs with new schemes of perfectability, inventors of perpetual
motion, illiterate novelists, and oratorical cretins, as a swamp with
mosquitoes. They seem to breed almost overnight; we have no standard
to which the wise and the foolish may equally repair, no criterion
by which spontaneously to appraise them and thus, by robbing them of
the breath of their life, recognition, reduce their numbers. On the
contrary, we welcome them all with a kind of Jamesian gusto, as if
every fool, like every citizen, must have his right to vote. It is
a kind of intellectual enfranchisement that produces the same sort
of leadership which, in the political field of complete suffrage,
we suffer under from Washington and our various State capitals. Our
intellectual life, when we judge it objectively on the side of vigour
and diversity, too often seems like a democracy of mountebanks.

Yet when we turn from the more naïve and popular experiments for
finding expression for the baulked disposition to think, the more
sophisticated _jeunesse dorée_ of our cultural life are equally
crippled and sterile. They suffer not so much from being thought and
being “queer”--in fact, inwardly deeply uncomfortable at not being
successful business men, they are scrupulously conventional in manner
and appearance--but from what Professor Santayana has called, with his
usual felicity, “the genteel tradition.” It is a blight that falls on
the just and the unjust; like George Bernard Shaw, they are tolerant
before the caprices of the mind, and intolerant before the caprices of
the body. They acquire their disability from the essentially American
(and essentially feminine) timorousness before life itself; they seem
to want to confine, as do all good husbands and providers, adventure
to mental adventure and tragedy to an error in ratiocination. They
will discant generously about liberty of opinion--although, strictly
speaking, _opinion_ is always free; all that is restricted is the right
to put it into words--yet seem singularly silent concerning liberty of
action. If this were a mere temperamental defect, it would of course
have no importance. But it cuts much deeper. Thought, like mist, arises
from the earth, and to it must eventually return, if it is not to be
dissipated into the ether. The genteel tradition, which has stolen from
the intellectual life its own proper possessions, gaiety and laughter,
has left it sour and _déraciné_. It has lost its earthy roots, its
sensuous fulness, its bodily _mise-en-scène_. One has the feeling, when
one talks to our correct intellectuals, that they are somehow brittle
and might be cracked with a pun, a low story, or an animal grotesquerie
as an eggshell might be cracked. Yet whatever else thought may be in
itself, surely we know that it has a biological history and an animal
setting; it can reach its own proper dignity and effectiveness only
when it functions in some kind of rational relationship with the more
clamorous instincts of the body. The adjustment must be one of harmony
and welcome; real thinkers do not make this ascetic divorce between
the passions and the intellect, the emotions and the reason, which
is the central characteristic of the genteel tradition. Thought is
nourished by the soil it feeds on, and in America to-day that soil is
choked with the feckless weeds of correctness. Our sanitary perfection,
our material organization of goods, our muffling of emotion, our
deprecation of curiosity, our fear of idle adventure, our horror of
disease and death, our denial of suffering--what kind of soil of life
is that?

Surely not an over-gracious or thrilling one; small wonder that our
intellectual plants wither in this carefully aseptic sunlight.

Nevertheless, though I was tempted to give the sub-title “A Study in
Sterility” to this essay, I do not believe that our soil is wholly
sterile. Beneath the surface barrenness stirs a germinal energy that
may yet push its way through the weeds and the tin-cans of those
who are afraid of life. If the genteel tradition did not succumb to
the broad challenge of Whitman, his invitations have not been wholly
rejected by the second generation following him. The most hopeful
thing of intellectual promise in America to-day is the contempt of
the younger people for their elders; they are restless, uneasy,
disaffected. It is not a disciplined contempt; it is not yet kindled
by any real love of intellectual values--how could it be? Yet it is
a genuine and moving attempt to create a way of life free from the
bondage of an authority that has lost all meaning, even to those
who wield it. Some it drives in futile and pathetic expatriotism
from the country; others it makes headstrong and reckless; many it
forces underground, where, much as in Russia before the revolution
of 1905, the _intelligentsia_ meet their own kind and share the
difficulties of their common struggle against an environment that is
out to destroy them. But whatever its crudeness and headiness, it is
a yeast composed always of those who _will not_ conform. The more
the pressure of standardization is applied to them the sharper and
keener--if often the wilder--becomes their rebellion against it. Just
now these non-conformists constitute a spiritual fellowship which is
disorganized and with few points of contact. It may be ground out of
existence, for history is merciless and every humanistic interlude
resembles a perilous equipoise of barbaric forces. Only arrogance and
self-complacency give warrant for assuming that we may not be facing
a new kind of dark age. On the other hand, if the more amiable and
civilized of the generation now growing up can somehow consolidate
their scattered powers, what may they not accomplish? For we have a
vitality and nervous alertness which, properly channelled and directed,
might cut through the rocks of stupidity with the precision and
spaciousness with which our mechanical inventions have seized on our
natural resources and turned them into material goods. Our cup of life
is full to the brim.

I like to think that this cup will not all be poured upon the sandy
deltas of industrialism ... we have so much to spare! Climb to the top
of the Palisades and watch the great city in the deepening dusk as
light after light, and rows of lights after rows, topped by towers of
radiance at the end of the island, shine through the shadows across the
river. Think, then, of the miles of rolling plains, fertile and dotted
with cities, stretching behind one to that other ocean which washes a
civilization that was old before we were born and yet to-day gratefully
accepts our pitiful doles to keep it from starvation, of the millions
of human aspirations and hopes and youthful eagernesses contained
in the great sprawling, uneasy entity we call our country--must all
the hidden beauty and magic and laughter we know is ours be quenched
because we lack the courage to make it proud and defiant? Or walk down
the Avenue some late October morning when the sun sparkles in a clear
and electric air such as can be found nowhere else in the world. The
flashing beauty of form, the rising step of confident animalism, the
quick smile of fertile minds--must all these things, too, be reduced to
a drab uniformity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer
physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hidden under a
fog of ugliness by those who never really loved it, who never knew our
natural gaiety and high spirits and eagerness for knowledge? They have
the upper hand now--but who would dare to prophesy that they can keep
it?

Perhaps this is only a day-dream, but surely one can hope that the
America of our natural affections rather than the present one of
enforced dull standardization may some day snap the shackles of those
who to-day keep it a spiritual prison. And as surely will it be the
rebellious and disaffected who accomplish the miracle, if it is ever
accomplished. Because at bottom their revolt, unlike the aggressions
of the standardizers, is founded not on hate of what they cannot
understand, but on love of what they wish all to share.

                                                   HAROLD E. STEARNS




SCIENCE


The scientific work of our countrymen has probably evoked less
scepticism on the part of foreign judges than their achievements in
other departments of cultural activity. There is one obvious reason for
this difference. When our letters, our art, our music are criticized
with disdainfully faint commendation, it is because they have failed to
attain the higher reaches of creative effort. Supreme accomplishment in
art certainly presupposes a graduated series of lesser strivings, yet
from what might be called the consumer’s angle, mediocrity is worthless
and incapable of giving inspiration to genius. But in science it is
otherwise. Here every bit of sound work--however commonplace--counts as
a contribution to the stock of knowledge; and, what is more, on labours
of this lesser order the superior mind is frequently dependent for its
own syntheses. A combination of intelligence, technical efficiency,
and application may not by itself suffice to read the riddles of
the universe; but, to change the metaphor, it may well provide the
foundation for the epoch-makers’ structure. So while it is derogatory
to American literature to be considered a mere reflection of English
letters, it is no reflection on American scientists that they have
gone to Europe to acquire that craftsmanship which is an indispensable
prerequisite to fruitful research. And when we find Alexander von
Humboldt praising in conversation with Silliman the geographical
results of Maury and Frémont, there is no reason to suspect him of
perfunctory politeness to a transatlantic visitor; the veteran scholar
might well rejoice in the ever widening application of methods he had
himself aided in perfecting.

Thus even seventy years ago and more the United States had by honest,
painstaking labour made worthwhile additions to human knowledge and
these contributions have naturally multiplied a hundredfold with the
lapse of years. Yet it would be quite misleading to make it appear
as if the total represented merely a vast accumulation of uninspired
routine jobs. Some years ago, to be sure, an American writer rather
sensationally voiced his discontent with the paucity of celebrated
_savants_ among our countrymen. But he forgot that in science fame
is a very inadequate index of merit. The precise contribution made
by one man’s individual ability is one of the most tantalizingly
difficult things to determine--so much so that scholars are still
debating in what measure Galileo’s predecessors paved the way for
his discoveries in dynamics. For a layman, then, to appraise the
relative significance of this or that intellectual worthy on the basis
of current gossip is rather absurd. Certainly the lack of a popular
reputation is a poor reason for denying greatness to a contemporary or
even near-contemporary scientific thinker. Two remarkable instances at
once come to mind of Americans who have won the highest distinction
abroad yet remain unknown by name to many of their most cultivated
compatriots. Who has ever heard of Willard Gibbs? Yet he was the
recipient of the Copley medal, British learning’s highest honour, and
his phase rule is said to mark an epoch in the progress of physical
chemistry. Again, prior to the Nobel prize award, who outside academic
bowers had ever heard of the crucial experiment by which a Chicago
physicist showed, to quote Poincaré, “that the physical procedures are
powerless to put in evidence absolute motion”? Michelson’s name is
linked with all the recent speculations on relativity, and he shares
with Einstein the fate of finding himself famous one fine morning
through the force of purely external circumstances.

In even the briefest and most random enumeration of towering native
sons it is impossible to ignore the name of William James. Here for
once the suffrage of town and gown, of domestic and alien judges,
is unanimous. Naturally James can never mean quite the same to the
European world that he means to us, because in the United States he
is far more than a great psychologist, philosopher, or literary man.
Owing to our peculiar spiritual history, he occupies in our milieu an
altogether unique position. His is the solitary example of an American
pre-eminent in a branch of science who at the same time succeeded in
deeply affecting the cultural life of a whole generation. Further, he
is probably the only one of our genuinely original men to be thoroughly
saturated with the essense of old world civilization. On the other
side of the Atlantic, of course, neither of these characteristics
would confer a patent of distinction. Foreign judgment of James’s
psychological achievement was consequently not coloured by external
considerations, and it is all the more remarkable that the “Principles
of Psychology” was so widely and by such competent critics acclaimed as
a synthesis of the first order.

Without attempting to exhaust the roster of great names, I must
mention Simon Newcomb and his fellow-astronomer, George W. Hill, both
Copley medallists. Newcomb, in particular, stood out as the foremost
representative of his science in this country, honoured here and abroad
alike for his abstruse original researches into the motion of the
moon and the planetary system and for his effective popularization.
Henry Augustus Rowland, the physicist, was another of our outstanding
men--one, incidentally, whose measure was taken in Europe long before
his greatness dawned upon his colleagues at home. He is celebrated,
among other things, for perfecting an instrument of precision and for
a new and more accurate determination of the mechanical equivalent of
heat. Among geologists Grove Karl Gilbert, famous for his exploration
of Lake Bonneville--the major forerunner of Great Salt Lake--and his
investigations of mountain structure, stands forth as one of our
pre-eminent savants. Even those who, like the present writer, enjoyed
merely casual contact with that grand old man could not fail to gain
the impression that now they knew what a great scientist looked like
in the flesh and to feel that such a one would be a fit member of any
intellectual galaxy anywhere.

If from single individuals we turn to consider currents of scientific
thought, the United States again stands the trial with flying colours.
It can hardly be denied that in a number of branches our countrymen
are marching in the vanguard. “Experimental biology,” said a German
zoologist some time before the War, “is pre-eminently an American
science.” Certainly one need merely glance at German or British
manuals to learn how deeply interpretations of basic evolutionary
phenomena have been affected by the work of Professor T. H. Morgan
and his followers. In psychology it is true that no one wears the
mantle of William James, but there is effective advancement along
a number of distinct lines. Thorndike’s tests marked an era in the
annals of animal psychology, supplanting with a saner technique the
slovenly work of earlier investigators. Experimental investigation of
mental phenomena generally, of individual variability and behaviour in
particular, flourishes in a number of academic centres. In anthropology
the writings of Lewis H. Morgan have proved a tremendous stimulus to
sociological speculation the world over and still retain their hold
on many European thinkers. They were not, in my opinion, the product
of a great intellect and the scheme of evolution traced by Morgan is
doomed to abandonment. Yet his theories have suggested a vast amount
of thought and to his lasting credit it must be said that he opened
up an entirely new and fruitful field of recondite research through
his painstaking accumulation and discussion of primitive kinship
terminologies.

More recently the anthropological school headed by Professor Boas has
led to a transvaluation of theoretical values in the study of cultural
development, supplanting with a sounder historical insight the cruder
evolutionary speculation of the past. Above all, its founder has
succeeded in perfecting the methodology of every division of the vast
subject, and remains probably the only anthropologist in the world who
has both directly and indirectly furthered ethnological, linguistic,
somatological and archæological investigation. Finally, the active part
played by pathologists like Dr. Simon Flexner in the experimental study
of disease is too well known to require more than brief mention.

Either in its individual or collective results, American research is
thus very far from being a negligible factor in the scientific life of
the world. Nevertheless, the medal has a reverse side, and he would be
a bold optimist who should sincerely voice complete contentment either
with the status of science in the cultural polity of the nation or with
the work achieved by the average American investigator. Let us, then,
try to face the less flattering facts in the case.

The fundamental difficulty can be briefly summarized by applying
the sociologist’s concept of maladjustment. American science,
notwithstanding its notable achievements, is not an organic product of
our soil; it is an epiphenomenon, a hothouse growth. It is still the
prerogative of a caste, not a treasure in which the nation glories.
We have at best only a nascent class of cultivated laymen who relish
scientific books requiring concentrated thought or supplying large
bodies of fact. This is shown most clearly by the rarity of articles
of this type even in our serious magazines. Our physicians, lawyers,
clergymen and journalists--in short, our educated classes--do not
encourage the publication of reading-matter which is issued in Europe
as a profitable business venture. It is hard to conceive of a book
like Mach’s “Analyse der Empfindungen” running through eight editions
in the United States. Conversely, it is not strange that hardly any of
our first-rate men find it an alluring task to seek an understanding
with a larger audience. Newcomb and James are of course remarkable
exceptions, but they _are_ exceptions. Here again the contrast
with European conditions is glaring. Not to mention the classic
popularizers of the past, England, e.g., can boast even to-day of such
men as Pearson, Soddy, Joly, Hinks--all of them competent or even
distinguished in their professional work yet at the same time skilful
interpreters of their field to a wider public. But for a healthy
cultural life a rapport of this sort between creator and appreciator is
an indispensable prerequisite, and it is not a whit less important in
science than in music or poetry.

The estrangement of science from its social environment has produced
anomalies almost inconceivable in the riper civilizations of the Old
World. Either the scientist loses contact with his surroundings or
in the struggle for survival he adapts himself by a surrender of his
individuality, that is, by more or less disingenuously parading as
a lowbrow and representing himself as a dispenser of worldly goods.
It is quite true that, historically, empirical knowledge linked with
practical needs is earlier than rational science; it is also true that
applied and pure science can be and have been mutual benefactors.
This lesson is an important one and in a country with a scholastic
tradition like Germany it was one that men like Mach and Ostwald did
well to emphasize. But in an age and country where philosophers pique
themselves on ignoring philosophical problems and psychologists have
become experts in advertising technique, the emphasis ought surely to
be in quite the opposite direction, and that, even if one inclines in
general to a utilitarian point of view. For nothing is more certain
than that a penny-wise Gradgrind policy is a pound-foolish one. A
friend teaching in one of our engineering colleges tells me that owing
to the “practical” training received there the graduates are indeed
able to apply formulæ by rote but flounder helplessly when confronted
by a new situation, which drives them to seek counsel with the despised
and underpaid “theoretical” professor. The plea for pure science
offered by Rowland in 1883 is not yet altogether antiquated in 1921:
“To have the applications of a science, the science itself must exist
... we have taken the science of the Old World, and applied it to all
our uses, accepting it like the rain of heaven, without asking whence
it came, or even acknowledging the debt of gratitude we owe to the
great and unselfish workers who have given it to us.... To a civilized
nation of the present day, the applications of science are a necessity,
and our country has hitherto succeeded in this line, only for the
reason that there are certain countries in the world where pure science
has been and is cultivated, and where the study of nature is considered
a noble pursuit.”

The Bœotian disdain for research as a desirable pursuit is naturally
reflected in the mediocre encouragement doled out to investigators, who
are obliged to do their work by hook or by crook and to raise funds
by the undignified cajolery of wealthy patrons and a disingenuous
_argumentum ad hominem_. Heaven forbid that money be appropriated to
attack a problem which, in the opinion of the best experts, calls
for solution; effort must rather be diverted to please an ignorant
benefactor bent on establishing a pet theory or fired with the zeal to
astound the world by a sensational discovery.

Another aspect of scientific life in the United States that reflects
the general cultural conditions is the stress placed on organization
and administration as opposed to individual effort. It is quite true
that for the prosecution of elaborate investigations careful allotment
of individual tasks contributory to the general end is important and
sometimes even indispensable. But some of the greatest work in the
history of science has been achieved without regard for the principles
of business efficiency; and whatever advantage may accrue in the future
from administrative devices is negligible in comparison with the
creative thought of scientific men. These, and only these, can lend
value to the machinery of organization, which independently of them
must remain a soulless instrument. The overweighting of efficiency
schemes as compared to creative personalities is only a symptom of a
general maladjustment. Intimately related with this feature is that
cynical flouting of intellectual values that appears in the customary
attitude of trustees and university presidents towards those who
shed lustre on our academic life. The professional pre-eminence of a
scientist may be admitted by the administrative officials but it is
regarded as irrelevant since the standard of values accepted by them is
only remotely, if at all, connected with originality or learning.

There are, of course, scientists to whom deference is paid even by
trustees, nay, by the wives of trustees; but it will be usually found
that they are men of independent means or social prestige. It is, in
other words, their wealth and position, not their creative work, that
raises them above their fellows. One of the most lamentable results
of this contempt for higher values is the failure to provide for
ample leisure that might be devoted to research. The majority of our
scientists, like those abroad, gain a livelihood by teaching, but few
foreign observers fail to be shocked by the way the energies of their
American colleagues are frittered away on administrative routine and
elementary instruction till neither time nor strength remains for
the advancement of knowledge. But even this does not tell the whole
story, for we must remember that the younger scientists are as a rule
miserably underpaid and are obliged to eke out a living by popular
writing or lecturing, so that research becomes a sheer impossibility.
If Ostwald and Cattell are right in associating the highest
productivity with the earlier years of maturity, the tragic effects of
such conditions as I have just described are manifest.

In justice, however, mention must be made of a number of institutions
permitting scientific work without imposing any obligation to teach
or onerous administrative duties. The U. S. Geological Survey, the
Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Institute may serve as examples.
We must likewise remember that different individuals react quite
differently to the necessity for teaching. Some of the most noted
investigators--Rowland, for instance--find a moderate amount of
lecturing positively stimulating. In a utopian republic of learning
such individual variations would be carefully considered in the
allotment of tasks. The association of the Lick Observatory with the
University of California seems to approximate to ideal conditions,
inasmuch as its highly trained astronomers are relieved of all academic
duties but enjoy the privilege of lecturing to the students when the
spirit moves them.

To return to the main question, the maladjustment between the specific
scientific phase of our civilization and the general cultural life
produces certain effects even more serious than those due to penury,
administrative tyranny, and popular indifference, for they are
less potent and do not so readily evoke defence-mechanisms on the
victims’ part. There is, first of all, a curtailment of potential
scientific achievement through the general deficiencies of the cultural
environment.

Much has been said by both propagandists and detractors of German
scholarship about the effects of intensive specialization. But an
important feature commonly ignored in this connection is that in the
country of its origin specialization is a concomitant and successor
of a liberal education. Whatever strictures may be levelled at the
traditional form of this preparatory training--and I have seen it
criticized as severely by German writers as by any--the fact remains
that the German university student has a broad cultural background such
as his American counterpart too frequently lacks; and what is true of
Germany holds with minor qualifications for other European countries.

A trivial example will serve to illustrate the possible advantages
of a cultural foundation for very specialized research. Music is
notoriously one of the salient features of German culture, not merely
because Germany has produced great composers but because of the wide
appreciation and quite general study of music. Artistically the
knowledge of the piano or violin acquired by the average child in
the typical German home may count for naught, yet in at least two
branches of inquiry it may assume importance. The psychological aspect
of acoustics is likely to attract and to be fruitfully cultivated by
those conversant with musical technique, and they alone will be capable
of grappling with the comparative problems presented by the study
of primitive music--problems that would never occur to the average
Anglo-Saxon field ethnologist, yet to which the German would apply his
knowledge as spontaneously as he applies the multiplication table to a
practical matter of everyday purchase.

As a matter of fact, all the phenomena of the universe are interrelated
and, accordingly, the most important advances may be expected from a
revelation of the less patent connections. For this purpose a diversity
of interests with corresponding variety of information may be not only
a favourable condition but a prerequisite. Helmholtz may have made an
indifferent physician; but because he combined a medical practitioner’s
knowledge with that of a physicist he was enabled to devise the
ophthalmoscope. So it may be that not one out of ten thousand men
who might apply themselves to higher mathematics would ever be able
to advance mathematical theory, but it is certainly true that the
manipulatory skill acquired would stand them in good stead not only in
the exact sciences but in biology, psychology, and anthropometry, in
all of which the theory of probability can be effectively applied to
the phenomenon of variability.

I do not mean to assert that the average European student is an
Admirable Crichton utilizing with multidexterity the most diverse
methods of research and groups of fact. But I am convinced that
many European workers produce more valuable work than equally able
Americans for the sole reason that the European’s social heritage
provides him with agencies ready-made for detecting correlations that
must inevitably elude a vision narrower because deprived of the same
artificial aid. The remedy lies in enriching the cultural atmosphere
and in insisting on a broad educational training over and above that
devoted to the specialist’s craftsmanship.

Important, however, as variety of information and interests doubtless
are, one factor must take precedence in the scientist’s equipment--the
spirit in which he approaches his scientific work as a whole. In
this respect the point that would probably strike most European or,
at all events, Continental scientists is the rarity in America of
philosophical inquiries into the foundations of one’s scientific
position. The contrast with German culture is of course sharp, and in
many Teutonic works the national bent for epistemological discussion is
undoubtedly carried to a point where it ceases to be palatable to those
not to the manner born. Yet this tendency has a salutary effect in
stimulating that contempt for mere authority which is indispensable for
scientific progress. What our average American student should acquire
above all is a stout faith in the virtues of _reasoned nonconformism_,
and in this phrase adjective and noun are equally significant. On
one hand, we must condemn the blind deference with which too many of
our investigators accept the judgments of acknowledged greatness.
What can be more ridiculous, e.g., than to make dogmas of the _obiter
dicta_ of a man like William James, the chief lesson of whose life is
a resentment of academic traditionalism? Or, what shall we think of
a celebrated biologist who decides the problem of Lamarckianism by
a careful weighing not of arguments but of authorities? No one can
approve of the grim ferocity, reminiscent of the literary feuds of
Alexander Pope, with which German savants sometimes debate problems of
theoretic interest. Yet even such billingsgate as Dührring levelled at
Helmholtz is preferable to obsequious discipleship. It testifies, at
all events, to the glorious belief that in the republic of learning
fame and position count for naught, that the most illustrious scientist
shall not be free from the criticism of the meanest _Privatdozent_,
But the nonconformism should be rational. It is infantile to cling to
leading-strings but it is no less childish to thrust out one’s tongue
at doctrines that happen to disagree with those of one’s own clique.
Indeed, frequently both forms of puerility are combined: it is easy to
sneer with James at Wundt or to assault the selectionists under cover
of De Vries’s mutationism. A mature thinker will forego the short and
easy but misleading road. Following Fechner, he will be cautious in his
belief but equally cautious in his disbelief.

It is only such spiritual freedom that makes the insistence on academic
freedom a matter worth fighting for. After all, what is the use of
a man’s teaching what he pleases, if he quite sincerely retails
the current folk-lore? In one of the most remarkable chapters of
the “Mechanik” Ernst Mach points out that the detriment to natural
philosophy due to the political power of the Church is easily
exaggerated. Science was retarded primarily not because scientists were
driven by outward compulsion to spread such and such views but because
they uncritically swallowed the cud of folk-belief. _Voilà l’ennemi!_
In the insidious influence of group opinions, whether countenanced by
Church, State or a scientific hierarchy, lies the basic peril. The
philosophic habit of unremitting criticism of one’s basic assumptions
is naturally repugnant to a young and naïve culture, and it cannot be
expected to spring up spontaneously and flower luxuriantly in science
while other departments of life fail to yield it nurture. Every phase
of our civilization must be saturated with that spirit of positive
scepticism which Goethe and Huxley taught before science can reap a
full harvest in her own field. But her votaries, looking back upon
the history of science, may well be emboldened to lead in the battle,
and if the pioneers in the movement should fail they may well console
themselves with Milton’s hero: “... and that strife was not inglorious,
though the event was dire!”

                                                     ROBERT H. LOWIE




PHILOSOPHY


Philosophy is at once a product of civilization and a stimulus to
its development. It is the solvent in which the inarticulate and
conflicting aspirations of a people become clarified and from which
they derive directing force. Since, however, philosophers are likely
to clothe their thoughts in highly technical language, there is
need of a class of middle-men-interpreters through whom philosophy
penetrates the masses. By American tradition, the philosophers have
been professors; the interpreters, clergymen. Professors are likely to
be deflected by the ideas embodied in the institutions with which they
associate themselves. The American college, in its foundations, was
designated a protector of orthodoxy and still echoes what Santayana
has so aptly called the “genteel tradition,” the tradition that the
teacher must defend the faith. Some of the most liberal New England
colleges even now demand attendance at daily chapel and Sunday church.
Less than a quarter of a century ago, one could still find, among major
non-sectarian institutions, the clergyman-president, himself a teacher,
crowning the curriculum with a senior requirement, Christian Evidences,
in support of the Faith.

The nineteenth century organized a vigorous war against this genteel
tradition. Not only were the attacks of rationalism on dogma
reinforced by the ever-mounting tide of scientific discovery within
our institutions of learning, but also the news of these scientific
discoveries began to stir the imagination of the public, and to
carry the conflict of science and theology beyond the control of the
church-college. The greatest leaven was Darwin’s “Origin of Species,”
of which two American editions were announced as early as 1860, one
year after its publication in England. The dogma of science came
publicly to confront the dogma of theology. Howsoever conservative
the college, it had to yield to the new intellectual temper and the
capitulation was facilitated by the army of young professors whom
cheapened transportation and the rumour of great achievements led to
the universities of Germany.

From the point of view of popular interest, the immediate effects of
these pilgrimages were not wholly advantageous to philosophy. In losing
something of their American provincialism, these pilgrims also lost
their hold on American interests. The problems that they brought back
were rooted in a foreign soil and tradition. To students they appeared
artificial and barren displays of technical skill. Thus an academic
philosophy of professordom arose, the more lonely through the loss
of the ecclesiastical mediators of the earlier tradition. But here
and there American vitality showed through its foreign clothes and
gradually an assimilation took place, the more easily, perhaps, since
German idealism naturally sustains the genteel tradition and thrives
amid the modes of thought that Emerson had developed independently and
for which his literary gifts had obtained a following.

Wherever New England has constituted the skeletal muscles of
philosophic culture, its temper has remained unchanged. Calvinism was
brought to America because it suited this temper, and the history of
idealism in America is the history of its preservation by adaptation to
a changing environment of ideas. Its marks are a sense of the presence
of the Divine in experience and a no less strong sense of inevitable
evil. Jonathan Edwards writes, “When we behold the light and brightness
of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous
bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the
blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things
wherein we may behold His awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in
comets, in thunder, with the lowering thunder-clouds, in ragged rocks
and the brows of mountains.” Emerson’s version is: “Nature is always
consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws.... She arms
and equips an animal to find it place and living in the earth, and at
the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space
exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with
a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence.... Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. Every moment instructs and every object; for wisdom is
infused into every form.” And Royce’s: “When they told us in childhood
that we could not see God just _because_ he was everywhere, just
because his omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix
our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegorical fashion....
The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the unknown source
of experience, that already, in the very least of daily experiences,
you unconsciously know him as something present.”

In its darker aspect this temper gives us Edwards’s “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God,” whose choices we may not fathom. But Emerson
is not far behind: “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters
and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned
themselves to face it.... At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like
flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in
a few minutes. Etc.... Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road
to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in the clean
shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.” For Royce, “the
worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which
everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us--the tragedy of
the diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of whatever is
significant.”

Emersonian philosophy fails in two respects to satisfy the demands of
the puritanical temperament upon contemporary thought. In building
altars to the “Beautiful Necessity,” it neglects to assimilate the
discoveries of science, and it detaches itself from the Christian
tradition within which alone this spirit feels at home. Both of these
defects are met by the greatest of American idealists, Professor Royce.

In character and thought Royce is the great reconciler of
contradictions. Irrational in his affections, and at his best in
the society of children, he stands for the absolute authority of
reason; filled with indignation at wrong and injustice, he explains
the presence of evil as an essential condition for the good; keenly
critical and not optimistic as to the concrete characters of men, he
presents man as the image of God, a part of the self-representative
system through which the Divine nature unfolds itself. Never was there
a better illustration of Pascal’s dictum that we use our reasons to
support what we already believe, not to attain conclusions. And never
was there greater self-deception as to the presence of this process.

What man not already convinced of an Absolute could find in error the
proof of a deeper self that knows in unity all truth? Who else could
accept the dilemma “_either_ ... your real world yonder is through
and through a world of ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less
comprehending through your experience, _or else_, in so far as it
is real and outer, it is unknowable, an inscrutable X, an absolute
mystery”? Without the congeniality of belief, where is the thrill in
assimilating self-consciousness as infinite to a greater Infinite, as
the infinite systems of even numbers, or of odd numbers, or an infinity
of other infinite series can be assimilated to the greater infinity
of the whole number series as proper parts? Yet Royce has been able
to clothe these doctrines with vast erudition and flashes of quaint
humour, helped out by a prolix and somewhat desultory memory, and give
them life.

By virtue of the obscurantist logic inherent in this as in other
transcendental idealisms, there is a genuine attachment to a certain
aspect of Christianity. The identification of the Absolute with the
Logos of John in his “Spirit of Modern Philosophy” and the frequent
lapses into Scriptural language are not mere tricks to inspire
abstractions with the breath of life. By such logic “selves” are never
wholly distinct. If we make classifications, they are all _secundum
quid_. Absolute ontological sundering is as mythical as the Snark.
The individual is essentially a member of a community of selves that
establishes duties for him under the demands of Loyalty. This is the
basis of Royce’s ethics. But the fellowship in this community is also a
participation in the “beloved community” within which sin, atonement,
and the dogma of Pauline Christianity unfold themselves naturally in
the guise of social psychology. In such treatment of the “Problem of
Christianity” there is at most only a slight shifting of emphasis
from the somewhat too self-conscious individualism of his earliest
philosophy.

Royce used to tell a story on himself that illustrates a reaction of a
part of the public to idealistic philosophy. At the close of a lecture
before a certain woman’s organization, one of his auditors approached
him with the words: “Oh, my dear Professor Royce, I _did_ enjoy your
lectures _so_ much! Of course, I didn’t understand one word of it,
but it was so evident _you_ understood it all, that it made it _very_
enjoyable!” The lady, though more frank in her confession, was probably
not intellectually inferior to a considerable portion of the idealist’s
public. James notes the fascination of hearing high things talked
about, even if one cannot understand. But time is, alas, productive of
comparative understanding, and it may be with Royce, as with Emerson
before him, that growth of understanding contributes to narrowing the
circle of his readers. The imported mysteries of Eucken and Bergson
offer newer thrills, and a fuller sense of keeping up to date.

If Royce’s philosophy of religion has not the success that might have
been anticipated among those seeking a freer religion, it is probably,
as Professor Hocking suggests, because “idealism does not do the work
of religious truth.” Royce has no interest in churches or sects. Christ
is for him little more than a shadow. Prayer and worship find no place
in his discussion. The mantle of the genteel tradition must then fall
on other shoulders, probably those of Hocking himself. His “Meaning of
God in Human Experience” is an effort to unite realism, mysticism, and
idealism to establish Christianity as “organically rooted in passion,
fact, and institutional life.” Where idealism has destroyed the fear of
Hell, this new interpretation “restores the sense of infinite hazard, a
wrath to come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in the process of
time and by the use of our freedom”!

In this philosophy, we ask, what has religion done for humanity and how
has it operated? Its effects appear in “the basis of such certainties
as we have, our self-respect, our belief in human worth, our faith in
the soul’s stability through all catastrophes of physical nature, and
in the integrity of history.” But if we accept this “mass of actual
deed, once and for all accomplished under the assurance of historic
religion” and through the medium of religious dogma and practice,
does this guarantee the future importance of religion? Much has been
accomplished under the conception that the earth was flat, but the
conception is nevertheless not valid.

It is too soon to estimate the depth of impression that this philosophy
will make on American culture. Professor Hocking warns us against
hastening to judge that the world is becoming irreligious. He believes
that the current distaste for the language of orthodoxy may spring
from the opposite reason, that man is becoming potentially more
religious. If so, this fact may conspire with the American tradition
of the church-college to verify Professor Cohen’s assertion that
“the idealistic tradition still is and perhaps will long continue to
be the prevailing basis of philosophic instruction in America.” But
there are signs that point to an opposite conclusion and the means of
emancipation are at hand both in a change of popular spirit and within
philosophy itself.

The economic and social conditions that scattered the more adventurous
of the New Englanders through the developing West, and the tides
of immigration of the 19th century, have weakened the hold of the
Calvinistic spirit. These events, and scientific education, are
producing a generation that can look upon the beauties of nature, be
moved to enjoyment, admiration, and wonder by them without, on that
account, feeling themselves in the presence of a supernatural Divine
principle. Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling of
helplessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of
intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earthquake,
it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in reinforced
concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, an antitoxin, and
sanitary measures. There are no longer altars built to the Beautiful
Necessity.

Within philosophy, the most radical expression of this attitude appears
in the New Realism, and in the instrumentalism of Dewey. In 1910,
six of the younger American philosophers issued in the _Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method_ “The Programme and First
Platform of Six Realists,” followed shortly by a co-operative volume
of studies to elaborate the doctrine. Their deepest bond of union is
a distaste for the romantic spirit and obscurantist logic of Absolute
Idealism. Hence their dominant idea is to cut at the very foundations
of this system, the theory of relations in general, and the relation
of idea and object in particular. Young America is not fond of the
subtleties of history, hence these realists take their stand upon the
“unimpeachable truth of the accredited results of science” at a time
when, by the irony of history, science herself has begun to doubt.

To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While consciousness
exists there is always the chance that our world of facts may fade into
subjective presentations. Seizing a fruitful suggestion of James’, they
introduce us to a world of objects that exists quite independently
of being known. The relations of these objects are external to them
and independent of their character. Sometimes, however, there arise
relations between our organisms and other objects that can best be
described by asserting that these objects have entered into our
consciousness. How then can we fall into error? Only as nature makes
mistakes, by reacting in a way that brings conflict with unnoted
conditions. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Realism as yet to
American thought is the contribution of some of its apostles to its
implicit psychology, already independently established as behaviourism,
the most vital movement in contemporary psychology.

The highly technical form of the Six Realists’ co-operative volume has
kept their doctrine from any great reading public. But in its critical
echoes, the busy American finds a sympathetic note in the assertion
of the independent reality of the objects with which he works and the
world in which he has to make his way. His also is practical faith
in science, and he is glad to escape an inevitable type of religion
and moral theory to be swallowed along with philosophy. Until the New
Realists, however, develop further implications of their theory, or
at least present congenial religious, moral, and social attitudes,
their philosophy has only the negative significance of release. If it
is going to take a deep hold on life, it must also be creative, not
replacing dogma by dogma, but elaborating some new world vision. As yet
it has told us little more than that truth, goodness, and beauty are
independent realities, eternal subsistencies that await our discovery.

Professor Perry has outlined a realistic morality. For him a right
action is any that conduces to goodness and whatever fulfils an
interest is good. But a good action is not necessarily moral. Morality
requires the fulfilment of the greatest possible number of interests,
under the given circumstances; the highest good, if attainable,
would be an action fulfilling all possible interests. This doctrine,
though intelligible, is hard to apply in specific instances. In it
realism dissolves into pragmatism, and its significance can best be
seen in connection with that philosophy, where it has received fuller
development and concrete applications.

Pragmatism obtained its initial impulse through a mind in temper
between the sturdy common sense of the New Realists and the
emotionalistic romanticism of the Idealists, or rather comprehending
both within itself. This mind is that of William James, the last heir
of the line of pure New England culture, made cosmopolitan by travel
and intellectual contacts. Of Swedenborgian family, skilled alike in
science and art, James lived the mystical thrills of the unknown but
could handle them with the shrewdness of a Yankee trader. With young
America, his gaze is directed toward the future, and with it, he is
impatient of dogma and restraint. He is free from conventions of
thought and action with the freedom of those who have lived them all
in their ancestry and dare to face realities without fear of social
or intellectual _faux pas_. With such new-found freedom goes a vast
craving for experience. For him, the deepest realities are the personal
experiences of individual men.

James’ greatest contribution is his “Psychology.” In it he places
himself in the stream of human experience, ruthlessly cutting the
gordian knots of psychological dogma and conventions. The mind that he
reports is the mind each of us sees in himself. It is not so much a
science of psychology as the materials for such a science, a science
in its descriptive stage, constantly interrupted by shrewd homilies
wherein habit appears as the fly-wheel of society, or our many selves
enlarge the scope of sympathetic living. Nor is it congenial to this
adventurer in experience that his explorations should constrain
human nature within a scientist’s map. Not only must the stream of
consciousness flow between the boundaries of our concepts, but also in
the human will there is a point, be it ever so small, where a “we,” too
real ever to be comprehended by science or philosophy, can dip down
into the stream of consciousness and delay some fleeting idea, be it
only for the twinkling of an eye, and thereby change the whole course
and significance of our overt action. Freedom must not unequivocally
surrender to scientific determinism, or chance to necessity.

James is a Parsifal to whom the Grail is never quite revealed. His
pragmatism and radical empiricism are but methods of exploration and
no adventure is too puny or mean for the quest. We must make our ideas
clear and test them by the revelation they produce. Thoughts that make
no difference to us in living are not real thoughts, but imaginings.
The way is always open and perhaps there is a guiding truth, a
working value, in the operations of even the deranged mind. We must
entertain the ecstatic visions of saints, the alleged communications of
spiritualists, mystical contacts with sources of some higher power, and
even the thought-systems of cranks, that nothing be lost or untried.
Not that we need share such beliefs, but they are genuine experiences
and who can foretell where in experiences some fruitful vision may
arise!

As a psychologist, James knew that the significance of a belief lies
not so much in its content as in its power to direct the energies it
releases. His catholic interests are not equivalent to uncritical
credulity. Santayana, the wisest of his critics, is right in his
assertion that James never lost his agnosticism: “He did not really
believe; he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be
right if you believed.” As for Pascal, the wager on immortality might
be worth the making for if one won there was the blessedness of Heaven,
and if one lost--at least there should have been a sustaining optimism
through the trials of this life. Communion with the infinite might open
new sources of power. If so, the power was there. If not, no harm had
been done by the trial. Yet there is no evidence in James’ philosophy
that he himself drew inspiration from any of such sources.

If James has drawn to himself the greatest reading public of all
American philosophers, it is because in him each man can find the
sanction for himself. Without dogmatism or pedantry, James is the
voice of all individual human experiences. In him, each man can find a
sympathetic auditor, and words vivid with the language of the street,
encouraging his endeavours or at least pointing out the significance
of his experiences for the great business of living. Sometimes James
listens to human confessions with a suppressed cry of pain and recalls
wistfully “A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” or asks “Is Life Worth
Living?” Once with indignation at “the delicate intellectualities
and subtleties and scrupulosities” of philosophy he confronts “the
host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers” with the radical realities of
Morrison I. Swift, only to partially retract a few pages later with
the admission, for him grudgingly given, that the Absolute may afford
its believers a certain comfort and is “in so far forth” true. We live
after all in an open universe, the lid is off and time relentlessly
operates for the production of novelties. No empiricist can give a
decision until the evidence is all in, and in the nature of the case
this can never happen.

Such openness of interest forefends the possibility of James’ founding
a school of philosophy. It also renders all his younger contemporaries
in some measure his disciples. Popularly he is the refuge of the
mystics and heterodox, the spiritualists and the cranks who seek the
sanction of academic scholarship and certified dignity. There are
more things in the philosophies of these who call him master than are
dreamed of in his philosophy. In academic philosophy there is a dual
descent of the James tradition. As a principle of negative criticism,
it may be turned into its opposite, as with Hocking, who enunciates
the extreme form of the pragmatic principle, If a theory is not
interesting, it is false--and utilizes it for his realistic, mystic,
idealistic absolutism. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, that has been
widely read in this country, reinforces this mystical spiritual side,
but American mysticism has popularly tended to degenerate into the
occultisms of second-rate credulous minds.

On the other hand, for those in whom the conflict of science and
religion is settling itself on the side of science, the principle of
pragmatism lends itself to the interpretation originally intended by
Charles Peirce, the author of the term, as an experimentalism, a search
for verifiable hypotheses after the manner of the sciences. But this
side of the doctrine is the one that has been developed by John Dewey.

Professor Dewey is without question the leading American philosopher,
both from the thoroughness of his analyses and the vigour of his appeal
to the American public. In discarding the Hegelian Idealism in which
he was trained, he is thoroughly aligned with the New America. In him
science has wholly won, and although of New England, Vermont, ancestry,
there remains not a trace of the New Englander’s romantic spiritual
longings for contact with a vast unknown. His dogmatic faiths, and no
man is without such faiths, relate to evolution, democracy, and the
all-decisive authority of experience.

For Dewey, as for the Realists, psychology is the study of human
behaviour. For him mind is the instrument by which we overcome
obstacles and thinking takes place only when action is checked. Hence
in the conventional sense there are no abstractions. Our concepts are
instruments by which we take hold of reality. If we need instruments to
manufacture instruments, or to facilitate their use, these instruments
are also concepts. We may call them abstract, but they are not thereby
removed from the realm of experienced fact. Since, therefore, our real
interest is not in things as they are in themselves, but in what we
can do with them, our judgments are judgments of value, and value is
determined by practice. Such judgments imply an incomplete physical
situation and look toward its completion. But the will to believe
is gone. There is no shadow of James’ faith in the practicality of
emotional satisfactions, or in his voluntaristic psychology. Our
“sensations are not the elements out of which perceptions are composed,
constituted, or constructed; they are the finest, most carefully
discriminated objects of perception.” Early critics, particularly
among the realists, have accused Dewey of subjectivism, but except in
the sense that an individual must be recognized as one term in the
reaction to a situation, and the realists themselves do this, there is
no ground for the charge.

Such a philosophy as Dewey’s is nothing if it is not put to work. And
here is his greatest hold on American life. Like most Americans, he has
no sympathy for the lazy, and even the over-reflective may suffer from
the contamination of sloth; the true American wants to see results, and
here is a philosophy in which results are the supreme end. Reform is,
for America, a sort of sport and this philosophy involves nothing but
reform. Metaphysical subtleties and visions leave the busy man cold;
here they are taboo.

Professor Dewey puts his philosophy to work in the fields of ethics
and education. Perhaps his ethics is the least satisfactory, howsoever
promising its beginnings. Moral codes become the expression of
group-approval. But they easily pass into tradition, get out of touch
with fact, are superannuated. The highest virtue is intelligence and
with intelligence one can recognize the uniqueness of every moral
situation and develop from it its own criteria of judgment. Progress
in morals consists in raising the general level of intelligence and
extending the group whose approvals are significant from a social
class to the nation, a notion of highest appeal to Democracy, with
its faith in the individual man. But with Dewey the limit of group
expansion is humanity, and this may verge on dangerous (unfortunately)
radicalism. Dewey’s weapon against conventional ethics is two-edged.
For the intelligent man perhaps there is no better actual moral
standard than that springing from intelligent specific judgments, but
for the uneducated, it is only too easy to identify intelligence with
sentimental opinion and to let practice degenerate into legislative
repression.

After all, judgments of practice do face incomplete situations and the
problem is not only to complete but also to determine the manner in
which the completion shall be brought about. What men transform is not
merely the world, but themselves, and the ethics is incomplete without
some further consideration of such questions as what are human natures,
and what do we want them to become. But perhaps such questions are
too dangerously near metaphysics to have appealed to Dewey’s powers
of analysis. At any rate, the general effectiveness of his ethics is
weakened by his neglect of attention to principles in some sense at
least ultimate.

In education Dewey’s philosophy has its most complete vitality, for
here he is dealing with concrete needs and the means of satisfying
them. The problem of education is to integrate knowledge and life.
He finds no joy in information for information’s sake. Curiosity
may be the gift of the child, but it must be utilized to equip the
man to hold his own in a world of industrialism and democracy. Yet
Dewey’s sympathies are with spontaneity. He is a Rousseau with a new
methodology. Connected with the Laboratory School at Chicago from 1896
to 1903, he has since followed with sympathetic interest all radical
experimentation from the methods of Madame Montessori to those of the
Gary Schools. The vast erudition amassed in this field, and his careful
and unprejudiced study of children, has made him competent above all
men to speak critically of methods and results.

In regard to education, he has given a fuller consideration of the ends
to be attained than in the case of ethics. The end is seen as continued
growth, springing from the existing conditions, freeing activity, and
flexible in its adaptation to circumstances. The educational result
is social efficiency and culture. This efficiency does not, however,
imply accepting existing economic conditions as final, and its cultural
aspect, good citizenship, includes with the more specific positive
virtues, those characteristics that make a man a good companion.
Culture is a complete ripening of the personality. “What is termed
spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about
it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might
have internally--and therefore exclusively.” The antithesis between
sacrificing oneself for others, or others for oneself, is an unreal
figment of the imagination, a tragic product of certain spiritual and
religious thinking.

Professor Dewey well understands the dangers that lurk behind such
terms as _social efficiency_ and _good citizenship_. To him sympathy
is much more than a mere feeling: it is, as he says it should be, “a
cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion
at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” But his very gift of clear
vision, his penetration of the shams of dogma, economic and social,
leads him to treat these things with scant respect. In consequence his
fellow-philosophers, the educators over whom his influence is profound,
and the public suspect him of radicalism. Only too often, to avoid
suspicion of themselves, they turn his doctrine to the very uses that
he condemns: industrial efficiency for them becomes identical with
business expedience; the school, a trade school; culture, a detached
æstheticism to be condemned; and democracy, the privilege of thinking
and acting like everybody else.

The greatest weakness of Dewey’s philosophy, and it is serious, for
Dewey as no other American philosopher grasps principles through
which American civilization might be transformed for the better--lies
in its lack of a metaphysics. Not, of course, a transcendentalism
or a religious mysticism, but above all an interpretation of human
nature. Emotionality represents a phase of the behaviour process
too real to deny, yet it has no place in Dewey’s philosophy of man.
Human longings and aspirations are facts as real as the materials
of industry. Most men remain religious. Must they rest with quack
mystics or unintelligent dogmatists? What is religion giving them that
they crave? Is it a form of art, an attitude toward the ideal, or
some interpretation of the forces of nature that they seek to grasp?
Professor Dewey is himself a lover of art, but what place has art in
his philosophy? If it is an instrument of education, what end does it
serve, and how is it to be utilized? The pragmatic ethics gives no
guarantee that the moral criteria developed by specific situations will
always be the same even for two men equally intelligent. Perhaps, in
spite of the paradox, there may be several best solutions. If so, this
fact has some significance rooted in man’s nature and his relations to
the world that philosophy should disclose. Such supplementation need
not change the character of the results, but it might forefend them
from misinterpretation and abuse.

With all its incompleteness, Dewey’s philosophy is undeniably
that of the America of to-day. What shall we say of the future? No
nation in the world has more abused its philosophies than ours. The
inspirational elements of our idealisms have become the panderings of
sentimentalists. The vitalizing forces of our pragmatisms threaten to
congeal into the dogmata of cash-success. The war has intensified our
national self-satisfaction. We tend to condemn all vision as radical,
hence unsound, hence evil, hence to be put down. Philosophy thrives in
the atmosphere of the Bacchæ:

      “What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
           Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
           To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
           To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
       And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?”

But what have we now of this atmosphere?

At Christmas-time, the American Philosophical Association devoted three
sessions to the discussion of the Rôle of the Philosopher in Modern
Life. From report, opinion was divided between those who would have
him a social reformer, to the exclusion of contemplative background,
and those with a greater sense of playing safe, who would have him
turn to history, of any sort, or contemplation quite detached from
social consequences. Let us hope these opinions are not to be taken
seriously. Our social reformers are not all like Dewey, whose neglect
of basic reflection is probably not as great as the omission of
such reflections from his published works would indicate. Nor is an
academic chair generally suited to the specific contacts with life from
which successful reforms must be shaped. On the other hand, abstract
contemplation with the pedagogic reinforcements advocated, will confirm
the popular American sentiment against reflection, if it is true,
as Dewey asserts, that education must be an outgrowth of existing
conditions. Fortunately genius, if such there be amongst us, will not
submit to the opinions of the American Philosophic Association. If
philosophy can find freedom, perhaps America can yet find philosophy.

                                                HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN




THE LITERARY LIFE


Among all the figures which, in Mrs. Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,”
make up the pallid little social foreground, the still more pallid
middle distance, of the New York of forty years ago, there is none
more pallid than the figure of Ned Winsett, the “man of letters
untimely born in a world that had no need of letters.” Winsett, we
are told, “had published one volume of brief and exquisite literary
appreciations,” of which one hundred and twenty copies had been sold,
and had then abandoned his calling and taken an obscure post on a
women’s weekly. “On the subject of _Hearth-fires_ (as the paper was
called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining,” says Mrs. Wharton; “but
beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man
who has tried and given up.” Sterile bitterness, a bright futility, a
beginning without a future: that is the story of Ned Winsett.

One feels, as one turns Mrs. Wharton’s pages, how symbolic this is
of the literary life in America. I shall say nothing of the other
arts, though the vital conditions of all the arts have surely much in
common; I shall say nothing of America before the Civil War, for the
America that New England dominated was a different nation from ours.
But what immediately strikes one, as one surveys the history of our
literature during the last half century, is the singular impotence of
its creative spirit. That we have and have always had an abundance of
talent is, I think, no less evident: what I mean is that so little
of this talent succeeds in effectuating itself. Of how many of our
modern writers can it be said that their work reveals a continuous
growth, or indeed any growth, that they hold their ground tenaciously
and preserve their sap from one decade to another? Where, to speak
relatively, the characteristic evolution of the European writer is one
of an ever-increasing differentiation, a progress toward the creation,
the possession of a world absolutely his own (the world of Shaw, the
world of Hardy, the world of Hamsun, of Gorky, of Anatole France),
the American writer, having struck out with his new note, becomes--how
often!--progressively less and less himself. The blighted career,
the arrested career, the diverted career are, with us, the rule. The
chronic state of our literature is that of a youthful promise which is
never redeemed.

The great writer, the _grand écrivain_, has at the best of times
appeared but once or twice in America: that is another matter. I am
speaking, as I say, of the last half century, and I am speaking of the
rank and file. There are those who will deny this characterization of
our literature, pointing to what they consider the robust and wholesome
corpus of our “normal” fiction. But this fiction, in its way, precisely
corroborates my point. What is the quality of the spirit behind it? How
much does it contain of that creative element the character of which
consists in dominating life instead of being dominated by it? Have
these novelists of ours any world of their own as distinguished from
the world they observe and reflect, the world they share with their
neighbours? Is it a personal vision that informs them, or a mob-vision?
The Danish writer, Johannes V. Jensen, has described their work as
“journalism under exceptionally fortunate conditions.” Journalism, on
the whole, it assuredly is, and the chief of these fortunate conditions
(fortunate for journalism!) has been the general failure of the writers
in question to establish and develop themselves as individuals; as
they have rendered unto Cæsar what was intended for God, is it any
wonder that Cæsar has waxed so fat? “The unfortunate thing,” writes Mr.
Montrose J. Moses, “is that the American drama”--but the observation is
equally true of this fiction of ours--“has had many brilliant promises
which have finally thinned out and never materialized.” And again:
“The American dramatist has always taken his logic second-hand; he
has always allowed his theatrical sense to be a slave to managerial
circumstance.” The two statements are complementary, and they apply,
as I say, to the whole of this “normal” literature of ours. Managerial
circumstance? Let us call it local patriotism, the spirit of the times,
the hunger of the public for this, that, or the other: to some one of
these demands, these promptings from without, the “normal” American
writer always allows himself to become a slave. It is the fact, indeed,
of his being a slave to some demand from without that makes him
“normal”--and something else than an artist.

The flourishing exterior of the main body of our contemporary
literature, in short, represents anything but the integrity of an
inner well-being. But even aside from this, one can count on one’s two
hands the American writers who are able to carry on the development
and unfolding of their individualities, year in, year out, as every
competent man of affairs carries on his business. What fate overtakes
the rest? Shall I begin to run over some of those names, familiar to
us all, names that have signified so much promise and are lost in
what Gautier calls “the limbo where moan (in the company of babes)
still-born vocations, abortive attempts, larvæ of ideas that have won
neither wings nor shapes”? Shall I mention the writers--but they are
countless!--who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves
in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines? The poets
who, at the very outset of their careers, find themselves extinguished
like so many candles? The novelists who have been unable to grow up,
and remain withered boys of seventeen? The critics who find themselves
overtaken in mid-career by a hardening of the spiritual arteries? Our
writers all but universally lack the power of growth, the endurance
that enables one to continue to produce personal work after the
freshness of youth has gone. Weeds and wild flowers! Weeds without
beauty or fragrance, and wild flowers that cannot survive the heat of
the day.

Such is the aspect of our contemporary literature; beside that of
almost any European country, it is indeed one long list of spiritual
casualties. For it is not that the talent is wanting, but that somehow
this talent fails to fulfil itself.

This being so, how much one would like to assume, with certain of our
critics, that the American writer is a sort of Samson bound with the
brass fetters of the Philistines and requiring only to have those
fetters cast off in order to be able to conquer the world! That, as I
understand it, is the position of Mr. Dreiser, who recently remarked
of certain of our novelists: “They succeeded in writing but one
book before the iron hand of convention took hold of them.” There
is this to be said for the argument, that if the American writer as
a type shows less resistance than the European writer it is plainly
because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nourished by
the society into which he has been born. In this sense the American
environment is answerable for the literature it has produced. But what
is significant is that the American writer _does_ show less resistance;
as literature is nothing but the expression of power, of the creative
will, of “free will,” in short, is it not more accurate to say, not
that the “iron hand of convention” takes hold of our writers, but
that our writers yield to the “iron hand of convention”? Samson had
lost his virility before the Philistines bound him; it was because he
had lost his virility that the Philistines were able to bind him. The
American writer who “goes wrong” is in a similar case. “I have read,”
says Mr. Dreiser, of Jack London, “several short stories which proved
what he could do. But he did not feel that he cared for want and public
indifference. Hence his many excellent romances.” _He did not feel
that he cared for want and public indifference._ Even Mr. Dreiser, as
we observe, determinist that he is, admits a margin of free will, for
he represents Jack London as having made a choice. What concerns us
now, however, is not a theoretical but a practical question, the fact,
namely, that the American writer as a rule is actuated not by faith
but by fear, that he cannot meet the obstacles of “want and public
indifference” as the European writer meets them, that he is, indeed,
and as if by nature, a journeyman and a hireling.

As we see, then, the creative will in this country is a very weak and
sickly plant. Of the innumerable talents that are always emerging about
us there are few that come to any sort of fruition: the rest wither
early; they are transformed into those neuroses that flourish on our
soil as orchids flourish in the green jungle. The sense of this failure
is written all over our literature. Do we not know what depths of
disappointment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams and
Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the surly contempt with
which the author of “The Story of a Country Town” habitually speaks of
writers and writing, the unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose
creative life was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness
with which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London
regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying that for
half a century the American writer as a type has gone down in defeat.

Now why is this so? Why does the American writer, relatively speaking,
show less resistance than the European writer? Plainly, as I have
just said, because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated,
nourished by the society into which he has been born. If our creative
spirits are unable to grow and mature, it is a sign that there is
something wanting in the soil from which they spring and in the
conditions that surround them. Is it not, for that matter, a sign of
some more general failure in our life?

“At the present moment,” wrote Mr. Chesterton in one of his early
essays (“The Fallacy of the Young Nation”), struck by the curious
anæmia of those few artists of ours who have succeeded in developing
themselves, usually by escaping from the American environment; “at
the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to
consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near
it may be to its end.... The English colonies have produced no great
artists, and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent
possibilities and reserve force. But America has produced great artists
and that fact most certainly means that she is full of a fine futility
and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are,
they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a
brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect
us with the spirit of a school-boy? No, the colonies have not spoken,
and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But
out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as
the cry of a dying man.” That there is truth behind this, that the
soil of our society is at least arid and impoverished, is indicated
by the testimony of our own poets; one has only to consider what
George Cabot Lodge wrote in 1904, in one of his letters: “We are a
dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and
not accumulators, third-rate”; one has only to consider the writings
of Messrs. Frost, Robinson, and Masters, in whose presentation of our
life, in the West as well as in the East, the individual as a spiritual
unit invariably suffers defeat. Fifty years ago J. A. Froude, on a
visit to this country, wrote to one of his friends: “From what I see of
the Eastern states I do not anticipate any very great things as likely
to come out of the Americans.... They are generous with their money,
have much tenderness and quiet good humour; but the Anglo-Saxon power
is running to seed and I don’t think will revive.” When we consider
the general colourlessness and insipidity of our latter-day life
(faithfully reflected in the novels of Howells and his successors),
the absence from it of profound passions and intense convictions,
of any representative individuals who can be compared in spiritual
force with Emerson, Thoreau, and so many of their contemporaries, its
uniformity and its uniform tepidity, then the familiar saying, “Our
age has been an age of management, not of ideas or of men,” assumes
indeed a very sinister import. I go back to the poet Lodge’s letters.
“Was there ever,” he writes, “such an anomaly as the American man?
In practical affairs his cynicism, energy, and capacity are simply
stupefying, and in every other respect he is a sentimental idiot
possessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the desire for even
the most elementary processes of independent thought.... His wife
finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear him children and
so drivelling in every way except as a money-getter that she compels
him to expend his energies solely in that direction while she leads a
discontented, sterile, stunted life....” Is this to be denied? And does
it not in part explain that extraordinary lovelessness of the American
scene which has bred the note of a universal resentment in so much of
our contemporary fiction? As well expect figs from thistles as any
considerable number of men from such a soil who are robust enough to
prefer spiritual to material victories and who are capable of achieving
them.

It is unnecessary to go back to Taine in order to realize that here we
have a matrix as unpropitious as possible for literature and art. If
our writers wither early, if they are too generally pliant, passive,
acquiescent, anæmic, how much is this not due to the heritage of
pioneering, with its burden of isolation, nervous strain, excessive
work and all the racial habits that these have engendered?

Certainly, for example, if there is anything that counts in the
formation of the creative spirit it is that long infancy to which John
Fiske, rightly or wrongly, attributed the emergence of man from the
lower species. In the childhood of almost every great writer one finds
this protracted incubation, this slow stretch of years in which the
unresisting organism opens itself to the influences of life. It was so
with Hawthorne, it was so with Whitman in the pastoral America of a
century ago: they were able to mature, these brooding spirits, because
they had given themselves for so long to life before they began to
react upon it. That is the old-world childhood still, in a measure;
how different it is from the modern American childhood may be seen if
one compares, for example, the first book (“Boyhood”) of “Pelle the
Conqueror” with any of those innumerable tales in which our novelists
show us that in order to succeed in life one cannot be up and doing too
soon. The whole temper of our society, if one is to judge from these
documents, is to hustle the American out of his childhood, teaching him
at no age at all how to repel life and get the best of it and build up
the defences behind which he is going to fight for his place in the
sun. Who can deny that this racial habit succeeds in its unconscious
aim, which is to produce sharp-witted men of business? But could
anything be deadlier to the poet, the artist, the writer?

Everything in such an environment, it goes without saying, tends to
repress the creative and to stimulate the competitive impulses. A
certain Irish poet has observed that all he ever learned of poetry he
got from talking with peasants along the road. Whitman might have said
almost as much, even of New York, the New York of seventy years ago.
But what nourishment do they offer the receptive spirit to-day, the
harassed, inhibited mob of our fellow-countrymen, eaten up with the
“itch of ill-advised activity,” what encouragement to become anything
but an automaton like themselves? And what direction, in such a
society, does the instinct of emulation receive, that powerful instinct
of adolescence? A certain visitor of Whitman’s has described him as
living in a house “as cheerless as an ash-barrel,” a house indeed “like
that in which a very destitute mechanic” might have lived. Is it not
symbolic, that picture, of the esteem in which our democracy holds the
poet? If to-day the man of many dollars is no longer the hero of the
editorial page and the baccalaureate address, still, or rather more
than ever, it is the “aggressive” type that overshadows every corner
of our civilization; the intellectual man who has gone his own way
and refused to flatter the majority was never less the hero or even
the subject of intelligent interest; at best ignored, at worst (and
usually) pointed out as a crank, he is only a “warning” to youth,
which is exceedingly susceptible in these matters. But how can one
begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form
a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative
type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige
to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career,
everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural
course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a
single narrow channel.

Here, of course, I touch upon the main fact of American history.
That traditional drag, if one may so express it, in the direction
of the practical, which has been the law of our civilization, would
alone explain why our literature and art have never been more than
half-hearted. To abandon the unpopular and unremunerative career of
painting for the useful and lucrative career of invention must have
seemed natural and inevitable to Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse.
So strong is this racial compulsion, so feeble is the hold which
Americans have upon ultimate values, that one can scarcely find to-day
a scientist or a scholar who, for the sake of science or scholarship,
will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering president
of some insignificant university. Thus our intellectual life has
always been ancillary to the life of business and organization: have
we forgotten that the good Washington Irving himself, the father of
American letters, thought it by no means beneath his dignity to serve
as a sort of glorified press-agent for John Jacob Astor?

It is certainly true that none of these unfavourable factors of
American life could have had such a baleful effect upon our literature
if there had been others to counteract them. An aristocratic tradition,
if we had ever had it, would have kept open among us the right of
way of the free individual, would have preserved the claims of mere
living. “It is curious to observe,” writes Nietzsche in one of his
letters, “how any one who soon leaves the traditional highway in order
to travel on his own proper path always has more or less the sense of
being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind.” If that
is true in the old world, where society is so much more complex and
offers the individual so much more latitude, how few could ever have
had the strength in a society like ours, which has always placed such
an enormous premium on conformity, to become and to remain themselves?
Is it fanciful indeed to see in the famous “remorse” of Poe the traces
left by this dereliction of the tribal law upon the unconscious mind
of an artist of unique force and courage? Similarly, a tradition of
voluntary poverty would have provided us with an escape from the
importunities of bourgeois custom. But aside from the fact that even so
simple a principle as this depends largely for its life on precedent
(Whitman and the painter Ryder are almost alone among latter-day
Americans in having discovered it for themselves), aside from the fact
that to secede from the bourgeois system is, in America, to subject
oneself to peculiar penalties (did it ever occur to Mark Twain that he
_could_ be honourably poor?)--aside from all this, poverty in the new
world is by no means the same thing as poverty in the old: one has only
to think of Charles Lamb and all the riches that London freely gave
him, all the public resources he had at his disposal, to appreciate
the difference. With us poverty means in the end an almost inevitable
intellectual starvation. Consider such a plaint as Sidney Lanier’s:
“I could never describe to you” (he writes to Bayard Taylor) “what a
mere drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multitude of
matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art,
or when one is in conversational relationship with men of letters,
with travellers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done
large things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation
in the South since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been
merely not dying.” That is what poverty means in America, poverty
and isolation, for Lanier, whose talent, as we can see to-day, was
hopelessly crippled by it, was mistaken if he supposed that there was
anything peculiar to the South in that plight of his: it has been the
plight of the sensitive man everywhere in America and at all times. Add
to poverty the want of a society devoted to intellectual things and we
have such a fate as Herman Melville’s in New York. “What he lacked,”
wrote Mr. Frank Jewett Mather the other day, explaining the singular
evaporation of Melville’s talent, “was possibly only health and
nerve, but perhaps even more, companionship of a friendly, critical,
understanding sort. In London, where he must have been hounded out of
his corner, I can imagine Melville carrying the reflective vein to
literary completion.” Truly Samuel Butler was right when he jotted down
the following observation in his note-book: “America will have her
geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she has already had one
in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good place in which to
be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if
he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which
life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.”

To such circumstances as these, I say, the weakness of our literary
life is due. If we had lacked nothing else indeed, the lack of great
leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild, even of an
enlightened publishing system would have sufficed to account for
much of it. To consider the last point first: in the philosophy of
American publishing, popularity has been regarded not only as a
practical advantage but as a virtue as well. Thanks to the peculiar
character of our democracy, our publishers have been able to persuade
themselves that a book which fails to appeal to the ordinary citizen
cannot be good on other grounds. Thus, if we had had to depend on the
established system, the present revival in our letters, tentative as
it is, would have been still more sadly handicapped. The history of
Mr. Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” is enough to suggest what may well have
been the fate of many an incipient author less persistent than he. It
is certain, in any case, that many another, at a critical moment, has
drifted away from literature because of the lack in our publishing
world of those opportunities for a semi-creative hack-work which
have provided countless European writers with a foothold and even a
guideway. The Grub Street of London and Paris is a purgatory, but as
long as it exists, with its humble instrumentalities, translating,
editing, reviewing, one can at least survive until one has either
lost or found oneself: it scarcely needs to be pointed out that the
American magazine, with its mechanical exactions, which levy such a
terrible toll upon one’s individuality, is anything but an advantageous
substitute. Till one has found oneself, the less one is subjected to
such powerful, such essentially depolarizing influences, the better;
the most mediocre institutions, if they enable one at the same time
to maintain one’s contact with literature and to keep body and soul
together, are as life is to death beside them. How many English
writers owe their ultimate salvation to such trivial agencies as
_T. P.’s Weekly_? In America, where nothing of the kind has existed
until lately, or nothing adequate to the number of those who might
have benefitted by it, the literary aspirant is lost unless his powers
mature at once.

But the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting
literary guild (the one results from the other)--is not this our chief
misfortune? In the best of circumstances, and considering all the
devils that beset the creative spirit, a strong impulse is scarcely
enough to carry one through: one must feel not only that one is doing
what one wishes to do but that what one is doing _matters_. If dozens
of American writers have fallen by the wayside because they have met
with insuperable obstacles, dozens of others have fallen, with all
their gifts, because they have lost interest in their work, because
they have ceased to “see the necessity” of it. This is just the point
where the presence of a leader, of a local tradition, a school, a
guild makes all the difference. “With the masters I converse,” writes
Gauguin in his journal. “Their example fortifies me. When I am tempted
to falter I blush before them.” If that could have been true of
Gauguin, the “Wolf,” who walked by himself as few have walked, what
shall we say of other men whose artistic integrity, whose faith in
themselves, is exposed every day to the corroding influences of a
third-rate civilization? It would be all very well if literature were
merely a mode of “having a good time;” I am speaking of those, the real
artists, who, with Nietzsche, make a distinction (illusory perhaps)
between “happiness” and “work,” and I say that these men have always
fed on the thought of greatness and on the propinquity of greatness. It
was not for nothing that Turgeniev bore in his memory, as a talisman,
the image of Pushkin; that Gorky, having seen Tolstoy once, sitting
among the boulders on the seashore, felt everything in him blending
in one happy thought, “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as
this man lives on it.” The presence of such men immeasurably raises
the morale of the literary life: that is what Chekhov meant when he
said, “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” and is it not true that the
whole contemporary literature of England has drawn virtue from Thomas
Hardy? The sense that one is _working in a great line_: this, more than
anything else perhaps, renews one’s confidence in the “quaint mania
of passing one’s life wearing oneself out over words,” as Flaubert
called it, in the still greater folly of pursuing one’s ego when
everything in life combines to punish one for doing so. The successful
pursuit of the ego is what makes literature; this requires not only
a certain inner intensity but a certain courage, and it is doubtful
whether, in any nation, any considerable number of men can summon up
that courage and maintain it unless they have _seen the thing done_.
The very notion that such a life is either possible or desirable, the
notion that such a life exists even, can hardly occur to the rank and
file: some individual has to start the ball rolling, some individual
of extraordinary force and audacity, and where is that individual to
be found in our modern American literature? Whitman is the unique
instance, for Henry James, with all his admirable conscience, was at
once an exile and a man of singularly low vitality; and Whitman was not
only essentially of an earlier generation, he was an invalid who folded
his hands in mid-career.

Of those others what can we say, those others whose gifts have fitted
them to be our leaders? Mr. Howells once observed of the American drama
of the last few decades that “mainly it has been gay as our prevalent
mood is, mainly it has been honest, as our habit is, in cases where
we believe we can afford it.” In this gently ironical pleasantry one
seems to discern the true spirit of modern American letters. But it was
Howells himself who, in order to arrive at the doctrine that “the more
smiling aspects of life are the more American,” deliberately, as he has
told us, and professed realist that he was, averted his eyes from the
darker side of life. And Mark Twain suppressed his real beliefs about
man and the universe. And Henry Adams refused to sponsor in public the
novels that revealed what he considered to be the truth about American
society. Thus spake Zarathustra: “There is no harsher misfortune in
all the fate of man than when the mighty ones of earth are not also
the most excellent.” At its very headwaters, as we see, this modern
literature of ours has failed to flow clear: the creative impulse in
these men, richly endowed as they were, was checked and compromised
by too many other impulses, social and commercial. If one is to blame
anything for this it is the immense insecurity of our life, which is
due to its chaotic nature; for one is not entitled to expect greatness
even of those who have the greatest gifts, and of these men Henry Adams
was alone secure; of Howells and Mark Twain, Westerners as they were,
it may be said that they were obliged to compromise, consciously or
unconsciously, in order to gain a foothold in the only corner of the
country where men could exist as writers at all. But if these men were
unable to establish their independence (one has only to recall the
notorious Gorky dinner in order to perceive the full ignominy of their
position), what must one expect to find in the rank and file? Great men
form a sort of wind shield behind which the rest of their profession
are able to build up their own defences; they establish a right of
way for the others; they command a respect for their profession, they
arouse in the public a concern for it, an interest in it, from which
the others benefit. As things are, the literary guild in America is
not respected, nor does it respect itself. In “My Literary Passions”
Howells, after saying that his early reading gave him no standing
among other boys, observes: “I have since found that literature gives
one no more certain station in the world of men’s activities, either
idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it does, but
that is all nonsense. At every period of life among boys or men we
are accepted when they are at leisure and want to be amused, and at
best we are tolerated rather than accepted.” Pathetic? Pusillanimous?
Abject? Pathetic, I suppose. Imagine Maxim Gorky or Knut Hamsun or
Bernard Shaw “trying to believe” that literature gives him a certain
station in the world of men’s activities, conceiving for a moment
that any activity could exceed his in dignity! Howells, we observe,
conscientious craftsman as he was, instinctively shared, in regard
to the significance of his vocation, the feeling of our pragmatic
philosophers, who have been obliged to justify the intellectual life by
showing how useful it is--not to mention Mr. R. W. Chambers, who has
remarked that writers “are not held in excessive esteem by really busy
people, the general idea being--which is usually true--that literature
is a godsend to those unfitted for real work.” After this one can
easily understand why our novelists take such pains to be mistaken for
business men and succeed so admirably in their effort. One can easily
understand why Jack London preferred the glory of his model ranch and
his hygienic pigsties to the approval of his artistic conscience.

So much for the conditions, or at least a few of them, that have
prevented our literature from getting its head above water. If
America is littered with extinct talents, the halt, the maimed and
the blind, it is for reasons with which we are all too familiar; and
we to whom the creative life is nothing less than the principle of
human movement, and its welfare the true sign of human health, look
upon this wreckage of everything that is most precious to society and
ask ourselves what our fathers meant when they extolled the progress
of our civilization. But let us look facts in the face. Mr. Sinclair
Lewis asserts that we are in the midst of a revival and that we are
too humble in supposing that our contemporary literature is inferior
to that of England. That we are in the midst of a revival I have no
doubt, but it is the sustained career that makes a literature; without
the evidence of this we can hope much but we can affirm nothing. What
we can see is that, with all its hope, the morale of the literary
profession in this country is just what its antecedents have made
it. I am reminded of the observation of a friend who has reason to
know, that the Catholic Church in America, great as it is in numbers
and organization, still depends on the old world for its models, its
task-masters and its inspiration; for the American priest, as a rule,
does not feel the vocation as the European feels it. I am reminded of
the American labour movement which, prosperous as it is in comparison
with the labour movements of Europe, is unparalleled for the feebleness
of its representatives. I am reminded of certain brief experiences in
the American university world which have led me to believe that the
professors who radiate a genuine light and warmth are far more likely
to be Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes and
Finns than the children of ’76. That old hostility of the pioneers to
the special career still operates to prevent in the American mind the
powerful, concentrated pursuit of any non-utilitarian way of life:
meanwhile everything else in our society tends to check the growth of
the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself.
Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has
been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our
literature is merely emblematic.

Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a
change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy
that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him,
appreciating him, forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the
individual and the mob. That no change can come without the development
of an aristocracy of some sort, some nucleus of the more gifted,
energetic and determined, one can hardly doubt. But how can one expect
the emergence of an aristocracy outside of the creative class, and
devoted to its welfare, unless and until the creative class itself
reveals the sort of pride that can alone attract its ministrations?
“The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously
is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities.” Thus William
James, in defence of the aristocratic principle; and what he says is
as applicable to literature as to every other department of social
life. But he continues: “Mankind does nothing save through initiatives
on the part of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest
of us--these are the sole factors alive in human progress. Individuals
of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then
adopt and follow.” In other words, as I understand it, and so far
as literature is concerned, the burden of proof lies on the writer
himself--which brings one back to a truism: it is not for the public or
any aristocratic minority within the public to understand the writer,
it is for the writer to create the taste by which he is understood. Is
it not by this indeed (in a measure, at least) that we recognize the
creator?

Certainly if our contemporary literature is not respected, if it
has not been able to rally to its support the sensitive public that
already exists in this country, it is partly because this literature
has not respected itself. That there has been every reason for it
makes no difference; that it has begun to respect itself again makes
no difference either, for when a people has lost confidence in its
literature, and has had grounds for losing confidence in it, one cannot
be surprised if it insists a little cynically upon being “shown.”
The public supported Mark Twain and Howells and the men of their
generation, it admired them for what was admirable in them, but it
was aware, if only unconsciously, that there was a difference between
them and the men of the generation before them; and in consequence of
this the whole stock of American literature fell. But those who insist
in our day that America prefers European writers to its own, because
America is still a colony of Europe, cannot ignore the significant fact
that at a time when America was still more truly colonial than it is
now American writers had all the prestige in this country that European
writers have at present; and it is not entirely because at that time
the country was more homogeneous. Poe and Thoreau found little support
in the generation of which I speak, as Whitman found little support
in the generation that followed it. On the other hand, there were no
European writers (and it was an age of great writers in Europe) who
were held in higher esteem in this country than Hawthorne, Emerson,
Motley, and one or two others almost equally distinguished, as well
from a European as from an American point of view; there were few,
if any, European writers, in fact, who were esteemed in this country
as highly as they. How can one explain it? How can one explain why,
at a time when America, in every other department of life, was more
distinctly colonial than it is now, American literature commanded the
full respect of Americans, while to-day, when the colonial tradition is
vanishing all about us, it so little commands their respect that they
go after any strange god from England? The problem is not a simple one,
but among the many explanations of it one can hardly deny that there
were in that period a number of writers of unusual power, who made the
most (who were able to make the most) of their power, who followed
their artistic conscience (who were able to follow it) and who by this
fact built up a public confidence in themselves and in the literature
they represented. Does it matter at all whether to-day we enjoy these
writers or not? They were men of spiritual force, three or four of
them: that is the important point. If the emerging writers of our epoch
find themselves handicapped by the scepticism of the public, which has
ceased to believe that any good thing can come out of Nazareth, let
them remember not only that they are themselves for the most part in
the formative stage, but that they have to live down the recent past of
their profession.

Meanwhile, what constitutes a literature is the spiritual force of
the individuals who compose it. If our literature is ever to be
regenerated, therefore, it can only be through the development of a
sense of “free will” (and of the responsibility that this entails) on
the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a “victim”
is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to
live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of
which he is the cause, the world of his own creation. For this reason,
the pessimistic determinism of the present age is, from the point of
view of literature, of a piece with the optimistic determinism of
the age that is passing. What this pessimistic determinism reveals,
however, is a _consciousness of the situation_: to that extent it
represents a gain, and one may even say that to be conscious of
the situation is half the battle. If we owed nothing else to Mr.
Dreiser, for instance, we should owe him enough for the tragic sense
of the waste and futility of American life, as we know it, which his
books communicate. It remains true that in so far as we resent this
life it is a sign of our own weakness, of the harm not only that our
civilization has done us but that we have permitted it to do us, of
our own imperfectly realized freedom; for to the creative spirit in
its free state the external world is merely an impersonal point of
departure. Thus it is certain that as long as the American writer
shares what James Bryce calls the “mass fatalism” of the American
people, our literature will remain the sterile, supine, and inferior
phenomenon which, on the whole, it is.

“What we want,” wrote Henry Adams in 1862 to his brother Charles, “is a
_school_. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better,
to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in
law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the
country--a national school of our own generation. And that is what
America has no power to create.... It’s all random, insulated work,
for special and temporary and personal purposes. And we have no means,
power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end.” _That is what
America has no power to create._ But can it be said that any nation
has ever created a school? Here we have the perfect illustration of
that mass fatalism of which I have spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in
his passivity, is the type of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure,
why did he refuse to accept the responsibility of those novels in
which he expressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind
for the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding element
in American society? In the darkest and most chaotic hours of our
spiritual history the individual has possessed a measure of free
will only to renounce it: if Henry Adams had merely signed his work
and accepted the consequences of it, he might by that very fact have
become the founder, the centre, of the school that he desired. But it
is true that in that generation the impulses of youth were, with an
extraordinary unanimity, focused upon a single end, the exploitation of
the continent; the material opportunities that American life offered
were too great and too all-engrossing, and it is unlikely that any
considerable minority could have been rallied for any non-utilitarian
cause. Sixty years later this school remains, and quite particularly
as regards our literature, the one thing necessary; the reforestation
of our spiritual territory depends on it. And in more than one sense
the times are favourable. The closing of the frontier seems to promise
for this country an intenser life than it has known before; a large
element of the younger generation, estranged from the present order,
exists in a state of ferment that renders it highly susceptible to new
ideas; the country literally swarms with half-artists, as one may call
them, men and women, that is to say, who have ceased to conform to the
law of the tribe but who have not accepted the discipline of their
own individual spirits. “What I chiefly desire for you,” wrote Ibsen
to Brandes at the outset of his career, “is a genuine, full-blooded
egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you
yourself as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as
non-existent.... There is no way in which you can benefit society more
than by coining the metal you have in yourself.” The second half of
this rather blunt counsel of perfection is implied in the first, and it
connotes a world of things merely to name which would be to throw into
relief the essential infantility of the American writer as we know the
type. By what prodigies of alert self-adaptation, of discriminating
self-scrutiny, of conscious effort does the creative will come into its
own! As for us, weak as too many of us are, ignorant, isolated, all too
easily satisfied, and scarcely as yet immune from the solicitations of
the mob, we still have this advantage, that an age of reaction is an
age that stirs the few into a consciousness of themselves.

                                                     VAN WYCK BROOKS




MUSIC


We spend more money upon music than does any other nation on earth;
some of our orchestras, notably those of Boston, Chicago, and
Philadelphia, are worthy to rank among the world’s best; in the
Metropolitan Opera House we give performances of grand opera that for
consistent excellence of playing, singing, and _mise-en-scène_ are
surpassed probably nowhere. Yet there has never been a successful opera
by an American offered at that opera house, and the number of viable
American orchestral works is small enough to be counted almost upon
one’s fingers. We squander millions every year upon an art that we
cannot produce.

There are apologists for the American composer who will say that we
do produce it, but that it is strangled at birth. According to their
stock argument, there are numberless greatly gifted native composers
whose works never get a hearing, (a) because Americans are prejudiced
against American music and in favour of foreign music, and (b) because
the foreigners who largely control the musical situation in this
country jealously refuse to allow American works to be performed.
This would be impressive if it were consistent or true. As far as
concerns the Jealous Foreigner myth--he does not dominate the musical
situation--I have never noticed that the average European in this
country is deficient either in self-interest or tact. He is generally
anxious, if only for diplomatic reasons, to find American music that
is worth singing or playing. Even when he fails to find any that is
worth performing, he often performs some that isn’t, in order to
satisfy local pride. Moreover, Americans are no more prejudiced against
American musicians than they are against other kinds. As a matter of
fact, if intensive boosting campaigns produced creative artists, the
American composer during the past decade should have expanded like
a hot-house strawberry. We have had prize contests of all kinds,
offering substantial sums for everything from grand operas to string
quartettes, we have had societies formed to publish his chamber-music
scores; publishers have rushed to print his smaller works; we have had
concerts of American compositions; we have had all-American festivals.
Meanwhile the American composer has, with a few lonely exceptions,
obstinately refused to produce anything above the level of what it
would be flattering to call mediocrity.

No. If he is not heard oftener in concert halls and upon recital
platforms, it is because he is not good enough. There is, in the
music of even the second-rate Continental composers, a surety of
touch, a quality of evident confidence in their material and ease in
its handling that is rarely present in the work of Americans. Most
American symphonic and chamber music lacks structure and clarity. The
workmanship is faulty, the utterance stammers and halts. Listening to
an average American symphonic poem, you get the impression that the
composer was so amazed and delighted at being able to write a symphonic
poem at all that the fact that it might be a dull one seemed of minor
importance to him. When he isn’t being almost entirely formless he is
generally safely conventional, preferring to stick to what a statesman
would call the Ways of the Fathers rather than risk some structural
innovation what might or might not be effective. Tschaikovsky’s
variation of the traditional sequence of movements in the _Pathétique_
symphony, for example--ending with the slow movement instead of the
march--would scandalize and terrify the average American.

This feebleness and uncertainty in the handling of material makes
American music sound more sterile and commonplace than it really is.
The American composer never seems certain just what, if anything, he
wants to say. His themes, his fundamental ideas, are often of real
significance, but he has no control over that very essence of the
language of music, mood. He lacks taste. The fact that an American
composition may begin in a genuinely impressive mood is no guarantee
at all that inside of twenty-four bars it may not fall into the
most appalling banalities. We start with lyric beauty and finish in
stickiness. The curse of bathos is upon us. We lack staying power. Just
as so many American dramatists can write two good acts of a three-act
play, so many American novelists can write superb opening chapters, so
do American composers devise eloquent opening themes. But we all fail
when it comes to development. The train is laid, the match is applied,
and the spectators crowd back in delighted terror amid tremendous
hissings and sputterings. But when the awaited detonation comes, it is
too often only a pop.

Such failure to make adequate use of his ideas is partially
attributable to the American musician’s pathetically inadequate
technical equipment. Generally speaking, he doesn’t know his business.
He has been unable, or hasn’t bothered, to learn his trade. Imagine if
you can a successful dramatist who can neither read nor write, but has
to dictate his plays, or a painter who can only draw the outlines of
his pictures, hiring some one else to lay in the colours, and you have
something analogous to many an American “composer” whose music is taken
seriously by Americans, and who cannot write out a playable piano part,
arrange a song for choral performance, or transcribe a hymn tune for
a string quartette. Such elementary work he has to have done for him,
whenever it is necessary, by some hack. This, to say nothing of the
more advanced branches of musical science, like counterpoint, fugue,
orchestration. Though it is risky to generalize, it is probably safe
to say that among Americans who write music, the man who can construct
a respectable fugue or canon or score a piece for full orchestra is
decidedly the exception. In Europe, of course, any man who did not
have these technical resources at his fingertips would have to be a
Moussorgsky to be taken seriously as a composer at all.

It is not entirely the American’s fault that he is so ill-equipped.
Much of his comparative musical illiteracy, true, is the result of
his own laziness and his traditional American contempt for theory and
passion for results. On the other hand, the young American who honestly
desires a good theoretical training in music must either undertake
the expensive adventure of journeying to one of the few cities that
contain a first-class conservatory, or the equally expensive one of
going to Europe. If he can do neither, he must to a great extent
educate himself. Some kinds of training it is nearly impossible for
him to obtain here at any price. Orchestration, for instance, a
tremendously complex and difficult science, can be mastered only by
the time-honoured trial and error method, i.e., by writing out scores
and hearing them played. How is our young American to manage this?
Granted that there is a symphony orchestra near him, how can he get
his scores played? The conductor cannot be blamed for refusing. He
is hired to play the works of masters, not to try out the apprentice
efforts of unskilled aspirants. What we need so badly here are not
more first-class orchestras, but more second-rate ones, small-town
orchestras that could afford to give the tyro a chance.

Because of their lack of technical skill many composers in this country
never venture into the broader fields of composition at all. As a
class, we write short piano and violin pieces, or songs. We write them
because we do earnestly desire to write something and because they do
not demand the technical resourcefulness and sustained inspiration
that we lack. Parenthetically, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that
clumsy workmanship and sterility are unknown in Europe, that we are all
mediocrities and they are all _Uebermenschen_. As a matter of fact,
we have to-day probably much more creative musical talent, if less
brains, than Europe; but, talent for talent, the European is infinitely
better trained. This, at least in part, because he respects theory
and has a desire for technical proficiency that we almost totally
lack. Then too, the European has some cultural background. There is a
curious lack of inter-communication among the arts in this country.
The painter seems to feel that literature has nothing direct to give
him, the writer, that music and painting are not in his line, and the
musician--decidedly the worst of the three in this respect--that his
own art has no connection with anything.

The American composer’s most complete failure is intellectual. The
fact that he writes music seldom warrants the assumption that he has
the artist’s point of view at all. He is likely to be a much less
interesting person than one’s iceman. Ten to one, he never visits a
picture gallery or a sculpture exhibition, his taste in the theatre
is probably that of the tired business man, and what little reading
he does is likely to be confined to trade papers, _Snappy Stories_,
and best-sellers. He takes no interest in politics, economics, or
sociology, either national or international (how could they possibly
concern him?), and probably cannot discuss even music with pleasure or
profit to anybody.

The natural inference that might be drawn from this diatribe--that
the composing of music in this country is confined exclusively to the
idiot classes--is not strictly true. Plenty of American musicians are
intelligent and cultured men as well; but that is not America’s fault.
She is just as cordial to the stupid ones. And the widespread impotence
and technical sloppiness of American music is the inevitable result of
the American attitude toward music and to the anomalous position the
art occupies in this country.

Let me be platitudinous in the interest of clarity and point out what
we so often forget: that our nation, unlike most of the others, is not
a race as well. We have common wellsprings of thought, but--and this
is significant and ominous--none of feeling. Sheer environment may
teach people to think alike within a generation; but it takes centuries
of common emotional experiences to make them feel alike. Any average
American, even of the National-Security-League-one-hundred-per-centum
variety, may have in his veins the blood of English, French, Italian,
and Russian ancestors, and there is no saying that his emotional
nature is going to find many heart-beats in common with some equally
average neighbour, whose ancestry may be, say, Irish, Danish, and
Hungarian. What national spirit we have has been determined, first,
by the fact that the ancestors of every one of us, whether they came
here twenty years ago or two hundred, were pioneers. Every one of them
left a civilization whose cultural background had been established for
centuries, to come to a land where the problem of mere existence was
of prime importance. Again, many of them were religious fanatics. In
the life of the pioneer there was little room for art of any sort, and
least for music. What he demanded of music, when he had time to spare
for it, was that above all things it distract him from the fatigue
and worry of everyday life, either by amusing him or by furnishing a
sentimental reminder of old ways. To the Puritan, music, both for its
own sake and as entertainment, was anathema. As sensuous beauty it was
popish, and as entertainment it was worldly pleasure, and therefore
wicked. To be tolerated at all, it must be practical, i.e., perform
some moral service by being a hymn tune. And what the American pioneer
and the American Puritan asked a few generations back, the average
American asks to-day whenever he is confronted with any work of art:
Does it point a moral? If not, will it help me to kill time without
boring me?

Instruction, release, or amusement: that, in general, is all we want
of art. The American’s favourite picture is one that tells a story, or
shows the features of some famous person, or the topography of some
historic spot. Fantastic pictures he likes, because they show him
people and places far removed from his own rather tedious environment,
but they must be a gaudy, literal, solid sort of fantasy--Maxfield
Parrish rather than Aubrey Beardsley. If he can’t have these, he wants
pretty girls or comics. Purely decorative or frankly meaningless
pictures--Hokusai and Whistler (except, of course, the portraits of
Carlyle and his mother)--do not exist for him. Sculpture--which he
does not understand--is probably his favourite art-form, for it is
tangible, three-dimensionable, stable. He doesn’t mind poetry, for it,
too, gives him release. He likes novels, especially “glad” ones or
mystery stories. He even tolerates realism if, as in “Main Street,” it
gives him release by showing him a set of consistently contemptible
and uncultured characters to whom even he must feel superior. His
architecture he likes either ornate to imbecility or utilitarian to
hideousness.

In other words, the typical American goes to an art-work either frankly
to have his senses tickled or for the sake of a definite thing that it
says or a series of extraneous images or thoughts that it evokes--never
for the _Ding an sich_. Of pure æsthetic emotion he exhibits very
little. To him, beauty is emphatically not its own excuse for being.
He does not want it for its own sake, and distrusts and fears it when
it appears before him unclothed in moral lessons or associated ideas.
In such a civilization music can occupy but a very unimportant place.
For music is, morally or intellectually, the most meaningless of arts:
it teaches no lesson, it offers no definite escape from life to the
literal-minded, and aside from the primitive and obvious associations
of patriotic airs and “mother” songs, it evokes no associated images or
ideas. To love music you must be willing to enjoy beauty pretty largely
for its own sake, without asking it to mean anything definite in words
or pictures. This the American hates to do. Since he cannot be edified,
he refuses to be stirred. There is nothing left for him, therefore, in
music, except such enjoyment as he can get out of a pretty tune or an
infectious rhythm.

And that, despite our admirable symphony orchestras and our two superb
permanent opera companies (all run at a loss, by the way), is about all
that music means to the average American--amusement. He simply does not
see how an art that doesn’t teach him anything, that is a shameless
assault upon his emotions (he makes no distinction between emotions
and senses), can possibly play any significant part in his life. So,
as a nation, he does what he generally does in other matters of art,
delegates its serious cultivation to women.

Women constitute ninety per cent. of those who support music in this
country. It is women who attend song and instrumental recitals; it
is women who force reluctant husbands and fathers to subscribe for
opera seats and symphony concerts; the National Federation of Musical
Clubs, which works throughout the country to foster the appreciation
of music, is composed entirely of women; at least two-thirds of the
choral organizations in the United States contain women’s voices only.
It is no disparagement of their activities to say that such a state
of affairs is unhealthy. This well-nigh complete feminization of
music is bad for it. After all, art, to be alive, must like any other
living thing be the result of collaboration. Women have undertaken
to be the moral guardians of the race, and no one can deny that they
guard, upon the whole, as well as men could; but their guardianship
is a bit too zealous at times, and their predominance in our musical
life aggravates our already exaggerated tendency to demand that art be
edifying. One of the conditions of the opera contest conducted by the
National Federation in 1914 was that the libretto must contain nothing
immoral or suggestive (I paraphrase). Now music is, after all, an adult
occupation, and it might be assumed that a composer competent to write
an opera score might have taste and intelligence enough not to be
vulgar--for, surely, vulgarity was all they wanted to guard against.
If the clause were to be interpreted literally, it would bar the
librettos of _Tristan_, _Walküre_, _Carmen_, _Pelléas et Mélisande_,
and _L’Amore dei Tre Re_--a supposition quite too unthinkable. The
feminine influence helps to increase the insularity of our musicians.
Women are more chauvinistic in art matters--if possible--than men,
and among the women’s clubs that are trying to encourage the American
composer there is a tendency to insist rather that he be American than
that he be a composer. Since it is women who support our recitals and
concerts it is they who must assume responsibility for our excessive
cult of the performer. This land is certainly the happy hunting-ground
of the virtuoso, be he singer, player, or conductor. What he chooses
to sing, play, or conduct is comparatively unimportant to us. Our
audiences seem to gather not so much to listen as to look; or if
they do listen, it is to the voice or the instrument rather than
to the music. The announcement, “Farrar in _Carmen_” will pack the
Metropolitan to the doors; but if the bill be changed, and _Zaza_ be
substituted at the last moment, who cares? Indeed the ticket agencies,
knowing what people really attend opera for, frankly advertise “tickets
for Farrar to-night.” Rachmaninoff is a great pianist, and Rachmaninoff
playing an all-Chopin programme could fill Carnegie Hall at any
time. But Rachmaninoff playing a programme of Czerny’s “Exercises
for the Beginner” could fill it just as well. Announce an all-Chopin
programme without naming the pianist, and see how much of an audience
you draw. The people who go to hear Galli-Curci sing the shadow-song
from _Dinora_ do not go to hear music at all. They go as they would go
to see Bird Millman walk a slack wire; they go to hear a woman prove
that, given a phenomenal development of the vocal cords, she can, after
years of practice, perform scales and trills _in altissimo_ very nearly
as well as the union flute-player who furnishes her obligato. All
this is to a certain extent true elsewhere, of course. It is natural
that if one person can sing or play better than another, audiences
should prefer to hear him rather than another. But this worship of the
performance rather than the thing performed, this blind adoration of
skill for its own sake, is cultivated in America to a degree that is
quite unparalleled.

Many American cities and large towns hold annual musical festivals,
lasting from two days to a week or more, and these are often mentioned
as evidence of the existence of a genuine musical culture among us. Are
they? What happens at them? For one thing, the local choral society
performs a cantata or oratorio. This is more than likely to be either
_The Messiah_ or _Elijah_, works which through long association have
taken on less the character of musical compositions than of devotional
exercises. Edification again. Soloists are engaged, as expensive and
famous as the local budget allows, and these give recitals during the
remaining sessions of the festival. The audiences come largely to see
these marvels rather than to hear music, for after the annual spree of
culture is over they return home contentedly enough to another year
void of any music whatever. Hearing a little music is better than
hearing none, but the test of genuine culture is whether or not it
is an integral part of life rather than a vacation from it. By this
test the annual festival would seem to exert about as much permanent
cultural influence as a clambake.

The total unconsciousness on the part of his fellow-countrymen that art
is related to life, a sense of futility and unreality, is what makes
the lot of the musician in America a hard one, and is responsible for
his failure as an artist. If people get the kind of government they
deserve, they most certainly get the kind of art they demand; and if,
comparatively speaking, there is no American composer, it is because
America doesn’t want him, doesn’t see where he fits in.

Suppose most American music is trivial and superficial? How many
Americans would know the difference if it were profound? The composer
here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured
contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself--that wouldn’t
matter--but for his very art. In the minds of many of his compatriots
it ranks only as an entertainment and a diversion, slightly above
embroidery and unthinkably below baseball. At best, what he gets is
unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak. Blind
Tom, the negro pianist, is still a remembered and admired figure in
American musical history; and Blind Tom was an idiot. To an American,
the process of musical composition is a mysterious and incomprehensible
trick--like sword-swallowing or levitation--and as such he admires it;
but he does not respect it. He cannot understand how any normal he-man
can spend his life thinking up tunes and putting them down on paper.
Tunes are pleasant things, of course, especially when they make your
feet go or take you back to the days when you went straw-riding; but as
for taking them seriously, and calling it work--man’s work--to think
them up ... any one who thinks that can be dismissed as a crank.

If the crank could make money, it might be different. The respect
accorded to artists in our country is pretty sharply graded in
accordance with their earning power. Novelists and playwrights come
first, since literature and the stage are known to furnish a “good
living.” Sculptors have a certain standing, on account of the rumoured
prices paid for statues and public memorials, though scenario writers
are beginning to rank higher. Painters are eyed with a certain
suspicion, though there is always the comfortable belief that the
painter probably pursues a prosperous career of advertising art on
the side. But poets and composers are decidedly men not to be taken
seriously. This system of evaluation is not quite as crass as it
sounds. America has so long been the land of opportunity, we have so
long gloried in her supremacy as the place to make a living, that
we have an instinctive conviction that if a man is really doing a
good job he must inevitably make money at it. Only, poetry and music
have the bad luck to be arts wherein a man may be both great and
successful and still be unable to look the landlord in the eye. Since
such trades are so unprofitable, we argue, those who pursue them are
presumably incompetent. The one class of composer whom the American
does take seriously is the writer of musical comedy and popular songs,
not only because he can make money, but because he provides honest,
understandable entertainment for man and beast. That, perhaps, is why
our light music is the best of its kind in the world.

The self-styled music-lover in this country too often brings little
more genuine comprehension to music. He is likely to be a highbrow
(defined as a person educated beyond his intelligence), with all the
mental obtuseness and snobbishness of his class. He divides music into
“popular”--meaning light--and “classical”--meaning pretentious. Now
there is good music and bad, and the composer’s pretensions have little
to do with the case. Compare, for example, the first-act finale of
Victor Herbert’s _Mlle. Modiste_ with such vulgar rubbish as _Donna è
mobile_. Yet because the latter is sung by tenors, at the Metropolitan,
the highbrow solemnly catalogues it as “classical,” abolishing the
work of Herbert, Berlin, and Kern, three greatly gifted men, with the
adjective “popular.” In general, he is the faithful guardian of the
Puritan tradition, always sniffing the air for a definite “message” or
moral, seeking sermons in tones, books in running arpeggios. It never
occurs to him that just as words are the language of intellect, so is
music the language of emotion, that its whole excuse for existence is
its perfection in saying what lies just beyond and above words, and
that if you can reduce a composer’s message to words, you automatically
render it meaningless.

Music criticism in America is amazingly good in the cities. The system
under which the critics must work, however, whereby they are supposed
to “cover” everything (in New York this theoretically entails making
some sort of critical comment upon every one of three or four hundred
events in a single season) is so impossible that much of their work is
inevitably scamped and perfunctory. Elsewhere throughout the country
criticism is handed over to reporters, who generally avoid trouble
by approving of everything. There is a tendency toward the double
standard--holding the stranger strictly to account, especially the
foreigner, and being “nice” to the native--that produces demoralizing
results.

Of real musical journalism we have none. There is _The Musical
Quarterly_, good of its kind, but rather ponderous and making no
pretence to timeliness. The monthlies are chiefly for the teacher.
The weeklies are in general frankly “shop” organs, devoted to the
activities of the performer and filled with his advertisements,
portraits, and press notices. There is no medium for the exchange
of contemporary thought, for the discussion of topics having a
non-professional cultural interest. Music publishing here is an
industry, conducted like any other industry. The Continental type of
publisher, who is a scholar and a musician, and a gentleman who is
conscious of a duty to music as well as to the stockholders, is almost
unknown here. To our publishers music is a commodity, to be bought
cheap and sold dear, and most of them will publish anything that looks
profitable, regardless of its quality. Their typographical standards
are higher than those anywhere in the world, except Germany.

So the American composer in America works more or less in a vacuum. He
is out of things, and he knows it. If he attempts to say something,
through his art, that will be intelligible to his countrymen, he is
baffled by the realization that his countrymen don’t understand his
language. This particular difficulty, this sense of inarticulateness,
probably weighed less heavily upon the last two generations of American
composers; for they were, most of them, virtually German composers.
In their time a thorough technical education in music was so nearly
unobtainable here that it was simpler to go abroad for it. So, from
Paine to MacDowell, they went to Germany. There they learned their
trade, and at least learned it thoroughly; but they learned to write,
not only music, but German music. To them, German music was music.
Their songs were _Lieder_; their symphonies and overtures were little
sinister sons of Beethoven, Raff, and Brahms. So completely Teutonized
did our musical speech become that we still find it hard to believe
that French music, Spanish music, Russian music is anything but an
imperfect translation from the German. A few went to Paris and learned
to write with a French accent. MacDowell was, and remains, our best:
a first-rank composer, who died before his work was done. His earlier
music was all written, performed, and published in Germany, and it is
as _echt Deutsch_ as that of Raff, his master. Not until he approached
middle life did he evolve a musical idiom that was wholly of MacDowell,
the American. Most of the rest came back to spend their days fashioning
good, honest, square-toed _Kapellmeistermusik_ that had about as much
genuine relation to their America as the Declaration of Independence
has to ours. They might feel this lack of contact, but at least they
had the consolation of knowing that there were people in the world to
whom what they said was at least intelligible.

The American of the present generation has no such consolation. He has
probably not been trained abroad. He wants to write music, and being
human, he wants it understood. But the minute he tries to express
himself he betrays the fact that he does not know what he wants to
express. Any significant work of art is inevitably based on the
artist’s relation and reaction to life. But the American composer’s
relation to the common life is unreal. His activities strike his
fellows as unimportant and slightly irrational. He can’t lay his
finger upon the great, throbbing, common pulse of America because for
him there is none. So he tries this, that, and the other, hoping by
luck to stumble upon the thing he wants to say. He tries desperately
to be American. Knowing that the great national schools of music in
other countries are based upon folksong, he tries to find the American
folksong, so as to base his music upon that. He utilizes Negro tunes,
and when they fail to strike the common chord he devises themes based
upon Indian melodies. What he fails to see is that the folksongs of
Europe express the common _racial_ emotions of a nation, not its
geographical accidents. When a Frenchman hears _Malbrouck_ he is moved
by what moved generations of long-dead Frenchmen; when a Russian hears
_Dubinushka_ he is stirred by what has stirred Russians for centuries.
But even if some melody did stir the pulse of Geronimo, the mere fact
that he was a former resident of my country is no proof that it is
going to stir mine. If you insist that Negro music is the proper basis
for an American school of composition, try telling a Southerner that
when he hears _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_, he is hearkening to the
voices of his ancestors!

A curious symptom of this feeling of disinheritance is the tendency of
so many Americans to write what might be called the music of escape,
music that far from attempting to affirm the composer’s relation to
his day and age is a deliberate attempt to liberate himself by evoking
alien and exotic moods and atmosphere. The publishers’ catalogues
are full of Arab meditations, Persian dances, Hindu serenades, and
countless similar attempts to get “anywhere out of the world.” The
best work of Charles Griffes, whose untimely death last year robbed
us of a true creative talent, was his symphonic poem, “The Pleasure
Dome of Kubla Khan,” and his settings of Chinese and Japanese lyrics
in Oriental rhythms and timbres. Not that the mere choice of subject
is important; it is the actual mood and idiom of so much of this music
that is significant evidence of the impulse to give up and forget
America, to create a dream-world wherein one can find refuge from the
land of chewing gum and victrolas.

These same victrolas, by the way, with their cousin, the player-piano,
which so outrage the sensibilities of many a musician of the elder day,
are a very real force in helping to civilize this country musically.
The American is by no means as unmusical as he thinks he is. His
indifference to art is only the result of his purely industrial
civilization, and his tendency to mix morals with æsthetics is a
habit of thought engendered by his ancestry. The Puritan tradition
makes him fearful and suspicious of any sort of sensuous or emotional
response, but it has not rendered him incapable of it. Catch him off
his guard, get him away from the fear of being bored, and he is far
from insensitive to music. He buys victrola records because he is a
hero-worshipper, because he wants to hear the expensive Caruso and
Kreisler and McCormack; but inevitably he is bound to take some notice
of what they play and sing, and to recognize it when he hears it again.
In spite of himself he begins to acquire a rudimentary sort of musical
background. He begins by buying jazz rolls for his player-piano, and
is likely in the long run, if only out of curiosity, to progress from
“blues” to Chopin, via Moszkovski and Grainger.

But the greatest present-day force for good, musically, in this
country, is the large motion-picture house. Music has always been a
necessary accompaniment to motion pictures, in order to compensate for
the uncanny silence in which these photographic wraiths unfold their
dramas. Starting with a modest ensemble of piano and glass crash, the
motion-picture orchestra has gradually increased in size and quality,
the pipe organ has been introduced to augment and alternate it, so
that the larger houses to-day can boast a musical equipment that is
amazingly good. A few years ago S. L. Rothafel devised a glorified
type of entertainment that was a sort of combination picture-show and
“pop” concert. He built a theatre, the Rialto, especially to house it,
containing a stage that was little more than a picture frame, a large
pipe organ, and an orchestra platform large enough to hold seventy or
eighty players. He recruited a permanent orchestra large enough to play
symphonic works, and put Hugo Riesenfeld, an excellent violinist and
conductor, who had been trained under Arthur Nikisch, in charge of the
performances. These, besides the usual film presentations, comprised
vocal and instrumental solos and detached numbers by the orchestra. All
the music played at these entertainments was good--in what is known in
this country as “classical.” Riesenfeld devised a running accompaniment
to the films, assembled from the best orchestral music obtainable--a
sort of synthetic symphonic poem that fitted the mood and action of the
film presented, and was, of course, much too good for it.

This new entertainment form was instantly successful, and is rapidly
becoming the standard offering at all the larger picture houses. It is
a significant step in our musical life, for it is the first entirely
successful attempt in this country to adapt art to popular wants. At
last the average man is going of his own accord into a public hall
and hearing music--real music--and discovering that he likes it. The
picture house allows him to pretend that he is going solely to see the
films, and needn’t listen unless he wants to. He finds that “classical”
music is not nearly so boresome as many of its admirers. Freed from
the highbrow’s condescension, unconscious of uplift, he listens and
responds to music like the prelude to _Tristan_, the _Walkürenritt_,
the _New World_ symphony, Tschaikovsky’s _Fourth_, and the _Eroica_.
Theodore Thomas rendered no more valuable service to music in America
than have Samuel Rothafel and Hugo Riesenfeld.

We are still far from utopia, however. In one of his essays upon
communal art Henry Caro-Delvaille speaks of “the true Mediterranean
_esprit_, the viable art philosophy of the French race, which is
essentially plastic, accepting and delineating life, free alike from
dogmatism and mysticism.” Try to frame a sentence like that about
America. Try to make any generalization about the American spirit
without using “liberty,” “free institutions,” “resourcefulness,”
“opportunity,” or other politico-economic terms, if you would know what
confronts the American artist, above all the American musician, when
he attempts to become articulate to his countrymen. We simply have no
common æsthetic emotions. No wonder our music flounders and stammers,
and trails off into incoherence!

Wagner wrote _Die Meistersinger_ in a deliberate effort to express the
German artistic creed; Verdi wrote consciously as an Italian; Glinka
founded an entire school of composers whose sole aim was to express
Russia. Such a task is beyond the American. The others were spokesmen
for a race: he has no race to speak for, and the moment he pretends
that he has, and tries to speak for it, he becomes conscious and
futile. To speak of American music, in any ethnic sense, is naïve; you
might as well speak of Baptist music. No. The American must accept his
lot. There is but one audience he can write for, and that is himself.
John Smith, American composer, dare not say: “I write to express
America.” He can only say: “I write to express John Smith. I accept my
life because, after all, it is mine, and I interpret my life because it
is the only life I know.” And because John Smith is an American, and
because somewhere, remote and inarticulate, there must be an American
soul, then perhaps, if he does honest work and is true to himself, he
may succeed in saying something that is of America, and of nowhere
else, and that other Americans will hear and understand.

                                                        DEEMS TAYLOR




POETRY


There are many fashions, among contemporary critics, of regarding
American poetry, each of them perhaps of equal helpfulness, since
each is one facet of an imaginable whole. There is the view of Mr.
John Middleton Murry, an English critic, that it depends perhaps a
shade too much on narrative or dramatic interest, on bizarrerie (if
I may very freely elaborate his notion) or, in general, on a kind of
sensationalism, a use of superficially intriguing elements which are
not specifically the right--or at all events the best--elements of
poetry. There is the view of Mr. Louis Untermeyer, one of the ablest
of our own critics and also one of the most versatile of our parodists
and poets, that our contemporary poetry is good in measure as it
comes in the direct line from Whitman: good, that is to say, when it
is the voice of the poet who accepts, accepts joyously and largely,
even loosely, this new world environment, these new customs, social
and industrial, above all, it may be, the new sense of freedom which
he might, if pressed, trace back to Karl Marx on one hand and Sigmund
Freud on the other. There is again the view of Miss Amy Lowell that
our poetry is good, or tends to be, precisely in proportion as it
represents an outgrowing, by the poet, of his acute awareness of a
social or ethical “here and now,” and the attainment of a relatively
pure pre-occupation with beauty--the sense of freedom here exercising
itself principally, if not altogether, with regard to literary
tradition, especially the English: once more, I dilate the view to make
it the more broadly representative. And there is, finally, the view of
the conservative, by no means silent even in this era, that what is
good in contemporary American poetry is what is for the moment least
conspicuous--the traditional, seen as it appears inevitably in America
to be seen, as something graceful, sentimental, rightly ethical, gently
idealistic.

What will be fairly obvious is that if we follow a little way any
particular one of these critics, we shall find him attempting to urge
our poetry in a particular direction, a direction which he prefers
to any other direction, and analysing its origins in such a way, if
he analyses at all, as to make plausible its (postulated) growth in
that direction. This is the natural, even perhaps the best thing, for
a participant critic to do--it contributes, certainly, an interest
and an energy. But if in some freak of disinterestedness, we wish if
for only a moment to see American poetry with no concern save that
of inordinate and intelligent curiosity, then it is to all of these
views that we must turn, rather than to any one, and to the obverse of
each, as well as to the face. For if one thing is apparent to-day in
a study of American letters, it is that we must heroically resist any
temptation to simplify, to look in only one direction for origins or
in only one direction for growth. Despite our national motto, American
civilization is not so much one in many as many in one. We have not, as
England has and as France has, a single literary heart; our literary
capitals and countries are many, each with its own vigorous people,
its own self-interest, its own virtues and provincialisms. We may
attribute this to the mere matter of our size, and the consequent
geographical sequestration of this or that group--that is no doubt a
factor, but of equal importance is the fact that in a new country, of
rapid and chaotic material growth, we must inevitably have, according
to the locality, marked variations in the rapidity of growth of the
vague thing we call civilization. Chicago is younger than Boston, older
than San Francisco. And what applies to the large unit applies also
to the small--if the country in general has not yet reached anything
remotely like a cultural homogeneity (as far, that is, as we ever in
viewing a great nation expect such a thing) neither has any section of
it, nor any city of it. It is no longer possible, if indeed it ever
was, to regard a section like New England, for example, as a definite
environmental factor, say “y,” and to conclude, as some critics are
so fond of doing, that any poet who matures there will inevitably be
representable as “yp.” This is among the commonest and falsest of
false simplifications. Our critics, frantically determined to find
an American poetry that is autochthonous, will see rocky pastures,
mountains and birches in the poetry of a New Englander, or skyscrapers
in the poetry of a New Yorker, or stockyards in the poetry of a
Chicagoan, as easily as a conjurer takes a rabbit from a hat.

What refuge we have from a critical basis so naïve is in assuming
from the outset, toward contemporary American poetry, an attitude
guardedly pluralistic--we begin by observing merely that American
poetry is certainly, at the moment, if quantitative production and
public interest are any measure, extraordinarily healthy and vigorous.
We are accustomed to hearing it called a renaissance. The term is
admissible if we carefully exclude, in using it, any implication of a
revival of classicism. What we mean by it is simply that the moment
is one of quite remarkable energy, productiveness, range, colour, and
anarchy. What we do not mean by it is that we can trace with accuracy
where this outburst comes from. The origins of the thing are obscure.
It was audible in 1914--Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound
were audible before that; it burst into full chorus in 1915; and ever
since there has been, with an occasional dying fall, a lusty corybantic
cacophony. Just where this amazing procession started nobody clearly
knows. Mr. Untermeyer would have us believe that Walt Whitman was, as
it were, the organizer of it, Miss Monroe tries to persuade us that
it was _Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_, But the facts, I think, wave
aside either postulate. If one thing is remarkable it is that in this
spate of poetry the influence of Walt Whitman--an influence, one would
suppose, as toxic for the young as Swinburne--is so inconsiderable:
if another is even more remarkable, it is that in all this chorus one
so seldom hears a voice of which any previous American voice was the
clear prototype. We have had, of course, our voices--of the sort, I
mean, rich enough in character to make imitation an easy and tempting
thing. Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Sill, Lanier are not in this regard
considerable,--but what of Poe, whose influence we have seen in French
poetry on Baudelaire, and in contemporary English poetry on Mr. Walter
de la Mare? No trace of him is discoverable, unless perhaps we find
the ghostliest of his shadows now and then across the work of Mr.
John Gould Fletcher, or Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, or Mr. Wallace Stevens,
a shadow cast, in all these cases, amid much else, from a technical
and colouristic standpoint, which would have filled Poe with alarm.
And there is another American poet, perhaps as great as Poe, perhaps
greater (as he in turn is perhaps greater than Whitman--as poet, though
not as personality)--Emily Dickinson. Of that quietist and mystic, who
walked with tranquillity midway between Blake and Emerson, making of
her wilful imperfections a kind of perfectionism, why do we hear so
little? Do we catch now and again the fleetingest glimpse of her in the
early work of Mr. Robert Frost? If so, it is certainly nowhere else.
Yet it would be hard to prove that she has no right to a place with Poe
and Whitman, or indeed among the best poets in the language.

But nowhere in America can we find, for contemporary poetry, any
clear precursive signal. Little as it may comfort our fuglemen of the
autochthonous, we must, I think, look to Europe for its origins. This
is not, as some imagine, a disgrace--it would be a melancholy thing,
of course, if we merely imitated the European, without alteration. But
Browning would hardly recognize himself, even if he cared to, in the
“Domesday Book” of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mallarmé and Rimbaud would
find Mr. Fletcher a mirror with an odd trick of distortion, Laforgue
would have to look twice at Mr. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” (for all
its Hamletism), M. Paul Fort would scarcely feel at home in Miss Amy
Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle,” Mr. Thomas Hardy and the ghost of
Tennyson would not quarrel much for the possession of Mr. Robinson’s
work, nor Mr. Chesterton and the author of “The Ingoldsby Legends”
for the lively sonorities of Mr. Vachel Lindsay. In such cases we
have not so much “influence” as fertilization. It is something of Mr.
Masters that “The Ring and the Book” reveals to Mr. Masters: something
of Miss Lowell to which M. Paul Fort offers her the key. Was it a
calamity for Baudelaire that he lived only by a transfusion of blood
from an American? Is Becquer the less Becquer or Spanish for having
fed upon the “Buch der Lieder”?... Culture is bartered, nowadays, at
open frontiers, and if to-day a new theme, chord, or colour-scheme is
French, German, or American, to-morrow it is international.

If we differ in this respect from any other country it is only that we
are freer to exploit, really exhaust, the new, because we hold, less
than any other, to any classical traditions: for traditions our poets
seldom look back further than the 19th century. We have the courage,
often indistinguishable from folly, of our lack of convictions. Thus it
comes about that as America is the melting-pot for races, so she is in
a fair way to become a melting-pot for cultures: we have the energy,
the curiosity, the intelligence, above all the lack of affiliations
with the past, which admirably adapt us to a task--so precisely
demanding complete self-surrender--of æsthetic experiment. Ignorance
has some compensations--I mean, of course, a partial ignorance. If Mr.
Lindsay had been brought up exclusively on Aristotle, Plato, Æschylus,
and Euripides, and had been taken out of the shadow of the church
by Voltaire and Darwin, perhaps he would not have been so “free” to
experiment with the “higher vaudeville.” It will be observed that this
is an odd kind of “freedom,” for it amounts in some ways to little
more than the “freedom” of the prison. For if too severe a training
in the classics unfits one somewhat for bold experiment, too little
of it is as likely, on the other hand, to leave one with an æsthetic
perceptiveness, a sensibility, in short, relatively rudimentary.

This, then, is something of the cultural _mise en scène_ for our
contemporary poetry. We have repeated waves of European suggestion
breaking Westward over our continent, foaming rather more in Chicago
than in New York; and we have our lusty young company of swimmers,
confident that they are strong enough to ride these waves farther than
any one in Europe rode them and with a more native grace. What is most
conspicuously American in most of these swimmers is the fact that
they rely not so much on skill and long training as on sheer energy,
vitality, and confidence. They rely, indeed, in most cases, on a kind
of exuberance or superabundance. Do we not feel this in the work of
Mr. Edgar Lee Masters--does he not try, in these many full books of
his, where the good is so inextricably enmeshed with the bad, simply
to beat us down as under a cataract? “Domesday Book” is, rather, an
avalanche. He never knows what to exclude, where to stop. Miss Lowell,
Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Carl Sandburg, and Mr. Lindsay are not far behind
him, either--they are all copious. I do not mean to imply that this
is a bad thing, at the moment--at the moment I am not sure that this
sheer exuberance is not, for us, the very _best_ thing. Energy is the
first requisite of a “renaissance,” and supplies its material, or,
in another light, its richness of colour. Not the beginning, but the
end, of a renaissance is in refinement; and I think we are certainly
within bounds in postulating that the last five years have given us
at the least a superb beginning, and enough more than that, perhaps,
to make one wonder whether we have not already cast Poe and Whitman,
Sidney Lanier, and Emily Dickinson, our strange little quartette, into
a shadow.

All that our wonder can hope for is at best a very speculative answer.
If parallels were not so dangerous, we might look with encouragement at
that spangled rhetorical torrent which we call Elizabethan literature.
Ben Jonson did not consider Shakespeare much of an artist, nor did
Milton, and classicists ever since have followed them in that opinion.
If one can be the greatest of poets and yet not much of an artist, we
may here keep clear of the quarrel: what we get at is the fact that
Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans participated in a literary
movement which, like ours, began in energy, violence, and extravagance,
was at its best excessively rhetorical and given to unpruned
copiousness, and perished as it refined. Will a future generation see
us in a somewhat similar light--will it like us for our vitality, for
the reckless adventurousness of our literature, our extravagances, and
forgive us, if it does not precisely enjoy as something with a foreign
flavour, our artistic innocence? That is conceivable, certainly. Yet
the view _is_ speculative and we dare not take it too seriously. For if
we have kept hopefully and intelligently abreast of the contemporary we
have kept, none the less, our own very sufficient aloofness, our own
tactilism and awareness, in the light of which we are bound to have our
own scepticisms and self-distrust. I do not mean that we would perhaps
prefer something more classical or severe than “Spoon River Anthology”
or “The Congo” or the colour symphonies of Mr. Fletcher, merely on
the ground that it is the intrinsically classical and severe which we
most desire. What we seem to see in contemporary American poetry is a
transition from the more to the less exuberant, from the less to the
more severe; and what we most _desire_ to see is the attainment of
_that point_, in this transition, which will give us our parallel to
the Shakespearean, if we may hope for anything even approximately so
high; a point of equipoise.

This hope gives us a convenient vantage from which to survey the
situation, if we also keep in mind our perception of American cultural
heterogeneity and the rashness of any attempt to generalize about
it. The most exact but least diverting method would be the merely
enumerative, the mere roll-call which would put before us Mr. Edwin
Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound as the two of our poets whose
public literary activities extend farthest back, and after them the
group who made themselves known in the interval between 1914 and 1920:
Mr. Robert Frost, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Masters, Mr. Sandburg, Miss Lowell,
Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, Mr. Wallace
Stevens, “H. D.,” Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Miss Sara Teasdale. These poets,
with few exceptions, have little enough in common--nothing, perhaps,
save the fact that they were all a good deal actuated at the outset
by a disgust with the dead level of sentimentality and prettiness and
moralism to which American poetry had fallen between 1890 and 1910.
From that point they diverge like so many radii. One cannot say, as
Miss Lowell has tried to persuade us, that they have all followed one
radius, and that the differences between them are occasioned by the
fact that some have gone farther than others. We may, for convenience,
classify them, if we do not attach too much importance to the bounds
of our classes. We may say that Mr. Robinson, Mr. Frost, and Mr.
Masters bring back to our poetry a strong sense of reality; that Mr.
Fletcher, Mr. Pound, Miss Lowell, “H. D.,” and Mr. Bodenheim bring to
it a sharpened consciousness of colour; that Mr. Eliot, Mr. Kreymborg,
and Mr. Stevens bring to it a refinement of psychological subtlety;
Mr. Sandburg, a grim sense of social responsibility; Mr. Lindsay, a
rhythmic abandon mixed with evangelism; Miss Teasdale, a grace. The
range here indicated is extraordinary. The existence side by side in
one generation and in one country of such poets as Mr. Masters and
Mr. Fletcher, or Mr. Eliot and Miss Lowell, is anomalous. Clearly we
are past that time when a nation will have at a given moment a single
direct literary current. There is as yet no sign that to any one of
these groups will fall anything like undivided sway. Mr. Frost’s
“North of Boston” and Mr. Fletcher’s “Irradiations” came out in the
same year; “Spoon River Anthology” and the first “Imagist Anthology”;
Mr. Robinson’s “Lancelot” and Mr. Bodenheim’s “Advice.” And what
gulfs even between members of any one of our arbitrary “classes”!
Mr. Frost’s actualism is seldom far from the dramatic or lyric, that
of Mr. Masters seldom far from the physiological. Mr. Masters is
bitter-minded, tediously explanatory, and his passionate enquiries fall
upon life like so many heavy blows; his delvings appear morbid as well
as searching. Mr. Frost is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense
of pain: if it is the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it,
none the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong.
The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as tender as
in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And can Mr. Robinson be
thought a commensal of either? His again is a prolonged enquiry into
the why of human behaviour, but how bared of colour, how muffled with
reserves and dimmed with reticence! Here, indeed, is a step toward
romanticism. For Mr. Robinson, though a realist in the sense that his
preoccupation is with motive, turns down the light in the presence of
his protagonist that in the gloom he may take on the air of something
larger and more mysterious than the garishly actual. Gleams convey the
dimensions--hints suggest a depth. We are not always too precisely
aware of what is going on in this twilight of uncertainties, but Mr.
Robinson seems to whisper that the implications are tremendous. Not
least, moreover, of these implications are the moral--the mirror that
Mr. Robinson holds up to nature gives us back the true, no doubt,
but increasingly in his later work (as in “Merlin” and “Lancelot,”
particularly the latter) with a slight trick of refraction that makes
of the true the exemplary.

We cross a chasm, from these sombre psycho-realists, to the colourists.
To these, one finds, what is human in behaviour or motive is of
importance only in so far as it affords colour or offers possibilities
of pattern. Mr. Fletcher is the most brilliant of this group, and
the most “uncontrolled”: his colourism, at its best, is a pure, an
astonishingly absolute thing. The “human” element he wisely leaves
alone--it baffles and escapes him. One is aware that this kaleidoscopic
whirl of colour is “wrung out” of Mr. Fletcher, that it conveys what
is for him an intense personal drama, but this does not make his work
“human.” The note of “personal drama” is more complete in the poetry
of “H. D.,” but this too is, in the last analysis, a nearly pure
colourism, as static and fragmentary, however, as Mr. Fletcher’s is
dynamic. Mr. Bodenheim is more detached, cooler, has a more conscious
eye for correspondences between colour and mood: perhaps we should
call him a symbolist. Even here, however, the “human,” the whim of
tenderness, the psychological gleam, are swerved so that they may
fall into a fantastic design. Miss Lowell, finally, more conscious,
deliberate and energetic than any of these, brilliantly versatile,
utterly detached, while she “sees” more of the objective world (and has
farther-ranging interests), sees it more completely than any of them
simply as raw colour or incipient pattern. If the literary pulse is
here often feverishly high, the empathic and sympathetic temperature is
as often absolute zero.

Mr. Pound shares with Miss Lowell this immersion in the “literary”--he
is intensely aware of the literary past, rifles it for odds and ends
of colour, atmosphere, and attitude, is perpetually adding bright new
bits, from such sources, to his Joseph’s coat: but if a traditionalist
in this, a curio-hunter, he is an experimentalist in prosody; he has
come far from the sentimental literary affectedness of his early work
and at his best has written lyrics of a singular beauty and transparent
clarity. The psychological factor has from time to time intrigued him,
moreover, and we see him as a kind of link between the colourists and
such poets as Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, and Mr. Wallace
Stevens. These poets are alike in achieving, by a kind of alchemy, the
lyric in terms of the analytic: introspection is made to shine, to the
subtly seen is given a delicate air of false simplicity. Mr. Stevens is
closest to the colourists. His drift has been away from the analytic
and towards the mere capture of a “tone.” Mr. Kreymborg is a melodist
and a mathematician. He takes a pleasure in making of his poems and
plays charming diagrams of the emotions. Mr. Eliot has more of an
eye for the sharp dramatic gesture, more of an ear for the trenchant
dramatic phrase--he looks now at Laforgue, now at John Webster. His
technical skill is remarkable, his perception of effect is precise, his
range narrow, perhaps increasingly narrow.

Even so rapid and superficial a survey cannot but impress us with the
essential anarchy of this poetic community. Lawlessness has seemed
at times to be the prevailing note; no poetic principle has remained
unchallenged, and we have only to look in the less prosperous suburbs
and corners of this city to see to what lengths the bolder rebels,
whether of the “Others” group or elsewhere, have gone. Ugliness and
shapelessness have had their adherents among those whom æsthetic
fatigue had rendered momentarily insensitive to the well-shaped;
the fragmentary has had its adherents among those whom cynicism had
rendered incapable of any service, too prolonged, to one idea. But
the fetichists of the ugly and the fragmentary have exerted, none the
less, a wholesome and fructifying influence. Whatever we feel about
the ephemerality of the specifically ugly or fragmentary, we cannot
escape a feeling that these, almost as importantly as the new realism
or the new colourism, have enlarged what we might term the general
“poetic consciousness” of the time. If there was a moment when the
vogue of the disordered seemed to threaten, or predict, a widespread
and rapid poetic decadence, that moment is safely past. The tendency
is now in the other direction, and not the least interesting sign is
the fact that many of the former apostles of the disordered are to-day
experimenting with the things they yesterday despised--rhyme, metre,
and the architecture of theme.

We have our affections, in all this, for the fragmentary and ugly
as for the abrupt small hideousness--oddly akin to virility--of
gargoyles. We have our affections, too, for the rawest of our very raw
realisms--for the maddest of our colourisms, the most idiosyncratic
subtleties of our first introspectionists. Do we hesitate a little to
ask something more of any of the poets whom we thus designate? What
we fear is that in attempting to give us our something more, they
will give us something less. What we want more of, what we see our
contemporary poets as for the most part sadly deficient in, is “art.”
What we are afraid they will lose, if we urge them in this direction,
is their young sharp brilliance. Urge them, however, we must. What
our poets need most to learn is that poetry is not merely a matter of
outpouring, of confession. It must be serious: it must be, if simple in
appearance, none the less highly wrought: it must be packed. It must
be beautifully elaborate rather than elaborately beautiful. It must be
detached from dogma--we must keep it away from the all too prevalent
lecture platform.

What we should like to see, in short, is a fusion, of the extraordinary
range of poetic virtues with which our contemporary poets confront
us, into one poetic consciousness. Do we cavil too much in assuming
that no one of our poets offers us quite enough? Should we rather take
comfort in the hope that many of their individual “personalities” are
vivid enough to offset their onesidedness, and in that way to have a
considerable guarantee of survival? We have mentioned that possibility
before, and certainly it cannot be flatly dismissed. But I think it
cannot be contested that many of these poets already feel, themselves,
a sharper responsibility, a need for a greater comprehensiveness, for
a finer and richer tactile equipment, a steadier view of what it is
that constitutes beauty of form. They are immeasurably distant from
any dry, cold perfectionism, however; and if we cheer them in taking
the path that leads thither, it is in the hope of seeing them reach
the halfway house rather than the summit. For to go all the way is to
arrive exhausted; to go half way is to arrive with vigour.... That,
however, is to interpose our own view and to lose our detachment. We
return to a reiteration of our conclusion that American poetry is at
the moment extraordinarily healthy. Its virtues are the virtues of all
good poetry, and they are sufficient to persuade us that the future
of English poetry lies as much in America as in England. Its faults
are the faults of a culture that is immature. But again, we reiterate
that we have here many cultures, and if some are immature, some are
not. Let those who are too prone to diagnose us culturally from “Spoon
River Anthology” or “Smoke and Steel” keep in mind also Mr. Robinson’s
“Merlin” and Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston”; Mr. Fletcher’s “Goblins and
Pagodas” and Miss Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle.”

                                                        CONRAD AIKEN




ART


The problem of American Art is unlike that of any other country of
the present or the past. We have not here the racial and historical
foundation on which, until now, every art has been built and so our
striving (it is far too soon to speak of success or failure) must be
judged from another standpoint than the one to be taken in viewing an
art that originates with its people or is directly transmitted from
an older race. Egypt and ancient Mexico furnish examples of the first
case, Italy and France of the second. When the latter countries were
colonized by the Greeks, Phœnicians and others, they received a culture
which could take on fresh vigour when grasped by a new race.

We did not start as a new race, but as Europeans possessing the same
intellectual heritage as the men who stayed in the parent countries.
Our problem was not one of receiving the ancient tradition from an
invading or colonizing people who brought with them an art already
formed. Ourselves the invaders and colonizers, our problem was to keep
alive the ideas that we had had in Europe, or to take over those of our
new home, or to evolve an art of our own.

To begin with the second possibility, the question of our relation to
the ideas of the Indians may obviously be disposed of very briefly.
The tribes encountered by the early settlers were in a state of
savagery, and this fact, together with the constant warfare between
the two races, is a sufficient explanation why we find no influence
from the red men. Even where the Europeans encountered culture of a
very high order, as in Mexico and Peru, the remoteness of the native
ideas from those of the invading race prevented for centuries a just
appreciation of the earliest and unquestionably the greatest art
produced in the Western Hemisphere. It is only in quite recent years
that we have realized its merit, and it is unlikely that even our
present-day interest in the exotic arts will bring about any important
influence from the Indians, although in regions such as our Southwest
and the parts of Mexico where “Americanizing” has not yet killed their
art-instinct, they are still producing beautiful work.

We have, of course, retained European ideals, but they have been
conditioned by circumstances and we have not kept pace with Europe or
even followed the course of the great art-movements until they were
almost or quite superseded abroad. Our distance from the centres of
ancient and modern culture on one hand, and the needs of building
up the new continent on the other, combined to make our people lose
interest in art, which, indeed, had never found a propitious soil among
our British forebears. The case of literature is different. The love
of it is an abiding one with the Anglo-Saxon race, and as Shakespeare
and the Bible could be read in the frontier cabin almost as well as in
London or Dublin, there was not the loss of knowledge of literature,
the break in the production of it that we find in the case of the
plastic arts.

It is easy to exaggerate on this score, however, forgetting that the
art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries is not to be lost by a
period of neglect. When he goes to the museum, the American recognizes
the same masters as does the European, but the smaller opportunity here
to know the classic past has the double effect of keeping art-lovers
in America in a far more reduced minority and at the same time of
weakening the authority of tradition.

Not to speak of 17th or 18th century conditions, nor even of those
of the 19th century, one need only consider the America of to-day to
realize how little opportunity our people has to know art. In all but
a few cities, Americans can learn only from reproductions and books,
though even these are an immeasurably safer guide than the bad original
works which are usually the first to arrive. When one thinks of the
European countryside and the numberless small towns of all the old
countries where there is no museum, one may be tempted to ask whether
art conditions are so very different there. But they are different.
There will be an old church, or some houses of a good period, or some
objects in the houses, or--on the walls of the inn--some old prints
handing on the tradition of the great religious pictures (such things
were made quite commonly until recent times and have not entirely
ceased to be produced); a tradition of construction and of colour makes
the modern houses fit in quite acceptably with those of the past. The
centuries have built up a sense of fitness and beauty in the making and
wearing of costume; there will be some form of folk-singing or other
collective action of an artistic character, and thus the exceptional
individual, born with a strong instinct toward art, has surroundings
and a foundation that are lacking here. A striking proof of the
difference between the two continents is the effect of the war on
art-interest: whereas in America public attention has been turned away
from art to a most marked degree, Europe is producing and buying art
with a fervour that can only be explained by the desire to get back to
essentials after the years in which people were deprived of them.

Another phenomenon to be noted at this point is the dominance of women
in American art-matters. It is unknown in any other country. The vast
majority of American men are engrossed in the drive of work, their
leisure goes to sport and to the forms of entertainment that call for
the smallest amount of mental effort. The women, with their quicker
sensibility and their recognition of art as one of the things that
mark the higher orders of life, take over the furnishing of the home
and through this and the study that their greater leisure permits
them, exert a strong influence on the purchase of art-works for
private collections and even museums. The production of the American
painter and sculptor is also much affected as a consequence, and in
the direction of conventionality. I do not claim that the level of art
in America would be greatly improved at present if it were the men
instead of the women who took the lead; perhaps, in view of the state
of appreciation in our people, it would be lowered; but I maintain that
the fact that art is so much in the hands of women and the suspicion
among men that it carries with it some implication of effeminacy are
among the indications of American immaturity in art-appreciation. We
cannot expect an art really representative of America until there is a
foundation of regard for his work that the artist can build on. In the
old civilizations the artist was meeting an active demand on the part
of his people; in America, he has to seek desperately for a living.
Albrecht Dürer summed up the difference between the two states of
civilization when he wrote from Venice to a friend in the young Germany
of his day: “Oh, how I shall freeze for this sun when I get home; here
I am a gentleman, at home a parasite.”

It will seem to many that even such famous words should not be repeated
in a country where art is so often mentioned in the papers, where
museums are springing up in large numbers, where unheard-of prices
are paid for the work of famous men, and where even those who take
no interest in art will accord it a sort of halo. But the very fact
that it is relegated to the class of Sunday things instead of entering
into everyday life shows that our colonial period--in the cultural
sense of the word--is not yet passed. This should not be looked on as
discouraging; it is natural that the formation of character and ideas
should require time and I shall endeavour to show that the development
is really a rapid and healthy one. The mistake Americans are most prone
to, that of imagining the country to have reached a mature character
and a valid expression, shows their eagerness to advance, and explains
their readiness to tear down or to build up.

In the presence of such a spirit, one must see the mistakes of
conservatism or of ignorance in due perspective. However trying to
those who suffer from them at the time, they cannot fatally warp the
growth that is going on. For years we retained a tariff that obstructed
the coming into the country of works of art. That is a thing of the
past, and as one of the reasons used to defend it was that it protected
American artists against the foreigner, so, with the abolition of the
tariff, there has been more of a tendency to judge works of art for
their own qualities, without question of their nationality and without
the puerile idea of nurturing the American product by keeping out work
from abroad. How far this mistake had gone may be judged from the
fact that in a certain city of our Far West a group of painters made
a protest against the attention given by a newspaper to an exhibition
sent out from New York, raising no question of the quality of the
work, but merely demanding that local men be spoken of when art was
discussed in the paper--which promptly acquiesced, and removed the
critic from his position. The case may seem an extreme one, yet it
illustrates the attitude of many of our collectors and even our museum
authorities who, in the name of Americanism, are “helping to fame many,
the sight of whose painting is a miseducation,” to use a phrase that
Mr. Berenson has applied to another matter.

There is no question to-day but that America must evolve along
the lines of contemporary thought throughout the civilized world.
There will be a local tang to our art. Certain enthusiasms and
characteristics, as we develop them, may give emphasis to special
phases of our production, but there is no longer the possibility of
an isolated, autochthonic growth, such as seemed to be forecast up to
about the time of the Revolution. The 18th century in America with its
beautiful architecture, its fine craftsmen, and its painting, is only
less far from the America of to-day than is the art of the Indians.
We still put up buildings and make furniture in what is called the
Colonial style, but so do we follow the even more remote Mission style
of architecture in our Western States, and attempt to use Indian
designs in decoration. The usual fate of attempted continuings of a
bygone style overtakes all these efforts. Our materials are different,
our needs are different, our time is different. A glance at two houses,
as one speeds by in an automobile, tells us which is the real Colonial
architecture, which the imitation. At the Jumel Mansion in New York
it is easy to see which are the old parts, which the restorations,
although enough time has passed since the latter were made to weather
them to the tone of the original places.

In painting, the change that occurred after we became a republic is
even more unmistakable. The English School underwent considerable
modification when its representatives here began to work for
themselves. Where Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence were consulting
the old masters with such studious solicitude, Sir Joshua especially
pursuing his enquiry into the processes of Titian, men like Copley
and Blackburn were thrown back on such technical resources as they
could find here and had to depend for progress on tightening their
hold on character. Copley has the true note of the primitive in the
intensity with which he studies his people, and must be reckoned with
portraitists of almost the highest order.

What a change in the next generation! The more independent we are
politically the more we come out of the isolation that gave us quiet
and freedom to build up the admirable style of pre-Revolutionary days.
And then there was so much to be done in getting our new institutions
to work and our new land under cultivation, there was so much money
to be made and so much to import from Europe. It is significant that
the best painter of the period is John Vanderlyn, who had been sent
to Paris to study under Ingres. Fine artist that Vanderlyn was, and
informed by a greater tradition than Copley knew, he never reached the
impressiveness of the latter.

I shall not attempt to describe at any length the various steps
by which we rose from the artistic poverty which was ours in the
earlier decades of the 19th century. My purpose is not to write even
a short history of American art, but to enquire into its character
and accomplishment. The test of these is evidently not what each
period or school meant to the American artists before or after it,
but how it compares with the rest of the world’s art at its time. The
thought occurs to one forcibly on hearing of the wildly exaggerated
esteem--whether measured by words or by money--in which the more
celebrated of American artists are held; one asks oneself how the given
work would be considered in Europe by competent men. Few indeed are
the reputations that will stand the test; and we do not need to go
abroad to apply it, for the galleries of our large cities supply ample
opportunity for the comparison.

Beginning with the landscape artists who are the earliest of the modern
Americans to be looked on as our possible contribution to art, one’s
most impersonal observation is that in point of time, they, like their
successors in this country, follow the Europeans of the school to which
they belong by something like a generation. Now, art-ideas moved very
rapidly in the 19th century, and--however mechanical an indication
it may appear at first sight--it is almost a sure condemnation of
a European painter to find him in one period trying to work with
the formula of the generation before him. In America this test does
not apply so well, for we must allow for the effect of distance and
compare the American with his immediate contemporaries abroad only
in proportion to the advance of time--which is to say in proportion
to the convenience of travel to Europe and the possibility of seeing
contemporary work here.

Thus when we consider that Inness, Wyant, and Martin were born about
a generation after the Barbizon men and very nearly at the time of
the French Impressionists, we shall not say that it was to the latter
school that the Americans should have belonged. Whereas the European
followers of Corot and Rousseau were merely _retardataires_ who had
not the intellectual power to seize on the ideas of their own day,
the Americans could feel a little of the joy of discoverers through
having themselves worked out some of the ideas of naturalism in their
evolution from the earlier landscape painting in this country. And
so if they add nothing to what the Frenchmen had done already--with
an incomparably greater tradition to uphold them--our trio of
nature-lovers expressed genuine sentiment, and Homer Martin pushed on
to a quality of painting that often places him within hailing distance
of the classic line which, in France, kept out of the swamps of
sentimentality that engulfed the followers of Wyant and Inness here.

The cases of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder have an interest aside
from the actual works of the two painters. They are doubtless the
strongest Americans of their time--and the ones who owe the least to
Europe. It must be men of such a breed who will make real American art
when we are ready to produce it. In any case their work must rank among
our permanently valuable achievements: Homer’s for the renewal of the
sturdy self-reliance that we noted in Copley, Ryder’s for the really
noble design he so often obtained and for the grand and moving fidelity
to a vision.

If their independence is so valuable a factor in both men’s work,
there is also to be noted the heavy price that each paid for having
been reared in a provincial school. With a boldness of character that
recalls Courbet, Winslow Homer fails utterly to hold a place in art
analogous to that of the French realist, because all the power and
ability that went into his work were unequal to compensating for his
lack of the knowledge of form, of structure, of optical effect that
Ingres and Delacroix, among others, furnished ready to the hand of
Courbet. Thus Homer’s painting goes on throughout his lifetime quite
innocent of any real concern with the central problems of European
picture-making and owes most of its strength to the second-rate quality
of illustration. One hesitates to say that Ryder would have gone
farther had he been born in France, yet the fact of his labouring for
ten or fifteen years on many a small canvas, the very limited number of
his works which has resulted from the difficulty he had in saying the
thing that was in him, are marks of a bad training. His range is not a
wide one, but the deep beauty he infused into his pictures is one of
our chief reasons for confidence in the art-instinct that lies dormant
in our people.

None of the men in the next group we must consider, the artists who
enter fully into European painting, have the foundation of talent that
Ryder had. Whistler is, of course, the painter to whom most Americans
pin their faith in searching among their compatriots for an essential
figure in 19th-century art. But take the first opportunity to see him
with the great Frenchmen of his time: beside Degas his drawing is of
a sickly weakness but slightly relieved by his sense of rhythm in
line and form; beside Manet his colour and painting seem even more
etiolated, and to save one’s feeling for him from utter demolition
one hastens to the usual American refuge of the sentiment and--in the
etchings--to the Yankee excellence of the craftsmanship. The nocturnes
really do have a felicity in their rendering of the poetry of the night
that would make us regret their loss, and when the unhappy Whistlerian
school has been forgotten (an artist must take _some_ responsibility
for his followers) we shall have more satisfaction in the butterfly
that Whistler knew himself to be, since he adopted it as his signature.
It is merit of no such slightness that we love in Ryder, and yet
when we reach Chase and Sargent we find even less of basic talent,
for which their immersion in the current of European painting could
have furnished a finely tempered instrument of expression. Both men
show the natural bent for painting that is often a valuable asset and
often--as in their case--a source of danger. They do not enrich our
annals by any great works, but they do the country an immense service
when they cause its students and collectors to take one of the final
steps in the direction of the live tradition of Europe. They never
appreciated what was greatest among their contemporaries, and failing
to have this grasp of the creative impulse and of the new principles
that were at work in Paris, they offered clever manipulations of the
material as a substitute. Feeling the insufficience of this, Sargent
has tried the grave style of the early Italians in his decorations at
the Public Library in Boston. But his Biblical personages get him no
nearer to the essentials of art than the society people of whom he has
done so many likenesses. In Boston, it is Chavannes who shows which is
the great tradition of the period and how it accords with the classic
past. Sargent is perhaps most American in his unreadiness to perceive
the immense things that Europe, modern and ancient, had to offer him.

Even so, with Chase and Sargent we find ourselves far nearer the period
when American artists shall partake in art-ideas during their moment
of full fertility. Our Impressionists are only a decade or two behind
the Frenchman, and while one must not slip into a too easy trick of
rating talent by the time of its appearance, one cannot fail to be
struck by the fact that John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir approached
the quality of their French preceptors with far greater closeness than
that with which the Inness-Wyant group followed the Barbizon men. Much
as there is of charm and sound pictorial knowledge in Twachtman’s work
and Weir’s, one feels that they are not yet deep enough in the great
tradition to go on to an art of their own creation, and we have to
content ourselves with giving them a place among the Impressionists of
secondary rank.

An interesting case among the Americans who made the serious study of
European art that began soon after the middle of the 19th century, is
that of John La Farge. We know the history of his seeking, his copying,
his associations, speculations, and travels. All his life he is the man
from the new country asking the dead and the living representatives of
the classic tradition for help. How little we see of the man himself
in the mosaic of charming things that make up his art. Winslow Homer
exists as a personality, ill-educated and crude, but affirmative and
arresting. La Farge disappears in the smoke of the incense that he
burns before the various shrines to which his eclecticism led him.

If not to be admired as a great artist, he was a man of great gifts
and a genuine appreciator of the masters. Therefore, he is not to
be confused for a moment with the ignoble _pasticheurs_ who achieve
office and honours in the anæmic institutions with which we imitate the
academies and salons of Europe. These are among the youthful errors I
mentioned on an earlier page--depressing enough when one sees the acres
of “decorative” abominations which fill our state-houses, courts, and
libraries, but in reality of no great importance as a detriment to
our culture. Like the soldiers’ monuments, the dead architecture, the
tasteless manufactured articles of common use, they sink so far below
any level of art that the public is scarcely affected by them. Only
the persons trained in schools to admire the painting of a Mr. E. H.
Blashfield or the sculpture of a Mr. Daniel C. French ever try to think
of them as beautiful; the rest of the public takes them on faith as
something that goes with the building, like the “frescoed” cupids to be
found in the halls of apartment houses or the tin cupolas and minarets
on the roof. The popular magazine-illustrators, poor as they are, have
more power to mislead than our quasi-official nonentities.

Between the pseudo-classic decorators and the frankly “lowbrow” artists
of the commercial publications, the posters, and the advertisements,
there is the large class of men whose work is seen at the annual
exhibitions, the dealers’ galleries, and the American sections of the
museums. They partake of the vice of each of the other two classes: the
easily learned formula for their product being a more or less thorough
schooling in some style derived from the past, plus an optimistic or
“red-blooded” or else gently melancholy attitude toward the subject.
Velasquez has been the main victim of their caricature in the later
years, but a little Chinese, Florentine, Impressionist, or even Cubist
style will often be added to give a look of “modernity” to the work.
As long as there is a recognizable proficiency in drawing and painting
(it is of course only for the cheaper trade that the picture has to
be guaranteed as done by hand), the erudite patron or museum trustee
is assured of the seriousness of the artist’s intentions, while to
make the thing take with the general buyer, the most important matter
is judgment as to the type of American girl, the virile male, or the
romantic or homely landscape that our public likes to live with.

The only excuse for mentioning such things in an essay on American art
is that they help to define it by contrast--for these pictures are
neither art nor American. The disease of which they are an outward sign
infects Europe almost as much as it does our own country, and there is
hardly a distinguishing mark to tell whether the Salon picture was done
in Madrid, Berlin, or Indianapolis. A sentence from an eminent American
critic, Russell Sturgis, gives the key to the situation. He said, “The
power of abstract design is lost to the modern world,--we must paint
pictures or carve expressional groups when we wish to adorn.” In the
half generation that has passed since these words were spoken, the
French have proven by several arts based entirely on abstract design
that the power for it was not lost to the world and that men still know
the difference between expression by form and colour and expression by
concrete ideas.

Throughout this survey I have taken painting as the index to the
art-instinct of America, and as we glance again at even our best
painters we see that it is on concrete ideas that they have built: on
character in portraiture with Copley, on romantic vision with Ryder,
on observation of appearances with Homer. Precisely the reason for
Whistler’s great success among his countrymen was the promise of
release he afforded by his reaching out for the design and colour
of the Orient, with which one associates also his spoken words,
offering us “harmonies” and “symphonies” in place of the art built on
intellectual elements that we had had before. The fact that Whistler
himself was not strong enough in his grasp of tradition, or of a nature
to achieve an important result along the lines he pointed to, does
not change the issue. We had begun to be aware of the repression of
instinct that was marking American life. We had recognized that the
satisfaction of the senses, quite as much as intellectual pleasure, is
to be demanded of art. Puritan morality and Quaker drabness had turned
us away from any such conception, and when they took notice of art at
all, it was for its educational value, either to inculcate religious or
patriotic ideas, or for its connection with the classic past.

Add to this the utilitarian needs of a country that had to build
rapidly, caring for cheapness more than for permanence (so little of
the building, in fact, was intended to be permanent), and one has an
explanation of the absence of architectural quality in the American
houses of the last hundred years. The characteristic of building in
the time is seen in the lifeless blocks of “brownstone fronts,” in
the apartments that have so little of the home about them that in the
restlessness of his search for a place to live satisfactorily, the
American of the cities has earned the name of the “van-dweller,”--one
sees the thing again in the abject monotony of farm-houses and country
residences. Their spirit, or lack of it, is continued in furniture
and decoration. One understands why Europe has been the magic word
for countless thousands of Americans. Perhaps it was the palaces and
museums that they set out to see and that they told about on their
return, but more impressive to them--because more satisfying to their
hunger for a beauty near to their daily lives--was the sight of an
Italian village built with love for hillsides and with understanding of
the forms of the hill and of the type of construction that would suit
it. Or was it the cheeriness of the solid Dutch houses whose clear reds
and blacks look out so robustly through the green of the trees that
border the canals? The bright-coloured clothing of the peasants became
delightful to the traveller, even if he still gave it a pitying smile
when he saw it again on the immigrant here; and the humble foreigner,
anxious to fit in to his new surroundings, hastened to tone down the
vivacity of his native costume to the colourlessness of the American
farmer’s or workman’s garb. In place of the gay pink or green stucco
of his cottage at home, the immigrant got more or less of sanitary
plumbing, higher wages, and other material benefits, to recompense him
for the life he had left behind.

The life! That was the magic that Europe held for our visitors. They
might return to the big enterprises, the big problems here, and feel
that America was home because they had a share in its growth, but
their nostalgia for the old countries continued to grow in the measure
that they came to appreciate the wisdom with which life was ordered
there--as they realized how the stable institutions, the old religions,
festivals, traditions, all the things that flower into art, had
resisted the terrific change that the industrial revolution had brought
into the 19th century. Behind all questions of the coming of objects of
art into this country or the appearance of new artists or new schools
here, lies this most pivotal matter of the elements of art in American
life. They need not be, they cannot be the same as those in European
life, but it is futile to think of having an art here if we deny
ourselves the ideas and feelings of which art has been made--the joy
and awe of life that the Greek responded to in his marbles, the Italian
in his frescoes, the Spaniard, the Fleming, the Dutchman, and the
Frenchman in his canvases. Copying the externals of their work without
again living their lives can result only in academism--bad sculpture
and bad pictures.

It was not as a protest against bad art, local or foreign, that the
International Exhibition of 1913 was organized, and it is very solidly
to the credit of our public that it did not regard the event in that
negative fashion--but as a positive thing, a revelation of the later
schools of European painting of which it had been kept in ignorance
by the will of the academies here and abroad. The “Armory Show,” as
it was called, drew forth a storm of ridicule, but it also attracted
such hundreds of thousands of visitors as no current exhibition had
ever gathered in this country before. The first contact of our public
with the arts that have succeeded Impressionism--with the painting
of Cézanne, Redon, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, the Cubists, and
others--was made at this epoch-marking show. With the jeers that it
received there were not a few hosannas, and even the vast majority of
visitors--doubtful as to the exact value of the various exhibits, knew
that qualities existed in the new schools that had never been seen
here and that were needed. Some three hundred works went from the walls
of the Armory to form a vanguard for the far more important purchases
of modern art that have since been building up our collections; so
that at the moment of this writing an exhibition can be opened at the
Metropolitan Museum which, while representing a mere fraction of the
wealth of such pictures in American possession, gives a superb idea of
the great schools of the later 19th century and the 20th century in
France. It is worthy of note that in its response to the great show of
1913 and to the smaller ones that followed, America was only giving,
in a stronger form, the measure of a power of appreciation it had
shown before. Earlier examples of this are to be found in the great
collections of Barbizon and Impressionist pictures here. A thing that
should weigh against many a discouraging feature of our art-conditions
is the fact that an American museum was the first in the world, and the
only one during the lifetime of Manet, to hang works by that master.

Returning now to our own painting, one man in this country resisted
with complete success the test of an exhibition with the greatest of
recent painters from abroad. It was Mr. Maurice B. Prendergast, who
for thirty years had been joyously labouring at an art which showed
its derivation from the best French painting of his day, its admirable
acceptances of the teaching of Cézanne (scarcely a name even in
Europe when Mr. Prendergast first studied him), and its humorous and
affectionate appreciation of the American scenes that the artist had
known from his youth. In original and logical design, in brilliant
colour that yet had the mellowness of a splendid wine, he expresses
the modern faith in the world we see and makes it lovable. At last
we welcome an art in accord with the finest of the ancient-modern
tradition, as European critics have since declared; yet it remains
American in provenance and in the air of unconscious honesty that has
always been a characteristic of the good work of this country.

The latest wave of influence to come over American art has almost
been the most far-reaching and invigorating. To go further than this
assertion, at least in the matter of individuals, would be to forego
the support of too large a part of that body of opinion that I know
to be behind my statements throughout this essay. Art-matters must,
in the final analysis, be stated dogmatically, but I am unwilling to
speak of the schools now developing save in a general way, especially
as the most interesting men in them have still to reach a definitive
point in their evolution. They are abreast or nearly abreast of the
ideas of Europe, and there is an admirable vigour in the work that some
individuals are producing with those ideas. But the changes brought
about by the International are still too recent for us to expect the
most important results from them for a number of years. The general
condition here has probably never been as good before.

I have, till now, spoken only of the more traditional aspects of
art--the kind one finds in museums--and that last word calls for at
least a mention of the great wealth of art-objects that are heaping up
in our public collections, and in the private galleries which so often
come to the aid of the museums.

There is, however, another phase of our subject that demands comment,
if only as a point of departure for the study that will one day be
given to the American art that is not yet recognized by its public or
its makers as one of our main expressions. The steel bridges, the steel
buildings, the newly designed machines, and utensils of all kinds we
are bringing forth show an adaptation to function that is recognized
as one of the great elements of art. Perhaps the process has not yet
gone far enough for us to look on these things as fully developed works
of art, perhaps we shall still need some influence from Europe to make
us see the possibilities we have here, or again, it may be in America
that the impetus to creation along such lines will be the stronger. At
all events we may feel sure that the study of the classics, ancient
and modern, which is spreading throughout the country has, in some
men, reached a point of saturation which permits the going on to new
discovery, and we may be confident of the ability of our artists to
make good use of their advantage.

                                                         WALTER PACH




THE THEATRE


Of the perceptible gradual improvement in the American popular taste so
far as the arts are concerned, the theatre as we currently engage it
offers, comparatively, the least evidence. The best-selling E. Phillips
Oppenheims, Robert W. Chamberses, and Eleanor H. Porters of yesterday
have given considerable ground to Wharton and Bennett, to Hergesheimer
and Wells. The audiences in support of Stokowski, the Flonzaley
Quartette, the Philharmonic, the great piano and violin virtuosos, and
the recognized singers, are yearly augmented. Fine painting and fine
sculpture find an increasing sober appreciation. The circulation of
_Munsey’s Magazine_ falls, and that of the _Atlantic Monthly_ rises.
But the best play of an American theatrical season, say a “Beyond the
Horizon,” has still to struggle for full breath, while across the
street the receipts of some “Ladies’ Night,” “Gold Diggers,” or “Bat,”
running on without end, mount to the half-million mark.

If one speaks of the New York theatre as the American theatre, one
speaks with an exaggerated degree of critical charity, for the New
York theatre--so far as there is any taste in the American theatre--is
the native theatre at its fullest flower. Persons insufficiently
acquainted with the theatre have a fondness for controverting this,
but the bookkeeping departments offer concrete testimony that, if good
drama is supported at all, it is supported in the metropolitan theatre,
not in the so-called “road” theatre. The New York theatre supports
an American playwright like Booth Tarkington when he does his best
in “Clarence,” where the road theatre supports him only when he does
his worst, as in “Mister Antonio.” The New York theatre, these same
financial records prove, supports Shaw, O’Neill, Galsworthy, Bahr, and
others of their kind, at least in sufficient degree to permit them to
pay their way, where the theatre of Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland,
Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh spells failure for them.
Save it be played by an actor or actress of great popular favour, a
first-rate piece of dramatic writing has to-day hardly a chance for
success outside of New York. These other cities of America, though
they are gradually reading better books and patronizing better music
and finer musicians, are almost drama-deaf. “There is, in New York,”
the experienced Mr. William A. Brady has said to me, “an audience of
at least fifteen thousand for any really good play. That isn’t a large
audience; it won’t turn the play into a profitable theatrical venture;
but it is a damned sight larger audience than you’ll be able to find
in any other American city.” Let the native sons of the cities thus
cruelly maligned, before they emit their habitual bellows of protest,
consider, once they fared forth from New York, the fate of nine-tenths
of the first-rate plays produced in the American theatre without the
hocus-pocus of fancy box-office “stars” during the last ten years.

The theatrical taste of America at the present time, outside of the
metropolis, is demonstrated by the box-office returns to be one
that venerates the wall-motto _opera_ of Mr. William Hodge and the
spectacular imbecilities of Mr. Richard Walton Tully above the finest
work of the best of its native dramatists like O’Neill, and above the
finest work of the best of the modern Europeans. In the metropolis,
an O’Neill’s “Beyond the Horizon,” a Galsworthy’s “Justice,” a Shaw’s
“Androcles,” at least can live; sometimes, indeed, live and prosper.
But for one respectable piece of dramatic writing that succeeds outside
of New York, there are twenty that fail miserably. The theatrical
culture of the American countryside is in the main of a piece with
that of the French countryside, and to the nature of the latter the
statistics of the French provincial theatres offer a brilliant and
dismaying attestation. Save a good play first obtain the endorsement
of New York, it is to-day impossible to get a paying audience for
it in any American city of size after the first curiosity-provoking
performance. These audiences buy, not good drama, but notoriety. Were
all communication with the city of New York suddenly to be cut off for
six months, the only theatrical ventures that could earn their way
outside would be the Ziegfeld “Follies,” the Winter Garden shows, “Ben
Hur,” and the hack dramatizations of the trashier best-sellers like
“Pollyanna” and “Daddy Longlegs.” This is not postured for sensational
effect. It is literally true. So true, in fact, that there is to-day
not a single producer in the American theatre who can afford to, or
who will, risk the loss of a mere four weeks’ preliminary “road” trial
of a first-class play. If he cannot get a New York theatre for his
production, he places it in the storehouse temporarily until he can
obtain a metropolitan booking rather than hazard the financial loss
that, nine times in ten, is certain to come to him.

More and more, the better producing managers--men like Hopkins, William
Harris, Jr., Ames, _et al._--are coming to open their plays in New
York “cold,” that is, without the former experimental performances in
thitherward cities. And more and more, they are coming to realize to
their sorrow that, unless New York supports these plays of the better
sort, they can look for no support elsewhere. Chicago, boasting of its
hospitality to sound artistic endeavour, spent thirty-five hundred
dollars on a drama by Eugene O’Neill in the same week that it spent
forty-five thousand dollars on Al Jolson’s Winter Garden show. Boston,
one of the first cities to rush frantically forward with proofs of
its old New England culture, has turned into a prompt and disastrous
failure every first-rate play presented in its theatres without a
widely advertised star actor during the last five years, and at the
same time has made a fortune for the astute Mr. A. H. Woods, who,
gauging its culture accurately, has sent it “Up in Mabel’s Room,”
“Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and similar spicy boudoir and hay-mow
farces, together with Miss Theda Bara in “The Blue Flame.” (It is no
secret among the theatrical managers that the only way to bring the
culture of Boston to the box-office window is through a campaign of raw
advertising: the rawer the better. Thus the Boston Sunday newspaper
advertisements of “Up in Mabel’s Room” were made to display a girl
lying on a bed, with the suggestive catch-lines, “10,000 Visitors
Weekly” and “Such a Funny Feeling.” Thus, the advertisements of another
exhibit presented a rear view of a nude female with the title of the
show, “Oh, Mommer,” printed across the ample buttocks. Thus, the
advertisements of a Winter Garden music show, alluding to the runway
used in these exhibitions, christened it “The Bridge of Thighs.”) No
play presented in Philadelphia since “The Girl with the Whooping Cough”
(subsequently suppressed by the New York police authorities on the
ground of indecency) has been patronized to the extent where it has
been found necessary to call out the police reserves to maintain order,
as was the case when the play in point was produced. Washington is a
cultural wilderness; I have personally attended the premières of ten
highly meritorious dramas in the national capital in the last six years
and can report accurately on the quality of the receptions accorded to
them. Washington would seem still to be what it was some fifteen years
or so ago when, upon the initial revelation of Barrie’s “Peter Pan,”
it essayed to boo it into permanent discard. Baltimore, Detroit (save
during the height of the war prosperity when the poor bohicks, wops,
and Greeks in the automobile works found themselves suddenly able to
buy theatre seats regularly), Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco--the
story is the same. Honourable drama spells ruin; legs, lewdness and
sentimentality spell riches.

In comparison with the taste of the great American cultural prairie
whereon these cities are situated, the city of New York, as I have
written, looms up an æsthetic Athens. In New York, too, there is
prosperity for bare knees, bed humours, and “Peg o’ My Heart” bathos,
but not alone for these. Side by side with the audiences that crowd
into the leg shows, the couch farces, and the uplift sermons are
audiences of considerable bulk that make profitable the production of
such more estimable things as Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” O’Neill’s
“Emperor Jones,” the plays of St. John Ervine and Dunsany, of Tolstoy
and Hauptmann, of Bahr and Benavente and Guitry. True enough, in
order to get to the theatres in which certain of these plays are
revealed, one is compelled to travel in a taxicab several miles from
Broadway--and at times has to sit with the chauffeur in order to pilot
him to far streets and alleyways that are not within his sophisticated
ken--but, once one gets to the theatres, one finds them full, and their
audiences enthusiastic and responsive. The culture of the American
theatre--in so far as it exists--may be said, in fact, to be an
alleyway culture. Almost without exception in the last dozen years
and more have the best dramatists of Europe and of our own country
been driven up alleyways and side-streets for their first American
hearing. Up these dark alleys and in these remote malls alone have they
been able to find a sufficient intelligence for their wares. Hervieu,
Shaw, Echegaray, Strindberg, Björnson, Dunsany, Masefield, Ervine,
Bergström, Chekhov, Andreyev, Benavente, O’Neill--these and many others
of eminence owe their New York introduction to the side-street American
who, in the majority of cases, is found upon analysis to be of fifty
per cent. foreign blood. And what thus holds true of New York holds
equally true in most of the other cities. In most of such cities, that
is, as have arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to
boast a little playhouse up an ulterior mews.

The more general American theatrical taste, reflected perhaps most
fairly in such things as the idiotic endorsements of the Drama
League and the various “white lists” of the different religious
organizations, is--for all the undeniable fact that it seems gradually
to be improving--still in the playing-blocks and tin choo-choo-car
stage. Satire, unless it be of the most obvious sort and approach
easily assimilable burlesque, spells failure for a producer. A point
of view that does not effect a compromise with sentimentality spells
failure for a dramatist. Sex, save it be presented in terms of a
seltzer-siphon, “Abendstern,” or the _Police Gazette_, spells failure
for both. The leaders in the propagation of this low taste are not
the American managers and producers, as is commonly maintained, but
the American playwrights. During the seventeen years of my active
critical interest in the theatre, I have not encountered a single
honest piece of dramatic writing from an American hand that could not
get a hearing--and an intelligent hearing--from one or another of these
regularly abused managers and producers. And during these years I have,
by virtue of my joint professional duties as critic and co-editor
of a sympathetic literary periodical, read perhaps nine-tenths of
the dramatic manuscripts which aspiring young America has confected.
This young America, loud in its inveighing against the managers and
producers, has in the space of time indicated produced very, very
little that was worth producing, and that little has promptly found
a market. A bad workman is always indignant. But I know of no good
American play that either has not already been produced, or has not
been bought for future production. Any good play by an American will
find its producer readily enough. The first manager who read “Beyond
the Horizon” bought it immediately he laid the manuscript down, and
this, recall, was its professionally unknown author’s first three-act
play. The American theatre has altered in this department; the last
fifteen years have wrought a tonic change.

No, the fault is not with the managers and producers, but with the
playwrights. The latter, where they are not mere parrots, are cowards.
Young and old, new and experienced, talented and talentless alike, they
are in the mass so many _Saturday Evening Post_ souls, alone dreaming
of and intent upon achieving a sufficient financial gain to transmute
the Ford into a Rolls-Royce and the Hudson Bay seal collar into Russian
sable. A baby cannot be nourished and developed physically upon water;
a theatrical public, for all its potential willingness, cannot be
developed aesthetically upon a diet of snide writing. In the American
theatre of the present time there are not more than two, or at most
three, playwrights out of all the hundreds, who retain in their hearts
a determined and uncorrupted purpose. Take away young O’Neill, and give
a bit of ground to Miss Rita Wellman (whose accomplishment is still
too vague for fixed appraisal), and there is next to nothing left.
Flashes of talent, yes, but only flashes. Craven’s “Too Many Cooks”
and “The First Year” are observant, highly skilful depictions of the
American scene, but they are dramatic literature only in the degree
that “Main Street” and “This Side of Paradise” are literature. With
the extraordinary “Papa,” Miss Zoë Akins gave up and surrendered--at
least temporarily--to the box-office skull and cross-bones. Until
Tarkington proves that “Clarence” was not a happy accident in the
long and unbroken line of “Up from Nowhere,” “Mister Antonio,” “The
Country Cousin,” “The Alan from Home,” “Cameo Kirby,” “Your Humble
Servant,” “Springtime,” “Getting a Polish,” “The Gibson Upright,” and
“Poldekin,” we shall have to hold up our decision on him. George Ade,
the great promise of authentic American drama, is no more; he pulled
in his oars, alas, in mid-stream. Joseph Medill Patterson, an honest
dramatist, fell through the bridge while not yet half way across. The
rest? Well, the rest are the Augustus Thomases, left-overs from the
last generation, proficient technicians with empty heads, or youngsters
still dramatically wet behind the ears. The rest of the rest? Ticket
salesmen.

In no civilized country in the world to-day is there among playwrights
so little fervour for sound drama as in the United States. In England,
they at least try, in a measure, to write well; in Germany, to
experiment bravely in new forms; in France, to philosophize either
seriously or lightly upon life as they find it; in Russia, to treat
soberly of problems physical and spiritual; in Spain, to depict the
Spanish heart and conscience and atmosphere; in Ireland, to reflect
the life and thoughts, the humour and tragedy and encompassing
aspirations, of a people. And in the United States--what? In the
United States, with hardly more than two exceptions, there is at the
moment not a playwright who isn’t thinking of “success” above honest
work. Good and bad craftsmen alike, they all think the same. Gold,
silver, copper. And the result is an endless procession of revamped
crook plays, detective plays, Cinderella plays, boudoir plays, bucolic
plays: fodder for doodles. The cowardice before the golden snake’s eye
spreads to the highest as well as to the lowest. Integrity is thrown
overboard as the ship is steered unswervingly into the Golden Gate. The
unquestionable talent of an Avery Hopwood--a George M. Cohan--a George
Bronson-Howard--is deliberately self-corrupted.

The American professional theatre is to-day at once the richest theatre
in the world, and the poorest. Financially, it reaches to the stars;
culturally, with exception so small as to be negligible, it reaches to
the drains. For both of these reaches, the American newspaper stands
largely responsible. The American newspaper, in general, regards the
theatre with contempt. My early years, upon leaving the university,
were spent on the staff of one of them--the leading daily journal of
America, it was in those days--and I shall never forget its attitude
toward the theatre: cheap, hollow, debased. If a play was produced by
a manager who advertised extensively in the paper, it was praised out
of all reason. If a play was produced by a manager who happened to
be _persona non grata_ in the office, it was dismissed with a brief
reportorial notice. If a play was produced by a new and enterprising
manager on the night of another production in a theatre patronized by
fashionable audiences--the Empire, say--the former play, however worthy
an effort it might be, was let down with a stick or two that there
might be room to print the names of the fashionables who were in the
Empire seats. The surface of things has changed somewhat since then,
but the situation at bottom is much the same. A talented young reviewer
writes honestly of a tawdry play in the _Evening Sun_; the producer
of the play, an office favourite, complains; and the young reviewer
is promptly discharged. A moving picture producer takes half-page
advertisements of his forthcoming _opus_ in the New York newspapers,
and the screen exhibit, a piece of trash, is hailed as a master work.
Let a new drama by Gerhart Hauptmann be presented in the Park Theatre
to-night and let Mr. John Barrymore also appear at eight-thirty in a
play by some obscure hack at the Empire, and there will not be a single
newspaper in the whole of New York City that will not review the latter
flashy affair at the expense of the former.

It is not that the newspapers, in New York as elsewhere, are
dishonest--few of them are actually dishonest; it is that they are
suburban, shoddy, cheap. With only four exceptions that I can think of,
the American newspaper, wherever you find it, treats the theatre as if
it were of very much less importance than baseball and of but a shade
more importance than a rape in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Two columns are
given freely to the latest development in bootlegging in Harlem, and
a begrudged half-column to a play by John Galsworthy. A society woman
is accused by her husband of having been guilty of adultery with a
half-breed Indian, and the allotment is four columns. On the same day,
a Shakespearean production is mounted by the most artistic producer
in the American theatre, and the allotment of space is two-thirds of
a column. The reply of the newspapers is, “Well, we give the public
what it wants! And it is more greatly interested in scandal than in
Shakespeare.” Have not then the theatrical managers the right to reply
in the same terms? And when they do, some of them, disgustedly reply in
the same terms, what is the hypocritical appraisal of their offerings
that the selfsame newspapers vouchsafe to them? If the New York _Times_
devotes three columns to a dirty divorce case, I fail to see how it can
with justice or reason permit its theatrical reviewer indignantly to
denounce Mr. A. H. Woods in the same issue for devoting three hours to
a dirty farce.

The American drama, like the American audience, lacks repose. This is
ever logically true of a new civilization. Time must mellow the mind
and heart before drama may achieve depth and richness; time must mellow
the mind and heart before an audience may achieve the mood of calm
deliberation. Youth is a rare and precious attribute, but youth, for
all its fine courage and derring-do, is inclined to be superficial.
Its emotions and its reactions are respectively of and to the primary
colours; the pastels it is impatient of. The American theatre, drama,
and audience are the theatre, drama, and audience of the metaphysical
and emotional primary colours: substantial, vivid, but all too obvious
and glaring. I speak, of course, generally. For there are a few
notable exceptions to the rule, and these exceptions portend in the
American theatre the first signs of the coming dawn. A producer like
Arthur Hopkins, perhaps the first American man of the theatre gifted
with a genuine passion for fine and beautiful things and the talent
with which to do--or at least try to do--them; a dramatist like young
O’Neill, permitting no compromise or equivoke in the upward sweep of
his dynamic imagination; an actor like Arnold Daly and an actress like
Margaret Anglin to whom failure in the service of honest drama means
absolutely nothing--these are they who inspire our faith in the future.
Nor do they stand alone. Hume and Moeller, Jones, Peters, Simonson and
Bel-Geddes, Glaspell, Wellman and Pottle--such youngsters, too, are
dreaming their dreams, some of them, true enough, still silly dreams,
but yet dreams. And the dreaming spreads, spreads....

But in its slow and brave ascent, the American theatre is still
heavily retarded by the insular forces that, as in no other theatre
save the English, operate in the Republic. The fight against outworn
convention is a brave and bitter fight, but victory still rests
mainly on the banners of the Philistines. The drama that dismisses
sentimentality for truth, that seeks to face squarely the tragedy
and comedy of love and life, that declines to pigeon-hole itself,
and that hazards to view the American scene with cosmopolitan eyes,
is confronted at every turn by the native Puritanism (as often
shammed as inborn), and by the native parochialism and hypocrisy. The
production that derides all stereotype--all the ridiculous and mossy
rubber-stamps--is in turn derided. The actor or actress who essays to
filter a rôle through the mind of a human being instead of through the
mind of a rouged marionette is made mock of. Here, the playgoing public
finds its leaders in three-fourths of the newspaper reviewing chairs,
chairs influenced, directly or indirectly, by an intrinsic inexperience
and ignorance, or by an extrinsic suggestion of “policy.”

The American theatre and drama have long suffered from being slaves
to the national hypocrisy. Only on rare occasions have they been
successful in casting off the shackles, and then but momentarily. The
pull against them is stubborn, strong. Cracking the black snake across
their backs are a hundred padrones: newspapers trembling at the thought
of offending their advertisers, religious orders poking their noses
into what should not concern them, corrupt moral uplift organizations
and lecherous anti-vice societies itching for the gauds of publicity,
meddling college professors augmenting their humble wage by writing
twenty-dollar articles on subjects they know nothing about for the
Sunday supplements, ex-real estate reporters and divorcée interviewers
become “dramatic critics,” notoriety seeking clergymen, snide
producers trying to protect their snide enterprises from the dangers
of the invasion of truth and beauty. Let a group of drama-loving and
theatre-loving young men, resourceful, skilful, and successful, come
upon the scene, as the Washington Square Players came, let them bring
flashes of authentic dramatic art into their native theatre, and
against them is promptly hurled the jealous irony of the Old Guard
that is dead, but never surrenders. Let a young playwright like Zoë
Akins write an admirable fantastic comedy (“Papa”), and against her
are brought all the weapons of the morals-in-art mountebanks. Let a
producer like Hopkins break away from the mantel-leaning histrionism
and palm-pot investiture, and against him is brought up the curt
dismissal of freakishness.

The native theatre, for all the fact that it is on the way, is not yet
ready for such things as demand a degree of civilization for receptive
and remunerative appreciation. The “Pegs o’ My Heart” and “Pollyannas,”
the “Turn to the Rights” and “Lightnin’s” still make millions, while
the bulk of finer things languish and perish. I speak, remember, not of
the theatre of one city, but of the theatre of the land. This theatre,
considering it in so far as possible as a unit, is still not much above
the Midway Plaisance, the honk-a-tonk, the Sunday School charade. That
one, or maybe two, foreign national theatres may not be much better is
no apology. Such foreign theatres--the French, say--are less national
theatres than one-city theatres, for Paris is France. But the American
theatre spreads from coast to coast. What it spreads, I have herein
tried to suggest.

                                                  GEORGE JEAN NATHAN




ECONOMIC OPINION


IF there were conscious restriction upon the expression of opinion in
America, this essay would possess the pompous certainty of an official
document. Instead of threading its hazardous way through a mass of
confused thought, it would record in formal terms acceptable utterance.
In fact, the very restrictions upon thought and speech, with the aid
of scissors and a license to speech, could easily be turned into a
statement of the reputable theory of the welfare of the community.

Unluckily, however, American life has not been arranged to make
matters easy for the interpreter of economic opinion. Every American
is conscious of a right to his own opinion about “why all of us taken
together are as well off as we are” and “why some of us are better
off and others of us worse off than the average of us.” Whether this
privilege comes from the Bill of Rights, the constitution of the United
States, or his Simian ancestry, he could not say; but he is fully
assured that it is “inalienable” and “indefeasible.” No restriction of
birth, breeding, position, or wealth limits his right to an opinion
or persuades him to esteem his more fortunate neighbour’s more highly
than his own. Nor do intellectual limitations check the flow of words
and of ideas. No one is examined upon the growth of industrialism, the
institutions which make up the economic order, or the nature of an
industrial problem before he is allowed to speak. In fact, the idea
that a knowledge of the facts about the subject under discussion,
or of the principles to be applied to it, is essential to the right
to an opinion is a strange notion little understood here. Even if
occasionally some potentate attempts a mild restriction upon the
spoken or the written word, it checks only those who talk directly and
therefore clumsily. Its principal effect is through provocation to add
mightily to the volume of opinion.

The result is a conglomerate mass of opinion that sprawls through
the known realm of economics and into regions uncharted. The mighty
men of finance spin a theory of national welfare in terms of foreign
concessions no more glibly than the knights of the road in solemn
convention solve with words the riddle of unemployment. The newly
enfranchised women compete with the members of the Dynamite Club in
proposals for setting the industrial cosmos in order. Economic opinion
bobs up in the financial journals, “the labour press,” the periodicals
of the “learned” societies, and in all the “Christian” advocates. It
shows itself boldly in political speeches, in directors’ reports, in
public hearings, and in propagandist sheets. It lurks craftily in
editorials, moving pictures, drawing-room lectures, poems, cartoons,
and hymns. It ranges from the sonorous apologies for the existing order
voiced by the Aaron Baal Professor of Christian Homiletics in the
Midas Theological Seminary to the staccato denunciation of what is by
the Sons of Martha Professor of Proletarian Tactics in the Karl Marx
College for Workers.

A mere semblance of order is given to this heterogeneous mass of
opinion by the conditions which make it. A common system of legal,
business, and social usages is to be found the country over. This
has left its impress too firmly in the assumptions which underlie
thought to allow this material to be separate bits from so many mental
universes. The prevailing scheme of economic life is so definitely
established as to force its imprint upon the opinion that moves about
it. Acceptable opinion is created in its likeness, and unacceptable
opinion becomes acceptable opinion when the negatives are skilfully
extracted. Protestants are concerned rather with eliminating the
“evils” of “capitalism” than with eradicating it root and branch.
Protestantism is rather a variant of orthodox doctrine than an
independent system of thought. Radical opinion that is likely to pass
the decent bounds of negation is kept small in volume by a press which
allows it little upon which to feed. Accordingly, varied doctrines wear
the semblance of unity.

Such elements, however, do not free this adventure into speculation
from its perils. They merely make the hazards mortal. In the paragraphs
below the economic opinion in America is recklessly resolved into four
main classes. These are the _laissez-faire_ opinion of the mid-19th
century, the conventional “case for capitalism,” the protestant demand
for “control,” and the academic insistence upon conscious “direction”
of industrial change. Radical opinion gets a competent judgment
elsewhere in this volume. Even in this bold outline the opinions of
small minorities are lost to sight, and views and doctrines, seemingly
alien to the authors who know their subtle differences, are often
blurred into a single picture. To avoid the charge that the lion and
the lamb have been pictured as one, no names have been called. Here as
elsewhere particulars will rise up to curse their generalizations, and
the whole will be found to be entirely too scanty to be disbursed into
its parts. But the chance must be taken, and, after all, truth does not
reside in copy-book mottoes.


I

The current types of economic opinion in this country all have a common
origin. The men who express them are but a scant generation or two
removed from the country or the small town. The opinions are so many
variants of a stream of thought which goes back to a mid-19th century
America of small towns and open country. This primitive economic
opinion was formed out of the dust of the ground in the likeness of
an exploitative America. The conditions which shaped it might be set
forth in two lines of a school history thus: First, abundant natural
resources; second, a scanty population; and third, the principle of
letting the individual alone.

It was a chance at an economic opportunity which made America of the
19th century the “land of promise.” The raw materials of personal
wealth were here in soil, stream, and mine. The equipment necessary to
the crude exploitative farming of the time was easy to possess. Since
there was an abundance, the resources essential to a chance at a living
were to be had for the asking. One with enterprise enough to “go it
alone” lived upon what he himself and his wealth in wife and children
produced. He did not have to drive a shrewd bargain for the sale of his
labour nor purchase the wherewithal to be fed and clothed in a market.
There was no confusing scheme of prices to break the connection between
effort and reward; opportunity and responsibility went hand in hand;
success or failure was of one’s own fashioning. Where nature does most,
man claims all; and in rural America men were quite disposed to claim
personal credit for nature’s accomplishments. Since ample resources
smothered even mediocre effort in plenty, the voice of chronic failure
which blamed circumstance, fate, or “the system” was unheard. A freedom
to have and to hold economic resources plentiful enough to supply all
was the condition of material prosperity.

Even when the lure of natural resources drew men from agriculture to
industrial exploitation conditions did not change materially. The
population of the new towns for a while kept at least one foot upon
the soil. When at last the city possessed its people, aliens came out
of Southeastern Europe to do the “dirty work,” and the native born
passed up into administrative, clerical, or professional positions.
The alternative of farm employment and the rapid expansion of industry
fixed a rough minimum beneath which wages could not fall. The expanding
machine technique with large scale production by quantity methods
turned out an abundance of goods evidenced alike in lower prices and in
higher standards of living. The “captains of industry” were regarded by
the community as the creators of the jobs which they dispensed and as
the efficient cause of the prosperity of the neighbourhood. The trickle
of immigration that swelled to a “stream” and rose to a “tide” is an
eloquent testimonial of the time paid by the peasantry of Europe to the
success of the American system of letting the individual alone in his
business.

These conditions brought forth the lay economic theory acceptable to
the national community. Its precepts came from experience, rather
than from books; by intuition, rather than by reason. The welfare of
the individual and the wealth of the nation were alike due to free
institutions. In business and industry the individual was to be free to
do as he pleased unless specifically forbidden by the State. The State
was powerless to interfere with the individual unless granted specific
“constitutional” authority to do so. Each knew what he wanted and was
able to take care of himself. The interests of all were an aggregate of
the interests of individuals. The prevailing scheme of institutions
was accepted as a part of the immutable world of nature. Private
property, if defended at all, was good because it gave the individual
security and enabled him to enjoy the fruits of his own labour. The
right of contract, exercised in a market characterized by “higgling,”
gave one an occasional adventure beyond the horizon of a household
economy. If perchance the individual stumbled into a bad bargain
occasionally, so much the better. The mistake was a useful exercise
in the development of the cardinal virtue of self-reliance. When the
coming of industrialism made contract the basis of all industrial
relations, the older justification was still used. Competition, with
which it was always associated, was regarded as the prime agency in the
organization of industry. It forced the elements of production into
order and exercised a moral restraint over them. Under its régime men
were rewarded in accordance with their deserts. In general, it was true
beyond peradventure that “opportunity” knocked once “at every gate”;
that there was “plenty of room at the top”; that each built the ladder
by which he rose; and that even the humblest was “master of his fate.”

Out of such raw materials there was fashioned a body of professional
economic theory. In a sense it was an imported product; for its earlier
statement was that of English “classical” economics. But in reality
it was the return of an earlier export, for accepted theory had been
made from crude individualistic notions which England had got from
America. In addition, at the hands of American economists it received
a far more elaborate and articulate statement than had been given it
overseas. These theorists used subtle analysis, ponderous logic, and
circumlocution; but their decorous processes brought them to much
the same conclusions that practical men gained from their limited
experiences. Its strength and its acceptability were wholly due to
the precision and verbiage with which it reduced to formal terms the
common-sense economics of the day.

In its terms the economic order is made up of individuals. Each of
these is actuated by the motive of self-interest. Each has for disposal
personal services, goods, or property rights. Each must live upon
goods and services purchased from others. Each must compete with his
fellows in the sale of his wares and the purchase of his articles of
livelihood. Because of the competition of sellers the wages of labour,
the profits of capital, and the prices of goods cannot be forced to
untoward heights. Because of the competition of buyers they cannot be
driven too low. The equilibrium of this double competitive process
assures to each a return which represents the just value of the
service, the property right, or the good. Prices, by moving up and down
in response to changing conditions, stimulate and retard consumption
and production. Their very movement constantly reallocates resources
to the production of a variety of goods and services in just the
proportion which the consumers demand. In this theory the institutions
which comprise the framework of the economic order are taken for
granted. It has no place for an interference by the State with “private
business.” It regards monopoly as a thing to be abjured, whether
appearing as a capitalistic combine or as a union of workingmen. In
the Eden of free enterprise the community’s resources yield all they
have and competition rewards justly all the faithful who by serving
themselves serve society. It is small wonder that sermons were preached
upon “The Relation of Political Economy to Natural Theology.”


II

The conditions which made the economic opinion of the America of small
towns and open country are gone. With their passing the older theories
have been reshaped to new purposes. There are no longer free economic
opportunities for all comers. Natural resources have been appropriated,
and the natural differences between men have been enhanced by the
artificial ones of ownership and inheritance. Wealth and control have
alike been stripped from the many and concentrated in the few. The
prevailing unit in business is the corporation. Establishments have
been gathered into industries, and these have been articulated into a
mighty industrial system, with its established rights, its customary
ways of doing things, and its compulsions upon those who serve it.
The older personal relation of “master” and “servant” abides only in
indices of the records of the law courts. The contract of employment
is now between a “soulless” but “legal entity” and a mere creature of
flesh and blood. The more human individual, the survival of a less
mechanical age, no longer lives upon the fruit of his individual
toil. His welfare is pent in between his wages and the prices which
he must pay for his necessities. Beyond this immediate bargain lies a
mysterious economic system filled with unknown causes which threaten
his income and even his employment. Those who possess have come into
succession to those who ventured. In short, free enterprise has given
way to an established system.

These events have left their mark upon economic opinion. It is
altogether fitting that those who fell heir to the wealth piled up by
free enterprise should gain its outer defences of theory and dialectic.
So the older economics, with its logic and its blessing, has come
as a legacy to those who have. Its newer statement, because of its
well-known objective, may be called “the case for capitalism.” In its
revision the adventurous militarism bent upon exploitation has given
way to a pacifistic defence of security, possession, and things as they
are.

In outward form few changes were necessary to convert the older theory
of _laissez-faire_ into a presentable case for capitalism. A more
rigid and absolute statement of the classical doctrine was almost
enough. In its terms the economic order is independent of other social
arrangements. It is an automatic, self-regulating mechanism. Over it
there rules an immutable and natural “law of supply and demand.” This
maintains just prices, prevents exploitation, adjusts production and
consumption to each other, secures the maximum of goods and services
from the resources at hand, and disburses incomes in accordance with
the merits of men and the verity of things. So just and impartial is
the operation of this law that interference by the State amounts to
meddlesome muddling. It cannot override natural law; therefore it
should not.

It differs most from the older economics in the more explicit statement
of the function of institutions. The growing inequality of income,
of control, and of opportunity have presented facts that have to be
faced. But even here, instead of contriving new defences, the advocates
of capitalism have refurbished the older ones. The thing that is
finds its justification in that which was. Property rights are to be
preserved intact, because private property is essential to personal
opportunity; just as if the propertyless did not exist and each was
to win his living from his own acres or his own shop. The right of
contract is not to be abridged, because the interests of both parties
are advanced by a bargain between equals; just as if the corporate
employer and the individual employé were alike in their freedom, their
capacity to wait, and their power to shape the terms of the bargain.
Prices are to be self-determined in open market, because competition
will best reconcile the conflicting interests of buyers and sellers;
just as if there was no semblance of monopoly among producers, no open
price agreements, and no informal understandings. Individual initiative
is not to be abridged, because it creates the wealth of the nation;
just as if routine had no value for efficiency and the masses of men
still had discretion in economic matters. The arrangements which make
up the economic order find their validity in the symbolic language of
ritual rather than in a prosaic recital of current fact.

This defence crosses the frontier which separates the economic from the
political order only to appropriate the prestige of democracy. Its real
concern is the preservation of the prevailing system wherein business
controls industry for purposes of profit. Its formal solicitation
is lest “the form of government” be changed. This concern finds
expression in veneration for the work of the “fathers” (rather young
men, by the way), not of machine technology and business enterprise,
but of “representative government” and of “constitutional authority.”
Its creed becomes propaganda, not for the defence of business, the
security of corporations, or the preservation of managerial immunities,
but for the defence of the nation, the security of America, and
the preservation of “constitutional” rights. The newer economic
arrangements are masked behind political rights and given the values
of the political institutions which antedate them by many decades. In
short, the staunchest defenders of the prevailing economic system
believe that “their economic preferences are shared by the constitution
of the United States.”

If we may borrow a term from its advocates, this body of opinion
must be pronounced “theoretical.” In their speech a “theory” is a
generalization which goes much further than its particulars warrant.
In that sense their conclusions are not “practical.” The essential
question with which this body of opinion is concerned is whether the
scheme of institutions which focus upon profit-making make the members
of the community, severally and collectively, as well off as they ought
to be. It seems offhand that a realistic defence of the prevailing
order might be convincingly formulated. At any rate, “the case for
capitalism” is good enough to get into the records. Instead, its
advocates have confused their own pecuniary success with the well-being
of the community and have argued that because profits have been made
the system is good. Like the classical economists they vindicate the
system by assumption.


III

In the wake of the new industrialism there has come an economic opinion
of protest. It is being gradually formulated by professional men, by
farmers, by trade unionists, and by the younger business men who have
escaped being “self-made.” Its hesitating and confused statement is
due to the disturbed conditions out of which it comes. The varied
interests of its many authors prevents unity of words or of principles.
Its origin in the contact of minds steeped in the older individualism
with the arresting facts of the newer economic order explains its
current inarticulate expression. It can be set forth briefly only
by subordinating the reality of variety to the tendencies which are
clearly inherent within it.

The objective of this newer opinion is a modification of the prevailing
order, rather than its overthrow. It is quite conscious of defects in
its arrangements and knows that its fruits are not all good. It has
never considered the question of the efficiency or inefficiency of the
system as a whole. The older individualistic notions are strong enough
to give an intuitive belief that the theory of the control of industry
by business for profit is essentially sound. But it would eliminate
the bad, patch up the indifferent, and retain the good. It would set up
in the government an external authority which through regulation and
repression would make business interests serve the community. Its faith
is in private enterprise compelled by the State to promote “public
welfare.” Its detail can best be suggested by typical illustrations.

There is, first of all, the attitude of the protestants towards freedom
of contract. They accept the prevailing theory that the relations of
buyer and seller, employer and employé, owner and agent, can safely
be left to the free choice of all concerned. But they point out that
in practice the principle does not give its assumed results. For,
whereas the theory assumes the parties to be equal in their power to
determine the terms of the contract, it is a matter of common knowledge
that employers and labourers occupy unequal bargaining positions.
They would leave relations to be determined by free bargaining;
but, as a preliminary, they would attempt to establish equality of
bargaining power. To that end they would have the contract made by
“collective bargaining” between employers and employés “through
representatives” chosen by each. Moreover, they would use the State
to better the position of the weaker party. Thus legislation has been
passed depriving employers of their right of requiring employés, as
a condition of employment, not to remain members of labour unions.
Although the courts have found such legislation to be “an arbitrary
interference with the liberty of contract which no government can
justify in a free land,” its advocates will insist that their aim has
been only “to establish that equality in position between the parties
in which liberty of contract begins.”

There is, in the next place, a growing opinion among the protestants
that the State is “a moral agent” and should determine the rules under
which business is to be carried on. They point out that in business
there are bad as well as good conditions, that business men engage in
proper as well as in improper practices, and that some activities harm
while others help the community. In many instances the employer finds
it to his advantage to establish conditions which the interests of the
workers and of the consumers require. In others, the elevation of
standards waits upon the pleasure of the most inconsiderate employer.
The prohibition of child labour, the shortening of the working day, and
the payment of a minimum wage may be advantageous alike to labourers
and to the community; yet these innovations involve an increase in cost
and cannot be made against the competition of the producer who will not
establish them. In such cases it is the duty of the State to establish
minimum conditions which must be met by all employers. The imposition
of such standards in no way affects the system under which business is
carried on; for the competition of rival sellers can be just as acute
and just as considerate of the public, if all of them are forced to pay
their employés a living wage, as if they are all free to force wages
down to starvation. Upon this theory the State has established uniform
weights and measures, prohibited the use of deleterious chemicals,
stopped the sale of impure food, provided compensation for the human
wear and tear of industry, and established minimum standards of safety,
health, and service.

There is, finally, a growing opinion that in some industries the
profit-making motive must be superseded by some other. In the railway
industry it has been repeatedly shown that the pecuniary interest of
the management fails to coincide with that of either the owners or
of the shippers. Long ago the determination of charges for service
was put beyond the discretion of the officials. Of late there has
been an increasing tendency to make accounts, services, expenditures,
valuations, and other matters meet standards of public service. When
this has been effected, as it will be, the officials of the roads
will become mere subordinates responsible to a public authority. Then
profit-making as a guide to administration will have given way to an
official judgment of results in terms of established standards. Then
it will be discovered that public control formally rejected has been
achieved by indirection. But many times ere this American opinion has
come by devious paths to goals which its individualism has not allowed
it to regard as quite desirable.

For the moment the medley of opinion here roughly characterized as a
demand for control is dominant. Its proponents are almost as naïve
as the advocates of capitalism in a belief in the essential goodness
of a mythical system of “free enterprise.” They differ from them in
placing greater emphasis upon voluntary associations and in demanding
that the State from without compel business to serve the common good.
As yet they have formulated no consistent theory of economics and
no articulate programme for achieving their ends. Without a clear
understanding of the development of industry and of the structure of
the economic order, they are content to face specific problems when
they meet them. They are far from ready to surrender an inherited
belief in an individualistic theory of the common good.


IV

The changes of the last four decades, which make up “The Industrial
Revolution in America,” have left their mark upon the economics of
the schools. If there was a time when the thought of the professed
economists was a thing apart from the common sense of the age, it
ended with the coming of industrialism. Differ as it may in phrase, in
method, and in statement, the economics in solid and dull treatises
reflects, as it has always reflected, the opinions of the laity. If
there were agreement among the sorts of men who gather at ball games
and in smoking cars, the books on economics would all read alike. But
when the plumber differs from the banker and the scrub woman refuses
to take her ideas from the coupon clipper, it is futile to expect mere
economists to agree. To some, the classical doctrine still serves as
a sabbatical refuge from modern problems. Others, who “specialize”
in trusts, tariffs, and labour are too busy being “scientific” to
formulate general opinions. Still others insist upon creating a
new economics concerned with the problem of directing industrial
development to appointed ends. Each of these schools has a membership
large enough to allow dissension within the ranks.

The revolt against the classical economics began when it encountered
modern fact. Beyond the pale of doctrine taught by certified theorists
appeared studies upon corporations, international trade, railway rates,
craft unionism, and other matters of the newer fact. For a time those
who studied these subjects were content to describe in superficial
terms the results of their observations. But as facts accumulated they
provoked generalizations at variance with the accepted principles of
the older competitive theory. At the same time the rise of a newer
history concerned with development rather than chronology, a new ethics
that recognized the existence of a social order, and a new psychology
that taught that the content of men’s behaviour is poured in by the
environment, together made the foundations of the older economics very
insecure.

For a time this protest found expression only in critical work. The
picture of an economic order as a self-regulating mechanism, peopled
with folk who could not but serve the community in serving themselves
became very unreal. The complexity of industrialism made it hard to
believe that the individual had knowledge enough to choose best for
himself. The suspicion that frequently thought follows action made it
hard to continue to believe in man’s complete rationality. The idea
that incomes are different because opportunities are different led to
a questioning of the justice of the ratings of men in the market. The
unequal division of income made impossible pecuniary calculations in
which each man counted for one and only for one. With these assumptions
of 19th-century economics passed “the economic man,” “the Crusoe
economy,” and the last of the divine theories, that of “enlightened
self-interest.” It was no longer possible to build a defence of the
existing order upon “the hedonistic conception of man” as “a lightning
calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous
globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift
him about the area, but leave him inert.”

The most immediate effect of this criticism was a change in method.
The older process of juggling economic laws out of assumptions about
human nature, human motives, and the beneficence of competition lost
prestige. It was evident that if the system was to be appraised
the facts must be had. Accordingly a veritable multitude of facts,
good, bad, and mostly indifferent were treasured up. This process of
garnering information soon made it evident that the facts about the
relationship of industry to the welfare of the community were too
varied and too numerous to be separately catalogued. Since only totals
could be used, economics came to rely upon facts presented in the
quantitative language of statistics.

But since facts are not possessed of the virtue of self-determination,
they did not yield an opinion which was very relevant or very truthful.
Their use was for the moment nothing more than a substitution of the
superstition of facts for that of logic. The facts were of value,
because when properly interpreted they gave the story of what the
economic system had done. But without the aid of standards it was
impossible to determine whether it had worked well or ill, whether it
had much or little to give in return for the solicitous concern about
it. It was evident that modern industrialism was developing without
conscious guidance. As long as no goal was fixed it was impossible
to tell whether industrial development was proceeding in the right
direction. As long as we were unmindful of the kind of society we
wished ours to be, we could not appraise its accomplishments. Without
standards all that could be said was that the system had worked as well
as it had worked and that we were as well off as we were well off. The
problem, therefore, became one of judging the system on the basis of
the facts by means of standards.

Thus the newer economics has been of service in stating the problem
with which opinion must be concerned. The “prevailing” economic order
is one of many schemes of arrangements for making industry serve the
purposes of the community. The system has been slowly evolved out
of the institutions of the past, is constantly being affected by
circumstances, and for the future is capable of conscious modification.
How well it has served its purpose cannot be attested by an abstract
argument proceeding from assumptions about human nature and the cosmos.
A judgment upon its relative goodness or badness requires an appraisal
of the facts in terms of standards. These standards must be obtained
from our notions of the kind of society we want this to be. These
notions must proceed from a scientific study of the properties of
things and the needs of human beings. That judgment will be one not of
goodness or badness, but of the relative merits of a very human scheme
of arrangements compared with its alternatives.

The economists are reluctant to pass a judgment upon the prevailing
order. The relevant facts are too scanty and the standards too inexact
to warrant an appraisal of the virtues and the vices of “capitalism.”
They distrust the eulogies of apologists because they do not square
with the known facts. They are not convinced by the reformers, because
they fear that they know as little about their own schemes as they
do about current arrangements. They insist that a general judgment
must be a progressive affair. The system will change through gradual
modification; the larger problem will be solved by attention to an
endless succession of minor problems. Each of these must be met with
the facts and with an ideal of what our society should be. They have
too little faith in the rationality of the collect to believe that
problems can be faced in battalions or that a new order can emerge
as a work of creation. They have little fear for “the future of the
nation,” if only problems can be intelligently handled as they emerge.
Their attitude towards the present system is one, neither of acceptance
nor of rejection, but of doubt and of honest inquiry. Their faith is
neither in the existing order nor in a hand-me-down substitute, but in
a conscious direction of the process of change.

       *       *       *       *       *

This tedious narrative has failed entirely in its purpose, if it has
not revealed the strength and the weakness of economic opinion in
America. Its merits stand out boldly in the preceding paragraphs; its
defects are too striking to be concealed. The reader has already been
informed; but the writer must inform himself. The essay, therefore,
will close with an explicit statement of some three of the more obvious
characteristics.

First, its most striking characteristic is its volume. In quantity
it contains enough verbal and intellectual ammunition to justify or
to wreck a dozen contradictory economic orders. If, in an orderly
way, opinion became judgment and judgment ripened into the society of
to-morrow, it would stand condemned. For little of it has a practical
consequence and our ways of expression are very wasteful. But it also
affords a harmless outlet for the dangerous emotions aroused by the
wear and tear of everyday work in a humdrum universe. And, if it is
true that we are, all of us, Simians by lineage, this is by far the
most important function it serves.

Second, it is grounded none too well in information and principles.
The ordinary mortal is busied with his own affairs. He lacks the time,
the patience, and the equipment necessary to get at the facts about
the material welfare of the nation. In the most casual way he makes up
his mind, using for the purpose a few superficial facts, a number of
prejudices, and a bit of experience. He has little idea of where we are
in the course of social development, of the forces which have brought
us here, or of where we ought to be going. Since the opinions of groups
and of the nation are aggregates of individual opinion, the ideas of
those who have an intellectual right to speak are not a large part of
the compound.

Third, despite its crudeness and variety, it possesses elements of
real value. Its very volume creates at least a statistical probability
that some of it is of high quality. The waste of much of it gives the
rest a real chance of expression in social policy. The common features
of industrialism are giving to men something of a common experience
out of which there will come a more or less common-sense appreciation
of problems and of ideals. This will dictate the larger features of a
future social policy. The particularized opinion which finds expression
in the detailed formulation of programmes must be left to the experts.
The great masses of men must learn that these problems are technical
and must trust the judgment of those who know. Despite the record
of halting development and of confused statement, the pages above
indicate that the economic opinion in America is coming slowly to an
appreciation of the factors upon which “the good life for all” really
rests.

But enough. Opinion by being economic does not cease to be opinion, and
an essay about it is only more opinion.

                                                  WALTON H. HAMILTON




RADICALISM


The first obstacle to an assessment of radicalism in America is the
difficulty of discovering precisely what American radicalism is.
According to his enemies, a radical is a person whose opinions need
not be considered and whose rights need not be respected. As a people
we do not wish to understand him, or to deal with what he represents,
but only to get him out of sight. We deport him and imprison him. If
he writes a book, we keep it out of the schools and libraries. If he
publishes a paper, we debar it from the mails. If he makes a speech,
we drive him out of the hall and shoo him away from the street-corner.
If by hook or crook he multiplies himself to considerable numbers,
we expel his representatives from legislative chambers, break up his
parades, and disperse his strikes with well-armed soldiery.

These being the associations which cluster about the word, it has
naturally become less a definition than a weapon. Statisticians in
the Federal Trade Commission publish certain figures dealing with the
business of the packing-houses--a Senator loudly calls these devoted
civil servants “radicals,” and they are allowed to resign. A labour
leader, following the precedent of federal law established for over a
half a century, espouses the eight-hour day, but because he has the
bad taste to do so in connection with the steel industry, he becomes a
“radical,” and is soundly berated in the press. If one were to ask the
typical American Legion member how he would describe a radical--aside
from the fact that a radical is a person to be suppressed--he would
probably answer that a radical is (a) a pro-German, (b) a Russian or
other foreigner, (c) a person who sends bombs through the mail, (d) a
believer in free love, (e) a writer of free verse, (f) a painter of
cubist pictures, (g) a member of the I.W.W., (h) a Socialist, (i) a
Bolshevist, (j) a believer in labour unions and an opponent of the open
shop, and (k) any one who would be looked upon with disapproval by a
committee consisting of Judge Gary, Archibald Stevenson, and Brander
Matthews.

There is scarcely more light to be had from the radicals themselves.
Any one who feels a natural distaste for the censorious crowd of
suppressors is likely to class himself with the free spirits whom
they oppose. To call oneself a radical is in such circumstances a
necessary accompaniment of self-respect. The content of the radicalism
is of minor importance. There is an adventurous tendency to espouse
anything that is forbidden, and so to include among one’s affirmations
the most contradictory systems--such as Nietzscheanism and Communism,
Christianity of the mystical sort and rebellion. And when these rebels
really begin to think, the confusion is increased. Each pours his whole
ardour into some exclusive creed, which makes him scorn other earnest
souls who happen to disagree about abstruse technical points. Among
economic radicals, terms like “counter-revolutionary” and “bourgeois”
are bandied about in a most unpleasant fashion. If, for instance, you
happen to believe that Socialism may be brought about through the
ballot rather than through the general strike, numbers of radicals will
believe you more dangerous than the Czar himself; it is certain that
when the time comes you will be found fighting on the wrong side of
the barricade. Creeds have innumerable subdivisions, and on the exact
acceptance of the creed depends your eternal salvation. Calvinists,
Wesleyans, Lutherans, and the rest in their most exigent days could not
rival the logical hair-splitting which has lately taken place among
the sectarian economic dissenters, nor has any religious quarrel ever
surpassed in bitterness the dogmatic dissidence with which the numerous
schools of authoritarian rebellion rebel against authority.

There is a brilliant magazine published in New York which takes pride
in edging a little to the left of the leftmost radical, wherever for
the moment that may be. Its editor is a poet, and he writes eloquently
of the proletariat and the worker. Not long ago I was speaking of this
editor to an actual leader of labour--a man who is a radical, and who
also takes a daily part in the workers’ struggles. “Yes,” he said, “he
certainly can write. He is one of the best writers living.” And he
went on wistfully, “If the labour movement only had a writer like that!”

There is another brilliant magazine published in New York which takes
exquisite pains to inform the reader that it is radical. In precise
columns of elegant type, Puritan in its scorn of passion or sensation,
it weekly derides the sentimental liberal for ignorance of “fundamental
economics.” Not long ago it made the startling discovery that
Socialists favour taking natural resources out of private ownership.
And its “fundamental economics,” whenever they appear in language
simple enough for the common reader to understand, turn out to be
nothing more dangerous than that respectable and ancient heresy, the
single tax.

Another method of definition is now in common use--a method which
seems easy because of its mechanical simplicity. People are arranged
in a row from left to right, according to their attitude toward the
existing order. At the extreme right are the reactionaries, who want
to restore the discarded. Next to them are the conservatives, who wish
to keep most of what exists. At their elbow are the liberals, who are
ready to examine new ideas, but who are not eager or dogmatic about
change. And at the extreme left are the radicals, who want to change
nearly everything for something totally new. Such an arrangement is a
confusing misuse of words based on a misconception of social forces.
Society is not a car on a track, along which it may move in either
direction, or on which it may stand still. Society is a complex, with
many of the characteristics of an organism. Its change is continuous,
although by no means constant. It passes through long periods of
quiescence, and comparatively brief periods of rapid mutation. It
may collect itself into a close order, or again become dispersed
into a nebula. There is much in its development that is cyclical; it
has yet undiscovered rhythms, and many vagaries. The radical and the
reactionary may be agreed on essentials; they may both wish sudden
change and closer organization. The conservative may be liberal because
he wishes to preserve an order in which liberal virtues may exist. Or a
liberal may be so cribbed and confined by an unpleasant constriction
of social tissue that he becomes radical in his struggle for immediate
release. The terms are not of the same class and should not be arranged
in parallel columns.

The dictionary definition is enlightening. “Radical--Going to the root
or origin; touching or acting upon what is essential or fundamental;
thorough.... _Radical reform_, a thorough reform.... Hence Radical
Reformer equals Radical” (New English Dictionary). In this sense
radicalism is an historic American tradition. The revolt of the
Colonies against England and the formation of the Republic were,
indeed, far from the complete break with the past which the schoolboy
assumes them to have been, but what lives in the minds of the American
people is, nevertheless, not the series of counterchecks which men
like Hamilton and Madison wrote into the Constitution, but rather the
daring affirmations of Jefferson which have a real kinship with the
radical spirit of the French Revolution. Talk of “inalienable rights”
such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was genuine radical
talk; it searched out the bases of human relationship, proclaimed them
against authority, and sought to found on them a system of government.

So strongly has this conception seized the imagination of Americans
that it largely accounts for their almost instinctive hostility to new
kinds of political change. The roots of politics have been uncovered,
the change has in fact been made once for all--so they reason. To admit
that any new fundamental alteration is necessary is to be disloyal to
the historical liberation. Because the conservative American believes
himself a complete democrat, because for him the “new order” was
achieved in 1776, he is intolerant of modern radicals. Suggestions of
new revolution touch him closely on his pride. In this sense Jefferson
has been less a spur to future generations than an obstacle. If his
fine frenzy about rights had been less eloquently expressed, if it had
not obscured in a cloud of glory the true nature of the foundation of
our government--a highly practical compromise which embodied a few
moderate advances and many hesitancies--we should have a different
temper about change to-day. We should not assume that all desirable
fundamental modification of social and political structure had been
completed nearly a century and a half ago.

The greatest historic expression of American radicalism has thus
become the altar of the conservatives. To the unlettered man it
may seem strange that a Supreme Court of elderly radicals will not
allow Congress to forbid child-labour because of their loyalty to an
18th-century limitation of the federal government, presumably in the
interest of freedom and humanity. To workmen voting for the eight-hour
day the language of Jefferson did not seem hostile--they were
struggling to pursue happiness in a way that he must have approved.
And yet it is the sacred “right” of contract which deprived them, as
voters, of the right to legislate for shorter hours. Workmen using
their collective economic power to gain industrial freedom are met by
a shower of injunctive denials, based chiefly on that same right of
contract. In order to stay any further liberation of the human body
and spirit, judges and officials and industrial barons have only to
invoke the phrases of freedom thrown out against an ancient despotism.
They have only to point out that freedom as defined abstractly over a
hundred years ago forbids practical freedom to-day. Frozen radicalism
of the past chills and destroys the new roots of American life.

Some appreciation of this state of affairs underlies the prevailing
tendency to believe that all new radicalism has a foreign origin. It
is, indeed, part of the best nationalistic tradition to attribute
subversive doctrines to foreigners. This is the habit in every country.
But in the United States the habit is perhaps more deep-seated than
elsewhere. Americans are by definition free and equal; if then any one
talks or acts as if he were not free and equal, he must have been born
somewhere else. The American Government, being not a faulty product of
human growth, but a new creation sprung perfect out of the ineffable
minds of the Fathers, is unassailable; if any one assails it, he
cannot know it, and must be subjected to courses in English and Civics
(Americanization) until he recognizes its perfection. Treason in this
country is not simple treason to a ruler, to a class, or to a system
as elsewhere; it is an act of sacrilege, by one uninitiated, upon a
religious mystery.

Of course there are and have been Americans whose radicalism is less
crust and more meat. The spirit of Jefferson still lives, after all, to
confute the interpretation put upon his words. And imported doctrine
has actually had less to do with most of the radical movements in
America than has American tradition itself. It is an easy step from the
conception of political liberty to the conception of economic liberty,
and the step has been made here as readily as in Europe. In a country
which for so long offered extraordinary opportunities to the individual
business man, it is only natural that economic liberty should have been
conceived as a means of protecting his enterprise; and as a matter of
fact our economic legislation for many years has been sprinkled with
victories of the small business men and farmers over the interests
which had already become large enough to seem to them oppressive.
The regulation of the railroads, the succession of popular financial
doctrines, and the anti-trust legislation, were all initiated by the
interpretation of economic democracy naturally arising in the vigorous
class of the small entrepreneurs. With the slow weakening of this class
by its disintegration, on one hand into captains and lieutenants of the
great principalities of industry, and on the other into permanently
salaried or waged members of the rank and file, comes a corresponding
tendency to change the prevailing conception of economic democracy.
The radicalism of workmen in the United States has often been no less
sweeping or assertive than the radicalism of workmen anywhere--witness
the I.W.W. Even violence in the labour struggle has been practised
chiefly by one hundred per cent. Americans--the steel workers in
Homestead in 1892 and the West Virginia miners in Mingo County in 1921
were of old American stock. And the moment the predominating group
in American thought and activity is composed of those who expect to
live by their daily work rather than of those who expect to accumulate
property, we are likely to see the rise of an economic radicalism more
akin to that which exists in Europe, and one which, because of its
sanction in our tradition, will be twice as militant and convinced.

For, after all, economic radicalism arises neither from a merely stupid
desire for more material goods, nor from an intellectual adherence
to a particular formula of industrial organization. It arises from a
desire to be free, to achieve dignity and independence. Poverty is
distressful not so much because of its physical hardships as because
of its spiritual bondage. To be poor because one chooses to be poor is
less annoying than to be moderately paid while the man who fixes one’s
wages rides in a Rolls-Royce. The most modest aspects of the labour
movement are attempts of the workmen to gain some voice in determining
the conditions under which they must work--in other words, to extend
democracy into industry. And when the workman wakes up to the fact
that industrial policies are governed by a comparatively small class
of owners, and that the visible result of those policies seems to be a
large class of underemployed, undernourished, and under-housed families
on one hand, and a small class of abundantly supplied families on the
other, he feels that he is suffering an indignity. You may challenge
him to prove that any other system would work better. You may argue
that if all the wealth of the rich were distributed equally, he would
receive but a trifle. Such reasoning will affect him little. If every
one must be miserable, he at least wants to share and exercise whatever
power exists to alter that misery. Kings have argued that the people
could rule no better than they, but that has not prevented peoples from
demanding representative government. The American tradition is sure to
be as subversive a motive in industry as it has been in the State. The
technical problem of how industry may be better organized, important as
it is, is subordinate to this cry of the personality. Essentially, this
sort of radicalism arises from the instinct of the workman to achieve
an adult relationship to the industrial world.

The impact of the war upon industry, and the reverberation of its
social results abroad, for some time stimulated this latent feeling
in American workmen. For the first time in decades the competition
of the unemployed and the immigrant was virtually removed, and the
wage-earner began to feel secure enough to assert his personality. He
was necessary to the community in an immediate way. The policy of the
government was to recognize this fact, and to prevent an unduly rapid
increase in wages and in the power of organized labour by compromising
with it on certain simple issues like collective bargaining and the
eight-hour day. But larger aspirations arose in the rank and file, and
when the Russian Revolution sent a word of emancipation around the
world, they were ready to listen. In spite of the crushing force of
the whole ruling propaganda machinery, which had been so successful in
arousing hatred against Germany, countless American workmen sensed the
approach of a new order as a result of the success of the Bolsheviki.
A secondary impulse of the same sort, felt even more strongly in
some quarters, arose from the Nottingham programme of the British
Labour Party. But affairs moved slowly, hope was deferred, and at
length the new spirit lost much of its freshness and power. The very
acrimoniousness and volume of the controversy over what had or had
not been done in Russia wearied most people of the whole matter. The
many expected revolutions in other countries, which missed fire so
many times, caused disillusionment. The doctrinaire and even religious
adherents of the Russian Communists began to make trouble for every
radical organization in the country by their quarrels and divisions. At
length, the war being over, the American labour movement itself began
to display a weakness in the face of renewed attack on the part of its
opponents, which showed how illusory had been many of its recent gains
and how seriously its morale had been injured.

Economic radicalism never looked--on the surface--weaker than it does
in the United States to-day. On the strength of statements by Mr.
Gompers and some other leaders of the trade unions, we are likely to
assume that organized labour will have nothing to do with it. The
professed radicals themselves have been weakened by dissensions and
scattered by persecution. Yet a brief survey of the formal groups which
now profess radical theories will indicate why the future of American
radicalism should not be assessed on the evidence of their present low
estate.

The Socialist Party, even more than the Socialist Parties in other
countries, was placed by the war in a difficult situation. With its
roots not yet firmly in the soil, except in a few localities and
among diverse national elements, it was faced with the necessity,
in accordance with its principles and tradition, of denouncing the
entrance of the United States into hostilities. But this decision
could command no effective support from the workers organized on the
economic field, who under a different leadership adopted a different
attitude. Nor was the party strong enough among any other element of
the population to make its decision respected. The only immediate
result of the gesture was therefore to place this unarmed little force
in the most exposed position possible, where it drew the fire of all
those who were nervously afraid the people would not sanction the war.
Socialism was not judged on the basis of its economic tenets, but was
condemned as disloyal and pro-German; and the effect was to render the
party even more sectarian and unrepresentative than ever before. It had
adopted a position in which it could not expect recruits except from
moral heroes, and no nation nourishes a large proportion of these. Such
episodes make good legend, but they do not lead to prompt victories.
Even those who later have come to believe that the Socialists were
right about the war are likely to express their belief in some other
form than joining the party.

In this weakened condition, the Socialist Party after the war developed
internal fissures. Many bitter words have been exchanged as to whether
the “Left Wingers” were or were not a majority of the party, whether
they were or were not more orthodox than those in control of the party
machinery, and whether, if they were more orthodox, their orthodoxy was
wise. At any rate, they broke away and formed two new parties of their
own, a fact which is the chief point of interest to one who is more
concerned with the larger issues of American radicalism than with the
minutiæ of Socialist politics. The Communist Party and the Communist
Labour Party, whatever may have been the legitimacy of their gestation
in the bowels of Socialism, certainly found their reason for being
chiefly in logic which originated in Moscow and Berlin rather than in
the American situation. At once selected for persecution by government
officials, they burrowed underground, doubtless followed by a band of
spies at least as numerous as they. From these subterranean regions
have come rumours of a fourth party--the United Communist, which
swallowed most of the Communist Labourites and some of the Communists.
At last accounts the Communists and the United Communists were each
attempting to prove the other counter-revolutionary by reference to the
latest documents from international revolutionary headquarters.

It is hazardous in the extreme for an outsider to speak of the
differences in doctrine among these groups. It is probably fair to
say, however, that the Communist parties are chiefly distinguished by
their total lack of interest in anything save a complete revolution,
because this is the only kind they believe possible. They reject
as “compromises” partial gains of all sorts; piecemeal progress by
evolutionary methods rather offends them than otherwise. Their eyes
are turned always toward some future revolutionary situation; for
this their organization and their theories are being prepared. This
being the case, the validity of their position will be tested by the
event. If, as the milder Socialists believe, economic changes may come
gradually by process of growth and smaller shocks, the Communists are
likely to remain a nearly functionless and tiny minority, even in the
labour movement. If, as the Communists believe, the present order in
the normal course of its development is destined to experience a sudden
collapse similar to that which occurred in Russia near the end of the
war, they will become the true prophets, and their mode of thought and
action will presumably have fitted them to assume leadership.

The Farmer-Labour Party is a recent growth far less doctrinaire than
either the Socialist or the Communist groups. It has neither prophet
nor Bible, but is based rather on the principle of gathering certain
categories of people together for political action, trusting that
as they become organized they will work out their own programme in
relation to the situation, and that that programme will develop as time
goes on. The categories to which it appeals are chiefly the industrial
workers and the small farmers, who have in general common economic
interests as opposed to the large owners of land and capital. It hopes
that other elements in the population, realizing that their major
interests are much the same as those of the unionists and the farmers,
will join forces with them to produce a majority. As an illustration
of the operation of such tactics, the Farmer-Labourites point to
the success of the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain, first
in aiding the foundation of the British Labour Party, and second in
building up for that party an increasingly coherent radical programme.

In all these cases, however, not much confidence is placed in the
actual political machinery of elections. There is a widespread
scepticism about the ability to accomplish industrial changes by the
ballot, on account of experience with political corruption, broken
election promises, adverse court decisions, and political buncombe
in general. These parties are formed as much for the purpose of
propagating ideas and creating centres of activity as for mobilizing
votes. All radical parties lay great stress on the industrial power
of the organized labour movement. This is not to say that they do not
recognize the importance of the State in industrial matters. All agree
that control of political machinery will in the long run be necessary,
if only to prevent it from checking the advance of the people through
the courts and police. But they also agree that control of the State
is not held and cannot be attained by political machinery alone. The
present influence of the proprietors of industry on politics is due,
they see, chiefly to economic power, and the workers consequently
must not neglect the development of their own economic organization.
The Communists are completely hopeless of attaining results through
the present election machinery; the Socialists and Farmer-Labourites
believe it possible to secure a majority at the polls, which may
then execute its will, if the workers are well enough organized for
industrial action.

Outwardly the most successful of the radical movements is the least
doctrinaire of all. It is unnecessary to repeat the history and
achievements of the Nonpartisan League--an attempt on the part of
organized farmers to use the machinery of the State in order to
gain economic independence from the banking, milling, and packing
interests. Other groups of farmers have aimed at a similar result
through co-operation, with varying success.

In the industrial labour movement proper there have been numerous
radical minorities. The most uncompromising of these, as well as
the most characteristically American, was the Industrial Workers of
the World, who aspired to build up a consciously revolutionary body
to rival the unions composing the American Federation of Labour.
This decline is due not so much to suppression as to their previous
failure to enlist the continued support of the industrial workers
themselves. Like the Communists, the I.W.W. predicated their success
on a revolutionary situation, and lacking that situation they could
not build a labour movement on an abstract idea. Over long periods not
enough people are moved by a philosophy of salvation to give staying
power to such an organization in the daily struggle with the employers.
Other similar attempts, such as the W.I.I.U., and the more recent One
Big Union, have encountered similar difficulties. They grow rapidly in
crises, but fail under the strain of continued performance.

The failure of American radicals to build up a strong movement is in
part due, of course, to the natural difficulties of the social and
economic situation, but it is also due to the mental traits which
usually accompany remoteness from reality. This is illustrated in
the history of the I.W.W., if we accept William Z. Foster’s acute
analysis. The regular trade-union movement, slowly evolving towards
a goal but half consciously realized, overcoming practical obstacles
painfully and clumsily, as such obstacles usually are overcome, was too
halting for these impatient radicals. They withdrew, and set up rival,
perfectionist unions, founded in uncompromising revolutionary ardour.
These organizations were often unable to serve the rank and file in
their practical difficulties, and consequently could not supplant
the historic labour movement. But they did draw out of that movement
many of its most sincere and ardent spirits, thus depriving it of the
ferment which was necessary to its growth. The I.W.W., for their part,
failing to secure any large grip on reality, regressed into quarrels
about theory, suffered divisions of their social personality, and
at length--except in the far West--became little more than economic
anchorites. As Foster says, “The I.W.W. were absolutely against
results.”

Too much of American radicalism has been diverted to the easy
emotional satisfaction which is substituted for the arduous process
of dealing with reality. We suffer a restriction of the personality,
we cry out against the oppressor, we invent slogans and doctrines,
we fill our minds with day dreams, with intricate mechanisms of some
imaginary revolution. At the same time we withdraw from the actual
next step. Here is the trade-union movement, built up painfully for
over a century, a great army with many divisions which function every
day in the industrial struggle. How many radicals know it in any
detail? How many have paid the slightest attention to the technique
of its organization, or have devoted any time to a working out of the
smaller problems which must be worked out before it can achieve this
or that victory? Here are our great industries, our complex systems
of exchange. How many radicals really know the technique of even the
smallest section of them? Radicals wish to reorganize the industrial
system; would they know how to organize a factory?

If radicalism arises from the instinct for economic maturity, then it
can find its place in the world only by learning its function, only
by expressing its emotion in terms of the actual with which it has to
deal. A period of adolescence was to be expected, but to prolong the
characteristics of that period is to invite futility. And as a matter
of fact American radicalism now exhibits a tendency to establish more
contacts with reality. Instead of withdrawing from established unions
to start a new and spotless labour movement, radicals are beginning to
visualize and to carry out the difficult but possible task of improving
the organization of the existing unions, and of charging them with new
energy and ideas. Unions which were founded by radicals--such as the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America--are devoting their efforts not
to talking of a future revolution, but to organizing the workers more
firmly in the present, to establishing constitutional government in
industry through which tangible advances may be made and safeguarded,
and to improving the productivity of industry itself. Engineers,
encouraged by labour organizations, and in some cases actually paid
by them, are investigating the problem of economic waste, and are
demonstrating by line upon line and precept upon precept how the chaos
of competition, industrial autocracy, and a controlling profit motive
are reflected in idle hours, low wages, high prices, and inferior
products. The co-operative movement is slowly providing a new and
more efficient machinery of distribution, while co-operative banks
are building up a reserve of credit for those who wish to experiment
with undertakings conducted for other purposes than the profit of
the proprietor. Such functional use of the labour movement is more
dangerous to the existing disorder than volumes of phrases or a whole
battalion of “natural rights.”

Extremists call such activities compromise. They are compromise in the
sense that any hypothesis must be changed to fit the facts, but they
involve no compromise with scientific truth. The alchemist compromised
when he gave up the search for the philosopher’s stone and began to
learn from the elements. He surrendered a sterile dogma for a fruitful
science. In proportion as radicals learn how to put their emotions to
work, in proportion as they devise ways to function in the world in
which we live, will they make possible not only unity among themselves,
but a rapprochement with other Americans. A man who believes there is
no real possibility of change short of complete revolution can unite
with a man who has no theory about the matter at all so long as they
do not discuss abstract doctrine, but concentrate upon the problem of
how to bring about a particular effect at a particular time. The most
radical theories, if expressed in terms of concrete situations, will be
accepted by those who are wary of generalities, or do not understand
them. The theories will be tested in the fact. The operation of such a
process may be blocked by those who dogmatically oppose all experiment,
but in that case the forces of reason and of nature will be so clearly
on the side of the radical that there can be no doubt about his
ultimate fruitfulness.

                                                        GEORGE SOULE




THE SMALL TOWN


America is a nation of villagers, once remarked George Bernard Shaw
in a moment of his most exclusive scorn for what he believed was our
crude and naïve susceptibility to the modes and moods, to say nothing
of the manners, of the professional patriots during that hectic period
when Wilhelm was training to become the woodman of Amerongen. Now Shaw
is the oracle of the Occident, and when he speaks there is no docile
dog this side of Adelphi Terrace presumptuous enough to bark. At least
there should not be; and in any event, neither history nor H. G.
Wells records any spirited protest on America’s part to the Shavian
accusation. It was allowed to stand invulnerable and irrefutable. Of
course, in our hearts we know Shaw is right. We may for the moment
be signifying _rus in urbe_, but between you and me and the chief
copy-reader of the Marion (Ohio) _Star_, _in urbe_ is a superfluous
detail.

Show me a native New Yorker and I will show you something as extinct
as a bar-tender. There are no native New Yorkers. All New Yorkers
come from small towns and farms. Ask Dad, ask the Sunday editor, ask
the census-taker--they know. And what is true of New York is true of
Boston and Chicago. The big men, the notable men of the big cities,
hail from the small towns, the Springfields, the Jacksons, the
Jamestowns, Georgetowns, Charlestowns--yes, and from the Elizabeths and
Charlottes--of the nation.

Under the circumstances any back-to-the-land movement in this country
seems futile if not ridiculous. The land is still confident and
capable of taking care of itself. It needs no aid from the city chaps
and asks none. The Freudians are not deceived for a moment over the
basis of a return-to-the-farm enterprise. They recognize it for what
it is--a sentimental complex superinduced by the nervous hysteria of
the city. But even the amazingly small proportion of the population
that is not Freudian refuses to become influenced by the cry of the
sentimentalists. Because it is keenly, though unpretentiously, aware of
the genuinely rural state of its culture and civilization.

The civilization of America is predominantly the civilization of
the small town. The few libertarians and cosmopolites who continue
to profess to see a broader culture developing along the Atlantic
seaboard resent this fact, though they scarcely deny it. They are too
intelligent, too widened in vision to deny it. They cannot watch the
tremendous growth and power and influence of secret societies, of
chambers of commerce, of boosters’ clubs, of the Ford car, of moving
pictures, of talking-machines, of evangelists, of nerve tonics, of
the _Saturday Evening Post_, of Browning societies, of circuses, of
church socials, of parades and pageants of every kind and description,
of family reunions, of pioneer picnics, of county fairs, of firemen’s
conventions without secretly acknowledging it. And they know, if they
have obtained a true perspective of America, that there is no section
of this vast political unit that does not possess--and even frequently
boast--these unmistakably provincial signs and symbols.

I do not mean to imply that such aspects make America an unfit place
in which to live. On the contrary, America’s very possession of them
brings colour and rugged picturesqueness, if not a little pathos, to
the individual with imagination sufficient to find them. Mr. Dreiser
found them and shed a triumphant tear. “Dear, crude America” is to
him a sweet and melancholy reality. It is a reality that has been
expressed with a good deal of prophecy--and some profit--by the young
novelists. Small-town realism with a vengeance, rather than a joy,
has been the keynote of their remarkable success during the past
year. However, they pulled the pendulum of cultural life too far in
one direction. They failed, for the most part, of appreciating the
similarity of human nature in city as in country, with the result that
their triumph is ephemeral. Already the reaction has set in. There are
now going on in the work-rooms of the novelists attempts to immortalize
Riverside Drive, Fifth Avenue, Beacon Street, Michigan Boulevard, and
Pennsylvania Avenue.

Unless they penetrate into the soul of these avenues, unless they
perceive that these avenues are not spiritually different from Main
Street, though they may be clothed in the habiliments of metropolitan
taste and fancy, they will fail to symbolize correctly America. They
will be writing merely for money and controversial space in the
literary supplements.

For the soul of these avenues is a soul with an _i_ substituted
for _u_. It is the soul of the land. It is a homely, wholesome
provincialism, typifying human nature as it is found throughout the
United States. We may herd in a large centre of population, assume
the superficialities of cosmopolitan culture and genuinely believe
ourselves devils of fellows. It takes all the force of a prohibition
law to make us realize that we are more sinned against than sinning.
Then are we confronted sharply by the fact that the herd is appallingly
inefficient and inarticulate in a conflict with isolated individualism.

The prohibition movement originated in farming communities and
villages where the evils of alcohol are ridiculously insignificant. No
self-respecting or neighbour-respecting villager could afford to be
known as a drinking man. His business or his livelihood was at stake.
Then why did he foster prohibition? Why did he seek to fasten it upon
the city resident who, if he drank, did not lose apparently his own
or his neighbour’s respect? Chiefly because of his very isolation.
Because he was geographically deprived of the enjoyments which the city
man shared. I can well imagine a farmer in the long sweating hours of
harvest time or a small town storekeeper forced to currying favour with
his friends and neighbours 365 days in a year, resolutely declaring
that what he cannot have the man in the city shall not have. The
hatching of all kinds of prohibitory plots can be traced to just such
apparent injustices of life. Dr. Freud would correctly explain it under
the heading of inferiority-complex.

City men have marvelled at the remarkable organization of the
reformers. It is not so much organization, however, as it is a national
feeling perceived and expressed simultaneously. Cities may conduct the
most efficient propaganda against such a feeling, they may assemble
their largest voting strength to assail it. All in vain. The country
districts roll up the majorities and the cities are left unmistakably
high and dry.

So it is with most of the laws and movements of America. The rural
sections have but to will them and they become in due time established
facts. An idea merely has to take root in the mind of some socially
oppressed individual. He talks it over with his friends at lodge
meeting or during an informal hour at a board of trade meeting. He
receives encouragement. He imparts the idea to his wife, who carries it
to her literary club, where it is given further airing. It spreads to
the volunteer firemen’s clubrooms, to the grange picnics and the church
socials. It is discussed in the pulpits. Finally it reaches the ears
of the village and county politicians who, impressed by its appeal to
the moral force of the community, decide after hours in the back room
of the post-office or the national bank to interest the congressman or
assemblyman from their district in its merits as a possible law upon
the statute books. The congressman and assemblyman, acutely aware of
the side on which their bread is buttered, agree to do “everything
within their power” to put the measure through. Having the assistance
of other congressmen and assemblymen, most of whom are from rural
districts, their tasks assuredly are not difficult.

Before the appearance of the automobile and the movie upon the national
horizon, the small town was chiefly characterized by a distinctly rural
and often melancholy peacefulness. A gentle air of depression hung
over it, destructive of the ambitious spirit of youth and yet, by very
reason of its existence, influencing this spirit to seek adventure and
livelihood in wider fields. Amusements were few and far between. It was
the day of the quilting party, of the Sunday promenade in the cemetery,
of buggy-riding, of the ice-cream festival and the spelling bee. The
bucolic note was ever present.

Such an environment, while joyous to the small boy, became hopelessly
dull and lifeless to the youth of vitality and imagination.
Restlessness with it tormented him day and night until it grew into an
obsession. Especially did he dislike Sunday, its funereal quiet with
stores closed and other possible avenues of excitement and adventure
forbidden. He began to cherish dreams of a life strange and teeming in
distant cities.

As he grew older and a measure of independence came to him he
fled, provided there was no business established by a patient and
hard-working ancestry which might lure him into remaining home. And
even that did not always attract him. He was compelled to go by his
very nature--a nature that desired a change from the pall of confining
and circumscribed realism, the masks of respectability everywhere about
him, the ridiculous display of caste, that saw a rainbow of fulfilled
ideals over the hills, that demanded, in a word, romance.

He, who did not feel this urge, departed because of lack of business
opportunities. Occasionally he returned disillusioned and exhausted
by the city and eager to re-establish himself in a line of work
which promised spiritual contentment. But more often he stayed away,
struggling with the crowd in the city, returning home only for short
vacation periods for rest and reminiscence, to see his people and renew
boyhood friendships. At such times he was likely to be impressed by
the seeming prosperity of those boys he left behind, of the apparent
enjoyment they found in the narrow environment. The thought may have
occurred to him that the life of the small town had undergone a marked
change, that it had adopted awkward, self-conscious urban airs.

Suddenly he realizes that the automobile and the movie and to some
extent the topical magazine are mainly responsible for the contrast.
The motor-car has given the small town man an ever-increasing contact
with the city, with life at formerly inaccessible resorts, with the
country at large. And the movie and the magazine have brought him news
and pictures of the outside world. He has patronized them and grown
wiser.

The basis, the underlying motive, of all cultural life in the small
town is social. The intellectual never enters. It may try to get in but
the doors are usually barred. There is practically no demand for the
so-called intellectual magazines. Therefore, they are seldom placed on
sale. But few daily papers outside of a radius of fifty miles are read.
Plays which have exclusive appeal to the imagination or the intellect
are presented to rows of empty seats. On the other hand, dramas teeming
with primitive emotions and the familiar devices of hokum attract
large audiences, provided the producing managers care to abide by the
present excessive transportation rates. There is but little interest
manifested in great world movements, such as the economic upheaval
in Eastern Europe. Normalcy is, indeed, the watchword so far as
intellectual development is concerned.

It is in the social atmosphere that the American village has its real
_raison d’être_. Therein do we meet the characteristics that have
stamped themselves indelibly upon American life. The thousand and one
secret societies that flourish here have particularly fertile soil in
the small towns. Count all the loyal legionaries of all the chapters
of all the secret societies between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
and you have a job suited only to the most irrepressible statistician.
And the most loyal live in the small towns and villages of the United
States. The choice is not limited. There are societies enough to suit
all kinds of personalities and purses.

The Knights of Pythias, the Knights of the Maccabees, the Odd Fellows,
the Elks, the Eagles, the Loyal Order of the Moose, the Modern Woodmen,
the Masons with their elaborate subdivisions of Shriners and Knights
Templar--all count their membership throughout the nation. And the
women, jealous of their husbands’ loyalty to various and complex forms
of hocus-pocus, have organized auxiliary societies which, while not
maintaining the secrecy that veils the fraternal orders, nevertheless
build up a pretentious mystery intriguing to the male mind.

No town is a self-respecting town unless it can boast half a dozen of
these societies. They are the fabric of which the basis of the social
structure is built. They are the very essence of America. They dot
the national landscape. Every city, as if to prove conclusively its
provincial nature, displays one or more temples devoted to the rituals
of fraternal organization.

Recently the South has revived the order of the Ku Klux Klan which
flourished after the Civil War as a means of improving upon the
orderly course of the law in dealing with the Negro race. Here is the
apotheosis of the secret society, with its magnificent concealment of
identity in a unique form of dress, its pretensions to 100 per cent.
Americanism, its blatant proclamations of perpetuating the great and
glorious traditions of the republic. The Negro has already organized to
offset this propaganda. He knew that unless he could show secret orders
of imposing strength he had no right even to the questionable heritage
of habitation here. He would be outside the spirit of the times. He
owed it to America, to “dear, crude America,” to organize lodges and
secret societies; and he has done so.

Undoubtedly the secret society plays a large part in the greatness of
America. It has made the American class-conscious. It has made him
recognize his own importance, his own right to the national distinction
of good-fellowship. It provides him temporary surcease from domestic
and business details, though there are countless numbers of men who
join these orders to make business details, so far as they affect them,
more significant.

The amazing prevalence of conventions in America is an outgrowth of
the secret societies. Life to many 100 per cent. Americans is just one
lodge convention after another. Held in a different city each year,
a distinction that is industriously competed for, the convention has
become a fixed fact in American cultural life. Here is the one occasion
of the year when the serious diddle-daddle is laid aside, and refuge
and freedom are sought in such amusements as the convention city can
offer. The secret order convention has inspired the assembly of all
kinds and descriptions of conventions--trade conventions, religious
conventions, educational conventions--until there is no city in the
land boasting a first-class hotel that does not at one time or another
during the year house delegates with elaborate insignia and badges.

Probably the first parade held in America was that of a class-conscious
fraternal organization eager to display its high standard of membership
as well as a unique resplendence in elaborate regalia. The parade
has continued an integral part of American life ever since. There
is something of the vigour, the gusto and crudeness of America in a
parade. It has come to represent life here in all its curious phases.

The parade had become an event of colourful significance when P. T.
Barnum organized the “greatest show on earth.” He decided to glorify
it--in his dictionary “to glorify” really meant “to commercialize”--and
once and for all time associate it chiefly with the circus. He
succeeded, mainly because the residents of the villages were receptive
to the idea. They saw a bizarre relief from the monotony of existence.
The farmers rolled down from the hills in their lumber-wagons and
found an inarticulate joy, storekeepers closed shop and experienced a
tumultuous freedom from the petty bickerings of trade, men and women
renewed their youth, children were suddenly thrown into a very ecstasy
of delight. Thus, the circus parade became part and parcel of American
civilization.

And the precious and unique spirit created by the circus parade has
been carried on in innumerable representations. To-day America shelters
parades of every conceivable enterprise. Firemen have a day in every
small town of the land on which they joyously pull flower-laden
hose-carts for the entertainment of their fellow-citizens. Bearing such
labels as Alerts, Rescues and Champion Hook and Ladder No. 1, they
march proudly down Main Street--and the world goes hang. The volunteer
firemen’s organization is an institution peculiar to the American small
town,--an institution, too, that is not without class-consciousness.
The rough-and-ready, comparatively illiterate young men form one group.
The clerks, men engaged in the professions and social favourites
compose another. This class is usually endowed by the wealthiest
resident of the town, and its gratitude is expressed usually by naming
the organization for the local Crœsus.

The Elks parade, the Knights of Pythias parade, veterans of various
wars parade, the Shriners and Knights Templar parade, prohibitionists
parade, anti-prohibitionists parade, politicians parade, women parade,
babies parade--everybody parades in America. Indeed, America can be
divided into two classes, those who parade and those who watch the
parade. The parade is indelibly identified with the small town. It is
also inalienably associated with the large city, composed, as it is, of
small-town men.

There has lately taken place in the villages throughout the country a
new movement that has civic pride as its basis. It is the formation
of boosters’ clubs. Everybody is boosting his home town, at least
publicly, though in the privacy of the front porch he may be justly
depressed by its narrowness of opportunity, its subservience to social
snobbery, its intellectual aridity. “Come to Our Town. Free Sites
Furnished for Factories,” read the signs along the railroad tracks.
“Boost Our Town” shout banners stretched across Main Street.

Is there not something vitally poignant in such a proud provincialism?
Is not America endeavouring to lift itself up by its boot-straps, to
make life more comfortable and interesting? The groping, though crude,
is commendable. It is badly directed because there is no inspiration
back of it, because its organizers are only remotely aware how to make
life here more interesting. However, there is the effort and it is
welcome.

Perhaps, when the towns--and for that matter the cities--realize that
artistic sensitiveness is necessary to achieve comfort and interest we
shall have boosters who are as enthusiastic on the front porch as in
the board of trade meeting. When will our towns take artistic advantage
of their river-fronts? The place for the most beautiful walk and
drive and park presents usually unsightly piers, factories and sheds.
Railroad tracks are often laid in the very heart of the town. For many
years the leading hotels in practically all of our towns and cities
were built in close proximity to the railroad station. In seeking to
save a traveller time and convenience hotel proprietors subjected him
to the bodily and mental discomforts that are related to the vicinity
of a railroad station. Of late there is a marked tendency to erect
hotels in quiet residential streets away from the noise and confusion
of shops and railroad yards.

The billboard menace, while diminishing, is still imposing. It is
to the everlasting shame of the towns and cities that in an era of
prohibitions no legislative effort has been made to stop the evil of
desecrating our finest streets with advertising signs. Such commercial
greed is inconceivable to the foreign visitor. It is one of his first
impressions, though he charitably takes refuge in public in attributing
it to the high tension of our existence.

While the first symptoms of artistic appreciation are beginning to
be faintly discerned upon the American horizon, the old and familiar
phases of social life in the country are still being observed. The
picnic of first settlers, the family reunion, the church supper, the
sewing circle, the Browning society--all have national expression.
The introduction of such modern industrial devices as the automobile
has not affected them in the least. It can truly be asserted that the
flivver has even added to their popularity. It has brought people of
the country districts into closer contact than ever before. It has
given a new prestige to the picnics and the reunions.

What offers more rustic charm and simplicity than a family reunion?
Practically every family in the farming districts that claims an
ancestral residence in this country of more than fifty years holds
one annually. It is attended by the great and the near-great from
the cities, by the unaffected relatives back home. Babies jostle
great-grandparents. Large and perspiring women bake for days the cakes
and pies to be consumed. The men of the house are foolishly helping in
making the rooms and the front lawn ready. At last the reunion is at
hand--a sentimental debauch, a grand gorging. Everybody present feels
the poignancy of age. But while the heart throbs the stomach is working
overtime. The law of compensation is satisfied. “A good time was had
by all” finds another expression in the weekly paper, and the reunion
becomes a memory.

At pioneer picnics one finds the family reunion on a larger scale.
The whole township and county has for the time become related. It is
the day of days, a sentimental tournament with handshaking as the
most popular pastime. Organized in the rugged primitiveness of the
early part of the 19th century by men who were first to settle in the
vicinity, the pioneer picnic has been perpetuated, until to-day it
is linked inalterably with America’s development. It has weathered
the passing of the nation from an agricultural to a great industrial
commonwealth. It has stood the gaff of time. And so it goes on for
ever, a tradition of the small town and the farming community. While it
has been divested almost entirely of its original purpose, it serves
to bring the politicians in touch with the “peepul.” Grandiloquent
promises are made for a day from the rostrum by a battalion of
“Honourables”--and forgotten both by the “Honourables” and the public
intent upon dancing and walking aimlessly about the grounds. The
politicians smile as they continue to preserve their heroic pose,
and the “peepul,” satisfied that all is well with the world, turn
to various gambling devices that operate under the hypocritical
eye of the sheriff and to the strange dances that have crept up
from the jungle, for it is a day filled with the eternal spirit of
youth. There is ingenuous appeal in the fair samples of the yokelry
present. There is a quiet force beneath the bovine expressions of
the boys. The soul of America--an America glad to be alive--is being
wonderfully and pathetically manifested. No shams, no superficialities,
no self-conscious sophistication are met. Merely the sturdy quality
of the true American civilization, picturesque and haunting in its
primitiveness.

The county fair belongs in the same classification as the first-settler
picnic. It is the annual relaxation by farmers and merchants from
the tedious tasks of seeing and talking to the same people day after
day. It offers them a measure of equality with the people in the city
with their excursion boats, their baseball games, their park sports.
And they make the most of their opportunity. They come to see and to
be seen, to risk a few dollars on a horse race, to admire the free
exhibitions in front of the side-shows, to watch with wide eyes the
acrobatic stunts before the grandstand; to hear the “Poet and the
Peasant” overture by the band, proud and serious in a stand of its own.

Three or four days given to such pleasures naturally bestow a fine
sense of illusion upon the visitors. They begin to believe that life
has been specially ordered for them. They see through a glass lightly.
They care not a whiff about the crowded excitements of the city. They
have something infinitely more enjoyable than a professional baseball
game or an excursion ride down the river. They have days of endless
variety, of new adventures, of new thoughts. They, too, know that
America cannot go wrong so long as they continue to find illusion. And
they are correct. They may not suspect that American culture is crude.
They do know, however, that it is dear. They should worry.

Against such a background have the flavour and essence of American
life been compounded. Their influence has extended in all directions,
in all walks of industry. They have left their impress upon the
character of the country, upon the mob and the individual. Sentimental
attachment to the old ties, to boyhood ideals and traditions remains
potent though a little concealed by the mask, be it affected or real,
of sophistication. It is the voice of a new land, of a vigorous and
curious nationalism that is being exerted. There obviously cannot
be among such a naturally healthy people a supercilious contempt
for sentiment. We may laugh a little haughtily at the amazing
susceptibility of folks to the extravagant eloquence of itinerant
evangelists. We may look on an “old home week” with a touch of urban
disdain. We may listen to the band concert on a Saturday night in
the Court House Square with a studied indifference. We may assume an
attractive weariness in watching the promenaders on Main Street visit
one ice-cream emporium after another. But deep down in our hearts is a
feeling of invincible pride in the charming homeliness, the youthful
vitality, the fine simplicity, yes, and the sweeping pathos of these
aspects of small-town civilization.

                                                  LOUIS RAYMOND REID




HISTORY

      “Nescire autem quid antea quam natus sis
       acciderit id est semper puerum esse.”

                                   _Cicero._

      “History is bunk.”

                _Henry Ford_


The burghers of Holland, being (like the Chinese) inclined towards
a certain conservatism of both manners and habits, continued the
tradition of the “front parlour”--the so-called “good-room”--well into
the 20th century. Every farmer had his “front parlour” filled with
stuffy air, stuffy furniture, and an engraving of the Eiffel Tower
facing the lithographic representation of a lady in mid-seas clinging
desperately to a somewhat ramshackle granite cross.

But the custom was not restricted to the bucolic districts. His late
Majesty, William III (whose funeral was the most useful event of
his long life), had been married to an estimable lady of Victorian
proclivities, who loved a “tidy” and an “antimacassar” better than
life itself. An aristocracy, recruited from the descendants of East
India Directors and West India sugar planters, followed the Royal
Example. They owned modest homes which the more imaginative Latin
would have called “Palazzi.” Most of the ground floor was taken up
by an immense “front parlour.” For the greater part of the year it
was kept under lock and key while the family clustered around the oil
lamp of the “back parlour” where they lived in the happy cacophony of
young daughters practising Czerny and young sons trying to master the
intricacies of “paideuo--paideueis--paideuei.”

As for the “front parlour” (which will form the main part of my text),
it was opened once or twice a twelve-month for high family functions.
A week beforehand, the cleaning woman (who received six cents per hour
in those blessed Neanderthal days) would arrive with many mops and
many brooms. The covers would be removed from the antique furniture,
the frames of the pictures would be duly scrubbed. The carpets were
submitted to a process which resembled indoor ploughing and for fully
half an hour each afternoon the windows were opened to the extent of
three or four inches.

Then came the day of the reception--the birthday party of the
grandfather--the betrothal of the young daughter. All the relatives
were there in their best silks and satins. The guests were there in
ditto. There was light and there was music. There was enough food and
drink to keep an entire Chinese province from starving. Yet the party
was a failure. The old family portraits--excellent pieces by Rembrandt
or Terborch--looked down upon grandchildren whom they did not know.
The grandchildren, on the other hand, were quite uncomfortable in the
presence of this past glory. Sometimes, when the guests had expressed
a sincere admiration of these works of art, they hired a hungry Ph.D.
to write a critical essay upon their collection for the benefit of the
“Studio” or the “Connoisseur.” Then they ordered a hundred copies,
which they sent to their friends that they might admire (and perhaps
envy) the ancient lineage of their neighbours. Thereafter, darkness and
denim covers and oblivion.

The history of our great Republic suffers from a fate similar to that
of these heirlooms. It lives in the “front parlour” of the national
consciousness. It is brought out upon a few grand occasions when it
merely adds to the general discomfort of the assisting multitude.
For the rest of the time it lies forgotten in the half dark of those
Washington cellars which for lack of National Archives serve as a
receptacle for the written record of our past.

Our popular estimate of history and the value of a general historical
background was defined a few years ago by Henry Ford. Mr. Ford, having
made a dozen flivvers go where none went before and having gained
untold wealth out of the motor-car industry, had been appointed an
ex-officio and highly esteemed member of our national Council of Wise
Men. His opinion was eagerly asked upon such subjects as child-raising,
irrigation, the future of the human race, and the plausibility of
the Einstein theory. During a now memorable trial the subject of
history came up for discussion, and Mr. Ford (if we are to believe the
newspaper accounts) delivered himself of the heartfelt sentiment that
“history is bunk.” A grateful country sang Amen!

When asked to elucidate this regrettable expression of dislike,
the average citizen will fall back upon reminiscences of his early
childhood and in terms both contrite and unflattering he will thereupon
describe the hours of misery which he has spent reciting “dreary facts
about useless kings,” winding up with a wholesale denunciation of
American history as something dull beyond words.

We cannot say much in favour of late Stuarts, Romanoffs, and Wasa’s,
but we confess to a sincere affection for the history of these United
States. It is true there are few women in it and no little children.
This, to us, seems an advantage. “Famous women of history” usually
meant “infamous trouble” for their much perturbed contemporaries. As
for the ever-popular children motif, the little princes of the Tower
would have given a great deal had they been allowed to whitewash part
of Tom Sawyer’s famous fence, instead of waiting in silken splendour
for Uncle Richard’s murder squad.

No, the trouble is not with the history of this land of endless plains
and a limitless sky. The difficulty lies with the reader. He is the
victim of an unfortunate circumstance. The Muses did not reach these
shores in the first-class cabin of the _Aquitania_. They were almost
held up at Ellis Island and deported because they did not have the
necessary fifty dollars. They were allowed to sneak in after they had
given a solemn promise that they would try to become self-supporting
and would turn their white hands to something useful.

Clio, our revered mistress, has tried hard to live up to this vow.
But she simply is not that sort of woman. An excellent counsellor,
the most charming and trusted of friends, she has absolutely no gift
for the practical sides of life. She was forced to open a little
gift-shop where she sold flags and bunting and pictures of Pocahontas
and Paul Revere. The venture was not a success. A few people took pity
on her and tried to help. She was asked to recite poetry at patriotic
gatherings and do selections from the “Founding Fathers.” She did not
like this, being a person of shy and unassuming character. And so she
is back in the little shop. When last I saw her, she was trying to
learn the Russian alphabet. That is always a dangerous sign.

And now, lest we continue to jumble our metaphors, let us state the
case with no more prejudice than is strictly necessary.

The earliest settlers of this country brought their history with them.
Little Snorri, son of Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni, playing amidst
the vines of his father’s Labradorian garden, undoubtedly listened to
the selfsame sagas that were being told at the court of good King Olaf
Tryggvason in distant Norway. The children of San Domingo shared the
glories of the Cid with the boys and girls who visited the schools of
Moukkadir’s ancient capital. And the long-suffering infants of the
early New England villages merely finished an historical education
that had begun at Scrooby and had been continued at No. 21 of the
_Kloksteeg_ in Leyden.

During the 17th century, the greater part of the Atlantic coast became
English. The Dutch and the French, the Spanish and Swedish traditions
disappeared. The history of the British Kingdom became the universal
history of the territory situated between the thirtieth and the
fiftieth degree of latitude. Even the American Revolution was a quarrel
between two conflicting versions of certain identical principles of
history. Lord North and George Washington had learned their lessons
from the same text-book. His Lordship, of course, never cut the pages
that told of Runymede, and George undoubtedly covered the printed
sheets which told of the fate of rebels with strange geometrical
figures. But the historical inheritance of the men who fought on the
left bank of the Fish Kill and those who surrendered on the right shore
was a common one, and Burgoyne and Gates might have spent a profitable
evening sharing a bottle of rum and complimenting each other upon the
glorious deeds of their respective but identical ancestors.

But during the ’twenties and ’thirties of the 19th century, the
men of the “old régime”--the founder and fighters of the young
Republic--descended into the grave and they took their traditions,
their hopes, and their beliefs with them. The curtain rose upon a
new time and upon a new people. The acquisition of the Northwestern
Territory in 1787 and the purchase of Napoleon’s American real-estate
in the year 1803 had changed a little commonwealth of struggling
Colonies into a vast empire of endless plains and unlimited forests.
It was necessary to populate this new land. The history of the Coast
came to an end. The history of the Frontier began. English traditions
rarely crossed the Alleghanies. The long struggle for representative
government took on a new aspect in a land where no king had ever set
foot and where man was sovereign by the good right of his own energy.

It is true that the first fifty years of the last century witnessed the
arrival upon these shores of millions of men and women from Europe who
had enjoyed a grammar school education in the land of their birth. But
dukes do not emigrate. Those sturdy fellows who risked the terrors and
horrors of the Atlantic in the leaky tubs of the early forties came to
the country of their future that they might forget the nightmare of the
past. That nightmare included the biography of Might which was then
the main feature of the European text-book. They threw it overboard as
soon as they were well outside of the mouth of the Elbe or the Mersey.
Settled upon the farms of Michigan and Wisconsin, they sometimes taught
their children the songs of the old Fatherland but its history never.
After two generations, this migration--the greatest of all “treks”
since the 4th century--came to an end. Roads had been made, canals had
been dug, railroads had been constructed, forests had been turned into
pastures, the Indian was gone, the buffalo was gone, free land was
gone, cities had been built, and the scene had been made ready for the
final apotheosis of all human accomplishment--civilization.

The schoolmaster has ever followed in the wake of the full dinner-pail.
He now made his appearance and began to teach. Considering the
circumstances he did remarkably well. But he too worked under a
disadvantage. He was obliged to go to New England for his learning
and for his text-books. And the historian of the Boston school,
while industrious and patient, was not entirely a fair witness. The
recollection of British red-coats drilling on the Common was still
fresh in the minds of many good citizens. The wickedness of George III
was more than a myth to those good men and women whose own fathers had
watched Major Pitcairn as he marched forth to arrest Adams and Hancock.
They sincerely hated their former rulers, while they could not deny
their love for the old mother country. Hence there arose a conflict of
grave consequence. With one hand the New England chronicler twisted the
tail of the British lion. With the other he fed the creature little
bits of sugar.

Again the scene changed. The little red school-house had marched across
the plains. It had followed the pioneer through the passes of the
Rocky Mountains. It had reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The
time of hacking and building and frying with lard came to a definite
end. The little red school-house gave way for the academy of learning.
College and University arose wherever a thousand people happened to be
together. History became a part of the curriculum. The schoolmaster,
jack of all learned trades and master of many practical pursuits,
became extinct. The professional historian made his appearance. And
thereby hangs a sad tale which takes us to the barren banks of the
Spree.

Ever since the Thirty Years War, Germany had been the battlefield of
Europe. The ambitions of the Napoleon who was four feet tall and smooth
shaven and the prospective ambitions of the Napoleon who was five feet
tall and who waxed his moustachios, had given and were actually giving
that country very little rest. The intelligentsia of the defunct Holy
Roman Empire saw but a single road which could lead to salvation. The
old German State must be re-established and the kings of Prussia must
become heirs to the traditions of Charlemagne. To prove this point
it was necessary that the obedient subjects of half a hundred little
potentates be filled with certain definite historical notions about
the glorious past of Heinrich the Fat and Konrad the Lean. The patient
historical camels of the Teutonic universities were driven into the
heart of _Historia Deserta_ and brought back those stupendous bricks
of learning out of which the rulers of the land could build their
monuments to the glorious memory of the Ancestors.

Whatever their faults and however misguided the ambition of these
faithful beasts of burden, they knew how to work. The whole world
looked on with admiration. Here, at last, in this country of scientific
precision, history had been elevated to the rank of a “_Wissenschaft_.”
Carrying high their banners, “For God, for Country, _und wie es
eigentlich dagewesen_,” all good historians went upon a crusade to save
the Holy Land of the Past from the Ignorance of the Present.

That was in the blessed days when a first-class passage to Hamburg and
Bremen cost forty-six dollars and seventy-five cents. Henry Adams and
John Lothrop Motley were among the first of the pilgrims. They drank a
good deal of beer, listened to many excellent concerts, and assisted,
“privatissime and gratis,” at the colloquia docta of many highly
learned _Geheimräte_, and departed before they had suffered serious
damage. Others did not fare as well. Three--four--five years they spent
in the company of the Carolingians and the Hohenstaufens. After they
had soaked themselves sufficiently in Ploetz and Bernheim to survive
the _Examen Rigorosum_ of the _Hochgelehrte Facultät_, they returned to
their native shore to spread the gospel of true _Wissenschaftlichkeit_.

There was nothing typically American in this. It happened to the
students of every country of the globe.

Of course, in making this point, we feel that we expose ourselves to
the accusation of a slight exaggeration. “How now,” the industrious
reader exclaims, “would you advocate a return to the uncritical days
of the Middle Ages?” To which we answer, “By no means.” But history,
like cooking or fiddling, is primarily an art. It embellishes life. It
broadens our tolerance. It makes us patient of bores and fools. It is
without the slightest utilitarian value. A handbook of chemistry or
higher mathematics has a right to be dull. A history, never. And the
professional product of the Teutonic school resembled those later-day
divines who tried to console the dying by a recital of the Hebrew verb
_abhar_.

This system of preaching the gospel of the past filled the pulpits but
it emptied the pews. The congregation went elsewhere for its historical
enlightenment. Those who were seriously interested turned to the works
of a few laymen (hardware manufacturers, diplomats, coal-dealers,
engineers) who devoted their leisure hours to the writing of history,
or imported the necessary intellectual pabulum from abroad. Others took
to the movies and since those temples of democratic delight do not open
before the hour of noon, they spent the early morning perusing the
endless volumes of reminiscences, memoirs, intimate biographies, and
recollections which flood the land with the energy of an intellectual
_cloaca maxima_.

But all this, let us state it once more, did not matter very much.
When all is peace and happiness--when the hospitals are empty of
patients--when the weather is fine and people are dying at the usual
rate--it matters little whether the world at large takes a deep
interest in the work of the Board of Health. The public knows that
somewhere, somehow, someway, there exists a Board of Health composed
of highly trained medical experts. They also appreciate from past
experiences that these watchful gentlemen “know their job” and that no
ordinary microbe can hope to move from Warsaw to Chicago without prompt
interference on the part of the delousing squad. But when an epidemic
threatens the safety of the community, then the public hastens to the
nearest telephone booth--calls up the Health Commissioners and follows
their instructions with implicit faith. It demands that these public
servants shall spend the days of undisturbed health to prepare for the
hour of sickness when there is no time for meditation and experiment.

The public at large had a right to expect a similar service from its
historians. But unfortunately, when the crisis came, the scientific
historical machine collapsed completely.

In Germany, the home country of the system of _historische
Wissenschaftlichkeit_, the historian became the barker outside the
Hohenzollern main tent, shouting himself hoarse for the benefit of
half-hearted fellow citizens and hostile neutrals, extolling the
ancestral Teutonic virtues until the whole world turned away in
disgust. In France, they arrange those things better. Even the most
unhealthy mess of nationalistic scraps can be turned into a palatable
dish by a competent cook of the Parisian school. In England, the
historian turned propagandist, and for three years, the surprised
citizens of Copenhagen, Bern, and Madrid found their mail boxes
cluttered with mysterious bundles of state documents duly stamped,
beautifully illustrated, and presented (as the enclosed card showed)
with the compliments of Professor So-and-so of Such-and-such College,
Oxford, England. In Russia, a far-seeing government had taken its
measures many years before. Those historians who had refused to be used
as _cheval de bataille_ for the glory of the house of Romanoff, were
either botanising along the banks of the Lena or had long since found
a refuge in the universities of Sofia and Geneva. I do not know what
happened in Japan, but I have a suspicion that it was the same thing,
the entire world over.

The historian turned apologist. He was as useful as a doctor who would
show a partiality to the native streptococcus on the grounds of loyalty
to the land of his birth.

What happened on this side of the ocean after the first three years of
“peace without victory” had given place to “force to the uttermost” is
too well known to demand repetition. Long before the first American
destroyer reached Plymouth, the staunch old vessel of history had been
_spurlos versenkt_ in the _mare clausum_ of the Western hemisphere.
Text-books were recalled, rehashed, and revamped to suit the needs of
the hour. Long and most deservedly forgotten treatises were called
back to life and with the help of publishers’ blurbs and reviews by
members of the self-appointed guardians of national righteousness
they were sent forth to preach the gospel of domestic virtue. Strange
encyclopædias of current information were concocted by volunteers from
eager faculties. The public mind was a blank. For a hundred years
the little children had learned to dislike history and grown-ups had
revaluated this indifference into actual hate. This situation had been
created to maintain on high the principles of scientific historical
investigation. Let popular interest perish as long as the Truth stand
firm. But in the hour of need, the guardians of the Truth turned
gendarmes, the doors of Clio’s temple were closed, and the public
was invited to watch the continuation of the performance in the next
moving-picture house. At Versailles the curtain went down upon the
ghastly performance.

After the first outbreak of applause the enthusiasm waned. Who had
been responsible for this terrible tragedy? The supposed authors were
branded as enemies of mankind. Nations tottered and ancient Empires
crumbled to dust and were hastily carried to the nearest historical
scrapheap. The ambitious monarch, who for thirty years had masqueraded
as a second Charlemagne, made his exit amidst properties borrowed from
the late King Louis Philippe. The gay young leader of the Death Head
Hussars developed into the amateur bicycle-repairer of the island of
Wieringen. International reputations retailed at a price which could
only be expressed in Soviet rubles and Polish marks and no takers. The
saviour of the world became the invalid of the White House. But not a
word was said about those inconspicuous authors of very conspicuous
historical works who had been the henchmen of the _Oberste_ and
_Unterste Kriegsherren_. They went back to the archives to prepare the
necessary post-mortem statements. These are now being published at a
price which fortunately keeps them well out of reach of the former
soldiers.

In certain dramas and comedies of an older day it was customary to
interrupt the action while the Chorus of moralising Villagers reviewed
what had gone before and drew the necessary conclusions. It is time for
the “goat-singers” to make their appearance.

“Are you, O Author,” so they speak, “quite fair when you pronounce
these bitter words? Are we not all human--too human? Is it reasonable
to demand of our historians that they shall possess such qualities of
detached judgment as have not been seen on this earth since the last
of the Mighty Gods departed from High Olympus? Has a historian no
heart? Do you expect him to stand by and discuss the virtues of vague
political questions, when all the world is doing its bit--while his
children are risking their lives for the safety of the common land?”

And when we are approached in this way, we find it difficult to answer
“no.” For we too are an animated compound of prejudice and unreasonable
preferences and even more unreasoning dislikes, and we do not like to
assume the rôle of both judge and jury.

The evidence, however, gives us no chance to decide otherwise. What
was done in the heat of battle--what was done under the stress of
great and sincere emotions--what was written in the agony of a thousand
fears--all that will be forgotten within a few years. But enough will
remain to convince our grandchildren that the historian was among those
most guilty of creating that “state of mind” without which modern
warfare would be an impossibility.

Here the music of the flutes grows silent. The Chorus steps back
and the main action of our little play continues. The time is “the
present” and the problem is “the future.” The children who are now in
the second grade will be called upon to bear the burden of a very long
period of reconstruction. America, their home, has been compared to an
exceedingly powerful and influential woman who is not very popular but
who must not be offended on account of her eminent social position. The
folk who live along our international Main Street are not very well
disposed towards a neighbour who holds all the mortgages and lives in
the only house that has managed to survive the recent catastrophe. It
will not be an easy thing to maintain the peace in the neurasthenic
community of the great post-war period. It has been suggested that the
Ten Commandments, when rightly applied, may help us through the coming
difficulties. We beg to suggest that a thorough knowledge of the past
will prove to be quite as useful as the Decalogue. We do not make this
statement hastily. Furthermore, we qualify it by the observation that
both History and the Decalogue will be only two of a great many other
remedies that will have to be applied if the world is to be set free
from its present nightmare of poison gas and high-velocity shells. But
we insist that History be included. And we do so upon the statement of
a learned and famous colleague who passed through a most disastrous
war and yet managed to keep a cool head. We mean Thucydides. In his
foreword to the History of the Peloponnesian War he wrote: “The absence
of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its
interest; but if it be judged by those inquirers who desire an exact
knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future,
which in the course of human things, must resemble, if it does not
reflect it, I shall be content.”

When we measure out achievements in the light of this ancient Greek
ideal, we have accomplished very little indeed. An enormous amount of
work has been done and much of it is excellent. The great wilderness
of the past has been explored with diligent care and the material
lies, carefully classified, in those literary museums which we call
libraries. But the public refuses to go in. No one has ever been able
to convince the man in the street that time employed upon historical
reading is not merely time wasted. He carries with him certain hazy
notions about a few names, Cæsar and Joan of Arc (since the war) and
Magna Charta and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He remembers
that Paul Revere took a ride, but whither and for what purpose he
neither knows nor cares to investigate. The historical tie which
binds him to the past and which alone can make him understand his own
position in relation to the future, is non-existent. Upon special
occasions the multitude is given the benefit of a grand historical
pyrotechnic display, paid for by the local Chamber of Commerce, and a
few disjointed facts flash by amidst the fine roar of rockets and the
blaring of a brass band. But this sort of historical evangelising has
as little value as the slapstick vespers which delight the congregation
of Billy Sunday’s circus tent.

We live in an age of patent medicines. The short-cut to success is the
modern _pons asinorum_ which leads to happiness. And remedies which
are “guaranteed to cure” are advertised down the highways and byways
of our economic and social world. But no such cure exists for the sad
neglect of an historical background. History can never be detached from
life. It will continue to reflect the current tendencies of our modern
world until that happy day when we shall discontinue the pursuit of a
non-essential greatness and devote our energies towards the acquisition
of those qualities of the spirit without which human existence (at its
best) resembles the proverbial dog-kennel.

For the coming of that day we must be as patient as Nature.

                                             HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON




SEX

      “The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
       Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.”


In one of the popular plays of last season, a melodrama toned up with
snatches of satire and farce, the wife was portrayed as a beaten dog
heeling her master after he has crushed her down across the table the
better to rowel off her nose. Not until the would-be mutilator was
finally disposed of by an untrammelled Mexican did the woman feel free
to go to her lover, and even then she took little or no satisfaction in
the venture. As for the lover, he had to be robbed of his pistol by the
husband and shot at, and then--the husband out of the way--threatened
by the bandit with the loss of the woman, before he felt free to take
her. The two New Englanders were made happy in spite of themselves--and
in accordance with the traditions or conventions of the audience.

To leave a husband for a lover is in theory un-American, unless the
husband gives a legal ground for divorce and the divorce is secured. In
several States cruelty is a legal ground, and so the conjugal fidelity
of the stage-heroine was perhaps overdrawn. But the feeling that she
was presumed to share with the audience--that the initiative towards
freedom in love should not come from her--is a characteristic trait
of American morality. If your husband is unrestrainedly a brute or a
villain, you may leave him, in fact it behooves you to leave him, but
if he is merely a bore, or perhaps a man you like well enough as a
friend, but only as a friend, you must stay on with him in an intimacy
where boredom readily becomes aversion and mere friendliness, disgust.
The fact that you do not love a person is no reason at all, in American
opinion, for not living as if you did.

This opinion or attitude is explicit in American divorce law. In
none of the States is divorce granted either by mutual consent or at
the desire, the overt desire, of either person. In fact collusion,
as mutual consent is called, is accounted a reason against granting
divorce, and desire for divorce on the part of one remains ineffectual
until the other has been forced into entertaining it. He or she must
be given due ground. Disinclination to intimacy is not of itself due
ground. You must express disinclination in a way so disagreeable that
he or she will want to get rid of you. The law sets a premium on being
hateful, declares indeed that in this case it is an indispensable
condition to not being miserable.

The grotesqueness, from either a social or psychological point of view,
would be too obvious to emphasize, if the implications of this attitude
towards divorce were not so significant of American attitudes at large
towards sex--attitudes of repression or deception. Of deception or
camouflage towards divorce there is one other conspicuous point I
should like to note. “Strictness of divorce” is commonly argued to be
protection of marriage for the sake of children, since brittle marriage
is destructive of the family life. It is safe to say that from no
contemporary discussion of divorce will this argument be omitted; and
it is equally safe to say that the rejoinder that divorce laws should
therefore discriminate between parents and non-parents will, by the
opponents of divorce, pass unheeded. That this distinction should be so
persistently ignored is accountable only, it seems to me, on the ground
of emotional self-deception. What else but a covert emotional attitude
could make tenable the irrationality, and what else is that attitude
but that joy in mating is of negligible value, that sex emotion, if not
a necessary evil, is at any rate a negligible good, deserving merely
of what surplus of attention may be available from the real business
of life? Indifference towards sex emotion is masked by concern for
offspring.

In France, we may note, this confusion between parenthood and mating
does not exist. The parental relation in both law and custom is highly
regulated, much more regulated than among English-speaking peoples,
but it is unlikely that it would be argued in France that mating and
parenthood were inseparable concepts. Unlikely, because the French
attitude towards sex differs so radically from the Anglo-Saxon.

To the French, as to many of the Continental peoples of Europe, sexual
interest is normally to be kept stimulated, neither covered over nor
suppressed. And in this case stimulation is seen to depend largely
upon the factor of interrelation. Sex-facts are to be related to other
facts of life, not rigidly or _a priori_, as in the American view that
mating is inseparable from parenthood, but fluently and realistically,
as life itself moves and finds expression. And sex-facts in European
opinion are to be interrelated in a philosophy of sex. Failure to make
these interrelations, together with the attitude of suppression, seem
to me to be the outstanding aspects of the characteristically American
attitude towards sex.

There is no need in this post-Freudian day of dwelling upon the effects
of suppression of sex instinct or impulse. Suppression leads, we are
told, either to sublimation, in which case it is diversion, rather
than suppression, or it leads to perversion or disease. Unfortunately
sex-pathology in the United States has been given little or no study,
statistically. We have no statistical data of health or disease in
relation to the expression or suppression of sex instinct, and no data
on the extent or the effects of homosexuality or of the direction
of the sex impulses towards self. Opinion therefore becomes merely
a matter of personal observation and conclusion, observation of
individuals or small groups. My own conclusion or guess in regard
to perversion in this country is that part of the commonly observed
spirit of isolation or antagonism between the sexes, and part of
the spirit of competition between individuals, are associated with
homosexual or masturbatory tendencies which get expressed in varying
degrees according to varying circumstances. More particularly the
lack of warmth in personal intercourse which makes alike for American
bad manners and, in the more intellectual circles, for cheerlessness
and aridity is due, I think, to failure of one kind or another in sex
relations. I mean cultural failure, not merely individual failure.

May not some such theory of sex failure account also for that herd
sense which is so familiar a part of Americanism, and which is not
incompatible with the type of self-seeking or pseudo-individualism
of which American individualism appears to be an expression? It is a
tenable hypothesis that sexually isolated individuals become dependent
upon the group for stimulus, whether of emotion or will, whereas
persons in normal sex relations, although they may contribute to the
group or co-operate with it, remain comparatively independent of it,
finding stimulus in sex and its sublimations.

If this theory is valid, we may expect to find a comparatively large
number of sex failures in those circles which are characterized by
what Everett Dean Martin has recently called crowd behaviour, reform
circles intolerant of other mindedness and obsessed by belief in the
paramountcy of their own dogma.

      “_Leur printemps sans jeunesse exige des folies,
       Leur sang brûlant leur dicte des propos amers,
       L’émeute est un remède à la mélancolie,
       Et nous aurions la paix si leurs yeux étaient clairs,
       Ou leur femme jolie._”

Were a set of tests for sex failure or sex fulfilment applied to the
more outstanding propagandists of this country, likewise, of course,
for comparative purposes, to an adequate number of non-propagandists,
the results might be of considerable significance. I recommend the
undertaking to the National Research Council in co-operation with some
organization for social hygiene.

Meanwhile in what measure propagandism of various sorts may be a
perversion of sex or a sublimation remains speculative; and in applying
theory one should be thoroughly aware that from the day of Sappho and
before to the day of Elizabeth Blackwell and after, even to the Russian
Revolution, sex failure of one kind or another, the kind considered
at the time most despicable, has commonly been imputed to persons or
groups disapproved of on other grounds or reprobated. Some sublimation
of sex in the United States there must be, of course, not only, in
propaganda movements, but in other expressions of American culture, in
American art and letters and science, in philanthropy, in politics,
finance, and business. By and large, however, in all these cultural
expressions does one see any conspicuous measure of sex sublimation? Is
not the concern practical rather than devotional, a matter of getting
rather than giving, of self-advancement or family support rather than
of interest in ideas and their forms or in the values of taste or of
faith?

Interest in impersonal subjects in general is not an American trait.
Personal concrete terms are the terms commonly used. Americans, as
we say, are not given to abstract thought or philosophy. They are
interested in facts as facts, not as related to other facts. How expect
of Americans, therefore, that kind of curiosity about sex which leads
to a philosophy of sex? Sex curiosity in American life does not lead
past curiosity about isolated facts, and that means that it leads
not to philosophy but to gossip and pruriency. Not long ago I was
talking with a woman about a common acquaintance to whom I referred
as singularly free through sophistication and circumstance to please
any man she liked. “What do you mean? Have you heard any scandal about
her?” snapped out my companion, not at all interested in the general
reflection, but avid of information about illicit affairs.

Facts which are not held together through theory call for labels.
People who do not think in terms of relations are likely to be
insistent upon names. Labels or names for sex disposition or acts
are, as a matter of fact, very definite in the American vernacular.
“Engaged,” “attentive,” “devoted,” “a married man,” “a man of family,”
“a grass widow,” “a _good_ woman,” “a _bad_ woman”--there is no end
to such tags. Again, intimacy between a man and a woman is referred
definitely to the act of consummation, a sex relation is strictly
classified according to whether or not it is physically consummated.
In this attitude towards sex boundaries or captions may lie the
explanation, incidentally, of what is a constant puzzle to the European
visitor--the freedom of social intercourse allowed to the youth of
opposite sexes. Since consummation only constitutes sexual intimacy in
American opinion, and since consummation, it is assumed, is utterly
out of the question, why raise barriers between boys and girls? The
assumption that consummation is out of the question is, by and large,
correct, which is still another puzzle. To this some clue may be found,
I think, in our concluding discussion.

Fondness for captions and for the sort of classification that is so
likely to paralyze perception of the finer distinctions and to arrest
thought, are natural enough in a child, learning language and so
pressed upon by the multiplicity of phenomena that in self-protection
he must make rough classifications and remain unaware of much. The
old who are dying to life are also exclusive, and they, too, cling
to formulas. Is American culture in the matter of sex childish and
immature, as Americans imply when they refer to their “young country,”
or is the culture representative of the aged; are Americans born old,
as now and again a European critic asserts?

Such terms of age are figurative, of course, unless we take them in
a historical sense, meaning either that a new culture was developed
in this country--or rather that there were fresh developments of an
old culture--or that an old culture was introduced and maintained
without significant change. This is not the place to discuss the
cultural aspects of Colonial America, but it is important to bear in
mind in any discussion of merely contemporaneous sex attitudes in this
country the contributions of European, and more particularly, English
morality. Without recalling the traditions of early Christianity or
of English Puritanism, those attitudes of ignoring or suppressing
the satisfactions of the impulses of sex to which we have referred
were indeed incomprehensible and bewildering--mere psychological
interpretation seems inadequate. But viewed as consequences of the
sense of sin in connection with sex, which was a legacy from Paul
and his successors in English Puritanism, interpretation is less
difficult, and the American attitude toward sex becomes comparatively
intelligible--the attitude seen in divorce and in the melodramas, and
in the standardizing of sex relations, in accordance with that most
significant of Pauline dogmas that marriage is the lesser of two evils,
that it is better to marry than to burn. Without the key of Paul and of
the obscenities of the early Christian Fathers how explain the recent
legislation in Virginia making it a crime to pay attention to a married
man or woman, or such a sermon as was recently preached somewhere
in the Middle West urging a crusade against the practice of taking
another man’s wife in to dinner or dancing round dances? “At a dinner
of friends let every man take his own wife on his arm and walk in to
their seats side by side at the dinner table to the inspiring music
of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” urged the minister. As to dancing,
whenever a man is seen to put his arm around a woman who is not his
wife, the band should cease playing. I do not quote the words of the
latter injunction, as they are rather too indecent.

Turning from the historical back to the psychological point of view--in
one of those circles of cause and effect that are composed now of
cultural inheritance or tradition, now of psychological trend or
disposition--the American case of sex, whether a case of adolescence or
of senescence, may be said to present symptoms of arrested development.
Together with the non-realism of childish or senile formula, there is
here the kind of emotionalism which checks emotional vitality and which
is fed upon the sense of crisis; we may call it crisis-emotion. Life at
large, the sex life in particular, is presented as a series of crises
preceded and followed by a static condition, and in these conventional
times of crisis only, the times when the labels are being attached,
are the emotions aroused. In the intervals, in the stretches between
betrothal, marriage, birth, christening, or divorce, there is little or
no sense of change--none of the emotions that correspond to changing
relations and are expressions of personal adjustment. The emotions of
crisis are statutory, pre-determined, conventionalized; neither for
oneself nor for others do they make any demands upon imagination, or
insight, or spiritual concern.

Here in this psychology of crisis is the clue--before mentioned--to
an understanding of the freedom allowed our youth, of “bundling,”
as the Colonials termed it, or, in current phrase, “petting.” In
general, “keeping company” is accounted one kind of a relationship,
marriage, another--one characterized by courtship without consummation,
the other by consummation without courtship. Between the two kinds
of relationship there is no transition, it is assumed, except by
convention or ritual. So inrooted is this social attitude that the
young cannot escape adopting it, at least the very young to whom, at
any rate, uncritical conservatism seems to be natural. Indeed the taboo
on unritualized consummation partakes enough of the absolutism of the
taboo, shall we say, on incest, to preclude any risk of individual
youthful experimentation or venture across the boundary lines set by
the Elders.

Given these boundary lines, given a psychology of crisis, all too
readily the sex relations, in marriage or out, become stale, flat,
colourless, or of the nature of debauch, which is only another
aspect of crisis-psychology. Sex relations perforce become limited
to two conventions, marriage and prostitution. Prostitute or wife,
the conjugal or the disorderly house, these are the alternatives. In
formulaic crisis-psychology there may be no other station of emotional
experiment or range of emotional expression.

That a man should “sow his wild oats” before marriage, and after
marriage “settle down,” is becoming throughout the country a somewhat
archaic formula, at least in so far as wild oats means exposure to
venereal disease; but there has been no change, so far as I am aware,
in the attitude towards the second part of the formula on settling
down--in conjugal segregation. The married are as obtrusively married
as ever, and their attitude towards persons of the opposite sex as
dull and forbidding. Few “happily married” women but refer incessantly
in their conversation to their husband’s opinion or stand; and what
devoted husband will fail to mention his wife in one way or another
as a notice of his immunity against the appeal of sex in any degree
by any other woman? Shortly after the war, a certain American woman
of my acquaintance who was travelling in France found herself without
money and in danger of being put off her train before reaching Paris
and her banker’s. She found a fellow-countryman and told him her
predicament. He was quite willing to pay her fare; she was an American
and a woman, but she was informed firmly and repeatedly that her knight
was a married man, and besides, he was travelling with his business
partner. Soon after I heard this anecdote I happened to repeat it to a
Chicago lawyer who promptly joined in the laugh over the American man’s
timidity. “Still, a married man travelling can’t be too prudent,” he
finished off.

Circumspection towards women, in travel or elsewhere, or, better still,
indifference towards women, is the standardized attitude of American
husbands. In marriage, too, a relationship of status rather than of
attention to the fluctuations of personality, indifference to psychical
experience, is a not uncommon marital trait. American men in general,
as Europeans have noted, are peculiarly indifferent to the psychology
of women. They are also peculiarly sentimental about women, a trait
quite consistent with indifference or ignorance, but one which, in view
of American prostitution and the persistent exclusion of many women
from equal opportunities for education and for life, gives an ugly look
of hypocrisy to the trumpeters of American chivalry.

And yet subject the American concept of chivalry to a little scrutiny
and the taunt, at least of hypocrisy, will miss the mark. For the
concept is, both actually and historically, a part of the already
noted classification of women as more or less sequestered, on the one
hand, and unsequestered or loose on the other, as inexperienced and
over-experienced or, more accurately, partially over-experienced. In
this classification the claims of both classes of women are settled by
men on an economic basis, with a few sentimentalities about womanhood,
pure or impure, thrown in for good measure. The personality of the
woman a man feels that he is supporting, whether as wife or prostitute,
may, theoretically, be disregarded and, along with her personality, her
capacity for sexual response. Whether as a creature of sin or as an
object of chivalry, a woman becomes a depersonalized, and, sexually, an
unresponsive being.

People sometimes forget this when they discuss the relations between
men and women in this country, and especially the sexlessness or
coldness of American women. They forget it in arguing against the
feminizing of education, the theatre, literature, etc., meaning,
not that women run the schools or are market for the arts, but that
immature, sexless women are in these ways too much to the fore. In
part at least it is thanks to chivalry or to her “good and considerate
husband” that the American woman, the non-wage earner at least, does
not grow up, and that it is possible for so many women to marry without
having any but the social consequences of marriage in mind. One
surmises that there are numbers, very large numbers, of American women,
married as well as unmarried, who have felt either no stirring of sex
at all or at most only the generalized sex stir of pre-adolescence.
What proportion of women marry “for a home” or to escape from a home,
or a job, and what proportion marry for love? After marriage, with the
advent of children, what of these proportions?

Marriage for a home or for the sake of children, chivalry,
“consideration” for the wife, all these attitudes are matters of
status, not of personality, and to personality, not to status, love
must look, since love is an art, not a formula. It often seems that
in American culture, whether in marriage or out, little or no place
is open to this patient, ardent, and discerning art, and that lovers
are invariably put to flight. Even if they make good their escape,
their adventure is without social significance, since it is perforce
surreptitious. Only when adventurers and artists in love are tolerated
enough to be able to come out from under cover, and to be at least
allowed to live, if only as variants from the commonplace, may they
contribute of their spirit or art to the general culture.

                                                 ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS




THE FAMILY


The American family is the scapegoat of the nations. Foreign critics
visit us and report that children are forward and incorrigible, that
wives are pampered and extravagant, and that husbands are henpecked
and cultureless. Nor is this the worst. It only skims the surface by
comparison with the strictures of home-grown criticism. Our domestic
arbiters of every school have a deeper fault to find: they see the
family as a crumbling institution, a swiftly falling bulwark. Catholic
pulpits call upon St. Joseph to save the ruins and Puritan moralists
invoke Will Carlton, believing in common with most of our public
guardians that only saints and sentimentalism can help in such a
crisis. Meanwhile the American family shows the usual tenacity of form,
beneath much superficial change, uniting in various disguises the most
ancient and the newest modes of living. In American family life, if
anywhere, the Neolithic meets the modern and one needs to be very rash
or very wise to undertake the nice job of finding out which is which.
But one at least refuses to defeat one’s normal curiosity by joining
in the game of blind-man’s buff, by means of which public opinion
about the family secures a maximum of activity along with a minimum of
knowledge.

A little science would be of great help. But popular opinion does not
encourage scientific probing of the family. In this field, not honesty
but evasion is held to be the best policy. Rather than venture where
taboo is so rife and the material so sensitive, American science would
much rather promote domestic dyes and seedless oranges. It is true
that we have the Federal Census with its valuable though restrained
statistics. But even the census has always taken less interest in
family status and family composition, within the population, than in
the classification of property and occupation and the fascinating
game of “watching Tulsa grow.” In no country is the collection of
vital statistics so neglected and sporadic and the total yield of
grab-bag facts so unamenable to correlation. Through the persistent
effort of the Children’s Bureau, this situation has been considerably
improved during the past ten years; so that now there exist the
so-called “registration areas” where births, marriages, and deaths
are actually recorded. For the country as a whole, these vital facts
still go unregistered. The prevailing sketchiness in the matter of
vital statistics is in distinct contrast to the energy and thoroughness
with which American political machinery manages to keep track of the
individual who has passed the age of twenty-one.

One of the tendencies, statistically verified, of the native family
is its reduction in size. In the first place the circumference of the
family circle has grown definitely smaller through the loss of those
adventitious members, the maiden aunt and the faithful servant. The
average number of adult females in the typical household is nowadays
just one. The odd women are out in the world on their own; they no
longer live “under the roofs” of their brothers-in-law. Miss Lulu
Bett is almost an anachronism in 1920. The faithful servant has
been replaced by the faithless one, who never by any chance remains
long enough to become a familial appendage, or else she has not
been replaced at all. Even “Grandma” has begun to manifest symptoms
of preferring to be on her own. Thus the glory of the patriarchal
household has visibly departed, leaving only the biological minimum in
its stead.

In the dwindling of this ultimate group lies the crux of the matter.
The American grows less and less prolific, and panicky theorists can
already foresee a possible day when the last 100 per cent. American
Adam and the last 100 per cent. American Eve will take their departure
from our immigrationized stage. It is providentially arranged--the
maxim tells us--that the trees shall not grow and grow until they
pierce the heavens; but is there any power on the job of preventing
the progressive decline of the original Anglo-Saxon stock even to the
point of final extinction? This is a poignant doubt in a country where
the Anglo-Saxon strain enjoys a prestige out of all proportion to its
population quota. The strain may derive what comfort it can from the
reflection that the exit of the Indian was probably not due to birth
control.

Still, birth control is not new. If it did not originate with the
Indians, it did at least with the Puritans. As the census books
and genealogy books show, every succeeding American generation has
manifested a tendency to reduce the birth-rate. The new aspects of the
situation are the acceleration of the tendency and the propaganda for
family limitation by artificial methods. In the birth registration
area, which includes twenty-three States, the number of births for the
year 1919 compared with those for 1918 showed a slump of seven per
cent. Also the current assumption that children are more numerous on
farms, where they are an economic asset, than they are in cities, where
they became an economic handicap, has recently received a startling
correction through a survey made by the Department of Agriculture.
Among the surprises of the study, says the report, was the small
number of children in farm homes:--“Child life is at a premium in
rural districts.” The farm is not the national child reserve it has
been supposed to be. As far as the salaried class is concerned, it
has stood out as the national pace-setter in family limitation. The
editorial writer of the New York _Times_, who may be trusted for a
fairly accurate statement of the standards of this group, justifies
its conduct thus: “Unless the brain-worker is willing to disclass his
children, to subject them to humiliation, he must be willing to feed,
clothe, and educate them during many years. In such circumstances, to
refuse parenthood is only human.” It therefore remains for the manual
worker, who cannot obtain from his Church the same absolution that the
suburban resident can obtain from his _Times_, to produce the bulk of
the population. This, as a whole, is not yet stationary; the recent
census estimates an annual excess of births over deaths throughout
the United States amounting to about one per cent. What will the next
decade do with it?

A peculiar feature of the American propaganda for birth control is its
specific advocacy of artificial methods. The defenders of this cause
have been compelled, it appears, to define a position which would be
self-evident in any society not incorrigibly Puritan. People who regard
celibacy as a state of grace and celibacy within marriage as a supreme
moral victory are still growing, it would seem, on every bush. This
unwholesome belief must have its effect upon the birth control methods
of the married population. It is a matter of speculation how many
marriages succumb to its influence, especially after the birth of a
second or third child; but there is reason to believe that the ascetic
method is by no means uncommon. You cannot hold up an ideal before
people steadily for forty years without expecting some of them to try
to follow it. This kind of rigorous negativism passes for morality in
America and finds its strongest devotees among the middle-aged and the
heads of families. Such people are greatly shocked at the wild conduct
of the young who are certainly out of bounds since the war; but the
most striking feature of the current wave of so-called immorality is
the exposure of the bankruptcy of ideals among the older generation.
There are thirty million families in the United States; presumably
there are at least sixty million adults who have experimented with
the sexual relationship with the sanction of society. But experience
has taught them nothing if one may judge by the patented and soulless
concepts which still pass for sexual morality among people who are
surely old enough to have learned about life from living it.

The population policies of the government are confined to the supply
through immigration. A few years ago, an American president enunciated
population policies of his own and conducted an energetic though
solitary campaign against “race suicide.” But no faction rallied to his
standard, no organization rose up to speed his message. His bugle-call
was politely disregarded as the personal idiosyncrasy of a popular
president who happened to be the proud father of six children. Mr.
Roosevelt was evidently out of tune with his own generation, as, no
doubt, Mr. Washington was with his, for exactly the opposite reason.
But the more retiring nature of our first president saved him from the
egoistic error of regarding his own familial situation as the only
proper and desirable example. The complete failure of Mr. Roosevelt’s
crusade is significant. There are clerical influences in America which
actively fight race suicide, but with these obscurantist allies the
doughty son of a Dutch Reform family had too little else in common.
Among the men of his own class he stirred not an echo. Is it because
the American husband is too uxorious or too indifferent? I have heard
a married man say, “It is too much to expert of any woman;” and still
another one explain, “The Missis said it was my turn next and so we
stopped with one.” Or is there any explanation in the fact that the
American father tends more and more to spend his life in a salaried job
and has little land or business to bequeath? Whatever the reason, the
Business Man is in accord with the Club Woman on the subject of birth
control, in practice if not in theory.

So far as relative distribution of income is concerned, the families
of the United States fare much as those in the industrial countries
of Europe. In 1910, the same relative inequality of wealth and income
existed in feudal Prussia and democratic America. The richest fifth of
the families in each country claimed about half the income while the
poorest two-thirds of the families were thankful for about one-third.
The same law of economic relativity falls alike on the just American
and the unjust Prussian. But the American family, it appears, is
in every case two or three times better off than the corresponding
family in Prussia. You must multiply Herr Stinnes by two to get a
Judge Gary and the wealth of a Silesian child labourer is only half
that of a Georgia mill-child. This economic advantage of our American
rich and poor alike is measured chiefly in dollars and marks and not
in actual standards of living. It is apparently difficult to get real
standards of living out into the open; otherwise the superior fortune
of American families of every estate might be less evident. Some of us
who may have visited middle-class Prussian people only half as well
off as ourselves probably did not commiserate the poor things as they
deserved. My hostess, I recall, had eight hundred dollars a year on
which she maintained an apartment of two rooms, bath, and kitchen;
kept a part-time maid; bought two new suits’ a year; drove out in a
hired carriage on Sunday; and contributed generously to a society
which stirred up women to call themselves Frau instead of Fräulein.
Any “single woman” in an American city of equal size who could have
managed as much in those days on fifteen hundred a year would certainly
have deserved a thumping thrift-prize.... And then there were all
those poor little children in a Black Forest village, who had to
put up with rye bread six days in the week and white bread only on
Sundays. Transported to America, they might have had package crackers
every day and ice-cream sandwiches on Sunday. One wonders whether the
larger income of the American family is not largely spent on things of
doubtful value and pinchbeck quality.

According to theory, the income of the family normally belongs to the
man of the house. According to theory, he has earned it or derived
it from some lawful business enterprise. “The head of the family
ordinarily divides income between himself and his various dependents
in the proportion that he deems best,” says Mr. Willford King.
The American husband has a peculiarly unblemished reputation as a
provider--and probably deserves it. Certainly few husbands in the world
are so thoughtful of their widows; they invest extensively in life
insurance but rarely in annuities against a period of retirement. Trust
Companies remind them through advertisements every day to make their
wills, and cemetery corporations nag them incessantly to buy their
graves. “Statistics show that women outlive men!” says the promoter
of America’s Burial Park. “They show that the man who puts off the
selection of a burial place leaves the task to the widow in her grief.
For the man it is easy now--for the woman an ordeal then.” The chivalry
of the business man leads him to contrive all sorts of financial
mechanisms for his widow’s convenience and protection. His will, like
his insurance policy, is in her favour. Unlike the European husband, he
hates to leave the man’s world of business and to spend his declining
years in the society of his wife. After he is dead, she is welcome to
his all, but so long as he lives he keeps business between them.

Though in life and death a generous provider, he is not a systematic
one. Financial arrangements between husband and wife are extremely
casual. As the dowry hardly exists, so a regular cash allowance is
very rare. He loves to hold the purse-strings and let her run the
bills. This tendency is known in the outside business world, and the
American wife, therefore, enjoys a command of credit which would amaze
any solvent foreign housekeeper. She has accounts on every hand. She
orders food by telephone or through the grocer’s boy and “charges it.”
The department store expects her to have a charge account, and gives
her better service if she does. For instance, the self-supporting woman
who is, for obvious reasons, more inclined to pay as she goes, finds
herself discriminated against in the matter of returning or exchanging
goods. In numerous ways, the charge account has the inside track. This
would not seem strange if credit were limited to the richest fraction.
But that is not the case; almost every housewife in the country has
credit, from the Newport ladies to the miners’ wives who “trade at the
company store.” The only difference is that, in the case of these two
extremes--Newport and the company store--longer credit than ususal
seems to be the rule. In the meantime, the preaching of thrift to the
American housewife goes on incessantly by apostles from a business
world which is largely organized on the assumption that she does not
possess it and which would be highly disconcerted if she actually
developed it. American business loves the housewife for the same reason
that it loves China--that is, for her economic backwardness.

The record of the American husband as a provider is not uniform for
all classes. In Congress it is now and then asserted with appropriate
oratory that there are no classes in America. This is more or less true
from the point of view of a Cabin Creek vote-getter, who lives in a
factitious political world, where economic realities fail to penetrate;
to him middle-class and working-class are much the same since they
have equal rights not to “scratch the ticket.” But the economist finds
it convenient, as has been said, to classify the totality of American
families in definite income-groups corresponding to the Prussian
classes. As one descends the income scale one finds that the American
husband no longer fulfils his reputation for being sole provider for
his family. According to Edgar Sydenstricker, “less than half of the
wage-earners’ families in the United States, whose heads are at work,
have been found to be supported by the earnings of the husband or
father.” The earnings of the mother and the children are a necessary
supplement to bring the family income up to the subsistence level. Half
the workingmen, who have dutifully “founded” families, cannot support
them. According to the latest figures published, it costs $2,334 a year
to keep a family of five in New York. Have the young Lochinvars of the
tenements never heard of those appalling figures? Very likely they have
a premonition, if not an actual picture of the digits. In any case they
have their mothers to warn them. “Henry’s brought it on himself,” said
the janitress. “He had a right not to get married. He had his mother
to take care of him.” If he had only chosen bachelorhood, he might
have lived at home in comfort and peace on his twenty-five a week. But
having chosen, or been chosen by, Mrs. Henry instead, it is now up
to the latter to go out office-cleaning or operating, which she very
extensively does. It is estimated that since the war fully one-third of
all American women in industry are married.

Going back up the scale to the middle-class wife, we find new
influences at work upon her situation. Custom has relaxed its
condemnation of the economically independent wife, and perhaps it
is just as well that it has done so. For this is the class which
has suffered the greatest comparative loss of fortune, during the
last fifteen years. “If all estimates cited are correct,” writes Mr.
Willford King, “it indicates that, since 1896, there has occurred a
marked concentration of income in the hands of the very rich; that
the poor have relatively lost but little; but that the middle class
has been the principal sufferer.” It is, then, through the sacrifices
of our middle-class families that our very richest families have
been able to improve their standard of living. The poor, of course,
have had no margin on which to practise such benevolence, but the
generous middle-class has given till it hurts. The deficit had to be
relieved, the only possible way being through the economic utilization
of the women. At first daughters became self-supporting, while wives
still tarried in the odour of domestic sanctity; then wives came to
be sporadically self-supporting. The war, like peace still bearing
hardest on the middle-class, enhanced all this. Nine months after the
armistice, fifty per cent. more women were employed in industry than
there were in the year before the war.

In America, we have no surplus women. The countries of western Europe
are each encumbered with a million or two, and their existence is
regarded as the source of acute social problems. What shall be done
with them is a matter of earnest consideration and anxious statecraft.
America has been spared all this. She has also no surplus men--or none
that anybody has ever heard of. It is true that the population in 1910
consisted of ninety-one millions, of whom forty-seven millions were
men and forty-four were women. There were three million more men than
women, but for some reason they were not surplus or “odd” men and they
have never been a “problem.” The population figures for 1920,--one
hundred and five millions,--have not yet been divided by sexes, but the
chances are that there is still a man for every woman in the country,
and two men apiece for a great number of them. However, no one seems to
fear polyandry for America as polygamy is now feared in Europe.

The situation is exceptional in New England where the typical European
condition is duplicated. Beyond the Berkshire Hills, all the surplus
women of America are concentrated. In the United States as a whole
there are a hundred and five men for each one hundred women, but in
New England the balance shifts suddenly to the other side. Within the
present century, a gradual increase has taken place in the masculine
contingent owing to immigration. But the chances of marriage have not
correspondingly improved, for matches are rarely made between New
England spinsters and Armenian weavers or Neapolitan bootblacks.

In America only the very rich and the very poor marry early. Factory
girls and heiresses are, as a rule, the youngest brides. It is
generally assumed that twenty-four for women and twenty-nine for
men are the usual ages for marriage the country over. Custom varies
enormously, of course, in so polyglot a population. Now and then an
Italian daughter acquires a husband before the compulsory education
law is through with her. In such cases, however, there is apparently a
gentleman’s agreement between the truant officer and the lady’s husband
which solves the dilemma. At the opposite extreme from these little
working-class Juliets are the mature brides of Boston. As the result
of a survey covering the last ten years, the registrar of marriage
licenses discovered that the women married between twenty-seven and
thirty-three and the men between thirty and forty. Boston’s average
marriage age for both sexes is over thirty. This does not represent
an inordinate advance upon the practice of the primitive Bostonians.
According to certain American genealogists, the Puritans of the 17th
century were in no great haste to wed--the average age of the bride
being twenty-one and of the bridegroom twenty-five. The marriage
age in the oldest American city has moved up about ten years in a
couple of centuries. The change is usually ascribed to increasing
economic obstacles, and nobody questions its desirability. Provided
that celibacy is all that it seems to be, the public stands ready to
admire every further postponement of the marriage age as evidence of an
ever-growing self-control and the triumphant march of civilization.

In the majority of marriages, the American wife outlives her husband.
This is partly because he is several years older than she and partly
because she tends to be longer-lived than he. Americans of the second
and third generation are characterized by great longevity,--the
American woman of American descent being the longest-lived human being
on earth. Consequently the survivors of marriage are more likely to
be widows than widowers. In the census of 1910, there were about two
million and a half widows of forty-five or over as compared with about
one million widowers of corresponding age. Nor do they sit by the
fire and knit as once upon a time; they too must “hustle.” Among the
working women of the country are a million and a quarter who are more
than forty-five and who are probably to a very large extent--though
the census provides no data on the subject--economically independent
widows. As was said before, “Grandma” too is on her own nowadays.

The widow enjoys great honour in American public life, although it
usually turns out to be rather a spurious and sentimental homage.
Political orators easily grow tearful over her misfortunes. For
generations after the Civil War, the Republican Party throve on a
pension-system which gathered in the youngest widow of the oldest
veteran, and Tammany has always understood how to profit from its
ostentatious alms-giving to widows and orphans. From my earliest
childhood, I can recollect how the town-beautifiers, who wanted to
take down the crazy board fences, were utterly routed by the aldermen
who said the widow’s cow must range and people must therefore keep
up their fences. Similarly, the Southern States have never been able
to put through adequate child labour laws because the widow’s child
had to be allowed to earn in order to support his mother. All this
sentimentalism proved to be in time an excellent springboard for a
genuine economic reform--the widow’s pension systems of the several
states which would be more accurately described as children’s pensions.
The legislatures were in no position to resist an appeal on behalf of
the poor widow and so nicely narcotized were they by their traditional
tender-heartedness that they failed to perceive the socialistic
basis of this new kind of widow’s pensions. Consequently America has
achieved the curious honour of leading in a socialistic innovation
which European States are now only just beginning to copy. Maternity
insurance, on the other hand, has made no headway in America although
adopted years and even decades ago in European countries. With us the
obstacle seems to be prudishness rather than capitalism--it makes a
legislator blush to hear childbirth spoken of in public while it only
makes him cry to hear of widowhood.

One aspect of widowhood is seldom touched upon and that is its
prevention. Aged widows, on the whole, in spite of their soap-boxing
and their wage-earning, are a very lonely race. Why must they bring
it on themselves by marrying men whose expectation of life is so much
less than theirs? And yet so anxious are the marrying people to observe
this conventional disparity of age, that if the bride happens to be
but by three months the senior of the bridegroom, they conceal it
henceforth as a sort of family disgrace. Even if this convention should
prove to be immutable, is there nothing to be done about the lesser
longevity of the American male? There is a life extension institute
with an ex-president at the head but, as far as I am aware, it has
never enlisted the support of the millions reported by the census as
widows, who surely, if anybody, should realize the importance of such
a movement. It is commonly assumed that the earlier demise of husbands
is due to the hazardous life they lead in business and in industry;
but domestic life is not without its hazards, and child-bearing is an
especially dangerous trade in the United States, which has the highest
maternal death-rate of seventeen civilized countries. If American
husbands were less philosophical about the hardships of child-bed--the
judgment of Eve and all that sort of thing--and American wives were
less philosophical about burying their husbands--the Lord hath given
and the Lord hath taken away and so on--it might result in greater
health and happiness for all concerned.

But the main trouble with American marriage, as all the world knows, is
that divorce so often separates the twain before death has any chance
to discriminate between them. The growing prevalence of divorce is
statistically set forth in a series of census investigations. In 1890,
there was one divorce to every sixteen marriages; in 1900, there was
one to every twelve marriages; and in 1916, there was one to every nine
marriages. The number of marriages in proportion to the population
has also increased during the same period, though not at a rate equal
to that of divorce. But divorce, being so much younger than marriage,
has had more room to grow from its first humble scared beginnings of
fifty years ago. Queen Victoria’s frown had a very discouraging effect
on divorce in America; and Mrs. Humphry Ward, studying the question
among us in the early 20th century, lent her personal influence
towards the arrest of the American evil. We also have raised up on
this side of the water our own apostles against divorce, among whom
Mr. Horace Greeley perhaps occupies the first and most distinguished
place. But in spite of all heroic crusades, divorce has continued to
grow. One even suspects that the marked increase in the marriage rate
is partly--perhaps largely--due to the remarriage of the divorced. At
any rate, they constitute new and eligible material for marriage which
formerly was lacking.

The true cause of the increase of divorce in America is not easy to
come by. Commissions and investigations have worried the question to
no profitable end, and have triumphantly come out by the same door by
which they went in. That seems to be the test of a successful divorce
inquiry; and no wonder, for the real quest means a conflict with
hypocrisy and prejudice, fear and taboo, which only the intrepid spirit
of a John Milton or a Susan B. Anthony is able to sustain. The people
who want divorces and who can pay for them seem to be able to get them
nowadays, and since it is the truth only that suffers the situation has
grown more tolerable.

In the meantime, there are popular impressions and assumptions which
do not tally with the known facts. It is assumed that divorce is
frequent in America because it is easy, and that the logical way to
reduce it would be to make it difficult. Certain States of the West
have lenient divorce laws but other States have stringent laws, while
South Carolina abolished divorce entirely in 1878. On the whole, our
laws are not so lenient as those of Scandinavia, whose divorce rate is
still far behind that of the United States. Neither is divorce cheap
in America; it is enormously expensive. Therefore for the poor it is
practically inaccessible. The Domestic Relations Courts do not grant
divorce and the Legal Aid Societies will not touch it. The wage-earning
class, like the inhabitants of South Carolina, just have to learn to
get along without it. Then there is another belief, hardly justified by
the facts, that most divorced wives get alimony. Among all the divorces
granted in 1916, alimony was not even asked for by 73 per cent. of the
wives and it was received altogether by less than 20 per cent. of them.
The statistics do not tell us whether the actual recipients of alimony
were the mothers of young children or whether they were able-bodied
ladies without offspring. The average American divorce court could not
be trusted to see any difference between them.

The war has naturally multiplied the actions for divorce in every
country. It was not for nothing that the British government called the
stipends paid to soldiers’ wives “separation allowances.” The war-time
conditions had a tendency to unmake marriages as well as to make them.
The momentary spread of divorce has revived again the idea of a uniform
divorce law embodied in an amendment to the Federal Constitution. As
no reasonable law can possibly be hoped for, the present state of
confusion is infinitely to be preferred as affording at least some
choice of resources to the individual who is seeking relief. If
there were any tendency to take divorce cases out of the hands of the
lawyers, as has been done with industrial accidents, and to put it into
domestic relations courts where it belongs; if there were the least
possibility of curbing the vested interest of the newspapers in divorce
news; if there were any dawning appreciation of the absurdity of
penalizing as connivance the most unanswerable reason for divorce, that
is, mutual consent; if there were any likelihood that the lying and
spying upon which divorce action must usually depend for its success
would be viewed as the grossest immorality in the whole situation;
if there were any hope whatever that a statesman might rise up in
Congress and, like Johan Castberg of Norway, defend a legal measure
which would help ordinary men and women to speak the truth in their
personal relationships--if there were any prospect that any of these
influences would have any weight in the deliberations of Congress,
one might regard the possibilities of Federal action with a gleam of
hope. But since nothing of the kind can be expected, the best that
can happen in regard to divorce in the near future is for Congress to
leave it alone. There is a strong tradition in the historical suffrage
movement of America which favours liberal divorce laws and which makes
it improbable that a reactionary measure could gain sufficient support
from the feminine electorate. Since the majority of those who seek
divorce in this country are women, it seems to put them logically on
the side of dissoluble marriage.

Though home is a sacred word in America, it is a portable affair.
Migration is a national habit, handed down and still retained from
the days when each generation went out to break new ground. The
disasters of the Civil War sent Southern families and New England
families scurrying to the far West. The development of the railway
and express systems produced as a by-product a type of family life
that was necessarily nomadic. The men of the railway “Brotherhoods”
have always been marrying men, and their families acquired the art of
living on wheels, as it were. Rich farmers of the Middle West retire
to spend their old age in a California cottage surrounded by an orange
grove--and the young farmers move to the city. The American family
travels on any and every excuse. The neurotic pursuit of health has
built up large communities in Colorado, Arizona, and other points West.
Whole families “picked up,” as the saying goes, and set out for the
miraculous climate that was to save one of its members from the dreaded
tuberculosis--and then later had to move again because somebody’s
heart couldn’t stand the “altitude.” The extreme examples of this
nomadic habit are found among the families of the very poor and the
very rich, who have regular seasonal migrations. The oyster canners
and strawberry-pickers have a mobility which is only equalled by that
of the Palm Beachers. And finally there is the curious practice of New
England which keeps boarders in the summer-time in order that it may be
boarded by Florida in the winter-time.

By contrast with all this geographical instability, the stable sway
of convention and custom stands out impressively. With each change
of environment, family tradition became more sacred. Unitarians who
moved to Kansas were more zealous in the faith than ever, and F.F.V.’s
who settled in Texas were fiercely and undyingly loyal to the memory
of Pocahontas. Families that were always losing their background,
tried to fixate in some form the ancestral prestige which threatened
always to evaporate. Organizations composed of the Sons and Daughters
of the Revolution, of the descendants of the Pilgrims, of Civil War
Veterans, of the Scions of the Confederacy, and so on, sprang up and
flourished on the abundant soil of family pride. All of which means
that pioneering brought no spiritual independence or intellectual
rebirth, and that new conditions were anxiously reformulated under
the sanction of the old. Above all, sanction was important. That
incredible institution, the “society column” of the local newspaper,
took up the responsibility where the Past laid it down. Stereotyped
values of yesterday gave way to stereotyped values of to-day. This
was the commercial opportunity of a multitude of home journals and
women’s magazines which undertook--by means of stories, pictures, and
advertisements--to regiment the last detail of home life. But the
perforated patterns, the foods “shot from guns,” and all the rest
of the labour-saving ingenuities which came pouring into the home
and which were supposed to mean emancipation for mothers and their
families, brought little of the real spirit of freedom in their wake.
Our materialistic civilization finds it hard to understand that liberty
is not achieved through time-saving devices but only through the love
of it.

But the notorious spoiling of the American child--some one says--is
not that a proper cradle of liberty for the personality? A spoilt
child may be a nuisance, but if he is on the way towards becoming a
self-reliant, self-expressive adult, the “American way” of bringing
up children may have its peculiar advantages. But a spoilt child is
really a babyish child, and by that token he is on the way towards
becoming a childish adult. Neither is his case disposed of simply by
adjudging him a nuisance; the consequence of his spoiling carry much
further than that. They are seen, for instance, in malnutrition of
the children of the American rich--a fact which has but recently been
discovered and which came as a great surprise to the experts. “In
Chicago,” one of them tells us, “it was found that a group of foreign
children near the stockyards were only 17 per cent. underweight, while
in the all-American group near the University of Chicago they were 57
per cent. below normal.” The same condition of things was found in a
select and expensive boarding school in the neighbourhood of Boston.
A pathetic commentary--is it not?--on a country which leads the world
in food-packing and food-profits, that it should contain so many
parents who, with all the resources of the earth at their command, do
not know how to feed their own children. Surely, the famous American
spoiling has something to do with this. Whether it may not also be
behind the vast amount of mental disturbance in the population may well
be considered. The asylums are suddenly over-crowded. The National
Committee for Mental Hygiene suggests for our consolation that this may
be because the asylums are so much more humane than they used to be and
the families of the sufferers are more willing than formerly to consign
them to institutions.

It is the fashion to attribute all these mental tragedies to the strain
of business life and industry, and more recently to war-shock. But if
we are to accept the results of the latest psychological research,
the family must receive the lion’s share of blame. The groundwork
for fatal ruptures in the adult personality is laid in childhood and
in the home which produced the victim. For many years the discussion
of American nerves has hinged on the hectic haste of business and
industrial life, on the noise and bustle and lack of repose in the
national atmosphere. But we have neglected to accuse the family to its
face of failing to protect the child against the cataclysms of the
future while it had the chance.

The tremendous influence of the family on the individuals, old and
young, composing it is not merely a pious belief. We are, alas,
what our families make us. This is not a pleasant thought to many
individuals who have learned through bitter experience to look on
family relationships as a form of soul imprisonment. Yet it seems to be
an incontestable fact that personality is first formed--or deformed--in
the family constellation. The home really does the job for which the
school, the press, the church, and the State later get the credit.
It is a smoothly articulated course from the cradle onward, however,
in which the subjugated parent produces a subjugated child, not so
much by the rod of discipline--which figures very little in American
family life--but by the more powerful and pervasive force of habit and
attitude. Parents allow themselves to be a medium for transmitting the
incessant pressure of standards which allow no room for impulse and
initiative; they become the willing instrument of a public mania for
standardization which tries to make every human soul into the image
of a folded pattern. The babe is moulded in his cradle into the man
who will drop a sentimental tear, wear a white carnation, and send a
telegram on Mother’s Day--that travesty of a family festival which
shames affection and puts spontaneous feeling to the blush.

As the family itself grows smaller, this pressure of mechanistic and
conventional standards encroaches more closely upon the child. A
sizeable group of brothers and sisters create for themselves a savage
world which is their best protection against the civilization that
awaits them. But with one or two children, or a widely scattered
series, this natural protection is lost. The youngster is prematurely
assimilated to the adult world of parents who are nowadays, owing to
later marriage, not even quite so young as formerly they were. It
is a peculiarity of parents, especially of mothers, that they never
entertain a modest doubt as to whether they might be the best of all
possible company for their children. And obviously the tired business
man cannot properly substitute in the evenings for a roistering,
shouting brother who never came into the world at all; nor can all the
concentrated care of the most devoted mother take the place of the
companionship and discipline which children get from other children.
These considerations deserve more attention than they usually receive
in connection with the falling birth-rate. The figures mean that the
environment of the young child is being altered in a fundamental
respect. Parents of small families need to take effective steps to
counteract the loss. Practical things, like nursery schools, would be a
help. But, chiefly, if parents will insist on being companions of their
children, they need themselves to understand and practise the art of
common joy and happiness.

                                                   KATHARINE ANTHONY




THE ALIEN


The immigrant alien has been discussed by the Anglo-Saxon as
though he were an Anglo-Saxon “problem.” He has been discussed by
labour as though he were a labour “problem”; by interpreters of
American institutions as though man existed for institutions and for
institutions which the class interpreting them found advantageous
to its class. Occasionally the alien has been discussed from the
point of view of the alien and but rarely from the point of view of
democracy. The “problem” of the alien is largely a problem of setting
our own house in order. It is the “problem” of Americanizing America.
The outstanding fact of three centuries of immigration is that the
immigrant alien ceases to be an alien when economic conditions are such
as properly to assimilate him.

There is something rather humorous about the way America discusses “the
alien.” For we are all aliens. And what is less to our liking we are
almost all descended from the peasant classes of Europe. We are here
because our forebears were poor. They did not rule over there. They
were oppressed; they were often owned. And with but few exceptions
they came because of their poverty. For the rich rarely emigrate. And
in the 17th and 18th centuries there was probably a smaller percentage
of immigrants who could pass the literacy test than there are to-day.
Moreover, in the early days only suffering could drive the poor of
Europe from their poverty. For the conditions of travel were hazardous.
The death toll from disease was very high. It required more fortitude
to cross the Atlantic and pass by the ring of settlers out onto the
unbroken frontier than it does to pass Ellis Island and the exploiters
round about it to-day.

The immigration question has arisen because America, too, has created a
master class, a class which owns and employs and rules. And the alien
in America is faced by a class opinion, born of the change which has
come over America rather than any change in the alien himself. America
has changed. The alien remains much the same. And the most significant
phase of the immigration problem is the way we treat the alien and the
hypocrisy of our discussion of the subject.

Sociologists have given us a classification of the immigrant alien.
They speak of the “old immigration” and the “new immigration.”
The former is the immigration of the 17th and 18th and the first
three-quarters of the 19th centuries. It was English, Scotch, Irish,
German, Scandinavian with a sprinkling of French, Swiss, and other
nationalities. From the beginning, the preponderance was British.
During the 18th century there was a heavy Scotch inflow and during the
first half of the 19th a heavy Irish and German immigration. The Irish
came because of the famine of 1848, the Scotch in large part because of
the enclosure acts and the driving of the people from the land to make
way for deer preserves and grazing lands for the British aristocracy.
Most of the British immigration was the result of oppressive land laws
of one kind or another. The population of Ireland was reduced from
eight million to slightly over four million in three-quarters of a
century. The British immigrant of the 17th century, like the recent
Russian immigration, was driven from home by economic oppression. Only
a handful came to escape religious oppression or to secure political
liberty. The cause of immigration has remained the same from the
beginning until now.

The “old immigration” was from the North of Europe. It was of Germanic
stock. It was predominantly Protestant. But the most important fact
of all and the fact most usually ignored is an economic fact. The
early immigrant found a broad continent awaiting him, peopled only
by Indians. He became a free man. He took up a homestead. He ceased
to belong to any one else. He built for himself. He paid no rent, he
took no orders, he kept what he produced, and was inspired by hope and
ambition to develop his powers. It was economic, not political, freedom
that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the “new.”

The “new immigration” is from Southern and Central Europe. It is
Latin and Slavic. It is largely Catholic. It, too, is poor. It, too,
is driven out by oppression, mostly economic and for the most part
landed. Almost every wave of immigration has been in some way related
to changes for the worse in the landed systems of Europe. Wherever
the poverty has been the most distressing, there the impulse to move
has been the strongest. It has been the poverty of Europe that has
determined our immigration from the 17th century until now.

The ethnic difference is secondary. So is the religious. The
fundamental fact that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the
“new” is economic. The “new immigration” works for the “old.” It
found the free land all taken up. The public domain had passed into
the hand of the Pacific railroads, into great manorial estates. Land
thieves had repeated the acts of the British Parliament of the 18th
century. The Westward movement of peoples that had been going on from
the beginning of time came to an end when the pioneer of the 80’s and
90’s found only the bad lands left for settlement. That ended an era.
It closed the land to settlement and sent the immigrant to the city.
The peasant of Europe has become the miner and the mill worker. He left
one kind of serfdom to take up another. It is this that distinguishes
the “old immigrant” from the “new.” It is this that distinguishes the
old America from the America of to-day. And the problem of immigration,
like the problem of America, is the re-establishment of economic
democracy. The protective tariff bred exotic industry. The employer
wanted cheap labour. The mine owners and mill owners combined with the
steamship companies to stimulate immigration. They sent agents abroad.
They brought in gangs from Southern and Central Europe. They herded
them in mining camps, in mill towns, in the tenements. The closing of
the public domain and the rise of monopoly industry marks the turning
point in immigration. It marks the beginning of the immigration
“problem.” It is partly ethnic, but largely economic.

The “new immigration” from Southern and Central Europe began to
increase in volume about 1890. It came from Southern rather than
Northern Italy, from Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, the Balkans,
and the Levant. There was a sprinkling of Spanish and Portuguese
immigrants. In 1914 South and Central European immigration amounted
to 683,000, while the North European immigration was but 220,000. Of
the former 296,000 came from Italy, 123,000 from Poland, 45,000 from
Russia, and 45,000 from Hungary. These figures do not include Jewish
immigrants, who numbered 138,000. Of the North European immigrants
105,000 came from the British Isles, 80,000 came from Germany, and
36,000 from the Scandinavian countries.

Of the 14,000,000 persons of foreign birth now in the country, a very
large percentage is of South and Central European stock.

We are accustomed to think of the old immigration and the new
immigration in terms of races and religions. And much of the
present-day hostility to immigration comes from the inexplicable
prejudice which has recently sprung up against persons of differing
races and religions. It is assumed that the new immigration is poor
and ignorant because it is ethnically unfitted for anything different
and that it prefers the tenement and the mining camp to American
standards of living and culture. But the newly arrived immigrant goes
to the mines and the crowded city not from choice but from necessity.
He lives in colonies with his fellows largely because the employing
class prefers that he be segregated and has no interest in his physical
comfort or welfare. The alien has been a commodity, not a human being;
he has been far cheaper than a machine because he provided his own
capital cost and makes provision for his own depreciation and decay. He
has been bought in the slums of Europe for his passage money and he can
be left to starve when bad times or industrial power throws him on his
own resources. The important difference between the “old immigration”
and the “new immigration” is not ethnic. It is not religious. It is
economic. The “old immigration” has become the owning and employing
class, while the “new immigration” is the servile and dependent
class. This is the real, the important difference between the “old
immigration” and the “new.” The former owns the resources of America.
The economic division coincides roughly with the race division.

When economic privilege becomes ascendant fear is born. It is born of
a subconscious realization on the part of the privileged classes that
their privileges rest on an unjust if not an unstable foundation. Fear
is the parent of hate, and back of other explanations of the present
demand for exclusion of the alien is fear. It is fear that gave birth
to the persecution and ruthless official and semi-official activity
first against all aliens under the White Slave Act and similar laws,
next against the Germans, and later against the “reds.” An economic
psychology born of injustice explains our present attitude toward the
alien just as a different economic psychology explained our attitude
during the first two and a half centuries of our life when it was the
consuming desire of statesmen, real-estate speculators, and exploiters
to people the continent and develop our industries and resources as
rapidly as possible.

The “immigration problem,” so called, has always been and always will
be an economic problem. There are many people who feel that there
is an inherent superiority in the Anglo-Saxon race; that it has a
better mind, greater virtue, and a better reason for existence and
expansion than any other race. They insist there are eugenic reasons
for excluding immigration from South and Central Europe; they would
preserve America for people of Anglo-Saxon stock. As an immigration
official I presided over Ellis Island for five years. During this
time probably a million immigrants arrived at the port of New York.
They were for the most part poor. They had that in common with the
early immigrant. They had other qualities in common. They were
ambitious and filled with hope. They were for the most part kindly
and moved by the same human and domestic virtues as other peoples.
And it is to me an open question whether the “new immigration,” if
given a virgin continent, and the hope and stimulus which springs
from such opportunity, would not develop the same qualities of mind
and of character that we assume to be the more or less exclusive
characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race. There is also reason for
believing that the warmer temperament, the emotional qualities, and the
love of the arts that characterize the South and Central European would
produce a race blend, under proper economic conditions, that would
result in a better race than one of pure Northern extraction. For it is
to be remembered that it was not political liberty, religious liberty,
or personal liberty that changed the early immigrant of Northern
Europe into the American of to-day. His qualities were born of economic
conditions, of a free continent, of land to be had for the asking, of
equal opportunity with his fellows to make his life what he would have
it to be. The old immigrant recognized no master but himself. He was
the equal of his neighbours in every respect. He knew no inferiority
complex born of a servile relationship. It was this rather than our
constitutions and laws that made the American of the first three
centuries what he was. It was this alchemy that changed the serf of
Northern Europe into the self-reliant freeman of America.

The immigration problem was born when this early economic opportunity
came to an end. When the free land was all gone, the immigrant had to
work for somebody else. He went to the mines and the city tenement
not from the choice but from necessity. He took the first job that
offered. When established he sent for his brother, his neighbour, or
his friend. He, too, went to the mining camp or the slum. Colonies
appeared. The alien became segregated. He lived by himself. And he
developed the qualities that would be developed by any race under
similar conditions. He, too, feared. He was known as a Dago, Wop,
Hunkie. To him government meant a policeman, a health officer, and an
immigration inspector--all agencies to be feared. He slowly learned to
unionize. He came to understand group action. He found in his craft
organization the only protection against the employers, and in the
political boss the only protection against agencies that interfered
with his personal and domestic life. The immigrant soon learned that
our immigration laws were shaped by economic motives. He learned that
he was in danger of being deported if he did not work. The menace which
hangs over the immigrant during his early years is the phrase “likely
to become a public charge.” And this alleged reason for deportation
covers a multitude of other excuses which can be used as it is used--as
a drag-net accusation. So the immigrant feels and justly feels that
what we want of him is to work, to work for some one else, and to
accept what is offered and be content. For within the last few years
the doctrine has become accepted by him and by the nation as well that
the alien must not complain, he must not be an agitator, he must not
protest against the established industrial order or the place which he
occupies within it. This has heightened his fear complex. It has tended
to establish his inferiority relationship.

Our legislative attitude toward the alien has mirrored the economic
conditions of the country. Up to about the middle of the last century
we had no restrictive laws of any kind. America was free to all comers.
We wanted population. Western States pleaded for settlers. They drew
them from the East as they drew them from Europe. We were hospitable
to the oppressed. We opened our arms to revolutionary leaders. We had
no fears. Experience had shown that the poorest of Europe, even the
classified criminals of Europe, would quickly Americanize themselves
under the stimulus of new opportunity in a virgin land where all
men were potentially equal. For generations there was fear that the
American continent could never be fully peopled.

But the free lands were all gone about 1890. The Western drift of
peoples, which had been in movement since the earliest times, came
to an end. Population closed in on the Pacific. Cities grew with
unprecedented rapidity. Factories needed men. Employers looked to
Europe. They sent agents abroad who employed them in gangs. Often
they were used to displace American-born workers. They were used to
break up labour organizations. The aliens were mixed to prevent them
organizing. Wages were temporarily at least forced down. For some years
our immigration policy was shaped by the big industrials who combined
with the steamship companies to induce immigration.

Organized labour began to protest. It, too, was moved by economic
motives. It secured the passage of the contract labour law, which
prevents the landing of any worker for whom employment has been
provided in advance by an employer. Organized labour began to demand
restrictive legislation to protect its standard of living. But the
country was not ready for restrictive legislation. Congress instead
adopted a selective policy. We excluded paupers, the insane and
diseased, criminals, immoral persons, and those who were likely to
become a public charge. Later we extended the selective idea to
persons who did not believe in organized government, to anarchists,
and to persons of revolutionary beliefs. We now exclude and deport for
opinions as well as for physical and mental conditions. The percentage
of rejections under these selective laws was not great. Of the
1,200,000 aliens who came to the country in 1914 only one and one-third
per cent. were denied admission by the immigration authorities.

The war stimulated the anti-alien feeling. It provided an opportunity
for crusades. The press aided the hue and cry. In 1915 there was a
nation-wide round-up of immoral cases. Thousands of prostitutes, of
procurers, and of persons guilty of some personal irregularity were
arrested all over the country. Many of them were deported. The demand
for restrictive legislation was supported by many different groups. It
had the backing of organized labour, of the Southern States, of many
protestant organization and churches. It was strongly supported in the
West.

The “literacy test,” which went into effect in 1917, requiring of the
alien an ability to read some language selected by him, was the first
restrictive measure enacted. Its purpose was to check the South and
Central European inflow. For in these countries illiteracy is very
high. It rises as high as sixty and seventy per cent. in the Central
European states. With the test of literacy applied it was felt that
the old immigration from Northern Europe would reassert itself. Our
industrial needs would be supplied from Great Britain, from Germany and
from the Scandinavian countries. The same motive underlies the recently
enacted law which arbitrarily fixes the number who may come in any one
year from any one country to three per cent. of the aliens already here
from that country. This will still further shift the immigration to the
Northern countries, and if continued as the permanent policy of the
Government will insure a predominant Anglo-Saxon-Germanic-Scandinavian
stock as the racial stock of America.

Despite all of the Congressional concern over the alien and the recent
nation-wide movement for his Americanization, there has never been any
official concern for the alien, for his protection from exploitation
and abuse, or any attempt to work out a policy of real Americanization.
Not that the task is impossible. Not that it is even experimental.
Australia, Brazil, and Canada have more or less well-developed agencies
for aiding the alien on landing, for protecting him until he is able
to protect himself, and for adjusting him as speedily as possible
to new conditions of life. In all of these countries the aim of the
government is to give the immigrant a stake in the land, to bring about
his permanent residence in the country, and, if possible, to induce him
to become a farmer rather than an industrial worker. This has not been
done by agencies of distribution alone, but by conscious selection in
the country from which the immigrant comes, by grants of land to those
who are ready to take up land holdings, and by the extension of credit
from state agencies to enable the settlers to stock and equip their
farms. The policy of Brazil has been so successful that many colonies
of Northern Italians have been induced to settle there who have become
prosperous and contented farmers. In other words, these countries have
consciously aimed to work out a continuing policy similar to that which
prevailed in this country up to about 1890 when the immigrant drifted
naturally to the land as a means of securing the freedom from the
exploiting class that had driven him from Europe.

It is not to be inferred that our policy of hands off the alien
after his landing has worked only evil. Viewed in the perspective
of two centuries, it has worked amazingly well. The rapidity with
which practically all immigrants rise in the world in spite of the
obstacles of poverty, illiteracy, and unfamiliarity with our language
is little short of a miracle. This is true of the older generation as
it is of the younger. It is most true in the cities, least true in
the mining camps and smaller industrial centres about the steel mills
and slaughter houses where the tyranny of the employing class is most
pronounced. For the newcomer speedily acquires the wants of those with
whom he associates. He becomes dissatisfied with his shack. He demands
more and better food and clothes. He almost always wants his children
to have a schooling and to rise in the scale, which to him means
getting out of the hod-carrying, day-labour, or even artisan class.
And the next generation does rise. It rises only less rapidly than did
the early immigrant. It increases its wants and demands. It finds the
trades union a weapon with which it can combat the employer who seeks
to bring about a confusion of tongues, a confusion of religion, and
a confusion of races as a means of maintaining the open shop. As an
evidence of this, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America is almost
exclusively Jewish, Italian, and Latin in its membership. It is the
most intelligent, the most social-minded, and the most highly developed
labour organization in the country. The coal miners are largely men of
foreign birth. They, too, have adopted an advanced social programme.
The alien has found the trades union the most efficient if not the only
agency through which he can Americanize himself. And in Americanizing
himself he is merely doing what the aliens of earlier centuries who
preceded him have done--he is seeking for economic freedom from a
master class.

America is a marvellous demonstration of the economic foundations of
all life. It is a demonstration of what happens to men when economic
opportunities call forth their resourcefulness and latent ability on
one hand and when the State, on the other, keeps its hands off them in
their personal relationships. For the alien quickly adopts a higher
standard of culture as he rises in the industrial scale, while his
morals, whatever they may have been, quickly take on the colour of
his new environment, whatever that may be. And if all of the elements
which should enter into a consideration of the subject were included,
I am of the opinion it would be found that the morals, the prevalence
of vice and crime among the alien population is substantially that of
the economic class in which he is found rather than the race from which
he springs. In other words, the alleged prevalence of crime among the
alien population is traceable to poverty and bad conditions of living
rather than to ethnic causes, and in so far as it exists it tends
disappear as the conditions which breed it pass away.

Despite the fact that our hands-off policy of the past has worked
amazingly well, the time has come when it must be changed. Not because
of any change in the character of the alien, but because of the change
which has taken place in our own internal life. Economic conditions
make it impossible for the alien, as it does for the native born, to
become a farmer. Exploiting agencies are making it difficult and
often impossible for the farmer to make a living. Land speculation has
shot up the price of farm land to prohibitive figures. The railroads
and middle men and banking agencies are putting the American farmer
into a semi-servile status. He is unable to market his crop after it
is produced or he markets it at a figure that ultimately reduces him
to bankruptcy. The immigration problem remains an economic problem.
It has become an American problem. The policy we should adopt for
Americanizing the alien is a policy we should adopt for our own people
as well, for when economic opportunity came to an end for our own
people, it created not only an immigration problem, but a domestic
problem. The solution of one is the solution of the other.

The alien will Americanize himself if he is given the opportunity to
do so. The bird of passage will cease to migrate when he possesses a
stake in the land of his adoption. The best cure for Bolshevism is
not deportation but a home, a farm, a governmental policy of land
settlement. A constructive immigration policy and Americanization
policy is one that will:

1. Direct the alien as well as the native born to opportunities of
employment and especially to agencies that will enable them to become
home owners and farm owners;

2. Provide government grants, as is done in Australia, Denmark, and
some of the South American countries, to which the would-be farmer or
home owner can go for financial assistance. In Denmark and Australia
any man who shows aptitude and desire for farming and who is able to
satisfy a local commission of his abilities, can secure a small farm
in a farm colony, fully equipped for planting. The grant includes a
house and barn, some cattle and machinery, and sufficient capital to
carry the settler over the first season. The applicant must provide a
certain portion of the initial outlay himself. He is aided by experts
from the colony, he is advised as to what to plant and how to care
for his cattle. His produce is marketed co-operatively, while much
of the machinery is owned either by the community or by co-operative
agencies identified with the community. The land is purchased in large
tracts by the State in advance of settlement to prevent speculation,
while settlers are required to develop their holdings. They may not
purchase for speculative purposes. The State of Denmark has planted
thousands of home-owning farmers in this way and has all but ended farm
tenancy in a generation’s time. The farm tenant and farm labourer have
become owners. A similar policy has been developed in Australia, where
millions of dollars have been advanced by the State to settlers. In
both of these countries the land settlement colonies have been a great
success. There have been few failures and no losses to the State.

3. The savings of the alien should be used for the benefit of the
alien. Hundreds of millions of dollars leave this country annually in
the form of remittances. Much of it goes abroad because of fear of
American banks. Many millions more are in hiding for the same reason.
The deposits in the Postal Savings banks are largely the deposits of
the immigrant. They are turned over to the National banks and find
their way into commercial activities. If these funds were mobilized in
co-operative banks, as is done all over Europe, or if the Government
would dedicate them to a revolving fund for aiding persons to build
homes, to buy farms, and to aid the alien with credit, which he now has
no means of securing; he would be lured from the city to the land, he
would become a home and farm owner rather than an industrial worker,
and would rapidly develop those qualities of mind and character that
are associated in our minds with the early Anglo-Saxon settler but
which are rather the qualities which spring up of themselves when the
economic conditions encourage them.

4. Our deportation laws are a disgrace to any country. They are an
adaptation of the fugitive slave laws. The offending alien is subject
to lynch law sanctioned by the State. He is arrested on complaint by an
inspector. He is then tried by the man who arrests him. His friends and
relatives are excluded from the trial. The judge who made the arrest
is often the interpreter and the clerk who transcribes the testimony.
He also is his jailer. He can and does hold the alien incommunicado.
Often the alien scarcely knows why he has been arrested. Often he does
not understand the testimony. The local findings have to be approved
at Washington by the Department of Labour. But the approval is by a
clerk who, like the inspector, often wants to make a record. The
opportunity for collusion with police, with crusaders, with employers,
with Chambers of Commerce, and with organization bent on “ridding the
country of disturbers” is manifest. Often men are arrested, tried,
convicted, and possibly placed on ships for their home countries before
their families are aware of what has happened to them.

The alien is denied every protection of our constitution. The Bill of
Rights does not apply to him. He has no presentment before a Grand
Jury, there is no jury trial, he rarely has counsel, and he is often
held incommunicado by the official who has taken him into custody and
who wants to justify his arrest. The only recourse the alien has is
the writ of habeas corpus. But this is of practically no avail. For
the courts have held that if there is a scintilla of evidence on which
the inspector could act the court will not review the finding. And
a scintilla is any evidence at all. When to this is added the fact
that the charge “likely to become a public charge” has come to cover
almost any condition that might arise, and as this charge is usually
added to the others as a recourse on which the inspector may fall
back, the chance of relief in the court is practically nil. Under the
laws as they now exist the alien is a man without a country. He has no
protection from the constitution and little protection under the laws.
The alien knows this. He feels that he is defenceless. American liberty
to him means the liberty of a policeman, a health or school official,
an immigration inspector, and agents of the department of justice to
invade his home, to seize his papers, to arrest without warrant, to
hold incommunicado, and to deport on a charge that is often as foreign
to the facts as anything could be.

It is this more than anything else that has embittered the alien
towards America during the last few years. It is this that makes him
feel that he is not wanted here. It is this that is sending hundreds of
thousands back to Europe, many of them among the best of the aliens and
many of them worthy in every way of our confidence and welcome.

A proper immigration policy should be a national policy. Not something
for the alien alone but for our own people. For the immigration problem
is merely another form of the domestic problem. When we are ready to
settle the one we will settle the other. A cross section of one branch
of our political State is a cross section of another. The alien of
to-day is not very different from the alien of yesterday. He has the
same instincts and desires as did those who came in the _Mayflower_.
Only those who came in the _Mayflower_ made their own laws and their
own fortunes. Those who come to-day have their laws made for them by
the class that employs them and they make their own fortunes only as
those aliens who came first permit them to do so.

                                                    FREDERIC C. HOWE




RACIAL MINORITIES

    “... not to laugh at the actions of men, nor yet to deplore or
    detest them, but simply to understand them.”--_Spinoza._


In America, the race-problem is not only without answer; thus far it is
even without formulation. In the face of ordinary economic, political,
and religious difficulties, people habitually formulate creeds
which give a kind of rhyme and reason to their actions; but where
inter-racial relations are concerned, the leaders go pussy-footing
all around the fundamental question, while the emotions of the masses
translate themselves into action, and action back again into emotion,
with less consideration of means and ends than one expects of the
maddest bomb-thrower. Everybody has some notion of the millennial aims
of the Communist Party, the National Association of Manufacturers, the
W.C.T.U., the Holy Rollers; but what are the Southerners getting at,
when they educate the Negro, and refuse him the ballot; what ultimate
result does the North expect from the granting of the franchise and
the denial of social equality? Do both the North and the South hope
to maintain a permanent racial division of the country’s population?
If so, are the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics to be classed
with the Negroes, as unassimilable minorities? How is the conduct
of the American majority suited to this aim, if it is an aim? How
can permanent division be maintained, except by permanent prejudice?
What do the racial liberators, ameliorators, uplifters, and general
optimists think about it; or do they think about it at all?

From the moment of initial contact between the mass of the American
population and the country’s most important racial minorities--the
Indian, the Jew, the Oriental, and the Negro--the self-congratulatory
feelings of the majority have always found a partial or complete
counterpart everywhere except among the slaves and the children of
the slaves. The long delay in the inception of All-Africanism in
America, and the groping uncertainty which still characterizes its
manifestations, are due in large part to the cultural youthfulness of
the American Negro. Biologically, the black race was matured in Africa;
culturally it had made considerable advances there, before the days of
the slave-trade. The process of enslavement could not strip away the
physical characteristics of the race, but in all that has to do with
cultural life and social inheritance, the Negro was re-born naked in
the new world.

When one compares the condition of the Negro with that of the other
three racial minorities at the moment of contact with the miscellaneous
white population, the Indian seems closer to the Jew and the Oriental
than to the slave. In a general way, the condition of the Indian
tribes resembled that of the Negroes in Africa, but the Indians were
left in possession of most of the elements of savage culture and were
never entirely deprived of the means of maintaining themselves in this
stage of development. Needless to say, the Jews and the Orientals were
in still better case than the Indians, for their imported cultural
equipment was far more elaborate and substantial, and their economic
position much better.

The four racial minorities thus varied widely in the degree of their
self-sufficiency, and likewise, inversely, in the degree of their need
for absorption into the current of American life. Quite obviously the
Negro was least independent and most in need of assimilation. However,
the necessity of the alien group has not been the only factor of
importance in this matter of assimilation. Each of the minorities has
been from the beginning subjected to the prejudice of the majority, and
that group which first lost all life of its own through contact with
the whites has been singled out for the maximum amount of persecution.

The standard explanation or excuse for race-prejudice is the theory
of the inequality of racial stocks. However, for all their eagerness
to bolster up a foregone conclusion, the race-patriots have not been
able to prove by any sort of evidence, historical, biological, or
psychological, that racial differences are not simply indications
of unlikeness, rather than of inherent superiority or inferiority.
The anthropologists are pretty well agreed that physical differences
divide mankind into three major groups, European (including the Jews),
Mongoloid (including the American Indians), and Negroid; but science
has set no definite limit to the respective potentialities of these
groups. In other words, it has remained for race-prejudice to assume an
unproved inferiority, and to devise all possible measures for making
the life of the objectionable races exactly what it would be, in the
absence of interference, if the assumed inferiority were real.

To accept the term “race-prejudice” as accurately descriptive of the
feelings to which it is usually applied, is to assume that these
feelings originate in race-differences, if not in the inequality
of races. This, however, is still to be proved. Race-differences
are a factor of the situation wherever two races are in contact,
but it is a matter of common knowledge that the members of two
or more racial groups sometimes intermingle on terms of greatest
friendliness. To attribute “race-prejudice” to race-difference, and
to leave race-friendliness entirely unexplained, is to blind oneself
deliberately to the existence of variable causes which alone can
account for the variable results that appear in the presence of racial
constants. Racial inequality of intelligence, if it actually exists,
is simply one of a number of ever-present race-differences, and in all
these differences taken together one can find no adequate explanation
of the variable phenomenon commonly called “race-prejudice,” but so
designated here only for the sake of convenience.

Any serious attempt to get at the non-racial causes of “race-prejudice”
in America would necessarily involve the comparison, point by point,
of economic, social, political, and intellectual conditions in various
localities in the United States with corresponding local conditions
in other countries where the races here in conflict are more nearly
at peace. In the present state of knowledge, the racial theory of
race-prejudice is demonstrably inadequate, while the non-racial theory
is an hypothesis which can neither be proved nor disproved. Such being
the case, the haphazard speculations which follow are not offered as
a proof of this hypothesis, or as an explanation of the existence of
race-prejudice in America, but simply as a stimulus to inquiry.

Beginning with these speculations, it may be said that the goods and
opportunities of the material life, unlike those of the intellectual
life, are frequently incapable of division without loss to the original
possessor. On this account, competition is likely to be particularly
keen and vindictive where material interests are given the foremost
place. It is also perhaps safe to say that the long preoccupation of
the American majority with the development of its material inheritance
has brought to the majority a heavy heritage of materialism. One may
hazard the statement that the prejudice of America’s native white
majority against the Negroes, the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics,
is now and has always been in some sense attributable and proportional
to the majority’s fear of some action on the part of the minority
which might injure the material interests of the majority, while the
only race-differences which have had any real importance are those
superficial ones which serve to make the members of the minorities
recognizable at sight. At any rate, an examination of some of the facts
that come most easily to hand shows an interesting coincidence between
the prejudice of the majority and the power of the minority.

Before the Civil War, the structure of Southern society was bottomed
on slavery, and the fear of any humanization of the Negro which would
make him appear worthy of emancipation was strong enough to arouse any
degree of prejudice, and any amount of repression. The prejudice of
the Southern white populace as a whole reached its maximum intensity
when emancipation threatened to place the blacks in permanent
political and economic control of certain portions of the South.
Even to-day, fear of the political power of the Negroes, and perhaps
also the over-emphasized fear of black “outrages,” still acts upon
the white population as a unifying force; but in spite of this fact,
class-interests have become plainly visible. When Black Republicanism
had once been driven to cover, the masters set about rebuilding their
privileges upon the foundation of Negro labour which is still their
chief support. Only a few Negroes have been able to compete directly
for a share in these privileges, and accordingly most of the fears
of the well-to-do people of the South are anticipatory rather than
immediate.

With the “poor whites,” the case is altogether different. Here there
is no question of keeping the Negro in his place, for ever since the
Emancipation the place of the Negro has been very much that of the poor
white himself, at least in so far as economic status is concerned. In
the view of the white labourer, the Negro rises too high the moment
he becomes a competitor for a job, and every Negro is potentially
just that. Accordingly, the prejudice of the poorer whites is bitter
and indiscriminate, and is certainly not tending to decrease with the
cityward drift of the Negro population.

With the appearance of Negro workers in large numbers in Northern
industrial centres, race-prejudice has begun to manifest itself
strongly among the white workers. The Northern masters have, however,
shown little tendency to reproduce the sentiments of their Southern
peers, for in the North there is no fear of political dominance by the
blacks, and a supply of cheap labour is as much appreciated as it is
south of the Line.

In spite of the fact that the proportion of Negroes in the total
population of the United States has declined steadily from 15.7
per cent. in 1850 to 9.9 per cent. in 1920, the attitude of both
Northerners and Southerners is somewhat coloured by the fear that
the blacks will eventually overrun the country. If prejudice had no
other basis than this, there would perhaps be no great difficulty in
effecting its cure. As a matter of course, immigration accounts in
part for the increasing predominance of the white population; but this
hardly disposes of the fact that throughout the South, during the
years 1890–1910, the percentage of native whites of native parentage
advanced in both urban and rural communities. Discussion of comparative
birth-rates also gives rise to numerous alarums and excursions, but the
figures scarcely justify the fears expressed. Statistics show that,
in spite of the best efforts of the people who attempt to hold the
black man down, and then fear him all the more because he breeds too
generously, the improvement in the material condition of the Negro is
operating inevitably to check the process of multiplication.

If the case of the Negro is complicated in the extreme, that of the
Indian is comparatively simple. Here race-prejudice has always followed
the frontier. As long as the Indian interfered with the exploitation
of the country, the pioneers feared him, and disliked him cordially.
Their feelings worked themselves out in all manner of personal cruelty,
as well as in a process of wholesale expropriation, but as soon as the
tribes had been cooped up on reservations, the white man’s dislike
for the Indian began to cool off perceptibly. From the beginning, the
Indian interfered with expansion, not as an economic competitor, but as
a military enemy; when the dread of him as a fighter disappeared, there
was no new fear to take its place. During the years 1910 to 1920 the
Indian population actually decreased 8.6 per cent.

If the Indian has neither shared the privileges nor paid the price
of a generous participation in American life, the Jew has certainly
done both. In every important field of activity, the members of this
minority have proved themselves quite able to compete with the native
majority, and accordingly the prejudice against them is not confined
to any one social class, but is concentrated rather in those regions
where the presence of Jews in considerable numbers predicates their
competitive contact with individuals of all classes. Although as a
member of one branch of the European racial family, the Jew is by
no means so definitely distinguished by physical characteristics as
are the members of the other minorities here under discussion, it
is nevertheless true that when the Jew has been identified by his
appearance, or has chosen to identify himself, the anti-Semite takes on
most of the airs of superiority which characterize the manifestations
of prejudice towards the other minorities. Nevertheless, the ordinary
run of anti-Semitic talk contains frequent admissions of jealousy
and fear, and it is safe to say that one must look chiefly to such
emotions, as intensified by the rapid increase of the Jewish population
from 1,500,000 in 1906 to 3,300,000 in 1918, rather than to the
heritage of European prejudice, for an explanation of the growth of
anti-Semitism in America. The inclusion of anti-Semitism with the
other types of race-prejudice here under discussion follows naturally
enough from the fact that the Jew is thought of as primarily a Jew,
whatever the country of his origin may have been, while the Slav,
for instance, is popularly regarded as a Russian, a Pole, a Serb--a
_national_ rather than a _racial_ alien.

Like the Jew, the Oriental has come into the United States as a
“foreigner,” as well as a member of an alien race. The absence of this
special disqualification has not particularly benefitted the Negro
and the Indian, but its presence in the case of the Japanese has been
of considerable service to the agitators. The prevalent dislike and
fear of the new Japan as a world-power has naturally coloured the
attitude of the American majority toward the Japanese settlers in this
country; but this in itself hardly explains why the Californians, who
were burning Chinamen out of house and home in the ’seventies, are now
centring their prejudice upon the Japanese agriculturist. The fact is
that since the passage of the Exclusion Laws the Chinese population
of the United States has fallen off more than 40 per cent., and the
importance of Chinese competition has decreased accordingly, while on
the other hand the number of Japanese increased 53.9 per cent. between
1910 and 1920, and the new competitors are showing themselves more
than a match for the white farmers. With a frankness that neither
Negrophobia nor anti-Semitism has made us familiar with, many of the
Californians have rested their case against the Japanese on an economic
foundation, and have confessed that they are unable to compete with
the Japanese on even terms. As a matter of course, there is the usual
flow of talk about the inferiority of the alien race, but the fear of
competition, here so frankly admitted, would be enough in itself to
account for this new outbreak of “race-prejudice.”

When one considers thus the course that prejudice has taken in the
case of the Negro, the Indian, the Jew, and the Oriental, it begins
to appear that this sentiment may wax and wane and change about
astonishingly in the presence of racial factors that remain always
the same. Such being the case, one is led to wonder what the attitude
of the native majority would be, if the minorities were recognizable
simply as groups, but _not_ as _racial_ groups. In other words, what
would be the result if the racial factor were reduced simply to
recognizability? The question has a more than speculative interest.

       *       *       *       *       *

If the causes of race-prejudice lie quite beyond the reach of any
simple explanation, the manifestation of this prejudice on the part of
the American majority are perhaps capable of an analysis which will
render the whole situation somewhat more comprehensible. By and large,
and with all due allowance for exceptions, it may be said that, in its
more familiar manifestations, race-prejudice takes a direction exactly
opposite to that taken by prejudice against the ordinary immigrant
of European stock; in the former case, a conscious effort is made to
magnify the differences between the majority and the minority, while
in the latter, a vast amount of energy is expended in the obliteration
of these differences. Thus race-prejudice aspires to preserve and even
to increase that degree of unlikeness which is its excuse for being,
while alien-prejudice works itself out of a job, by “Americanizing”
the immigrant and making him over into an unrecognizable member of
the majority. On one hand, enforced diversity remains as a source of
friction, while on the other, enforced uniformity is demanded as the
price of peace.

Although no purpose can be served by cataloguing here all the means
employed in the South to keep the black man in his place, a few
examples may be cited, in order to show the scope of these measures
of repression. In the economic field, there is a pronounced tendency
to restrict Negro workers to the humblest occupations, and in the
agricultural areas the system of peonage or debt-slavery is widely
employed for the purpose of attaching Negro families to the soil.
Residence-districts are regularly segregated, Jim Crow regulations
are everywhere in force, and inter-racial marriages are prohibited
by law in all the States of the South. The administration of justice
is in the hands of white judges and white juries, and the Negro’s
chances in such company are notoriously small. In nearly one-fourth of
the counties of the South, the population is half, or more than half
black, but the denial of the ballot excludes the Negroes from local,
State, and national political activities. In religious organizations,
segregation is the invariable rule. Theatres and even public libraries
are regularly closed to the Negro, and in every State in the South
segregation in schools is prescribed by law. Some idea of the
significance of the latter provision may be drawn from O. G. Ferguson’s
study of white and Negro schools in Virginia. In this comparatively
progressive State, the general rating of the white schools is 40.8, as
against 22.3 for the coloured schools, the latter figure being seven
points lower than the lowest general rating for any State in the Union.

Such are some of the legal, extra-legal, and illegal manifestations of
that prejudice which finds its supreme expression in the activities of
the lynching-mob and the Ku Klux Klan. There is still a considerable
annual output of lynchings in this country (in 1920 the victims
numbered sixty-five, of whom fifty were Negroes done to death in
the South), but the casualty-list for the South and for the country
as a whole has decreased steadily and markedly since 1889, and the
proportion of Negro victims who were accused of rape or attacks on
women has also decreased, from 31.8 per cent. in 1889–1893 to 19.8 per
cent. in 1914–1918.

On the other hand, the Ku Klux Klan has now re-commenced its
ghost-walking activities under the command of an “Imperial Wizard” who
claims that he has already enlisted 100,000 followers in the fight to
maintain the “God-ordained” pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race in
America. Other statements from the lips of the Wizard seem to indicate
that his organization is not only anti-African, but anti-Semitic,
anti-Catholic, and anti-Bolshevik as well. Indeed, the bearers of the
fiery cross seem bent upon organizing an all-American hate society, and
the expansion of the Klan in the North is already under way.

However, the Klansmen might have succeeded in carrying the war into the
enemy’s country even without adding new prejudices to their platform.
There has always been some feeling against the Negro in the North, and
the war-time migration of the blacks to Northern industrial centres
certainly has not resulted in any diminution of existing prejudice.
The National Urban League estimates that the recent exodus from
Dixie has produced a net increase of a quarter of a million in the
coloured population of twelve cities above the Line. This movement has
brought black and white workers into competition in many industries
where Negroes have hitherto been entirely unknown, and frequently the
relations between the two groups have been anything but friendly. Since
about half the “internationals” affiliated with the American Federation
of Labour still refuse to accept Negro members, the unions themselves
are in no small part to blame for the use that employers have made of
Negro workers as strike-breakers.

In twelve Northern and Western States there are laws on the
statute-books prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks. Jim
Crow regulations are not in force north of Maryland, but in most of
the cities there has been a continuous effort to maintain residential
segregation, and the practice of discrimination in hotels and
restaurants is the rule rather than the exception. Lynchings are
infrequent, but the great riots of Washington and Chicago were not
exactly indicative of good feeling between the races. One situation
which revealed a remarkable similarity of temper between the North
and the South was that which arose in the army during the war. It is
notorious that Northerners in uniform fell in easily with the Southern
spirit, and gave all possible assistance in an energetic Jim-Crowing of
the Negroes of Michigan and the Negroes of Mississippi, from the first
day of their service right through to the last.

The treatment of the Negro in literature and on the stage also reveals
an unconscious but all the more important unanimity of opinion. It is
true the North has produced no Thomas Dixons, but it is also true that
the gentle and unassuming Uncle Tom of Northern song and story is none
other than the Uncle Remus whom the South loves so much. In Boston, as
in Baton Rouge, the Negro who is best liked is the loyal, humble, and
not too able mammie or uncle of the good old days before the war. If
an exception be made in the case of Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,”
it may be said that American literature has not yet cast a strong,
upstanding black man for any other rôle than that of beast and villain.

And yet all these forms of discrimination and repression are not fully
expressive of the attitude of the white population. The people of the
South are fully sensible of the necessity of keeping the Negro in his
place; still they do not keep him from attending school. Educational
facilities, of a sort, are provided, however reluctantly, and in half
the States of the South school attendance is even made compulsory by
laws (which may or may not be enforced). The schooling is not of a kind
that will fit the Negroes for the permanent and contented occupancy of
a servile position. Generally speaking, the coloured children do not
receive a vocational education that will keep them in their place, but
an old-style three-R training that prepares for nothing but unrest.
If unrest leads to urbanization, the half-hearted education of the
Negro perhaps serves the interests of the new industrialists; but
these industrial employers are so few in number that their influence
cannot outweigh that of the planters who lose their peons, and the
poor whites who find the Negro with one grain of knowledge a somewhat
more dangerous competitor than the Negro with none. Hence there is
every reason to believe that if the white South had rationalized
this situation, the Negro would be as ruthlessly excluded from the
school as he now is from the ballot-box. In fact, the education of the
Negro seems quite inconsistent with race-prejudice as it is generally
preached and practised in the South.

In the North there is no discrimination in the schools, and black
children and white are put through the same mill. In the industrial
field, prejudice cannot effectually close to the Negroes all those
openings which are created by general economic conditions, and in
politics the Northern Negro also finds some outlet for his energies.

While it would be quite impossible to show that the existence of these
miscellaneous educational, industrial, and political opportunities
is due to any general desire upon the part of the members of the
white majority to minimize the differences between themselves and the
Negroes, it is certainly true that this desire exists in a limited
section of the white population. At the present time, white friends of
the Negro are actively engaged in efforts to eliminate certain legal
and illegal forms of discrimination and persecution, and are giving
financial support to much of the religious work and most of the
private educational institutions among the blacks. The Inter-racial
Committee of the War Work Council of the Y.M.C.A. has listed
thirty-three social and economic agencies, and twenty-three religious
agencies, in which members of both races are working co-operatively.
It must be admitted, however, that many, if not most, of the white
participants in work of this sort are affected by race-prejudice to the
extent that they desire simply to ameliorate the lowly condition of the
Negro, without altogether doing away with a certain wholesome degree
of racial segregation. For the complete elimination of the flavour
of condescension, one must usually seek out those extreme socialist
and syndicalist agitators who preach political or non-political
class-organization, as a substitute for the familiar national and
racial groupings.

In the case of the American Indian, the prejudice and self-interest of
the white majority have placed the emphasis on geographic rather than
social segregation. Here the demand of the whites has been for land
rather than for labour, and by consequence servility has never been
regarded as a prime virtue of Indian character.

If the early white settlers had so desired, they of course could
have enslaved a considerable portion of the Indian population, just
as the Spaniards did, in regions farther to the southward. However,
the Americans chose to drive the Indians inland, and to replace them
in certain regions with African tribesmen who in their native state
had been perhaps as war-like as the Indians themselves. Thus in the
natural course of events the African warrior was lost in the slave,
while the Indian chief continued to be the military opponent rather
than the economic servant of exploitation, and eventually gained
romantic interest by virtue of this fact. The nature of this operation
of debasement on one hand, and ennoblement on the other, is plainly
revealed in American literature. The latter phase of the work is
carried forward to-day with great enthusiasm by the Camp Fire Girls and
the Boy Scouts, whose devotion to the romantic ideal of Indian life is
nowhere paralleled by a similar interest in African tribal lore.

If the Indian has been glorified by remote admirers, he has also
been cordially disliked by some of his nearest neighbours, and indeed
the treatment he has received at the hands of the Government seems to
reflect the latter attitude rather than the former. In theory, most of
the Indian reservations are still regarded as subject principalities,
and the Indians confined within their boundaries are almost entirely
cut off from the economic, social, and political life of the
neighbouring white communities. Many of the tribes still receive yearly
governmental grants of food, clothing, arms, and ammunition, but these
allowances only serve to maintain them in a condition of dependence,
without providing any means of exit from it. In justice it should be
said, however, that the Government has declared an intention to make
the Indian self-supporting, and accordingly it restricts the grants,
in principle, to the old and the destitute. Several States have shown
their complete sympathy with the system of segregation by enacting laws
prohibiting the inter-marriage of Indians and whites.

On the other hand, the mental and moral Americanization of the red
man has been undertaken by Protestant and Catholic missions, and more
recently by Government schools. The agencies of the latter sort are
especially systematic in their work of depriving the Indian of most of
the qualities for which he has been glorified in romance, as well as
those for which he has been disliked by his neighbours. Many a Western
town enjoys several times each year the spectacle of Indian school-boys
in blue uniforms and Indian school-girls in pigtails and pinafores,
marching in military formation through its streets. As long as these
marchers are destined for a return to the reservation, the townsmen
can afford to look upon them with mild curiosity. The time for a new
adjustment of inter-racial relations will not come until the procession
turns towards the white man’s job on the farm and in the factory--if it
ever does turn that way.

Attention has already been called to the fact that the Jewish immigrant
normally marches from the dock directly to the arena of economic
competition. Accordingly his progress is not likely to be at any time
the object of mere curiosity. On the other hand, the manifestations
of prejudice against the Jew have been less aggressive and much less
systematic than those repressive activities which affect the other
minorities. Where anti-Semitism is present in America, it seems to
express itself almost entirely in social discrimination, in the
narrow sense. On the other hand, economic, political, and educational
opportunities are opened to the Jews with a certain amount of
reluctance. A major exception to this rule of discrimination must be
made in the case of those socialists, syndicalists and trade-unionists
who have diligently sought the support of the Jewish workers.

The Chinaman has also some friends now among the people who once
regarded him as the blackest of villains. Indeed, the Californian’s
attitude toward the Orientals has in it an element of unconscious irony
which somewhat illuminates the character of the race-problem. The
average Easterner will perhaps be surprised to learn that in Western
eyes the Chinaman is an inferior, of course, but nevertheless an honest
man, noted for square dealing and the prompt payment of his debts,
while the Jap is a tricky person whom one should never trust on any
account.

In California the baiting of the Japanese is now almost as much a part
of political electioneering as is the abuse of the Negro in the South.
The Native Sons of the Golden West and the American Legion have gone on
record in determined opposition to any expansion of Japanese interests
in California, while the Japanese Exclusion League is particularly
active in trouble-making propaganda. Economic discrimination has taken
statutory form in the Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920; discriminatory
legislation of the same general type has been proposed in Texas and
Oregon; a bill providing for educational segregation has been presented
for a second time at Sacramento; Congress has been urged to replace
the “gentlemen’s agreement” with an absolute prohibition of Japanese
immigration; and there is even a demand for a constitutional amendment
which will deny citizenship to the American-born children of aliens who
are themselves ineligible for naturalization. The method of legislation
is perhaps preferable to the method of force and violence, but if the
previous history of race-prejudice means anything, it means that force
will be resorted to if legislation fails. At bottom, the spirit of
the California Land Laws is more than a little like that of a Georgia
lynching; in the one case as in the other, the dominant race attempts
to maintain its position, not by a man-to-man contest, with fair
chances all around, but by depositing itself bodily and _en masse_ on
top of the subject people and crushing them.

If in the realm of individual conduct this sort of behaviour works
injury to the oppressor, as well as to the oppressed, it is not
otherwise where masses of men are concerned. Stephen Graham, in his
recent book, “The Soul of John Brown,” says that “in America to-day,
and especially in the South, there is a hereditary taint left by
slavery, and it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters
as much as in the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to
think of this American problem as exclusively a Negro problem.” Indeed,
it is true that in every case the race-problem is the problem of the
majority as well as of the minority, for the former can no more escape
the reaction of prejudice than the latter can escape its direct effects.

To-day the white South is still under the influence of a system of
life and thought that is far more enduring than the one institution
which gave it most complete expression. The Emancipation abolished
slavery, but it did not rid the master of the idea that it is his
right to live by the labour of the slave. The black man is not yet
relieved of the duty of supporting a certain proportion of the white
population in leisure; nor does it appear that the leisured Southerner
of to-day makes a better use of his time than his ancestors did before
him. Indeed, an historian who judged the peoples chiefly by their
contribution to science and the arts would still be obliged to condemn
the white South, not for enslaving the Negro, but for dissipating in
the practices of a barren gentility the leisure that Negro labour
created, and still creates, so abundantly. It is notorious also that in
the South the airs of gentility have been more widely broadcast among
the white population than the leisure necessary for their practice,
with the result that much honest work which could not be imposed upon
the black man has been passed on to posterity, and still remains
undone.

Any one who seeks to discover the cause of the mental lethargy that
has converted the leisure of the South so largely into mere laziness
must take some account of a factor that is always present where
race-prejudice exists. The race which pretends to superiority may not
always succeed in superimposing itself economically upon the inferior
group; and yet the pride and self-satisfaction of the members of the
“superior” race will pretty surely make for indolence and the deadening
of the creative spirit. This will almost inevitably be true where the
superiority of the one race is acknowledged by the other, and where no
contest of wits is necessary for the maintenance of the _status quo_.
This is the condition that has always obtained, and still obtains in
most of the old slave territory. In Dixie it is a career simply to go
through life inside of a white skin. However ignorant and worthless
the white man may be, it is still his privilege to proclaim on any
street corner that he is in all respects a finer creature than any
one of several million human beings whom he classes all together as
“good-for-nothin’ niggers.” If the mere statement of this fact is not
enough to bring warm applause from all the blacks in the neighbourhood,
the white man is often more than willing to use fire and sword to
demonstrate a superiority which he seldom stoops to prove in any
other fashion. Naturally this feeling of God-given primacy tends to
make its possessors indolent, immune to new ideas of every sort, and
quite willing to apply “the short way with the nigger” to any one who
threatens the established order of the universe.

It would be foolish indeed to suppose that the general intolerance,
bigotry, and backwardness which grow out of race-prejudice have
affected the South alone. The North and the West have their prejudices
too, their consciousness of a full-blooded American superiority that
does not have to be proved, their lazy-mindedness, their righteous
anger, their own short way with what is new and strange. No sane man
will attribute the origin of all these evils to race-prejudice alone,
but no honest man will deny that the practice of discrimination against
the racial minorities has helped to infect the whole life and thought
of the country with a cocky and stupefying provincialism.

Perhaps the most interesting phase of the whole racial situation in
America is the attitude which the minorities themselves have maintained
in the presence of a dominant prejudice which has constantly emphasized
and magnified the differences between the minorities and majority, and
has even maintained the spirit of condescension, and the principle of
segregation in such assimilative activities as education and Christian
mission work. One would naturally expect that such an attitude on
the part of the majority would stimulate a counter race-prejudice in
each of the minorities, which would render them also intent upon the
maintenance of differentiation.

Although such a counter prejudice has existed from the beginning among
the Indians, the Jews, and the Asiatics, it is only now beginning to
take form among the Negroes. The conditions of the contact between the
black minority and the white majority have thus been substantially
different from those which existed in the other cases, and the results
of this contact seem to justify the statement that, so long as it
remains _one-sided_, the strongest race-prejudice cannot prevent the
cultural and even the biological assimilation of one race to another.
In other words, prejudice defeats itself, in a measure, just so long
as one of the parties accepts an inferior position; in fact, it
becomes fully effective only when the despised group denies its own
inferiority, and throws the reproach back upon those with whom it
originated. Thus the new racial self-consciousness of a small section
of the Negro population gives the prejudiced whites a full measure of
the differentiation they desire, coupled with an absolute denial of the
inferiority which is supposed to justify segregation.

It has already been pointed out that the enslavement of the Negroes
deprived them of practically everything to which racial pride might
attach itself, and left them with no foundation of their own on which
to build. Thus they could make no advances of any sort except in so
far as they were permitted to assimilate the culture of the white man.
In the natural course of events, the adoption of the English language
came first, and then shortly the Negro was granted such a share in the
white man’s heaven as he has never yet received of the white man’s
earth. As the only available means of self-expression, religion took a
tremendous hold upon the slaves, and from that day to this, the black
South has wailed its heart out in appeals to the white man’s God for
deliverance from the white man’s burden. The Negro “spirituals” are not
the songs of African tribesmen, the chants of free warriors. Indeed,
the white man may claim full credit for the sadness that darkens the
Negro’s music, and put such words as these into the mouth of the Lord:

      Go down, Moses,
          Way down in Egyp’ lan’
              Tell ole Pharaoh
              Le’ ma people go!
      Israel was in Egyp’ lan’
          Oppres’ so hard dey could not stan’,
              Le’ ma people go!

When casual observers say that the black man is naturally more
religious than the white, they lose sight of the fact that the number
of church-members per thousand individuals in the Negro population is
about the same as the average for the United States as a whole; and
they forget also the more important fact that the Negro has never had
all he wanted of anything except religion--and in segregated churches
at that. It is more true of the black men than of Engel’s proletarians,
that they have been put off for a very long time with checks on the
bank of Heaven.

Emancipation and the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to open the path to
an earthly paradise; but this vision was soon eclipsed by a second
Civil War that resulted in a substantial victory for the white South.
Economic repression could not be made entirely effective, however, and
in the fifty-three years from 1866 to 1919 the number of American Negro
homeowners increased from 12,000 to 600,000 and the number of Negroes
operating farms from 20,000 to 1,000,000. In 1910 the Negro population
still remained 72.6 per cent. rural, but the cityward movement of the
blacks during the years 1890 to 1910 was more rapid than that of the
whites. Education has directly facilitated economic progress, and has
resulted in an increase of literacy among the Negroes from ten per
cent. in 1866 to eighty per cent. in 1919. During the period 1900 to
1910, the _rate_ of increase of literacy among the blacks was much more
rapid than that among the whites. Thus from the day he was cut off from
his own inheritance, the American Negro has reached out eagerly for an
alien substitute, until to-day, in practically everything that has to
do with culture, he is not black but white--and artificially retarded.

Since America has deprived the Negro of the opportunity to grow up as
an African, and at the same time has denied him the right to grow up
as a white man, it is not surprising that a few daring spirits among
the Negroes have been driven at last to the conclusion that there is no
hope for their race except in an exodus from the white man’s culture
and the white man’s continent. The war did a great deal to prepare
the way for this new movement; the Negroes of America heard much
talk of democracy not meant for their ears; their list of wrongs was
lengthened, but at the same time their economic power increased; and
many of them learned for the first time what it meant to fight back.
Some of them armed themselves, and began to talk of taking two lives
for one when the lynching-mob came. Then trouble broke in Chicago and
Washington--and the casualties were not all of one sort. Out of this
welter of unrest and rebellion new voices arose, some of them calling
upon the Negro workers to join forces with their white brothers;
some fierce and vengeful, as bitterly denunciatory of socialism and
syndicalism as of everything else that had felt the touch of the white
man’s hand; some intoxicated, ecstatic with a new religion, preaching
the glory of the black race and the hope of the black exodus.

With much travail, there finally came forth, as an embodiment of the
extreme of race-consciousness, an organization called the Universal
Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. This clan
lays claim to a million members in the United States, the West Indies,
South America and South Africa, and announces as its final object the
establishment of a black empire in Africa. Connected with the U.N.I.A.
are the Black Star Line, capitalized at $10,000,000, and the Negro
Factories Corporation, capitalized at $2,000,000. Just what these
astonishing figures mean in actual cash it is impossible to say, but
this much is certain: the Black Star Line already owns three of the
many vessels which--say the prophets of the movement--will some day ply
among the Negro lands of the world.

To cap the climax, the U.N.I.A. held in New York City during the month
of August, 1920, “the first International Negro Convention,” which drew
up a Negro Declaration of Independence, adopted a national flag and
a national anthem, and elected “a Provisional President of Africa, a
leader for the American Negroes, and two leaders for the Negroes of the
West Indies, Central and South America.”

The best testimony of the nature of this new movement is to be found
in an astonishing pamphlet called the “Universal Negro Catechism,” and
issued “by authority of the High Executive Council of the Universal
Negro Improvement Association.” In this catechism one discovers such
items as the following, under the head of “Religious Knowledge”:

    Q. Did God make any group or race of men superior to another?

    A. No; He created all races equal, and of one blood, to dwell
    on all the face of the earth.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. What is the colour of God?

    A. A spirit has neither colour, nor other natural parts, nor
    qualities.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. If ... you had to think or speak of the colour of God, how
    would you describe it?

    A. As black; since we are created in His image and likeness.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. What did Jesus Christ teach as the essential principle of
    true religion?

    A. The universal brotherhood of man growing out of the
    universal Fatherhood of God.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Who is responsible for the colour of the Ethiopians?

    A. The Creator; and what He has done cannot be changed. Read
    Jeremiah 13:23.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. What prediction made in the 68th Psalm and the 31st Verse is
    now being fulfilled?

    A. “Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon
    stretch out her hands unto God.”

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. What does this verse prove?

    A. That Negroes will set up their own government in Africa with
    rulers of their own race.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Will Negroes ever be given equal opportunity and treatment
    in countries ruled by white men?

    A. No; they will enjoy the full rights of manhood and liberty
    only when they establish their own nation and government in
    Africa.

Perhaps enough has already been said to make it clear that there exists
in America no distinctive black culture which could spontaneously give
rise to such a movement as this. Culturally the black man is American;
biologically he is African. It is solely and entirely the prejudice of
the American majority that has forced this group of Negroes to attempt
to reconstruct a cultural and sentimental connection that was destroyed
long ago. The task which faces the leaders of the new movement is one
of almost insurmountable difficulty, for in spite of every sort of
persecution, the general life and thought of America are still far more
easily accessible to the Negro than is anything distinctively his own.

The cultural shipwreck of the Negro on the American shore has thus
placed him more completely at the mercy of the majority than the other
minorities have ever been. In the case of the Indians, the Jews, and
the Orientals, the race-name has not stood simply for an incomplete
Americanism, but for a positive cultural quality which has persisted in
the face of all misfortune. These races were provisioned, so to speak,
for a long siege, while the Negro had no choice but to eat out of the
white man’s hand, or starve.

The reservation-system has reduced many of the Indian tribes to a
state of economic dependence, but it has also helped to preserve
their cultural autonomy. In most cases the isolated communities on
the reservations are distinctly Indian communities. The non-material
inheritance of the past has come down to the present generation in a
fairly complete form, with the result that the Indian of to-day may
usually take his choice between Indian culture and white. Under these
conditions the labours of missionaries and educators have not been
phenomenally successful, as is witnessed by the fact that the number
of Protestant Christians per thousand Indians is still only about
one-seventh as large as that for the Negroes, while the percentage
of illiterates is much larger among the Indians. However, school
attendance is increasing at a more rapid rate than among the whites,
and the prospect is that the Government schools will eventually deprive
the country of all that is attractive in Indian life.

Toward the close of the 19th century, the Indian’s resentment of
the white man’s overbearing actions found expression in a religious
movement which originated in Nevada and spread eastward till it
numbered among its adherents nearly all the natives between the Rocky
Mountains and the Missouri River. This messianic faith bore the name
of a ceremonial connected with it, the Ghost Dance, and was based upon
a divine revelation which promised the complete restoration of the
Indian’s inheritance. Such doctrines have, of course, been preached
in many forms and in many lands, but it is no great compliment to the
amiability of American civilization that the gospel of deliverance has
found so many followers among the Negroes, the Indians, and the Jews
who dwell within the borders of the country.

It does not seem likely that the Zionist version of this gospel will
produce any general exodus of the last-named minority from this
country, for in spite of prejudice, the Jews have been able to make a
large place for themselves in the United States. Since the movements
of the Jews have not been systematically restricted, as those of the
Negroes and the Indians have been, the great concentration of the
Jewish population in the cities of the East would seem to be due in
large measure to the choice of the Jews themselves. At the present time
they dominate the clothing industry, the management of the theatre,
and the production of motion-pictures. Approximately one-tenth of
the trade-unionists in the United States are Jews, and the adherence
of a considerable number of Jews to the doctrines of socialism and
syndicalism has unquestionably been one of the causes of prejudice
against the race.

In matters that pertain more directly to the intellectual life, the
Jews have exhibited every degree of eagerness for, and opposition to,
assimilation. There are among them many schools for the teaching of
the Hebrew language, and some other schools--private and expensive
ones--in which only non-Jewish, “all-American” teachers are employed.
Of the seventy-eight Jewish periodicals published in the United States,
forty-eight are printed in English. In every Jewish centre, Yiddish
theatres have been established for the amusement of the people; but
Jewish managers, producers, actors, and playwrights have also had a
large part in the general dramatic activities of the country. Finally,
in the matter of religion, the response of the Jews to Christian
missionary work has been very slight indeed, while, on the other
hand, the number of synagogue-members per thousand Jews is only about
one-fourth the general average of religious affiliation for the United
States as a whole. When one considers the fact that in some fields the
Jews have thus made advances in spite of opposition, while in others
they have refused opportunities offered to them, it seems at least
probable that the incompleteness of their cultural assimilation is due
as much to their own racial pride as to the prejudice of the majority.

Similarly in the case of the Orientals, the pride and self-sufficiency
of the minority has helped to preserve for it a measure of cultural
autonomy. In the absence of such a disposition on the part of the
Chinese, it would be difficult to account for the fact that their
native costume has not disappeared during the thirty-nine years
since the stoppage of immigration. San Francisco’s Chinatown still
remains very markedly Chinese in dress largely because the Chinese
themselves have chosen to keep it so. The Japanese have taken much
more kindly to the conventional American costume, but one is hardly
justified in inferring from this that they are more desirous for
general assimilation. Indeed, one would expect the opposite to be the
case, for most of the Japanese in America had felt the impress of
the nationalistic revival in Japan before their departure from that
country. In a measure this accounts for the fact that Japanese settlers
have established a number of Buddhist temples and Japanese-language
schools in the United States. However, figures furnished by the “Joint
Committee on Foreign Language Publications,” which represents a number
of Evangelical denominations, seem to indicate that the Japanese in the
United States are much more easily Christianized than the Chinese, and
are even less attached to Buddhism than are the Jews to their native
faith. In the nature of things, the domestic practice of Shinto-worship
among the Japanese is incapable of statistical treatment.

Thus the combination of all the internal and external forces that
affect the racial minorities in America has produced a partial, but by
no means a complete, remodelling of minority-life in accordance with
standards set by the majority. Prejudice and counter-prejudice have not
prevented this change, and there is no accounting for the condition of
the American minorities to-day without due attention to the positive
factor of cultural assimilation, as well as to the negative factor of
prejudice.

       *       *       *       *       *

Since it has already been implied that a greater or less assimilation
by the minorities of the culture of the majority is inevitable, it
is apparent that the relation of this assimilative change to the
biological fusion of the groups is a matter of ultimate and absolute
importance. Wherever friction exists between racial groups, the mere
mention of biological fusion is likely to stir up so much fire and
smoke that all facts are completely lost to sight; and yet it is quite
obvious that the forces of attraction and repulsion which play upon the
several races in America have produced biological as well as cultural
results.

The mulatto population of the United States is the physical embodiment
of a one-sided race-prejudice. By law, by custom, even by the
visitation of sudden and violent death, the master-class of the South
expresses a disapproval of relations between white women and coloured
men, which does not apply in any forcible way to similar relations
between white men and coloured women. The white male is in fact the
go-between for the races. The Negroes have not the power, and sometimes
not even the will, to protect themselves against his advances, and the
result is that illegitimate mulatto children in great numbers are born
of Negro mothers and left to share the lot of the coloured race.

If the infusion of white blood were stopped entirely, the proportion
of mulattoes in the Negro race would nevertheless go on increasing,
since the children of a mulatto are usually mulattoes, whether the
other parent be mulatto or black. There is, however, no reason for
supposing that under such conditions the proportion of mulattoes to
blacks would increase _more_ rapidly in one geographic area than in
another. The fact is that during the period 1890 to 1910 the number of
mulattoes per 1,000 blacks _decreased_ in the North from 390 to 363,
and _increased_ in the South from 159 to 252; the inference as to white
parenthood is obvious. During the same period the black population of
the entire United States increased 22.7 per cent., while the mulatto
population increased 81.1 per cent. The mulatto group is thus growing
far more rapidly than either the black or the white, and the male
white population of the South is largely responsible for the present
expansion of this class, as well as for its historical origin.

Thus the South couples a maximum of repression with a maximum of racial
intermixture; indeed, the one is naturally and intimately associated
with the other. The white population as a whole employs all manner
of devices to keep the Negro in the social and economic status most
favourable to sexual promiscuity, and aggressive white males take full
advantage of the situation thus created.

While it is not generally admitted in the South that the progressive
whitening of the black race is a natural result of the maintenance of
a system of slavery and subjection, the converse of this proposition
is stated and defended with all possible ardour. That is to say, it
is argued that any general improvement in the condition of the Negro
will increase the likelihood of racial intermixture on a higher level,
through inter-marriage. The Southerners who put forth this argument
know very well that inter-marriage is not likely to take place in the
presence of strong race-prejudice, and they know, too, that the Negro
who most arouses their animosity is the “improved” Negro who will not
keep his place. They are unwilling to admit that this increase in
prejudice is due largely, if not wholly, to the greater competitive
strength of the improved Negro; and likewise they prefer to disregard
the fact that such a Negro resents white prejudice keenly, and tends to
exhibit on his own part a counter prejudice which in itself acts as an
additional obstacle to inter-marriage.

In the absence of such factors as Negro self-consciousness and
inter-racial competition, it would be difficult to account for the
extreme rarity of marriages between blacks and whites in the Northern
States. No comprehensive study of this subject has been made, but an
investigation conducted by Julius Drachsler has shown that of all the
marriages contracted by Negroes in New York City during the years
1908 to 1912, only 0.93 per cent. were mixed. The same investigation
revealed the fact that Negro men contracted mixed marriages about four
times as frequently as Negro women.

Marriages between whites and Indians have not been so vigorously
condemned by the American majority as those between whites and Negroes,
and the presumption is that the former have been much more frequent.
However, it appears that no systematic investigation of Indian mixed
marriages has been made, and certainly no census previous to that of
1910 gives any data of value on the subject of mixed blood among the
Indians. The enumeration of 1910 showed that 56.5 per cent. of the
Indians were full-blooded, 35.2 per cent. were of mixed blood, and
8.4 per cent. were unclassified. Although it is impossible to fix the
responsibility as definitely here as in the case of the Negro, it is
obvious that an infusion of white blood half again as great as that
among the Negroes cannot be accounted for in any large part by racial
inter-marriages. Without question, it is chiefly due to the same sort
of promiscuity that has been so common in the South, and the present
and potential checks upon the process of infusion are similar to those
already discussed.

In the case of the Jews and the Asiatics, it seems that the only
figures available are those gathered by Drachsler. He found that only
1.17 per cent. of the marriages contracted by Jews in New York City
during the years 1908 to 1912 were classifiable as “mixed,” while
the corresponding percentages for the Chinese and the Japanese were
55.56 and 72.41 respectively. The largeness of the figures in the
case of Orientals is accounted for in part by the fact that there are
comparatively few women of Mongolian race in New York City. Besides
this, it must be remembered that, whatever the degree of their cultural
assimilation, the Chinese and Japanese residents of the metropolis are
not sufficiently numerous to form important competitive groups, while
the Jews constitute one-quarter of the entire population of the city.
Does any one doubt that the situation in regard to mixed marriages
would be partially reversed in San Francisco?

When due allowance is made for special conditions, Drachsler’s
figures do not seem to run contrary to the general proposition that
an improvement in the economic and social condition of one of the
minorities, and a partial or complete adoption by the minority of the
culture of the majority, does not necessarily prepare the way for
racial fusion, but seems to produce exactly the opposite effect by
increasing the competitive power of the minority, the majority’s fear
of its rivals, and the prejudice of each against the other.

In spite of all that prejudice can do to prevent it, the economic,
social, and intellectual condition of the minorities is becoming
increasingly like that of the majority; and yet it is not to be
expected that as long as the minorities remain physically recognizable
this change will result in the elimination of prejudice, nor is it
likely that the cultural assimilation which checks the process of
racial intermixture through promiscuous intercourse will result
automatically in intermixture on a higher level, and the consequent
disappearance of the recognizability of the minorities. Prejudice does
not altogether prevent cultural assimilation; cultural assimilation
increases competitive strength without eliminating recognizability;
competitive strength _plus_ recognizability produces more prejudice;
and so on ... and so on.... Thus it seems probable that race-prejudice
will persist in America as long as the general economic, social,
political, and intellectual system which has nurtured it endures. No
direct attack upon the race-problem, as such, can alter this system in
any essential way.

Is this conception sound, or not? It stands very high upon a slim
scaffolding of facts, put together in pure contrariness after it had
been stated that no adequate foundation for such a structure could be
found anywhere. But, after all, it is no great matter what happens
to the notion that race-prejudice can be remedied only incidentally.
If the conditions which surround race-prejudice are only studied
comparatively, this notion and others like it will get all the
attention they deserve.


_RACE PROBLEMS_

(The answers are merely by way of suggestion, but the questions may
prove to be worthy of serious attention.)

    Q. Has the inherent inferiority of any human race been
    established by historical, biological or psychological evidence?

    A. No.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Does the theory of the inequality of human races offer a
    satisfactory explanation of the existence of race-prejudice?

    A. No.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Do physical characteristics make the members of the several
    races recognizable?

    A. Yes.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Is race-prejudice inherent and inevitable, in the sense that
    it always exists where two recognizably different races are in
    contact?

    A. No.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. How does it happen that in the presence of _racial_
    factors which remain constant, race-prejudice exists in some
    localities, and is absent in others?

    A. No satisfactory explanation of these local variations in
    inter-racial feeling has yet been given; however, the existence
    of the variations themselves would seem to indicate that
    the primary causes of race-prejudice are _not racial_ but
    _regional_.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. What study will lead most directly to an understanding of
    race-prejudice--that of universal racial differences, or that
    of regional environmental differences which are associated with
    the existence and non-existence of racial prejudice?

    A. The latter.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Does the systematic study of regional environmental
    differences in the United States, in their relation to
    race-prejudice, yield any results of importance?

    A. No such systematic study has ever been made; a casual
    glance seems to reveal an interesting coincidence between
    race-prejudice and the fear of competition.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Is competition more likely to produce race-prejudice in the
    United States than elsewhere?

    A. Because of the general preoccupation of the American people
    with material affairs, _economic_ competition is likely to
    produce unusually sharp antagonisms.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Does the coincidence between race-prejudice and the fear of
    competition offer a complete explanation of the existence and
    strength of race-prejudice in the United States?

    A. No; no such claim has been advanced.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Is the assimilation by the minorities of the culture of the
    majority taking place continuously, in spite of the prejudice
    of the majority and the counter-prejudice of three of the
    minorities?

    A. Yes.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Q. Does this cultural assimilation make for better inter-racial
    feeling?

    A. Probably not, because as long as physical race-differences
    remain, cultural assimilation increases the strength of the
    minority as a _recognizable_ competitive group, and hence
    it also increases the keenness of the rivalry between the
    minorities and the majority.

    Q. How can the recognizability of the minorities be eliminated?

    A. By blood-fusion with the majority.

    Q. How can blood-fusion come about if cultural assimilation
    increases rivalry and prejudice?

    A.  ............................... .

    Q. Is it then true that, as things stand, the future of
    inter-racial relations in the United States depends upon the
    ratio between cultural assimilation, which seems inevitable,
    and biological assimilation, which seems unlikely?

    A. It so appears.

    Q. Does the race-problem in the United States then seem
    practically insoluble as a separate problem?

    A. It does.

    Q. Has the race-problem ever been solved anywhere by direct
    attack upon it as a _race_ problem?

    A. Probably not.

    Q. Does not this conclusion involve a return to the assumption
    that race-prejudice is inevitable wherever race-differences
    exist; and has this not been emphatically denied?

    A. On the contrary, the implication is that race-prejudice is
    inevitable where _race-prejudice_ exists. The conclusion in
    regard to the United States is based on the single assumption
    that the _non-racial_ conditions under which race-prejudice has
    arisen will remain practically unchanged.

    Q. Is it then conceivable that a complete alteration of
    non-racial conditions--as, for instance, an economic
    revolution which would change the whole meaning of the word
    “competition”--might entirely revise the terms of the problem?

    A. It is barely conceivable--but this paper is not an accepted
    channel for divine revelation.

                                            GEROID TANQUARY ROBINSON




ADVERTISING


Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising?
Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in God.
Though, to be sure, in so doing you would be committing less of a crime
against the tenets of modern American civilization than in doubting
the existence of a power so great that overnight it can raise up in
our midst gods, kings, and other potentates, creating a world which
for splendour and opulence far surpasses our own poor mortal sphere--a
world in which every prospect pleases and only the reluctant spender is
vile.

True, we can only catch a fleeting glimpse of its many marvels. True,
we have scarcely time to admire a millionth part of the joys and
magnificence of one before a new and greatly improved universe floats
across the horizon, and, from every corner news-stand, smilingly
bids us enter its portals. True, I repeat, our inability to grasp or
appreciate the full wonder of these constantly arriving creations,
yet even the narrow limitations of our savage and untutored minds can
hardly prevent us from acclaiming a miracle we fail to understand.

If it were only given me to live the life led by any one of the
fortunate creatures that dwell in these advertising worlds, I should
gladly renounce my home, my wife, and my evil ways and become the
super-snob of a mock creation. All day long should I stand smartly
clad in a perfectly fitting union-suit just for the sport of keeping
my obsequious butler waiting painfully for me with my lounging-gown
over his exhausted arm. On other days I should be found sitting in mute
adoration before a bulging bowl of breakfast food, and, if any one
should chance to be listening at the keyhole, they might even catch me
in the act of repeating reverently and with an avid smile on my lips,
“I can never stir from the table until I have completely crammed myself
with Red-Blooded American Shucks,” adding in a mysterious whisper, “To
be had at all good grocers.”

There would be other days of course, days when I should ride in a
motor of unrivalled power with companions of unrivalled beauty, across
canyons of unrivalled depth and mountains of unrivalled height. Then
would follow still other days, the most perfect days of all, days when
the snow-sheathed earth cracks in the clutches of an appalling winter
and only the lower classes stir abroad. This would be the time that I
should select for removing the lounging gown from my butler’s arm and
bask in the glowing warmth of my perfect heater, with my chair placed
in such a position as to enable me to observe the miserable plight of
my neighbours across the way as they strive pitifully to keep life in
their bodies over the dying embers of an anæmic fire. The sight of
the sobbing baby and haggard mother would only serve to intensify my
satisfaction in having been so fortunate and far-sighted as to have
possessed myself of a Kill Kold Liquid Heat Projector--That Keeps the
Family Snug.

What days I should spend! Take the literary days, for instance. Could
anything be more edifying than to dip discriminatingly into a six-inch
bookshelf with the absolute assurance that a few minutes spent thus
each day in dipping would, in due course of time, give me complete
mastery of all the best literature of the world--and incidentally
gain for me a substantial raise at the office? Nor could any of the
literature of the past ages equal my hidden library of books containing
Vital Secrets. In this room there would linger a never-failing thrill.
Here I should retreat to learn the secret of success, the secret of
salesmanship, the secret of vigour, the secret of bull-dozing one’s
boss, the secret of spell-binding, the secret of personality and social
charm, all bearing a material value measured in dollars and cents. In
time I should so seethe with secrets that, unable to bear them any
longer, I should break down before my friends and give the whole game
away.

But why should I lacerate my heart in the contemplation of happiness I
shall never experience? Why should I dwell upon the pipe-filling days,
or the days when I should send for samples? Why torture my mind with
those exquisitely tailored days when, with a tennis racket in one hand
and a varsity crew captain on my shoulder, I should parade across the
good old campus in a suit bereft of wrinkles and a hat that destroyed
the last shreds of restraint in all beholding women? No, I can go no
further.

For when I consider the remarkable characters that so charmingly infest
my paradise never found, I cannot help asking myself, “How do they
get that way?” How do the men’s legs grow so slim and long and their
chins so smooth and square? Why have the women always such perfect
limbs and such innocent but alluring smiles? Why are families always
happy and children always good? What miracle has banished the petty
irritations and deficiencies of life and smoothed out the problems of
living? How and why--is there an answer? Can it all be laid at the door
of advertising, or do we who read, the great, sweltering mass of us,
insist upon such things and demand a world of artificial glamour and
perfectly impossible people? The crime is committed by collusion, I am
forced to conclude. Advertising, for the most part, makes its appeal to
all that is superficial and snobbish in us, and we as a solid phalanx
are only too glad to be appealed to in such a manner.

In only the most unscholarly way can I lay my reflections before you,
and the first one is this: advertising is America’s crudest and most
ruthless sport, religion, or profession, or whatever you choose to call
it. With an accurate stroke, but with a perverted intent, it coddles
and toys with all that is base and gross in our physical and spiritual
compositions. The comforts and happiness it holds out to the reader
are for ever contrasted with the misery and misfortune of another.
Thus, if I ride in a certain make of motor, I have the satisfaction of
knowing that every one who rides in a motor of another make is of a
lower caste than myself and will certainly eat dust for the rest of his
life. There is a real joy in this knowledge. Again, if I wear a certain
advertised brand of underwear, I have the pleasure of knowing that my
fellow-men not so fortunately clad are undoubtedly foolish swine who
will eventually die of sunstroke, after a life devoted entirely to
sweating. Here, too, is a joy of rare order. If I brush my teeth with
an advertised tooth paste, my satisfaction is enhanced by the knowledge
that all other persons who fail to use this particular paste will in a
very short time lose all of their teeth. In this there is a savage, but
authentic delight. Even if I select a certain classic from my cherished
six-inch bookshelf, I shall have a buoyant feeling in knowing that all
men, who, after the fatigue of the day, take comfort in the latest
murder or ball-game, are of inferior intellect and will never succeed
in the world of business.

This is one of the most successful weapons used in advertising, and
there is no denying that a great majority of people take pleasure
in being struck by it. It is a pleasure drawn from the same source
that feeds so many people’s sense of satisfaction when they attend
a funeral, or call on a sick friend, or a friend in misfortune
and disgrace. It was the same source of inner satisfaction which
made it possible for many loyal citizens to bear not only with
fortitude, but with bliss, the sorrows of the late war. It is the
instinct of self-preservation, toned down to a spirit of complacent
self-congratulation, and it responds most readily to the appeal of
selfishness and snobbery. Advertising did not create this instinct,
nor did it discover it, but advertising uses it for its own ends. Who
is to blame, the reader or the advertiser, hardly enters in at this
point. The solid fact to take into consideration is that day in and day
out the susceptible public is being worked upon in an unhealthy and
neurotic manner which cannot fail to effect harmful results.

At this tragic moment I purpose briefly to digress to the people who
create advertisements, before returning to a consideration of the
effects of their creations.

To begin with, let it never be forgotten that advertising
is a red-blooded, two-fisted occupation, engaged in for the
most part by upstanding Americans of the kiss-the-flag or
knock-’em-down-and-drag-’em-out variety. Yet years of contact with
the profession compel me for the sake of truth to temper this remark
by adding that it also contains, or rather confines, within its
mystic circle a group of reluctant and recalcitrant “creatures that
once were men,” who, moving through a phantasmagoria of perverted
idealism, flabby optimism, and unexamined motives, either deaden their
conscience in the twilight of the “Ad. Men’s Club,” or else become so
blindly embittered or debauched that their usefulness is lost to all
constructive movements.

Generally speaking, however, advertising is the graveyard of literary
aspiration in which the spirits of the defeated aspirants, wielding a
momentary power over a public that rejected their efforts, blackjack
it into buying the most amazing assortment of purely useless and
cheaply manufactured commodities that has ever marked the decline of
culture and common sense. These men are either caught early after
their flight from college, or else recruited from the newspaper world.
Some--the most serious and determined--are products of correspondence
schools. Others are merely robust spirits whose daily contact with
their fellow-men does not give them sufficient opportunity to disgorge
themselves of the abundance of misinformation that their imaginations
manufacture in wholesale quantities. This advertising brotherhood is
composed of a heterogeneous mass of humanity that is rapidly converted
into a narrow-minded wedge of fanatics. And this wedge is continually
boring into the pocketbook of the public and extracting therefrom a
goodly quantity of gold and silver. Have you ever conversed with one
of the more successful and important members of this vast body? If
so have you been able to quit the conversation with an intelligent
impression of its subject-matter? For example: do you happen to know
what a visualizer is? If not, you would be completely at the mercy of a
true advertising exponent. Returning to my Edisonian method of attack,
do you happen to know by any chance what a rough-out man is, or what is
the meaning of dealer mortality, quality appeal, class circulation, or
institutional copy? Probably not, for there is at bottom very little
meaning to them; nevertheless, they are terms that are sacred to a
great number of advertising men, and which, if unknown, would render
all intelligent communication with them quite impossible.

If you should ever attend a session of these gentlemen in full cry--and
may God spare you this--you would return from it with the impression
that all was not well with the world. You would have heard speeches on
the idealism of meat-packing, and other kindred subjects. The idealism
would be transmitted to you through the medium of a hireling of some
large packing organization, a live-wire, God-bless-you, hail-fellow
type. Assuming that you had been there, you would have witnessed this
large fellow with a virile exhalation of cigar-smoke, heave himself
from his chair; you would have observed a good-natured smile play
across his lips, and then you would have suddenly been taken aback
by the tenderly earnest and masterfully restrained expression that
transformed our buffoon into a suffering martyr, as, flinging out his
arms, he tragically exclaimed, “Gentlemen, you little know the soul
of the man who has given the Dreadnought Ham to the world!” From this
moment on your sense of guilt would have increased by leaps and bounds
until at last you would have broken down completely and agreed with
everything the prophet said, as long as he refrained from depriving
you of an opportunity to make it up to the god-like man who gave
Dreadnought Hams to the world.

The orator would go on to tell you about the happiness and sunlight
that flood the slaughter-house in which Dreadnought Hams are made.
You would hear about the lovely, whimsical old character, who, one
day, when in the act of polishing off a pig, stood in a position
of suspended animation with knife poised above the twitching ear
of the unfortunate swine, and seizing the hand of the owner as he
passed benevolently by, kissed it fervently and left on it a tear of
gratitude. Perhaps you would not hear that in the ardour of loyal
zeal this lovable old person practically cut the pig to ribbons, thus
saving it from a nervous collapse, nor would you be permitted to hear a
repetition of the imprecations the old man muttered after the departing
back of the owner, for these things should not be heard,--in fact,
they do not exist in the world of advertising. Nothing would be said
about the red death of the pig, the control of the stock-raiser, the
underpaying of the workers, the daughter who visits home when papa is
out and the neighbours are not looking, the long years of service and
the short shrift of age, the rottenness and hypocrisy of the whole
business--no, nothing should be said about such things. But to make up
for the omission, you would be told in honied words of the workers who
lovingly kiss each ham as it is reverently carried from the plant to
receive the patriarchal blessing of the owner before it is offered up
as a sacrifice to a grateful but greedy public. The whole affair would
suggest to you a sort of Passion Play in which there was neither Judas
nor Pilot, but just a great, big happy family of ham producers.

This speech, as I have said, would soon appear in the principal papers
of the country. It would be published in installments, each one bearing
its message of peace on earth, good-will to men, and the public--always
preferring Pollyanna to Blue Beard--would be given an altogether false
impression of Dreadnought Hams, and the conditions under which they
were produced. But this particular speech would be only a small part of
the idealism you would be permitted to absorb. There would also be a
patriotic speech about Old Glory, which would somehow become entangled
with the necessity for creating a wider demand for a certain brand of
socks. There would perhaps be a speech on the sacredness of the home,
linked cunningly with the ability of a certain type of talking-machine
to keep the family in at nights and thus make the home even more
sacred. There would be speeches without end, and idealism without
stint, and at last every one would shake hands with every one else and
the glorious occasion would come to an end only to be repeated with
renewed vigour and replenished optimism on the following Friday.

But the actual work of creating advertisements is seldom done in this
rarefied and rose-tinted atmosphere; it is done in the more prosaic
atmosphere of the advertising agency. (And let it be said at once that
although, even in the case of agencies engaging in “Honest Advertising”
campaigns, many such firms indulge in the unscrupulous competitive
practice of splitting their regular commission with their clients in
order to keep and secure accounts, there are still honest advertising
agencies.)

Now there are two important classes of workers in most agencies--the
copy-writer and the solicitor--the man who writes the advertisements
and the man who gets the business. This latter class contains the
wolves of advertising, the restless stalkers through the forests
of industry and the fields of trade. They are leather-lunged and
full-throated; death alone can save their victims from hearing their
stories out. Copywriters, on the other hand, are really not bad at
heart; sometimes they even possess a small saving spark of humour, and
frequently they attempt to read something other than _Printer’s Ink_.
But the full-fledged solicitor is beyond all hope. Coming in close
touch with the client who usually is an industrialist, capitalist,
stand-patter, and high-tariff enthusiast, the solicitor gradually
becomes a small edition of the man he serves, and reflects his ideas
in an even more brutal and unenlightened manner. In their minds there
is no room for change, unless it be change to a new kind of automobile
they are advertising, for new furniture, unless it be the collapsible
table of their latest client, for spring cleaning, unless thereby one
is introduced to the virtues of Germ-Destroying Soap. Things must
remain as they are and the leaders of commerce and industry must be
protected at all costs. To them there are no under-paid workers, no
social evil, no subsidized press, no restraint of free speech, no
insanitary plants, no child-labour, no infant mortality due to an
absence of maternity legislation, no good strikers, and no questionable
public utility corporations. Everything is as it should be, and any one
who attempts to effect a change is a socialist, and that ends it all.

Advertising is very largely controlled by men of this type. Is it any
wonder that it is of a reactionary and artificial nature, and that any
irresponsible promoter with money to spend and an article to sell, will
find a sympathetic and wily minister to execute his plans for him,
regardless of their effect on the economic or social life of the nation?

Turning, for the moment, from the people who create advertisements to
advertising as an institution, what is there to be said for or against
it? What is there to advance in justification of its existence, or
in favour of its suppression? Not knowing on which side the devil’s
advocate pleads his case, I shall take the liberty of representing
both sides, presenting as impartially as possible the cases for the
prosecution and defence and allowing the reader to bring in the verdict
in accordance with the evidence.

The first charge--that the low state of the press and the magazine
world is due solely to advertising--is not, I believe, wholly
fair. There is no use denying that advertising is responsible for
the limitation of free utterance and the nonexistence of various
independent and amusing publications. However, assuming that
advertising were utterly banished from the face of the earth, would
the murky atmosphere be cleared thereby? Would the press become free
and unafraid, and would the ideal magazine at last draw breath in the
full light of day? I think not. Years before advertising had attained
the importance it now enjoys, public service corporations and other
powerful vested interests had found other and equally effective methods
of shaping the news and controlling editorial policies. The fact
remains however, and it is a sufficiently black one, that advertising
is responsible for much of the corruption of our papers and other
publications, as well as for the absence of the type of periodicals
that make for the culture of a people and the enjoyment of good
literature. When a profiteering owner of a large department store
can succeed in keeping the fact of his conviction from appearing in
the news, while a number of smaller offenders are held up as horrid
examples, it is not difficult to decide whether or not it pays to
advertise. When any number of large but loosely conducted corporations
upon which the people and the nation depend, can prevent from
appearing in the press any information concerning their mismanagement,
inefficiency, and extravagance, or any editorial advocating government
control, one does not have to ponder deeply to determine the efficacy
of advertising. When articles or stories dealing with the unholy
conditions existing in certain industries, or touching on the risks of
motoring, the dangers of eating canned goods, or the impossibility of
receiving a dollar’s value for a dollar spent in a modern department
store, are rejected by many publications, regardless of their merit,
one does not have to turn to the back pages of the magazine in order
to discover the names and products of the advertisers paying for the
space. Indeed, one of the most regrettable features of advertising is
that it makes so many things possible for editors who will be good,
and so many things impossible for editors who are too honest and too
independent to tolerate dictation.

Another charge against advertising is that it promotes and encourages
the production of a vast quantity of costly articles many of which
duplicate themselves, and that this over-production of commodities,
many of them of highly questionable value, is injurious to the country
and economically unsound. This charge seems to be well founded in
fact, and illustrated only too convincingly in the list of our daily
purchases. Admitting that a certain amount of competition creates a
stimulating and healthy reaction, it still seems hardly reasonable that
a nation, to appear with a clean face each morning, should require the
services of a dozen producers of safety razors, and several hundred
producers of soap, and that the producers of razors and soap should
spend millions of dollars each year in advertising in order to remind
people to wash and shave. Nor does it seem to be a well-balanced
system of production when such commodities as automobiles, sewing
machines, face powders, toilet accessories, food products, wearing
apparel, candy, paint, furniture, rugs, tonics, machinery, and so
on _ad infinitum_ can exist in such lavish abundance. With so many
things of the same kind to choose from, there is scarcely any reason
to wonder that the purchasing public becomes addle-brained and fickle.
The over-production of both the essentials and non-essentials of
life is indubitably stimulated by advertising, with the result that
whenever business depression threatens the country, much unnecessary
unemployment and hardship arises because of an over-burdened market and
an industrial world crowded with moribund manufacturing plants. “Give
me a strong enough motor and I will make that table fly,” an aviator
once remarked. It could be said with equal truth, “Give me money enough
to spend in advertising and I will make any product sell.” Flying
tables, however, are not nearly so objectionable as a market glutted
with useless and over-priced wares, and an army of labour dependent for
its existence upon an artificially stimulated demand.

The claim that advertising undermines the habits of thrift of a
nation requires no defence. Products are made to be sold and it
is the principal function of advertising to sell them regardless
of their merits or the requirements of the people. Men and women
purchase articles to-day that would have no place in any socially and
economically safe civilization. As long as this condition continues,
money will be drawn out of the savings accounts of the many and
deposited in the commercial accounts of the few--a situation which
hardly makes for happy and healthy families.

It has been asserted by many that advertising is injurious to literary
style. I am far from convinced that this charge is true. In my belief
it has been neither an injurious nor helpful influence. If anything,
it has forced a number of writers to say a great deal in a few words,
which is not in itself an undesirable accomplishment. Nor do I believe
that advertising has recruited to its ranks a number of writers or
potential writers who might otherwise have given pearls of faith to the
world. However, if it has attracted any first-calibre writers, they
have only themselves to blame and there is still an opportunity for
them to scale the heights of literary eminence.

The worst has been said of advertising, I feel, when we agree that
it has contributed to the corruption of the press, that it does help
to endanger the economic safety of the nation, and that, to a great
extent, it appeals to the public in a false and unhealthy manner. These
charges certainly are sufficiently damaging. For the rest, let us admit
that advertising is more or less like all other businesses, subject to
the same criticisms and guilty of the same mistakes. Having admitted
this, let us assume the rôle of the attorney for the defence and see
what we can marshal in favour of our client.

First of all, I submit the fact that advertising has kept many artists
alive--not that I am thoroughly convinced that artists should be kept
alive, any more than poets or any other un-American breed; but for
all that I appeal to your humanitarian instincts when I offer this
fact in support of advertising, and I trust you will remember it when
considering the evidence.

In the second place, advertising is largely responsible for the
remarkable strides we have taken in the art of typography. If you will
examine much of the literature produced by advertising, you will find
there many excellent examples of what can be done with type. To-day no
country in the world is producing more artistic and authentic specimens
of typography than America, and this, I repeat, is largely due to the
influence of advertising.

We can also advance as an argument in favour of advertising that it has
contributed materially to a greater use of the tooth-brush and a more
diligent application of soap. Advertising has preached cleanliness,
preached frantically, selfishly and for its own ends, no doubt, but
nevertheless it has preached convincingly. It matters little what
means are used to achieve the end of cleanliness as long as the end is
achieved. This, advertising has helped to accomplish. The cleanliness
of the body and the cleanliness of the home as desirable virtues are
constantly being held up before the readers of papers and magazines. As
has been said, there are altogether too many different makes of soap
and other sanitary articles, but in this case permit us to modify the
statement by adding that it is much better to have too many of such
articles than too few. This third point in favour of advertising is no
small point to consider. The profession cannot be wholly useless, if
it has helped to make teeth white, faces clean, bodies healthy, homes
fresh and sanitary, and people more concerned with their bodies and the
way they treat them.

The fourth point in favour of advertising is that through the medium
of paid space in the papers and magazines certain deserving movements
have been able to reach a larger public and thus recruit from it new
and valuable members. This example illustrates the value of advertising
when applied to worthy ends. In all fairness we are forced to conclude,
that, after all, there is much in advertising that is not totally
depraved.

Now that we are about to rest the case, let us gaze once more through
the magic portals of the advertising world and refresh our eyes with
its beauty. On second glance we find there is something strangely
pathetic and wistfully human about this World That Never Was. It is
a world very much after our own creation, peopled and arranged after
our own yearnings and desires. It is a world of well regulated bowels,
cornless feet, and unblemished complexions, a world of perfectly
fitting clothes, completely equipped kitchens, and always upright and
smiling husbands. To this world of splendid country homes, humming
motors, and agreeable companions, prisoners on our own poor weary
world of reality may escape for a while to live a few short moments of
unqualified comfort and happiness. Even if they do return from their
flight with pockets empty and arms laden with a number of useless
purchases, they have had at least some small reward for their folly.
They have dwelt and sported with fascinating people in surroundings of
unsurpassed beauty. True, it is not such a world as Rembrandt would
have created, but he was a grim old realist, who, when he wanted to
paint a picture of a person cutting the nails, selected for his model
an old and unscrupulous woman, and cast around her such an atmosphere
of reality that one can almost hear the snip of the scissors as it
proceeds on its revolting business. How much better it would be done
in the advertising world! Here we would be shown a young and beautiful
girl sitting gracefully before her mirror and displaying just enough
of her body to convince the beholder that she was neither crippled nor
chicken-breasted, and all day long for ever and for ever she would sit
thus smiling tenderly as she clipped the pink little moon-flecked nails
from her pink little pointed fingers.

Yes, I fear it is a world of our own creation. Only a few persons
would stand long before Rembrandt’s crude example, while many would
dwell with delight on the curves and allurements of the maid in the
advertising world. Of course one might forget or never even discover
what she was doing, and assuming that one did, one would hardly dwell
upon such an unromantic occupation in connection with a creature so
fair and refined as this ideal young woman; but for all that, one would
at least have had the pleasure of contemplating her loveliness.

So many of us are poor and ill-favoured in this world of ours, so many
girls are not honestly able to purchase more than one frock or one hat
a year, that the occasion of the purchase takes on an importance far
beyond the appreciation of the average well-to-do person. It is fun,
therefore, to dwell upon the lines and features of a perfectly gowned
woman and to imagine that even though poor and ill-favoured, one might
possibly resemble in a modified way, the splendid model, if one could
only get an extra fifteen minutes off at lunch-time in order to attend
the bargain sale. There are some of us who are so very poor that from
a great distance we can enjoy without hope of participation the glory
and triumph of others. The advertising world supplies us with just this
sort of vicarious enjoyment, and, like all other kinds of fiction,
enables us to play for a moment an altogether pleasing rôle in a world
of high adventure.

Therefore let us not be too uncharitable to the advertising world.
While not forgetting its faults, let us also strive to remember its
virtues. Some things we cannot forgive it, some things we would prefer
to forget, but there are others which require less toleration and
fortitude to accept when once they have been understood.

As long as the printed word is utilized and goods are bought and sold,
there will be a place and a reason for advertising--not advertising
as we know it to-day, but of a saner and more useful nature. He would
be a doughty champion of the limitation of free speech who would
deny a man the right to tell the world that he is the manufacturer
of monkey-wrenches, and that he has several thousands of these same
wrenches on hand, all of which he is extremely anxious to sell.

Advertising, although a precocious child, is but in its infancy. In
spite of its rapid development and its robust constitution, it has not
yet advanced beyond the savage and bragging age. It will appeal to our
instincts of greed as quickly as to our instincts of home-building.
It will make friends with the snob that is in us, as readily as it
will avail itself of the companionship of our desire to be generous
and well-liked. It will frighten and bulldoze us into all sorts of
extravagant purchases with the same singleness of purpose that it will
plead with our self-respect in urging us to live cleaner and better
lives. It will use our pride and vanity for its own ends as coolly as
it will use our good nature or community spirit. It will run through
the whole gamut of human emotions, selecting therefrom those best
suited to its immediate ends. Education alone will make the child
behave--not the education of the child so much as the education of the
reader.

Advertising thrives to-day in the shadows created by big business,
and, as a consequence, if it would retain its master’s favour it must
justify his methods, and practise his evil ways. Here it must be
added that there are some honest advertising agencies which refuse to
accept the business of dishonest concerns. It must also be added that
there are some magazines and newspapers which will refuse to accept
unscrupulous advertisements. These advertisements must be notoriously
unscrupulous, however, before they meet this fate. There are even such
creatures as honest manufacturers, but unfortunately for the profession
they too rarely advertise. As a whole, advertising is committed to the
ways of business, and as the ways of business are seldom straight and
narrow, advertising perforce must follow a dubious path. We shall let
it rest at that.

We have made no attempt in this article to take up the subject of
out-door advertising. There is nothing to say about this branch of
the profession save that it is bad beyond expression, and should be
removed from sight with all possible haste. In revolting against the
sign-board, direct action assumes the dignity of conservatism, and
although I do not recommend an immediate assault on all sign-boards,
I should be delighted if such an assault took place. Were I a judge
sitting on the case of a man apprehended in the act of destroying one
of these eyesores, I should give him the key to my private stock, and
adjourn the court for a week.

                                                     J. THORNE SMITH




BUSINESS


Modern business derives from three passions in this order, namely: The
passion for things, the passion for personal grandeur and the passion
for power. Things are multiplied in use and possession when people
exchange with each other the products of specialized labour. Personal
grandeur may be realized in wealth. Gratification of the third passion
in this way is new. Only in recent times has business become a means to
great power, a kind of substitute for kingship, wherein man may sate
his love of conquest, practise private vengeance, and gain dominion
over people.

These passions are feeble on the Oriental side of the world, strong
in parts of Europe, powerful in America. Hence the character of
American business. It is unique, wherein it is so, not in principle
but in degree of phenomena. For natural reasons the large objects of
business are most attainable in this country. Yet this is not the
essential difference. In the pursuit of them there is a characteristic
American manner, as to which one may not unreasonably prefer a romantic
explanation. No white man lives on this continent who has not himself
or in his ancestry the will that makes desire overt and dynamic, the
solitary strength to push his dream across seas. Islands had been
peopled before by this kind of selection, notably England; never a
continent. A reckless, egoistic, experimental spirit governs, betrays,
and preserves us still.

The elemental hunger for food, warmth, and refuge gives no direct
motive to business. People may live and reproduce without business.
Civilization of a sort may exist without its offices. The settler who
disappears into the wilderness with a wife, a gun, a few tools, and
some pairs of domestic beasts, may create him an idyllic habitation,
amid orchards and fields, self-contained in rude plenty; but he is lost
to business until he produces a money crop, that is, a surplus of the
fruits of husbandry to exchange for fancy hardware, tea, window glass,
muslin, china, and luxuries.

The American wilderness swallowed up hundreds of thousands of such
hearth-bearers. Business was slow to touch them. What they had to sell
was bulky. The cost of transportation was prohibitive. There were no
highways, only rivers, for traffic to go upon. Food was cheap, because
the earth in a simple way was bounteous; but the things for which food
could be exchanged were dear. This would naturally be true in a new
country, where craft industry must develop slowly. It was true also
for another reason, which was that the Mother Country regarded the New
World as a plantation to be exploited for the benefit of its own trade
and manufactures.

Great Britain’s claim to proprietary interest in America having been
established against European rivals by the end of the 17th century, her
struggle with the colonists began. The English wanted (1) raw materials
upon which to bestow their high craft labour, (2) an exclusive market
for the output of their mills and factories, and (3) a monopoly of
the carrying trade. The colonists wanted industrial freedom. As long
as they held themselves to chimney-corner industries, making nails,
shoes, hats, and coarse cloth for their own use, there was no quarrel.
But when labour even in a small way began to devote itself exclusively
to handicraft, so that domestic manufactures were offered for sale in
competition with imported English goods, that was business--and the
British Parliament voted measures to crush it. The weaving of cloth for
sale was forbidden, lest the colonists become independent of English
fabrics. So was the making of beaver hats; the English were hatters.
It was forbidden to set up an iron rolling-mill in America, because
the English required pig iron and wished to work it themselves. To all
these acts of Parliament the colonists opposed subterfuge until they
were strong enough to be defiant. That impatience of legal restraints
which is one of the most obstinate traits of American business was then
a patriotic virtue.

Meanwhile the New England trader had appeared--that adorable, hymning,
unconscious pirate who bought molasses in the French West Indies,
swapped it for rum at Salem, Mass., traded the rum for Negroes on the
African coast, exchanged the Negroes for tobacco in Virginia, and sold
the tobacco for money in Europe, at a profit to be settled with God.
This trade brought a great deal of money to the colonies; and they
needed money almost more than anything else. Then the British laid a
ban on trade with the French West Indies, put a tax upon coastwise
traffic between the colonies; and decreed that American tobacco should
be exported nowhere but to English ports, although--or because--tobacco
prices were higher everywhere else in Europe. The natural consequence
of this restrictive British legislation was to make American business
utterly lawless. As much as a third of it was notoriously conducted in
defiance of law. Smuggling both in domestic and foreign trade became
a folk custom. John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of
Independence, was a celebrated smuggler.

During the War of Independence domestic craft industry was stimulated
by necessity. But the means were crude and the products imperfect; and
when, after peace, British merchants with an accumulation of goods
on their hands began to offer them for sale in the United States at
low prices, hoping to recover their new-world trade in competitive
terms, the infant industries cried out for protection. They got
it. One of the first acts of the American Congress was to erect a
tariff against foreign-made goods in order that the country might
become self-sufficing in manufactures. This was the beginning of our
protectionist policy.

Fewer than four million unbusiness-like people coming into free
possession of that part of the North American continent which is
named America was a fabulous business event. We cannot even now
comprehend it. They had not the dimmest notion of what it was they were
possessed of, nor what it meant economically. Geography ran out at the
Mississippi. The tide of Westward immigration was just beginning to
break over the crest of the Alleghany mountains.

Over-seas trade grew rapidly, as there was always a surplus of food and
raw materials to be exchanged abroad for things which American industry
was unable to provide. Foreign commerce was an important source of
group-wealth and public interest was much concerned with it. Besides,
it was easier to trade across seas than inland. Philadelphia until
about 1835 was nearer London than Pittsburgh, not as the crow flies
but as freight moves. Domestic business, arising from the internal
exchange of goods, developed slowly, owing partly to the wretched state
of transportation and partly to the self-contained nature of families
and communities. The population was more than nine-tenths rural; rural
habits survived even in the towns, where people kept cows and pigs,
cured their own meats, preserved their own fruits and vegetables, and
thought ready-made garments a shocking extravagance. Business under
these conditions performed a subservient function. People’s relations
with it were in large measure voluntary. Its uses were more luxurious
than vital. There was not then, nor could any one at this time have
imagined, that interdependence of individuals, groups, communities,
and geographical sections which it is the blind aim of business
increasingly to promote, so that at length the case is reversed and
people are subservient to business.

In Southern New Jersey you may see a farm, now prosperously devoted to
berry and fruit crops, on which, still in good repair, are the cedar
rail fences built by a farmer whose contacts with business were six or
eight trips a year over a sand road to Trenton with surplus food to
exchange for some new tools, tea, coffee, and store luxuries. That old
sand road has become a cement pavement--a motor highway. Each morning
a New York baking corporation’s motor stops at the farm-house and the
driver hands in some fresh loaves. Presently a butcher’s motor stops
with fresh meat, then another one with dry groceries, and yet another
from a New York department store with parcels containing ready-made
garments, stockings and shoes.

Consider what these four motors symbolize.

First is an automobile industry and a system for producing, refining
and distributing oil which together are worth as much as the whole
estimated wealth of America three generations ago.

Back of the bakery wagon what a vista! An incorporated baking industry,
mixing, kneading, roasting, and wrapping the loaf in paraffine paper
without touch of human hands, all by automatic machinery. Beyond the
Mississippi, in a country undiscovered until 1804, the wheat fields
that are ploughed, sown, reaped by power-driven machinery. In Minnesota
a milling industry in which the miller has become an impersonal flour
trust. A railroad system that transports first the grain and then the
flour over vast distances at rates so low that the cost of two or three
thousand miles of transportation in the loaf of bread delivered to the
New Jersey farm-house is inexpressible.... Back of the butcher’s motor
is a meat-packing industry concentrated at Chicago. It sends fresh meat
a thousand miles in iced cars and sells it to a New Jersey farmer for
a price at which he can better afford to buy it than to bother about
producing it for himself.... Back of the grocer’s motor are the food
products and canning industries. By means of machinery they shred,
peel, hull, macerate, roll, cook, cool, and pack fruits, cereals, and
vegetables in cartons and containers which are made, labelled, and
sealed by other automatic machinery.... And back of the department
store motor are the garment-making, shoe-making, textile, and knitting
industries.

If one link in all this ramified scheme of business breaks there is
chaos. If the State of New Jersey were suddenly cut off from the
offices of business for six months, a third of her population might
perish; not that the State is unable potentially to sustain her own,
but that the people have formed habits of dependence upon others, as
others depend upon them, for the vital products of specialized labour.

All this has happened in the life of one cedar rail fence. You say
that is only fifty or sixty years. Nevertheless it is literally so.
The system under which we live has been evolved since 1860. The
transformation was sudden. Never in the world were the physical
conditions of a nation’s life altered so fast by economic means. Yet
it did not happen for many years. The work of unconscious preparation
occupied three-quarters of a century.

Man acts upon his environment with hands, tools, and imagination; and
business requires above everything else the means of cheap and rapid
transportation. In all the major particulars save one the founders
were ill-equipped for their independent attack upon the American
environment. At the beginning of the 19th century there were no
roads, merely a few trails fit only for horseback travel. There were
no canals yet. And the labour wherewith to perform heavy, monotonous
tasks was dear and scarce and largely self-employed. Though the hands
of the pioneer are restless they are not patiently industrious. There
was need of machinery such as had already begun to revolutionize
British industry, but the English jealously protected their mechanical
knowledge.

There is a tradition that the Americans were marvellously inventive
with labour-saving devices. That is to be qualified. Their special
genius lay rather in the adaptation and enthusiastic use of such
devices. The introduction of them was not resisted as in the older
countries by labour unwilling to change its habits and fearful of
unemployment. This was an important advantage.

The American textile industry was founded by British artisans who
came to this country carrying contraband in their heads, that is, the
plans of weaving, spinning, and knitting machines which the English
guarded as carefully as military secrets.... The pre-eminence of this
country in the manufacture and use of agricultural implements is set
out in elementary school-books as proof of American inventiveness; yet
the essential principles of the reaper were evolved in Great Britain
forty years before the appearance of the historic McCormick reaper
(1831) in this country, and threshing-machines were in general use in
England while primitive methods of flailing, trampling, and dragging
prevailed in America. As recently as 1850 the scythe and cradle reaped
the American harvest and there still existed the superstition that
an iron plough poisoned the soil and stimulated weeds. Of all the
tools invented or adopted the one which Americans were to make the
most prodigious use of was the railroad; yet the first locomotive was
brought from England in 1829, the embargo on machinery having by this
time been lifted--and it failed because it was too heavy!

Twenty years passed and still the possibilities of rail transportation
were unperceived, which is perhaps somewhat explained by the fact
that the one largest vested interest of that time existed in canals.
On the map of 1850 the railroads resemble earthworms afraid to leave
water and go inland. The notion of a railroad was that it supplemented
water transportation, connecting lake, canal, and river routes, helping
traffic over the high places.

But in the next ten years--1850 to 1860--destiny surrendered. There
was that rare coincidence of seed, weather, deep ploughing, and
mysterious sanction which the miracle requires. The essential power of
the American was suddenly liberated. There was the discovery of gold
in California. There was the Crimean War, which created a high demand
abroad for our commodities. The telegraph put its indignities upon
time and space. The idea of a railroad as a tool of empire seized the
imagination. Railroads were deliriously constructed. The map of 1860
shows a glistening steel web from the seaboard to the Mississippi.

The gigantesque was enthroned as the national fetich. Votive offerings
were mass, velocity, quantity. True cities began. The spirit of Chicago
was born. Bigness and be-damnedness. In this decade the outlines of our
economic development were cast for good.

In the exclusive perspective of business the Civil War is an indistinct
episode. It stimulated industry in the North, shattered it in the
South. The net result in a purely economic sense is a matter of free
opinion. The Morse telegraph code probably created more wealth than the
war directly destroyed. Or the bitter sectional row over the route of
the first transcontinental railroad which postponed that project for
ten years possibly cost the country more than the struggle to preserve
the Union. But that is all forgotten.

After 1860 the momentum of growth, notwithstanding the war and two
terrible panics, was cumulative. In the next fifty years, down to
1910, we built half as much railroad mileage as all the rest of
the world. Population trebled. This fact stands alone in the data
of vital statistics. Yet even more remarkable were the alterations
of human activity. The number of city dwellers increased 3½ times
faster than the population; the number of wage-earners, 2 times
faster; clerks, salesmen, and typists, 6½ times faster; banks, 7
times faster; corporations, 6½ times faster; miners, 3 times faster;
transportation-workers, 20 times faster, and the number of independent
farmers decreased. Wealth in this time increased from about $500 to
more than $1,500 _per capita_.

If America in its present state of being had been revealed to the
imagination of any hard-headed economist in, say, 1850, as a mirage or
dream, he would have said: “There is in all the world not enough labour
and capital to do it.” He could not have guessed how the power of both
would be multiplied.

First there was the enormous simple addition to the labour supply
in the form of immigration. Then the evolution of machinery and
time-saving methods incredibly increased the productivity of labour
per human unit. Thirdly, the application of power to agriculture and
the opening of all that virgin country west of the Mississippi to
bonanza-farming so greatly increased the production of food per unit
of rural labour that at length it required only half the population to
feed the whole. The other half was free. Business and industry absorbed
it.

Of what happened at the same time to capital, in which term we include
also credit, there could have been no prescience at all. Even now when
we think of building a railroad, a telephone system, or an automobile
factory the thought is that it will take capital, as of course it will
at first, but one should consider also how anything that increases the
velocity with which goods are exchanged, or reduces the time in which
a given amount of business may be transacted, adds to the functioning
power of capital. To illustrate this: the merchant of 1850 did business
very largely with his own capital unaided. He was obliged to invest
heavily in merchandise stocks. The turn-over was slow. His margin
of profit necessarily had to be large. But with the development of
transportation and means of communication--the railroad, telegraph,
and telephone--and with the parallel growth of banking facilities,
the conditions of doing business were fundamentally changed. All the
time-factors were foreshortened.

A merchant now has to lock up much less capital in merchandise, since
his stocks are easily and swiftly replenished. The turn-over is
much faster because people using suburban railways and street-cars
go oftener to shop. And not only is it possible for these reasons to
do a larger volume of business with a given amount of capital, but
the merchant now borrows two-thirds, maybe three-quarters, of his
capital at the bank in the form of credit. The same is true of the
manufacturer. Formerly he locked up his capital, first in raw materials
and then in finished products to be sold in season as the demand was;
and there was great risk of loss in this way of matching supply to
an estimated demand. Now he sells his goods before he makes them,
borrows credit at the bank to buy his raw materials, even to pay his
labour through the processes of manufacture, and when the customer
pays on delivery of the goods with credit which he also has borrowed
at the bank, the manufacturer settles with _his_ bank and keeps the
difference. An exporter was formerly one who bought commodities with
his own money, loaded them on ship, sent them on chance to a foreign
market, and waited for his capital to come back with a profit. Now he
first sells the goods to a foreign customer by cable, then buys them on
credit, loads them on ship, sells the bill of lading to a bank, uses
the proceeds to pay for the goods, and counts his profit. All large
business now is transacted in this way with phantom capital, called
credit; money is employed to settle differences only.

The effect of this revolution of methods upon the morals and manners
of business was tremendous. It destroyed the aristocracy of business
by throwing the field open to men without capital. Traders and brokers
over-ran it. The man doing business on borrowed capital could out-trade
one doing business on his own. The more he borrowed, the harder he
could trade. Salesmanship became a specialized, conscienceless art.
There was no rule but to take all the traffic would bear: let the
buyer look out. Dishonesty in business became so gross that it had
to be sublimated in the national sense of humour. There are many
still living who remember what shopping was like even in the largest
city stores when nobody dreamed of paying the price first asked and
counter-higgling was a universal custom. Indeed, so ingrained it
was that when A. T. Stewart in New York announced the experiment of
treating all buyers alike on a one-price basis his ruin was predicted
by the whole merchant community.

As credit both increases competition and enables a larger business
to be done on a small base of invested capital, the margin of profit
in business tends to fall. Under conditions of intense rivalry among
merchants and manufacturers operating more and more with phantom
capital the margin of profit did fall until it was very thin indeed.
This led to the abasement of goods by adulteration and tricks of
manufacture, which became at length so great an evil that the
government had to interfere with pure-food acts and laws forbidding
wilful misrepresentation.

There was a limit beyond which the cost of production could not be
reduced by degradation of quality. It was impossible to control prices
with competition so wild and spontaneous and with cheapness the
touchword of success. Therefore the wages of business were low, and
things apparently had come to an impasse. Yet out of this chaos arose
what now we know as big business. The idea was simple--mass production
of standardized foods. The small, fierce units of business began to be
amalgamated. As society is integrated by steps--clan, tribe, nation,
State--so big business passed through mergers, combines, and trusts
toward the goal of monopoly.

When a number of competing manufacturers unite to produce standard
commodities in quantity, much duplication of effort is eliminated,
time-saving methods are possible as not before, the cost of production
is reduced. There are other advantages. They are stronger than they
were separately, not only as buyers of labour, raw materials, and
transportation, but as borrowers of capital. The individual or firm
is the customer of a bank. The corporation makes a partnership with
finance.

Now a curious thing happens. The corporation with its mass production
restores the quality of goods. It is responsible for its products and
guarantees them by brands, labels and trade-marks. Sugar and oatmeal
come out of the anonymous barrel behind the grocer’s counter and go
into attractive cartons on his shelf, bearing the name of the producer.
Gloves, shirts, stockings, cutlery, furniture, meat products, jams,
watches, fabrics, everything in fact becomes standardized by name
and price and is advertised by the producer directly to the public
over the retailer’s head, so that the small retailer is no longer a
merchant in the old sense but a grumbling commission-man. Big business
has delivered itself from the impasse; it has recovered control of
its profits; but now the retailer’s margin of profit tends to become
fixed. What does the retailer do? He applies the same principle to the
last act of selling. Enter the chain-store. Obviously a corporation
owning a chain of several hundred stores and working, like the
manufacturer, with borrowed capital, is stronger than any one retailer
to bargain with the powerful producers, and as the chain-store tends
to displace the little retailer a balance is restored between the
business of production and the business of retailing. Mass production
is met by mass selling. The consumer as the last subject may resort to
legislation for his protection.

Big business could not have evolved in this way without the aid of the
railroads. Their dilemma was similar. Strife and competition had ruined
their profits. To begin with, nobody knew what it cost to produce
transportation. When a new line was opened it made rates according to
circumstances. At points where it met water competition it charged
very little, sometimes less than the cost of its fuel, and at points
where there was no competition it charged all the traffic would stand.
Then as competitive railroad-building excessively increased the high
rates steadily fell. Once they got started people were obsessed to make
railroads. They made them for speculative reasons, for feudal reasons,
for political reasons, for any reason at all. Two men might quarrel in
Wall Street, and one would build a thousand miles of railroad to spite
the other--build it with the proceeds of shares sold to the public or
hypothecated at the bank. Then there would be two roads to divide the
business of one. Railroads under these conditions were unscientifically
planned and over-built. The profit was rather in the building than
in the working of them. There was scandal both ways. Quantities of
fictitious capital were created and sold to the public. And when a
railroad was built it became the plaything of its traffic manager, who
conspired with other traffic managers to sell favours to shippers and
to invent disastrous rate-wars in order to profit by the fall of shares
on the stock market.

Rates could not be raised or held up, owing to the irresponsible
nature of the competition. Transportation is a commodity that cannot
be adulterated. How was the profit to be restored in this field of
business? Why, by the same method as in industry. That is, by mass
production.

Some one discovered that once you got a loaded train out of the
terminal and rolling on the right-of-way it cost almost nothing to
keep it moving. There was no money in hauling small lots of freight
short distances at the highest rates that could be charged; but there
was profit in moving large quantities of freight in full cars over
long distances at very low rates. At this the railroad people went mad
over the long, heavy haul. Here was industry seeking to concentrate
itself in fewer places for purposes of mass production; and here were
the railroads wanting masses of freight to move long distances. Their
problems coincided.

Result: mass production gravitates to those far-apart long-haul points
to get the benefit of low rates, there is congestion of industrial
population at those points, industry at intermediate points is
penalized by higher freight rates, and the railroads henceforth equip
themselves with mass tonnage primarily in view. You begin now to have
steel towns, meat towns, flour towns, textile towns, garment towns, and
so on. That interdependence of communities and geographical sections
which makes business is in full development.

However, the second state of the railroad is worse than the first. It
is overwhelmed by the monster it has suckled. It is at the mercy of
a few big shippers, masters of mass production, who bully it, extort
lower and lower rates still, and at length secret rebates, under threat
of transferring their tonnage to another railroad or in some cases of
building their own railroad, which now they are powerful enough to do.
The railroad yields; and whereas before only such industry as survived
at intermediate points was penalized by higher freight rates, now
all industry outside of big business is at a disadvantage, since big
business is receiving secret benefits from the railroads.

There was no philosophy in any of this, not even a high order of
intelligence. The will of business is anarchistic; its religion is
fatalism. If let alone, it will seek its profit by any means that serve
and then view the consequences as acts of Providence.

It has been noted that big business, going in for mass production,
restored the honesty of goods. The motive was not ethical. It paid. The
public’s good will toward a brand or a trade-mark was an asset that
could be capitalized, sometimes for more than plant and equipment, and
the shares representing such capitalization could be sold to the public
on the Stock Exchange. But what was gained for morality in the honesty
of goods was lost again in new forms of dishonesty. Standard Oil
products were always cheap and honest; its oil was never watered. But
the means by which the Standard Oil Company gained its dangerous trade
eminence were dishonest, and the trust was dissolved for that reason by
the United States Supreme Court. It happens to be only the most notable
instance. There were and are still many others--combines and trusts
whose products are honest but whose tradeways are either illegal or
ethically repugnant.

One cannot say that business is either honest or dishonest. It is both.
Evidence of permanent gain in a kind of intrinsic commercial honesty is
abundant. Wild-cat banking has disappeared. A simple book entry between
merchants is as good as a promissory note. The integrity of merchandise
now is a trade custom. Vulgar misrepresentations have ceased save in
the slums of business. The practice of making open prices to all buyers
alike, wholesale and retail, is universal. It is no longer possible to
print railroad shares surreptitiously overnight and flood the Stock
Exchange with them the next morning, as once happened in Erie. Nowhere
is character more esteemed than in business.

And yet, in spite of all this and parallel with it, runs a bitter feud
between society and business. People are continually acting upon big
business through the agencies of government to make it behave. What is
the explanation?

Well, in the first place, the improvement in commercial honesty
has been owing not so much to ethical enlightenment as to internal
necessity. Big business must do its work on credit; there is no other
way. Therefore credit is a sacred thing, to be preserved by all
means. Men know that unless they are scrupulous in fulfilling their
obligations toward it, the system will collapse. As the use of credit
increases the code of business become more rigid. It must. One who
breaks faith with the code is not merely dishonest, man to man; he is
an enemy of credit.

If a stock-market coterie of this day could print Erie shares without
notice and sell them the public would suffer of course but Wall Street
would suffer much more. Its own affairs would fall into hopeless
disorder. That kind of thing cannot happen again. The code has been
improved. You now may be sure that anything you buy on the Stock
Exchange has been regularly issued and listed. No institution is more
jealous of the integrity of its transactions--transactions as such.
Purchases and sales involving millions are consummated with a nod
of the head and simple dishonesty is unknown. Nevertheless, it is a
notorious fact that the amount of money nowadays lost on the Stock
Exchange by the unwary public is vastly greater than in Jay Gould’s
time. There is, you see, an important difference between formal and
moral honesty.

Secondly, business morality is a term without meaning. There is no
such thing. Business is neither moral nor immoral. It represents man’s
acquisitive instinct acting outside of humanistic motives. Morals are
personal and social. Business is impersonal and unsocial.

So far we come clear. Only now, what shall be said of the man in
business? He is not a race apart. He may be any of us. How then shall
we account for the fact that those evils and tyrannies of big business
with which the Congress, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the
Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Board, and other agencies
of the social will keep open war are not inhibited at the head by an
innate social sense? Does the business man lose that sense? Or by
reason of the material in which he works does he become an unsocial
being? No. The answer is that the kind of business we now are talking
about is not conducted by men. It is conducted by corporations.

A thing of policy purely, with only legal responsibilities and no
personality, free from hope of heaven or fear of hell, the corporation
is both a perfect instrument for the impersonal ends of business and a
cave of refuge for the conscience. Business by corporations is highly
responsible in all that pertains to business. Business by corporations
is in all ethical respects anonymous. A corporation does many things
which no one of its directors would do as an individual. The head
of a corporation says: “If it were my own business, I should handle
this labour problem very differently. But it isn’t. I am a trustee,
answerable to five thousand stockholders for the security of their
dividends.” Each of the five thousand stockholders says: “It isn’t my
business. I am merely one of a great number of stockholders. What can I
do about it?”

Nobody is personally responsible.

More than two-thirds of our national wealth is owned by corporations.
They control at some point every process of economic life. Their power
is so great that many have wondered whether in time it might not
overwhelm popular government. Yet in all this realm of power there is
nowhere that sense of personal moral liability which is acknowledged
between men and without which civilized human relationships would
become utterly impossible. A corporation is like a State in this
respect: it cannot, if it would, make moral decisions. The right to do
that is not delegated by people to a State nor by stockholders to a
corporation. Both therefore are limited to material decisions.

It is probably owing as much to the power-thirsty, law-baiting
temperament of the American in business as to the magnitude of the
work to be done that the use of the corporation, like the use of
labour-saving machinery, has been carried further here than in any
other country. Railroads naturally were the first great corporations.
The amount of capital required to build a railroad is beyond the
resources of any small group of individuals; it must be gathered from
a large number, who become shareholders. The original railroads were
subsidized by the government with loans of money and enormous grants
of land. Industrial and trading corporations came later. For a long
time America was to all corporations a Garden of Eden. They were
encouraged, not precisely that they were presumed to be innocent but
because they were indispensable. Then they ate of the Tree of Political
Power and the feud was on. When people began really to fear them their
roots were already very deep and touched nearly everything that was
solid. The sinister alliance between big business and high finance was
accomplished.

One of the absurdities of the case was and is that any State according
to its own laws may grant corporation-charters which carry rights of
eminent domain in all other states. The Standard Oil Company was once
dissolved in Ohio. It took out a new charter in New Jersey, and went on
as before, even in Ohio.

Every attempt to reform their oppressive ways by law they have resisted
under the constitution as an attack upon the rights of property. And
there has always been much confusion as to what the law was. In one
case it was construed by the United States Supreme Court to mean that
bigness itself, the mere power of evil, was illegal whether it had been
exercised or not; in another, that each instance must be treated on its
merits by a rule of reason, and, in still another, that the potential
power to restrain trade in a monopolistic manner was not in itself
illegal provided it had never been used.

Nevertheless the doubt as to which should control the other--the State
the corporations or the corporations the State--has been resolved.
Gradually the authority of the State has been asserted. The hand of the
corporation in national politics is branded. The Federal Government’s
control over the rates and practices of the railroads is complete; so
likewise is the control of many of the several separate States over the
rates and practices of public-utility corporations. Federal authority
over the tradeways of the great industrial and trading corporations
whose operations are either so large or so essential, to economic
life as to become clothed with public interest is far advanced; and
supervision of profits is beginning.

Now what manner of profit and loss account may we write with American
business?

Given to begin with an environment superb, it has made wealth available
to an aggregate extent hitherto unimaginable in the world. But in doing
this it has created a conscious, implacable proletariat in revolt
against private profit.

In production it has brought about a marvellous economy of human
effort. At the same time it has created colossal forms of social
waste. It wastes the spirit by depriving the individual of that sense
of personal achievement, that feeling of participation in the final
result, which is the whole joy of craftsmanship, so that the mind is
bored and the heart is seared. It wastes all things prodigally in the
effort to create new and extravagant wants, reserving its most dazzling
rewards for him that can make two glittering baubles to sell where only
one was sold before. It wastes the living machine in recurring periods
of frightful and unnecessary idleness.

For the distribution of goods it has perfected a web of exchange, so
elaborate that the breaking of one strand is a disaster and yet so
trustworthy that we take its conveniences every day for granted and
never worry. But the adjustment of supply to demand is so rude and
uncontrolled that we suffer periodic economic calamities, extreme
trade depression, and social distress, because there has been an
over-production of some things at a price-impasse between producer and
consumer.

In the field of finance and credit it has evolved a mechanism of the
highest dynamic intensity known; yet the speculative abuse of credit is
an unmitigated scandal, and nothing whatever has been done to eliminate
or diminish those alternations of high and low prices, inflation and
deflation, which produce panics and perilous political disorder. On the
contrary, business continues fast in the antique superstition that such
things happen in obedience to inexorable laws.

In the Great War American business amazed the world, itself included.
In 1914 the United States was a debtor nation, owing Europe 3 billions
of dollars. By the end of 1920 we were the largest creditor nation
on earth, other nations owing us 15 billions. This means simply
that in six years this country produced in excess of its own needs
and sent abroad commodities amounting to 18 billions of dollars. In
1921, to the naïve astonishment of business, the foreign demand
for American goods slumped because foreign countries had not the
means to go on buying at any such rate. The result was an acute
panic in prices here, trade prostration, unemployment, and sounds of
despair. The case was stated by leaders of business and finance in
these ominous terms: “America is over-equipped. It has the capacity
to produce more of everything than it needs. Therefore unless we
continuously sell our surplus abroad, unless the American government
will lend foreign countries the credit with which to buy our excess
production, prosperity is shattered. Factories will shut up, fields
will lie fallow, labour will suffer for want of work. Moreover, we are
threatened with a deluge of foreign goods, for presently the countries
that owe us 18 billions of dollars will be trying to pay us with
commodities. If we open our markets to their goods our own industries
will be ruined. So we must have high tariffs to protect American
producers from the competition of foreign merchandise.”

Ruined by over-plenty!

We are equipped to produce more of the goods that satisfy human wants
than we can use, our command over the labour of foreign countries by
reason of the debt they owe us is enormous, and _business desponds_.

Attend. To keep our prosperity we must sell away our surplus, or if
necessary give it away to foreign countries on credit, and then protect
ourselves against their efforts to repay us! The simple absurdity
of this proposition is self-evident. We mention it only for what
it signifies. And it signifies that business is a blind, momentous
sequence, with extravagant reflex powers of accommodation and extension
and almost no faculty of original imagination.

American business despairing at over-production and the American Indian
shivering on top of the Pennsylvania coalfields--these are twin ironies.

John Law’s Mississippi Bubble dream three centuries ago was a phantasy
of escape from the boredom of toil. The bubble itself has been
captured. That is the story of American business. But who has escaped,
save always a few at the expense of many? There may be in fact no other
way. Still, the phantasy will not lie. And nobody knows for sure what
will happen when business is no longer a feudal-minded thing, with
rights and institutions apart, seeking its own profit as the consummate
end, and perceives itself in the light of a subordinate human function,
justified by service.

                                                       GARET GARRETT




ENGINEERING


American engineering made its beginning almost immediately after
the end of the War for Independence. The pursuits of the colonists
under British domination were mainly agricultural. Manufacturing was
systematically thwarted in order that the Colonies might become a
market for the finished goods of England. Objection to this form of
sabotage subsequently developed into one of the main causes of the
Revolutionary War. It was but natural, therefore, as soon as the
artificial restrictions imposed upon Colonial enterprise were removed,
for the new citizens of America to devise machinery, build roads and
canals, and plan cities.

The early engineers who carried on this work were seldom formally
trained. They were little more than higher types of artisans. It was
only after thirty-odd years of discussion and agitation that the first
scientific schools were established in this country--two in number. And
it was only after the enactment of the Morrill Act by Congress (1862)
that formal engineering training as we know it to-day was put on a firm
national basis. By 1870, 866 engineers had been graduated from American
technical schools and colleges. The real advent of the typical American
engineer, however, has only occurred since 1870. At present he is being
supplied to the industries of the country at the rate of 5,000 a year.

The coming of the formally trained technologist or scientist of
industry lagged somewhat behind the development of the industrial
revolution. This was particularly true in America. Originally all
attention was centered on the training of so-called civil engineers,
i.e., canal, bridge, road, dam and building designers and constructors.
The rapid rise of the mechanical arts after the Civil War focused
attention on the training of engineers expert in manufacturing. To-day
the mechanical and electrical engineers are more numerous than any
other group and have far outstripped the civil engineers.

The original function of the engineer, especially in the first
days of his systematic training, was to deal scientifically with
purely mechanical problems. Thus the oft quoted definition of the
British Institution of Civil Engineers that “Engineering is the art
of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and
convenience of man” reveals quite clearly the legitimate field within
which the engineer was supposed to operate. He was to harness the
untamed energies of nature. That this conception was then sufficient,
and that the careers of most engineers were shaped accordingly, is
hardly to be disputed. Nor, judging from the achievement of American
engineers in the last fifty years, can it be contended that their
function was conceived in too narrow a light. Undoubtedly, the problems
of mechanical production, power-creation and transmission, bridge and
building construction, and railway and marine transportation, during
this period were largely material ones, and the opportunities for
their solution were especially good. To these the engineers directed
their attention. Thanks to their training, technique, and accumulated
experience, they became more and more successful in solving them.
At the same time, their relative freedom of thought and action with
reference to technological problems brought them into more or less
coherent groups which, as time went on, began to conceive a larger
function for the engineer--service to society as a whole rather than
the solving of mere concrete, specific difficulties.

For while the material problems of production are undoubtedly as
important as ever, the present-day industrial system has begun to
reveal new problems which the engineer in America has, to a limited
extent, come to realize must be faced. These new problems are not
material in the old sense of the word; they concern themselves with the
control and administration of the units of our producing system. Their
nature is psychological and economic.

Certain groups in the American engineering profession have become quite
conscious that these deeper problems are not being solved; at the same
time they consider it a necessary duty to help in their solution,
inasmuch as the engineer, they feel, is peculiarly fitted to see his
way clearly through them. Thus is being split off from the main body
of old-line engineers, a new wing not so much concerned with wringing
power from nature as with adjusting power to legitimate social needs.
As against the old engineer, concerned primarily with design and
construction, there is to be recognized the new engineer, concerned
mainly with industrial management.

Unfortunately, however, a strict evaluation of the engineer’s status
with reference to the influence he may have on the solution of these
social and economic problems causes serious doubts to arise regarding
his ultimate possibilities in this field. Despite his great value and
recognized indispensability as a technologist, expert in problems
of materials and processes of manufacture, he can at best but serve
in an advisory capacity on questions affecting the division of the
national surplus or the control of industry. Nevertheless, it is of
fundamental significance that the American engineering profession has
of late considerably widened the scope of the British Institution of
Civil Engineers’ definition of engineering, namely, to the effect that
“Engineering is the science of controlling the forces and utilizing the
materials of nature for the benefit of man _and the art of organizing
and of directing human activities in connection therewith_.” The
implications of this much broader definition, if widely accepted,
will bring the American engineers sooner or later squarely before a
fundamental issue.

The ideal of service is profoundly inherent in the profession of
engineering. But so, also, is the ideal of creative work. The
achievements of engineering enterprise are easily visualized and
understood, and from them the engineer is wont to derive a great
deal of satisfaction. Recently, however, the exactions of the modern
complex economic system, in which the engineer finds himself relatively
unimportant compared with, say, the financier, have contrived to rob
him of this satisfaction. And as his creative instincts have been
thwarted, he has turned upon business enterprise itself a sharp and
inquiring eye. From isolated criticisms of wastes and inefficiencies in
industry, for instance, he has not found it a long or difficult step to
the investigation of industry on a national basis for the purpose of
exposing technical and managerial shortcomings.

It appears, however, that the majority of American engineers
to-day believe that their position as a class is such that they can
effectively maintain an impartial position when differences which arise
between large economic groups of society such as those of the merchant,
the manufacturer, the labourer, the farmer, although these differences
frequently lead to economic waste and loss. At all events, it is on
this basis that attempts are being made to formulate a general policy
for engineers as a class to pursue. It is very doubtful, however,
whether a group such as the engineers, constituting the “indispensable
general staff of industry,” can long take an impartial attitude towards
two such conflicting forces as capital and labour so long as they (the
engineers) adhere to the ideal of maximum service and efficiency. The
pickets of the fence may eventually prove unduly sharp.

A minority group which believes otherwise has already organized
into an international federation of technicians affiliated with the
standard organized labour movement of America. This group holds that
the engineer is a wage-earner like all other industrial workers, and
that his economic welfare in many instances is no better than that
of ordinary wage-earners. In addition, this group maintains that in
the last analysis it is flatly impossible for engineers to take an
impartial attitude in the struggle between capital and labour. Hence
they advocate the engineer affiliating with the organized labour
movement like other wage earners and, in times of crisis, throwing his
influence with the workers of industry.

The organized labour movement of America has indicated in clear terms
its estimate of the American engineer’s true value and opportunity. The
American Federation of Labour in 1919 issued the following statement:

    “To promote further the production of an adequate supply of the
    world’s needs for use and higher standards of life, we urge
    that there be established co-operation between the scientist of
    industry and the representatives of the organized workers.”

This conviction has also been expressed in the following terms:

    “The trades-union movement of America understands fully the
    necessity for adequate production of the necessities of life.
    American labour understands, perhaps more fully than do
    American statesmen, the needs of the world in this hour, and it
    is exerting every effort to see that those needs are met with
    intelligence and with promptness. The question of increased
    productivity is not a question of putting upon the toilers
    a more severe strain; it is a question of vast fundamental
    changes in the management of industry; a question of the
    elimination of outworn policies; a question of the introduction
    of the very best in machinery and methods of management.”

The fundamental significance of these attitudes of the engineers and
the organized workers of the country will perhaps be better understood
when it is realized how indispensable the engineers have become in
the conduct of industrial affairs to-day. While virtually the product
of the last fifty years, they have already fallen heir to one of the
most strategic positions in society. To them are entrusted the real
“trade secrets” of industry. Only they understand how far the intricate
material processes of manufacture are interdependent, and how they can
be kept in harmony. The engineers have the skill and the understanding
which is absolutely necessary for industrial management. Without their
guidance the present highly complicated system of production would
quickly tumble into chaos.

The ownership of industry has frequently been suggested as the key
to the true emancipation of the great mass of workers of a nation.
Leastwise many theoretical arguments on the process of workers’
liberation have been premised on the necessity of eventually
liquidating the institution of private property. How futile such a
programme is without recognizing the indispensable part which technical
and managerial skill plays in any system of production has been
emphasized again and again by individuals, notably in Russia and Italy,
where the experiment of securing production without the assistance
of adequate technical control has been tried. In fact, the whole
question of property control is secondary when once the true value of
engineering management is understood. In so far as the American workers
see this, and make it possible for American engineers to co-operate
with them in their struggle for liberation, will they make the task
of the worker more easy and avoid the frequent recurrence of wasteful
and often tragic conflict. The burden, however, is equally upon the
shoulders of the engineer to meet labour half way in this enterprise.

It is very much to be doubted if most American engineers really have
a clear understanding of the position in which they find themselves,
beyond a general conception of their apparent impartiality. The
progressive economic concepts and activities which have been outlined,
while advanced by representatives of national associations of
engineers, are not necessarily the reflection of the great mass of
American engineers to-day, over 200,000 strong. Nevertheless, it is
fortunate that an otherwise conservative and socially timid body of
individuals, such as the engineers frequently have been in the past,
should now find itself represented by a few spokesmen at least who are
able to promulgate clear statements on fundamental issues. The rank and
file of engineers have a long road to travel before they will be in a
position to command adequate consideration for their basic ideals and
purposes as expressed in their new definition of engineering, and as
proposed by some of their leaders.

It is, indeed, seriously to be doubted if many engineers of America
have really had the training to grasp the relation of their position
to the economic developments of to-day. Conventional engineering
education has been entirely too narrow in its purpose. It has succeeded
in turning out good technical practitioners, not far-seeing economic
statesmen. In recent years many engineering schools have placed
emphasis on what has aptly been termed “The business features of
engineering practice.” This, while conceivably a good thing from the
standpoint of the limits within which engineering enterprise must
ordinarily function to-day, is bound to over-emphasize the _status
quo_, and so confine the vision of the engineer.

Engineers in this country have frequently taken a sort of pharisaic
attitude on the desirability--offhand--of delegating the entire running
of things human to technical experts. While such experts may usually
have been quite successful in operating engineering enterprises, it
hardly follows that this necessarily qualifies them for the wholesale
conduct of the affairs of society.

Yet the demand on the part of certain engineers for a more fundamental
participation in the conduct of the larger economic and political
affairs of society should be construed as a healthy sign. It is an
outgrowth of an intellectual unrest among the profession, precipitated
by the thwarting of a genuine desire to build and serve. This unrest,
in the absence of a constructive outlet combined with the past failure
of engineering education to provide a real intellectual background, has
resulted from time to time in some amusing phenomena. Thus not a few
engineers have developed a sort of symbolism or mysticism, expressed
in the terminology of their profession, with a view to building a
new heaven and a new earth whose directing head they propose to be.
From this they derive a peculiar satisfaction and perhaps temporary
inspiration, and incidentally they often seem to confound laymen who
do not understand the meaning of their terms. Instead of deriving
comfort from symbolic speculations and futurist engineering diagrams,
one would rather expect engineers to be realists, especially in the
larger affairs of their profession. The seriousness with which the
speculations concerning “space-binding” and “time-binding” have been
taken is an example of how engineers with their present one-sided
intellectual development may seize upon metaphysical cobwebs for
spiritual solace in their predicament.

Another aspect of the intellectual limitations of many American
engineers is revealed by some of the controversies which engage the
technical societies and the technical periodicals. A notable and
recurring instance is the debate concerning the relative merits of
steam and electrical operation of railways. The real question which
underlies replacing a going system with one which is better but more
costly in capital outlay is primarily economic in nature. Consequently
such a change is contingent upon a revised distribution of the national
surplus rather than on the comparative merits of detail parts. This
fact seldom seems to get home to the engineers. They have been arguing
for the last fifteen years the relative advantages of this or that
detail, failing all the while to understand that the best, in the
large, from an engineering standpoint, can be secured only when
unrestricted, free enterprise has given way to some form of enterprise
regulated principally in the interest of public service.

The profession of engineering, especially in America, is still young
enough not to have become ridden with tradition and convention. It has
developed rapidly along essentially pragmatic though perhaps narrow
lines. Certainly it is not bound and circumscribed by precedent and
convention like the legal profession, or even the medical profession.
Above all, it derives its inspiration from powerful physical realities,
and this constitutes its bulwark.

What the profession really lacks are two fundamentals, absolutely
necessary for any group strategically located and desirous of
leadership in society. These are: (1) an intellectual background based
squarely upon a comprehensive study of the economic and political
institutions of society, their history, growth, and function, together
with a study of the larger aspects of human behaviour and rights;
and, (2) the development of a facility for intelligent criticism,
especially of engineering and economic enterprises. A wholesome
intellectual background is necessary to interpret the new position and
its prerogatives which the application of science has created for the
engineer. A development of the critical faculty is desirable in order
to enable him to detect the blandishments of cult, the temptations of
formulas and systems expressed in indefinable abstractions, and the
pitfalls of the _status quo_.

The responsibility for the American engineer’s function in society
rests largely upon the schools which train him. Engineering education
in America has done its task relatively well considered from the simple
technical point of view. Of late, progressive engineering educators
have stressed the necessity for paying more attention to the humanistic
studies in the engineering curriculum. The beginning made in this
respect is, however, entirely too meagre to warrant much hope that
younger American engineers will soon acquire either that intellectual
background or genuine critical faculty which will entitle them to a
larger share of responsibility for the affairs of men.

The most hopeful sign in this direction is rather the fusion of the
engineers into a large federation of societies, with service to the
community, State, and Nation as their motto; a growing tendency,
collectively, at least, to investigate the conduct of national
industrial enterprises; and, finally, an attempt at a rapprochement,
in the interest of society, between labour and the engineers. Ere
long these developments will reflect themselves in the schools of
engineering, and then, it is reasonable to expect, will the process of
developing a truly worthy class of industrial leaders in this country
really make its beginning. In America to-day no such leadership exists.


                                                    O. S. BEYER, JR.




NERVES


Young as America is, she is nevertheless old enough to have known the
time when there were no such things as nerves. Our earliest settlers
and colonists, our proverbially hardy pioneers apparently managed to
get along with a very modest repertory of diseases. They died, if
not from malnutrition or exposure or from Indians, then from some
old-fashioned, heaven-sent seizure or sudden pain, not to mention
from “old age,” long a favourite diagnosis of a pious and not too
inquisitive school of medicine even where the patient’s age had to be
entered by the coroner as of forty or thereabouts. As for the various
forms of nervousness which belong to our age of indulgence and luxury,
they were unknown to those sturdier times, and would undoubtedly have
put their unhappy victims under the quick suspicion of having had
forbidden converse with the Devil.

If, nevertheless, we feel justified in assuming that this golden age
of health and disease probably hid beneath its tinsel a good many of
the nervous afflictions which had already made the Middle Ages so
interesting, we must bear in mind that the pioneer neurotic of those
days had at his command a number of disguises and evasions to which
his fellow-sufferer of to-day can no longer have recourse. One of his
favourite expedients for concealing his neurotic maladjustment was to
take refuge in some form of religion or rather in some new variation of
religious belief or practice, for it is, of course, not claimed here
that religion itself can be exhaustively explained as a manifestation
of nervous maladjustment. But the colonial period was an era when it
was still good form, so to speak, for a neurosis to express itself
in some religious peculiarity, and as this was a country without
monasteries (which had proved to be such a haven for the neurotically
afflicted during the Middle Ages), the neurotic was forced to exhibit
his neo-religionism in the open. Often he blossomed forth in some new
form of religious segregation, which allowed him to compensate for his
social defect and often gave him positive advantages.

The neurotic legacy which he thus bequeathed to the nation can still
be seen all around us to-day in the extraordinary multiplicity of
religious variations, not to say eccentricities, which dot the
theological heavens in America. For the neurotic as a religion
founder--or better, inventor--quickly gathered similarly inclined
adherents, formed a sect, and moved a little further West, so that
the country was rather plentifully sown with strange creeds. He was
thus freed from the criticism which would have overtaken him in a more
settled society and his neurotic disguise remained undetected to a
degree no longer possible to-day. For if nowadays we still occasionally
encounter a brand-new and crassly individual religion all registered
and patented like any temperance elixir, we usually discover that its
prophet is either a defective or even an illiterate person who has
distorted some biblical text in favour of a bizarre interpretation,
or else a psychopathic individual who already has highly systematized
ideas of the delusioned type. This class of neurotic has tended
to disappear by somewhat the same process through which the more
flamboyant type of hysteric such as flourished in the Middle Ages has
gradually succumbed to progressive exposure--an analogy to which I
refer with some diffidence in the face of one of the supreme ironies
of the 20th century, namely, the canonization of Joan of Arc. But that
lapse into the darkness of mediævalism is probably to be explained as a
by-product of the war mind.

The other great loophole for the early American neurotic was purely
geographical. He could always move on. In view of the tendency towards
social avoidance so characteristic of the neurotic, this was of
inestimable advantage. It is, of course, generally supposed that when
the embryonic American trekked Westward it was either in response to
some external pressure of political oppression or religious intolerance
or to the glad, free call of wider horizons and more alluring
opportunities, as was the case with the earliest colonists in their
flight from Europe. In both cases, however, the assumption may be
challenged as a sufficient explanation. For it is extremely probable
that a good many of these pioneers were, like Mr. Cohan’s “Vagabond,”
fugitives from their own thoughts quite as much as from the tyranny
of others. They felt an urge within them that made a further abidance
in their social environment intolerable. This geographical flight of
the neurotic has always been the most natural and the most obvious,
checked though it is to-day to a large extent by the disappearance of
further virgin territory and the sophistication born of the knowledge
wrought by a world-wide intercommunication which says that mankind is
everywhere much the same, a truth which can again be translated into an
internal realization that we cannot escape from ourselves.

Certainly our pioneers have been too much romanticized. The neurotic
legacy which they bequeathed to us can plainly be seen in many
characteristics of our uncouth Westerners with their alternate coldness
towards visitors and their undignified warmth towards the casual
stranger who really cannot mean anything to them. There is something
wrong about man as a social animal when he cannot live happily in a
valley where he sees more than the distant smoke of his neighbour’s
chimney. When at last the pressure of population forces him to live
socially his suspicion and distrust are likely to turn him into a
zealot and reformer and make possible the domination in American life
of such a sub-cultural type as Bryan or the beatitudes of a State
like Kansas. The favourite Western exhortation to be able to look a
man in the eye and tell him to go to Hell is worthy of an anti-social
community of ex-convicts, and the maxim about minding your own business
can only be understood as a defence against the prevalent tendency of
everybody to mind his neighbour’s business. Thus the self-isolating
neurotic ends by revenging himself upon society by making it
intolerable.

But this is to anticipate. It must be said that until after the Civil
War America remained singularly free from “nerves.” This is perhaps
largely due to the fact, as I have tried to show, that they were not
known as such. The only serious epidemic was the witchcraft hunting of
the 17th century. It is certainly most charitable towards a religion
which had so many other repellent features to characterize this as an
hysterical epidemic and let it go at that, though it also freshly
illustrates the time-worn truth that intolerance does not seem to
make its victims any more tolerant in their turn. The passing of this
epidemic also marked the last irruption of State intolerance towards
religion, with the exception of later incidents in connection with the
Mormon Church, though it has rarely been understood that especially
in this country State tolerance of religion was compensated for by
individual and social intolerance in matters that quite transcended the
religious sphere. The vast importance of this phenomenon in relation to
our modern nervous tension will be referred to again later on.

The first typical manifestation of American nerves on an imposing scale
began to develop in the sixties and seventies of the last century in
the form of neurasthenia. Until then the typical American, despite
his religious obsessions and his social deficiencies, had, to a large
extent, remained externally minded, a fact which is sufficiently
attested by his contempt for the arts and his glorification of his
purely material achievements. He had been on the make, an absorbing
process while it lasts, though rather dangerous in the long run because
it never comes to an end. Neurasthenia developed rapidly as soon as it
had been properly labelled, and claimed a notable number of victims
among our captains of industry and high-pressure men: indeed, the
number might easily lead to the perhaps rather unkindly conclusion that
business dishonesty, even though successful, is likely to result in
nervous breakdown in a generation piously reared on the unimpeachable
maxims of a Benjamin Franklin or a Herbert Smiley. More fundamentally
it was, of course, the logical penalty for cultivating the purely
energetic side of man at the expense of his contemplative nature. The
philosophy of hurry and hustle had begun to totter.

The discoverer, expounder, and popularizer of neurasthenia was Doctor
George M. Beard, under whose ægis neurasthenia came to be known as
“the American disease.” Dr. Beard was a sound neurologist within
the limits of his generation of medicine, but with a dangerous gift
of imagination. His conception of neurasthenia was truly grandiose.
According to him this fascinating disease was endemic in the United
States and was the result of our peculiar social conditions. Its
cause, he claimed, was “modern civilization, which has these five
characteristics--steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph,
the sciences, the mental activity of women.” Among the secondary
and tertiary causes of neurasthenia or nervousness he threw in such
things as climate, the dryness of our air and the extremes of heat
and cold, civil and religious liberty, our institutions as a whole,
inebriety, and the general indulgence of our appetites and passions.
In a remarkable chapter he also assigned as one of the causes of our
nervousness the remarkable beauty of American women, though he does
not clearly state whether this made only the men nervous or the women
as well. Such a diagnosis was to turn sociologist with a vengeance and
Doctor Beard lived up to his implications by saying that the cure of
neurasthenia would mean “to solve the problem of sociology itself.”

The inevitable result of such a broad and confident diagnosis was to
make of neurasthenia a kind of _omnium gatherum_ of all the ills of
mankind less obvious than a broken leg. To explain the affliction
in terms of America rather than in terms of the patient and his
symptoms had about the value of a foreigner’s book about America
written on his home-bound steamer after a six-weeks’ sojourn in
this country. In fact, the wildest diagnoses were made, and such
perfectly well-defined medical entities as tabes, arteriosclerosis,
parathyroidism, myasthenia, and incipient tumours of the brain were
frequently given the neurasthenic label. Various theories of exhaustion
and nervous strain were also advanced and the attempt was made to feed
and strengthen the nervous system directly on the analogy of Professor
Agassiz’s famous assumption that the phosphates in fish could be
directly absorbed as material for brain-cells, a theory which did not
account for the fact that comparatively few intellectual giants have
sprung from fisher-folk. This naturally opened up a wide field for
quackery and ushered in the era of “nerve tonics” which are still with
us to-day. The craze for sanitariums also started at about this time,
and with every doctor having a little sanitarium of his own the public
was pretty well fleeced both by its “medicine men” and its men of
medicine.

Of course no treatment could possibly be successful in curing such
a wide variety of diseases the very existence of many of which was
hidden from the physician under the blanket term of neurasthenia;
and in those cases where an actual neurasthenia was present the
treatment as developed by Beard and his followers made only superficial
progress. The S. Weir Mitchell formula, for instance, with its emphasis
upon quiet, diet, and rest, remained, in the majority of cases,
essentially a treatment of symptoms rather than of causes. The tired
and over-wrought business man was given a pacifying vacation from his
dubious labours and was then promptly sent back to them, like a dog to
his vomit. The American woman, grown nervous from being insufficiently
occupied, was initiated into a different form of doing nothing, whereat
she felt much relieved for a time. Neurasthenia was soon moving in a
vicious and ever-widening circle; the more it spread the more it had
to include and thus became less and less digested medically; it played
havoc especially among American women who exploited their “nervousness”
much as their European sisters had exploited their “migraine” or
their “vapours” in previous generations. By the nineties, however,
neurasthenia had run its course as a fashionable affliction, other
countries had succeeded in surviving without erecting a quarantine
against it, and medical circles had begun to debate whether there was
such a thing as neurasthenia at all.

But, despite the breakdown of neurasthenia and the sins that were
committed in its name, it would be a mistake to be merely amused at
Doctor Beard for the pretentiousness of his concept or to criticize
him too severely for being too much of a medical popularizer. His
insight was, after all, of considerable value. For he realized, however
imperfectly, that the neuroses as a class are cultural diseases and
that they cannot be properly understood without taking into account the
background of modern civilization. This is a rare virtue in American
medicine where the specialist is constantly in danger of isolating
himself, a tendency which is particularly harmful in the study of the
mental sciences. Unfortunately Doctor Beard did not follow through. He
seems to have become frightened at his own diagnosis. For no sooner
had he drawn the worst possible picture of American civilization as
a breeder of neurasthenia than he turned around and assured the
public that things were not so bad after all. He accomplished this by
enriching his sociology with a philosophy which is a prodigy in itself.
This philosophy of his he called the “omnistic philosophy” and claimed
for it the peculiar virtue of being able to include “optimism on the
one hand and pessimism on the other and make the best of both,” which
is undoubtedly as uplifting a piece of American metaphysics as one is
likely to find on the whole Chautauqua circuit. In criticizing the slow
advance of American medicine as a whole it is always well to remember
the atmosphere of intellectual quackery in which our physicians no less
than our early metaphysicians so confidently moved.

By the end of the 19th century the study of functional nervous
disorders in America was, as I have said, pretty well strewn with the
_disjecta membra_ of neurasthenia which still breathed slightly under
the stimulus of electro- and hydrotherapeutics and of the “health
foods” industry. Meanwhile hypnotism also had come to do its turn upon
the American medical stage, where it ran through a swift cycle of use
and abuse. Neurology as a special department, like the rest of American
medicine, had been greatly enriched by contact with continental
medicine, and the works of Kraepelin had come into honour among the
psychiatrists. Dr. Morton Prince had begun to publish some interesting
studies of double personalities, and a number of tentative systems of
psycho-therapy based on a rather mixed procedure had been set up only
to be knocked down again as a beneficial exercise for the critical
faculty.

But now the stage was set for the appearance of the two modern theories
of the neuroses as presented in Europe by Janet and Freud. In the
rivalry that immediately ensued between these two opposing theories
that of Janet was soon outdistanced. His fundamental conception of
hysteria as a form of degeneration was in a way quite as repugnant
to American optimism as the sexual interpretation of Freud was to
American prudery. Janet had indeed been of invaluable help to the
hysteric by taking him seriously, but his presentation of the subject
was so narrow and his theory in the end proved so static that his views
have made little headway. Janet was also under the disadvantage of
working as an isolated figure in a prescribed field and did not come
into any revolutionary relation to psychology as a whole or find those
immensely suggestive analogies in the field of psychiatry, especially
in dementia præcox and paranoia, which have given the work of Freud
such a wide range. He had, besides, the defects common to so much of
French medicine which is often so peculiarly insular and, so to speak,
not made for export. His contribution more or less began and ended
with the theory of the dissociation of the personality which is not
characteristic of hysteria alone and could not successfully be grafted
upon the old psychology to which Janet clung.

On the other hand, Freud after an initial resistance rapidly became
epidemic in America. As was the case in Europe, he enjoyed considerable
vogue among the lay public while still violently opposed in medical
circles. His visit to America, however, in 1909, on the occasion
of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University, created a very
favourable impression and brought him to the attention of such American
psychologists as William James, Edwin B. Holt, Adolf Meyer, and others.
His works appeared in this country in translations by Doctor A. A.
Brill, and in a short while Freud was “taken up” with a vengeance.

He has had both the advantages and the handicaps of a boom. His
admirers have obscured or exaggerated him and his enemies have derided
his popularity as proof of a reputation based upon sensationalism. In
fact, Freud met with three fates: he was either wildly embraced, or
rejected in toto with an appropriate academic lynching, or else he was
accepted with “improvements.”

He was fortified by previous experience against the second alternative
and probably resigned to the third: it was the embrace that most nearly
proved fatal to him. For America was to see the most extravagant
development of the so-called “wild” psychoanalysis, a danger against
which Freud himself had issued a warning. In 1916, for instance, an
informal canvas revealed that approximately five hundred individuals
were quite willing to psychoanalyze patients in the city of New
York alone, whereas there were probably not more than six properly
qualified medical practitioners in the whole State. Advertisements
offered to teach the psychoanalytic technique by mail and instructors
in chiropractic included it in their curriculum. This gross abuse was
due to the general laxness of medical law in this country which still
remains to be remedied. It was not only the amateurs that offended;
doctors themselves were often at fault. For it cannot be too often
emphasized that a psychoanalyst must have something more than the
conceit of psychological subtlety common to most of us; he must be
a trained neurologist and must have had considerable experience
in psychiatry if he would escape the pitfalls of differential
diagnosis--a case of hysteria can be dangerously like an incipient
tumour of the brain and a compulsion-neurosis may simulate a paranoid
condition. These abuses are, of course, no criticism of the intrinsic
value of psychoanalysis. It has been the history of so many medical
discoveries that they are recommended as a cure-all; we need but
recall vaccination, or the present vitamine craze. On the other hand,
it is regrettable that the direct attack upon Freud in this country
has rarely risen above the level of denunciation. Quite recently, for
instance, one of our socially eminent neurologists allowed himself
to indulge in the teleological, or rather disguised theological,
argument that if the unconscious is really so full of dreadful things
as Freud says, they should be left there. And yet it is just serious
and sympathetic criticism of which the science of psychoanalysis stands
most in need.

The attempts to assimilate Freud were of two kinds. The first of these,
like Professor Holt’s book on “The Freudian Wish” or Doctor Edward J.
Kempf’s “The Autonomic Functions and the Personality,” were sincere
attempts of critical dignity to relate psychoanalysis to American
behaviouristic psychology on the part of men who are not altogether
professed Freudians. The second were more in the nature of somewhat
pompous criticisms which attempted to reconcile and soften what seemed
to be the more repellent features of the Freudian theories. There is a
prevalent tendency among medical men in America to indulge in criticism
without any due regard to the proportions between the magnitude of a
subject and their familiarity with it, somewhat after the manner of the
green theological student who is confident of his ability to subvert
the theory of evolution in a casual thesis of his own. The scientist in
many fields is constantly facing this debasement of standards, making
science not too scientific or logic not too logical lest it should
be misunderstood; it is certainly a commentary that the majority of
Americans, for instance, look upon Edison as our greatest scientist.
The tendency to sweeten and refine Freud has taken some peculiar forms,
due, in great part, to Doctor Jung who, on having re-introduced the
libido theory to American audiences with a number of philosophical
and mystical trimmings of his own, felt that he had made Freud more
palatable over here.

Ironically enough, it would have been a very simple matter to “put
over” Freud in this country with all the éclat of the Bergsonian
craze which just preceded him. It was merely a question of the right
kind of publicity, for the problem of how to handle sex in America
has been solved long ago. The way to do it is to sentimentalize it.
If Freud, instead of saying that the incestuous longing of the child
for the parent of opposite sex is a natural impulse, though normally
sublimated during the period of adolescence, had put the same idea into
the phraseology of so many of our popular songs which reiterate the
theme about mother being her boy’s first and last and truest love, he
would have encountered no opposition. And if he had given his theory
of the unconscious a slightly religious setting by emphasizing the
fact that the unconscious has no sense of the passage of time and
cannot conceive its own annihilation, he would have been hailed as the
latest demonstrator of the immortality of the soul. A little personal
press-agenting to the effect that he led a chaste life and was the
father of a flourishing family would have completed the prescription.
He would have gone over with a bang, though he probably would have been
quite as amiably misunderstood as he is now viciously misunderstood.

Freud, however, presented his case at its own value and, aside from
informing an astonished American audience that Doctor Sanford Bell had
preceded him in announcing the preadolescent sexuality of children,
shouldered the responsibility for his theories. What he has said,
carefully and repeatedly, is that ever since, for a long period in our
development, the difficulties of satisfying the hunger impulse have
been overcome in so far as civilized man has pretty well solved the
problem of nutrition; it is the sex impulse to which the individual
has the greatest difficulty in adjusting himself. This difficulty
increases rather than decreases with the advance of culture and at
certain stages leads to the group of diseases known as the neuroses. In
a normal sexual life there is no neurosis. But our civilization has in
many ways become so perverse that we find something akin to an official
preference for a neurosis rather than a normal sexual life, in spite
of the fact that the neurosis ultimately will destroy civilization.
This is the vicious circle which Freud attacked. In doing so he
had first to enlarge the concept of sexuality and show its complex
relation to our whole culture. In studying civilization at its breaking
point he naturally had to study what was breaking it up, namely, the
individual’s maladjustment to his sexual impulses. But he has never
attempted to sexualize the universe, as has been claimed, nor has he
ever lost sight of the fact that while man as an egocentric being must
put the self-regarding instincts first, man regarded as one of the
processes of nature remains to be studied in terms of his reproductive
instincts. Freud has been persistently oversexualized both by his
admirers and his opponents, and the degree to which this has been done
in America is at least some indication of how close he has come home to
conditions here.

Freudian research in this country has been limited almost entirely
to cases. Our physicians who practise psychoanalysis have lacked
either the leisure or the culture to apply their science to wider
cultural questions to which the Freudian psychology applies, and
among the lay scholars using the psychoanalytic technique there has
been no outstanding figure like that of Otto Rank who has done such
notable work in Vienna. But the study of specific cases of hysteria
and neurosis as they occur in America already permit of some general
conclusions as to the character of the national matrix from which they
spring. One of the most striking features of our emotional life is
the exaggerated mother-love so frequently displayed by Americans. The
average American, whether drunk or sober, can grow maudlin about his
mother’s perfections and his devotion to her in a way that must shock
the European observer. Not that the European loves his mother less:
it is simply that he is more reticent about expressing an emotion
which he feels has a certain private sanctity; he would experience
a decided constraint or αἰδώς in boasting about it, just as a woman
of breeding would not parade her virtue. The American adult knows no
such restraint; he will “tell the world” how much he loves his mother,
will sing sentimental songs about her and cheerfully subscribe to the
advice to “choose a girl like your mother if you want to be happily
married,” and then grows violent when the incest-complex is mentioned.
This excessive mother worship has reached almost cultic proportions. It
is reflected in our fiction, in our motion-pictures, in the inferior
position of the American husband, and in such purely matriarchal
religions as Christian Science where a form of healing is practised
which is not very far removed from a mother’s consolation to her boy
when he has bruised his knees. All this points to a persistent sexual
infantilism and an incomplete sublimation, which are such fertile
breeders of hysteria. One is involuntarily reminded of Doctor Beard’s
rather enigmatic statement that the extraordinary beauty of our women
is one of the causes of nervousness in America. In so far as they
offer a maximum of enticement with a minimum of conjugal satisfaction
the charge is certainly justified. It is as if they did not even know
their own business in terms of their sexual function of weaning their
husbands from their mothers and thus completing the necessary exogamic
process. We thus have the condition where the husband, in further
seeking to overcome his incest-complex, becomes everything in his
business and nothing in his home, with an ultimate neurotic breakdown
or a belated plunge into promiscuity. The wife, on her part, either
becomes hysterical or falls a victim to religious or reformatory
charlatanism.

The study of compulsion-neuroses and allied paranoid states which are
so prevalent among us has given us further insights into the neurotic
character of the American temperament. One of the most valuable of
these is the recognition of the compulsive nature of so much of our
thinking. This has also been well observed by a foreign critic like
Santayana who says of America, “Though it calls itself the land of
freedom, it is really the land of compulsions, and one of the greatest
compulsions is that we must think and feel alike.” This is a rather
fatal indictment of our boasted individualism, which is, as a matter of
fact, an individualism born of fear and distrust such as already marked
our early pioneers. We are indeed ultra-conformists, and our fear of
other-mindedness amounts almost to a phobia. But such an atmosphere
constitutes a paradise for the compulsion-neurotic because he finds
it easy to impose his compulsions upon the rest of society. The fact
that compulsion-neurotics are constantly indulging in neo-religious
formations through which they are enabled temporarily to accommodate
their taboos and phobias in religious ceremonials, enables them to make
use of the general religious sanctions of society in order to impose
their compulsions upon their fellow-beings.

Herein probably lies a better explanation of American intolerance
than in the indictment of Puritanism which furnishes such a favourite
invective for our iconoclasts. Puritanism has become a literary
catchword and by no means covers the case. For it must be remembered
that we are dealing with offshoots of deteriorated religions which
spring from a very wide range of individuals. Religion, having been
cut off from direct interference with the State, and having gradually
lost its primitive anthropomorphism which really was one of its sources
of strength, proceeded to project itself more and more outwardly upon
social questions. As the personality of God grew dim the figure of the
Devil also lost its vividness and the problem between good and evil
could not longer be fought out entirely in the individual’s own bosom;
he was no longer tempted by the figure of the Devil appearing to him
in person. Christian religion in its prime saw very clearly that the
soul must put its own salvation to the fore, and constantly used many
apt similes, such as the beam in our own eye, to remind us that while
our neighbour might also have his hands full in fighting the Devil, he
probably was capable of taking care of himself. Our modern reformer
has no use for any such simile; he would have to go out of business
if he could not keep picking at the mote in his neighbour’s eye. He
finds the equivalent of the Devil in our social vices, in alcohol, in
tobacco, in tea and coffee, in practically all forms of amusements. He
preaches a crusade which no longer has an ideal object, and enlists
a vague religious emotion which is inaccessible to reason and mocks
intellectual criticism. The device of using religious associations as
carriers of propaganda has often been used for political purposes with
consummate skill. Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech and Roosevelt’s
Armageddon appeal are excellent examples of it.

The question has often arisen why the fanatical reformer is so
omnipotent in America. Why does he succeed so well in imposing his
compulsions upon others? Why are we so defenceless against his
blackmail? Why, in plain language, do we stand for him? Foreign
observers have frequently commented upon the enormous docility of the
American public. And it is all the more curious because ordinarily
the average American prides himself upon his assertiveness and his
quickness in detecting false pretensions. Yet it is a common occurrence
to meet people with valid claims to hard-headedness who nevertheless
submit to every form of compulsion. They do not believe in prohibition
but vote for it, they smoke but think smoking ought to be stopped, they
admit the fanatical nature of reform movements and yet continue their
subscriptions.

In giving what can at best be only a partial answer to this national
enigma, we may briefly consider two types which profoundly contribute
to our atmosphere of compulsion: our immigrant and our native
aristocrat. The first, from the very nature of the case, becomes the
victim of compulsion, while the second imposes the compulsion and then
in turn, however unwillingly, succumbs to it himself. Our society,
with its kaleidoscopic changes of fortune and its unchannelled social
distinctions, presents a problem of adjustment with which even those
who are at home in America find it difficult to cope. People on the
make, people who are not sure of themselves on a new social ladder, are
likely to conform: we find an astonishing amount of social imitation,
in its milder and more ludicrous form, in all our pioneer communities.
The immigrant faces the same problem to an intensified degree. He
comes to us in an uprooted state of mind, with many of his emotional
allegiances still lingering in his native country, and often with an
entirely alien tradition. His mind is set to conform, to obey at first
without much asking. He is like a traveller arriving in a strange
town who follows the new traffic directions even though he does not
understand their purpose. But even with the best of will he cannot
entirely conform. He finds himself in a new world where what formerly
seemed right to him is now considered wrong, his household gods have
lost their power, his conscience is no longer an infallible guide.
It is a sign of character in him to resist, to refuse to sink his
individuality entirely, to struggle somewhat against the democratic
degradation which threatens to engulf him too suddenly. But his
struggle leads to a neurotic conflict which is often not resolved
until the third generation. It is thus quite permissible to talk of an
immigrant’s neurosis, which has considerable sociological importance
even though it does not present an integral clinical picture. It leads
either to the formation of large segments of undigested foreigners
in American society who sullenly accept the forms we impose upon
them while remaining comparatively inarticulate in our cultural and
political life, or else it produces a type of whom our melting-pot
romanticists are foolishly proud, the pseudo-American who has sunk from
individualism to the level of the mob, where he conforms to excess in
order to cover his antecedents and becomes intolerant in order that he
may be tolerated.

Ordinarily, the mob tyranny which has become such an alarming feature
of our public life would be checked by the aristocratic element in
society. It is part of the aristocratic function to foster cultural
tolerance and to resist herd suggestion: the aristocratic or dominant
type, in enjoying the most privileges, is normally least subject to
compulsions and taboos. With us that is not the case. The Southerner,
for instance, our most traditional aristocrat, finds himself paralyzed
by the consciousness of a black shadow behind him who constantly
threatens both his political and his sexual superiority. He moves in
an atmosphere of taboos from which he himself cannot escape, for it
is an established fact that interdiction in one line of thought has
a crippling effect upon a man’s intellectual activity as a whole.
Elsewhere our native aristocrat frequently finds himself in the
position of a lonely outpost of a thin Anglo-Saxon tradition which he
must defend against the constant onslaughts of alien civilizations, in
the desperate attempt to uphold the fiction that spiritually, at least,
we are still an English colony. He is in a state of tension where he
himself cannot move with any of the freedom which he vaunts as one of
the outstanding characteristics of the country of his fathers. In his
hands his own latest hope, our war-born Americanization programme,
which should really be an initiation into freedom, has quickly become
little more than a forced observance of sterile rites with which to
impress the alien. He already sees its failure, and, like a general who
is afraid of his own army, he does not sleep very well.

                                                   ALFRED B. KUTTNER




MEDICINE


From time immemorial the doctor has been the object of respect and awe
by the generality of mankind. It is true that he has occasionally been
made the butt of the satirical humour of such dramatists as Molière and
Shaw, but the majority of people have regarded these jests as amiable
buffooneries, and not as penetrating criticisms. In ancient days the
veneration of the medico was based upon his supposed association with
gods and devils, and upon the belief that he could cure disease by
wheedling propitiation of _deus_, or by the exorcism of _diabolus_. In
modern times he holds sway by his supposed possession of the secrets of
science.

In spite of his pretension to scientific attainment, many vestiges
of his former priesthood remain, and this _mélange_ of scientist and
priest has produced curious contradictions and absurdities. But these
absurdities must by an inexorable law remain concealed from all save
a few, and the general failure to recognize them has led to a great
increase in the importance and prosperity of the medical cult. In
America, of all civilized nations, medical magnificence has reached its
most formidable proportions. This exaggeration, characteristic of all
social phenomena in the new world, makes the real importance of the
doctor to society easy to inspect and to analyze.

A friend not long ago asked me to explain the co-existence, in the same
city, of the elaborate installation of the Harvard Medical School and
the magnificent temple of the religion of Mrs. Eddy. “What is it in our
culture,” said he, “that permits the symbol of such obvious quackery
as that of Mrs. Eddy to flourish within a stone’s throw of such an
embodiment of scientific enlightenment as the medical college?”

I replied that the reason for this must be sought in the gullibility
of our citizens, who are capable of entertaining most incompatible and
contradictory credos. Thus, the average American can believe firmly and
simultaneously in the therapeutic excellence of yeast, the salubrious
cathartic effects of a famous mineral oil, the healing powers of
chiropractors, and in the merits of the regimen of the Corrective
Eating Society. His catholicity of belief permits him to consider such
palpable frauds seriously, and at the same time to admire and respect
authentic medical education and even the scientific study of disease.
But the teachers, students, and alumni of medical colleges are drawn
from our excessively credulous populace. So it is dangerous to consider
the votaries of the profession of medicine as sceptical and open-minded
_savants_, in contrast to the promulgators of the afore-mentioned
imbecilities and to _Homo sapiens americanus_, who is the unconscious
victim of such charlatanry. In reality the great majority of the
medical profession is credulous and must always remain so, even in
matters of health and disease.

The tendency to consider physicians in general as men of science is
fostered by the doctors themselves. Even the most eminent among them
are guilty in this respect. Thus the Director of the Hospital of the
Rockefeller Institute maintains that medicine must be considered
not as an applied science but as an independent science (R. Cole,
_Science_, N. S., Vol. LI, p. 329). And an eminent ex-President of the
American Medical Association holds a similar view, at the same time
preposterously asserting that “medicine has done more for the growth of
science than any other profession, and that its best representatives
have been among the leaders in the advancement of knowledge....” (V. C.
Vaughan, _Journal_, A. M. A., 1914, Vol. LXII, p. 2003.)

Such pronunciamentoes rest upon the almost universal confusion of the
_art_ of the practice of medicine with the _science_ of the study of
disease. Science, in its modern definition, is concerned with the
quantitative relationship of the factors governing natural phenomena.
No favourites are to be played among these factors. They are to be
weighed and measured meticulously and coldly, without enthusiasm
for one, or disdain and enmity toward another. Now, in the case of
relationship of doctor to patient, it is clear that such emotions must
enter. The physician must entertain enthusiasm for the defensive powers
of his patient, John Smith, and at the same time hate virulently the
pneumococcus that attacks him. This emotional state of the soldier of
health prevents the employment of what is known in the language of the
laboratory as the “control.” For example, a doctor wishes to test the
efficacy of a serum against pneumonia. In America it is practically
unknown for him to divide his cases of pneumonia into two groups of
equal size, to administer his serum to group A and to leave group B
untreated. He almost invariably has a _parti-pris_ that the serum will
work, and he reflects with horror that if he holds his remedy from
group B, some members of this group will die, who might otherwise have
been saved. So he injects his serum into all of his patients (A and B),
and if the mortality in the entire group appears to him to be lower by
statistics than that observed in previous series of cases, he concludes
that the value of his nostrum is proved. This is an illustration of the
fallacy of the notion that medicine is a science in the modern sense.

Modern study of disease, conducted in the laboratory upon experimental
animals, has furnished medical practitioners with a few therapeutic
and prophylactic weapons. In the use of these the American medico
has not lagged behind his European colleague. But the great majority
of the malaises that plague us are not amenable to cure, and it is
with these that the doctor has since the beginning of time played
his most important rôle, i.e., that of a “professional sympathizer.”
The encouraging conversation with the family of the sufferer; the
mumbling of recondite Latin phrases; the reassuring hopeful hand on
the patient’s shoulder; the grave use of complicated gimcracks; the
prescription of ineffective but also innocuous drugs or of water
tinted to pleasing hues; all these are of incalculable value to the
_ménage_ stricken by disease. It is my lamentable duty to point out
the danger of the decline of this essential rôle among the doctors of
America. The general practitioner of the _ancien régime_ was sincere
in his performance of his quasi-religious function. He was unsparing
of his energies, stern in his devotion to duty, deeply altruistic in
sentiment, and charmingly negligent in economic matters.

But at the present time this adorable figure is disappearing from the
land, to be replaced by another, more sinister type, actually less
learned in the important folklore of the bedside, pseudo-scientific,
given to rigidly defined office hours, and painfully exact in the
extortion of his emolument. What are the factors that give rise to
the appearance of this new figure on the American scene? The most
important of these is to be found in the high development of the craft
of surgery in the United States. Of all the dread afflictions that
plague us, a few may be cured or ameliorated by the administration of
remedies, and an equally small number improved or abolished by surgical
interference. But in spite of the relatively few diseases to which
surgery is beneficial, the number of surgeons that flourish in the land
is enormous. The fundamental discoveries of Pasteur and their brilliant
application by Lister were quickly seized upon in America. The names
of Bull, Halstead, Murphy, the brothers Mayo, Cushing, and Finney are
to be ranked with those of the best surgeons of any nation. In fact,
we may be said to lead the world--to use an apt Americanism--in the
production of surgeons, just as we do in that of automobiles, baby
carriages, and antique furniture.

The success of these protagonists in the higher carpentry at once
attracted a horde of smaller fry, imitators, men of inferior ability.
The rapid advances made by the leaders resulted in the development of
a diversified and complicated technic, which the ordinary surgeon was
able to master in sections but not _in toto_. From this, specialization
in surgery has developed rapidly and naturally, so that now certain men
devote their lives exclusively to the enthusiastic and indiscriminate
removal of tonsils, others are death on gall bladders, some the foes of
the vermiform appendix, and yet others practise exclusively the radical
cure of phimosis. It is obvious that such narrow specialization,
practised in isolation, would lead to most amusing results, which
may best be left to the imagination. But these absurdities were
finally apparent even to the surgeons themselves, with the resulting
development of what is now known as “group medicine.”

In brief, surgeons with special _penchants_ for the removal of various
organs, form partnerships, calling to their aid the internist for the
diagnosis of their prospective victims. The internist gathers about
him, in turn, a group of less important fry, known as radiographers,
bacteriologists, pathologists, and serologists. Frequently a dentist
is added to the coterie. The entire organization is welded into a
business partnership of typically American efficiency. These groups are
forming over the entire nation, are appearing even in the tank-towns
of the hinterland. They occupy elegant suites in important office
buildings, their members are generally considered the arbiters of the
medical opinion of the community. Their more or less intelligent use
of the paraphernalia of pathology, bacteriology, _et cetera_, gives
them an enormous advantage over their more humble brother, the general
practitioner. This last, indeed, is being rapidly routed in his battle
with such associations of “best minds,” equipped with the armamentarium
of modern science.

The remuneration required by the “super-docs” of group medicine is
naturally far in excess of that demanded by the general practitioner.
It is right that this should be so, if not for the results obtained,
then by reason of the elaborate organization and expensive equipment
that the group system demands. This increase in reward has made the
profession of medicine in America what it never was before, a paying
proposition--again to use an apt Americanism. The result of this entry
of crass materialism into a previously free-and-easy, altruistic,
anything but business-like profession is, once more, better left to the
imagination than described. The brigandage of many of these medical
banditti is too painful even to think about. It will be apparent that
relatively few of our citizens are able to pay for group medicine.
So, it is interesting to observe that the best in medical treatment
and advice is accessible only to the highest and lowest castes of our
plutocracy. The rich receive this at the elegant offices and private
hospitals of the groups, the miserably poor at the teaching hospitals
of medical colleges.

The service of the “super-doc” to such of our citizens as can afford
him cannot at this time be properly estimated. It is true that he
is progressive, that he leans heavily upon the subsidiary sciences
of pathology, _et cetera_, that he publishes papers in medical
periodicals, that he visits medical libraries, frequents medical
congresses. It has just been insisted that the doctor has benefitted
himself to a great extent economically by forming the group; it is
for the future to divulge whether his ministrations have resulted in
a perceptible reduction of human suffering or in a prolongation of
human life. Certainly he has perpetrated some astounding hoaxes, the
kind-hearted will say unwittingly. Probably the most interesting of
these is to be observed in the focal infection mania just now subsiding.

Focal infection came into prominence as the theory, so called, of a
group of eminent physicians in Chicago. It is, in brief, the doctrine
that many of our aches and pains whose direct etiology it is impossible
to demonstrate are due to the presence in the body of foci of harmful
microbes, at the roots of the teeth, in the tonsils, accessory sinuses,
or the appendix. Discover the focus, remove it, and presto!--the ache
disappears like the card up the sleeve of the expert American poker
player. The advantages of this theory to the various specialists of
a group will be obvious. To illustrate. Henry Doolittle is plagued
by a persistent and annoying pain over his left shoulder-blade. He
goes to the office of a group of “super-docs,” is referred to the
diagnostician, who makes a careful record of his _status præsens_, then
orders his satellites to perform the Wassermann reaction, make the
luetin test, do differential blood counts, perform the determination
of his blood urea, and carry out a thorough chemical study of his
basal metabolism. If the results of these tests show no departure from
the normal, or if they seriously contradict each other, the cause of
the pain is probably focal infection. The patient is then subjected
to examination by X-ray, his teeth are pulled by the dentist, his
tonsils excised by the otolaryngolist, who also takes a swipe, in
passing, at his accessory sinuses, and should these mutilations fail
to relieve him, his appendix is removed by the abdominal surgeon. If
relief still fails to occur, the theory is not given up, but the focus
is presumed to exist elsewhere. If Mr. Doolittle’s patience is equal
to the test, and if his purse is not by this time completely empty,
additional operations are advised. These continue until all organs and
appendages not actually necessary to mere existence have been removed.
Henry then returns to his former mode of life, depleted and deformed,
it is true, but occasionally minus his original pain. It is not the
intention to deny that infected teeth and tonsils have no significance
in pathology. But it is certain that their importance has been greatly
exaggerated by many physicians. The question needs more investigation,
with fewer preconceived ideas. The “science” underlying this astounding
practice is admirably outlined in the book of Billings called “Focal
Infection.” It is the most striking example of medical _Ga-Ga-ism_
that has appeared in our country. It is, as its author himself admits,
a triumph of the new idea of team-work and co-operative research in
medicine. The factors giving rise to this lamentable _Ga-Ga_ are the
gullibility of patient and doctor, the emotional element entering into
the interpretation of all of the phenomena observed by the physician,
commercialism, and, finally, the self-limiting nature of most disease.

So much for the Art of Healing as practised by the physicians of
America. What of our activities in the second aim of medicine, that
is, the prevention of disease? While superficial examination is enough
to lay bare the many hollow pretensions of the practice of medicine,
it would appear _a priori_ that the work of disease prevention might
at least approach the category of the applied sciences. This would
seem to be so, since the greater part of this field must of necessity
concern itself with infectious disease. Now the etiologic agents of the
majority of infectious diseases are known. It is easy to see that the
labour of their prevention rests upon an exact knowledge of the nature
of the disease-producing microbes, the analysis of the delicate balance
between the virulence of the microbic invader and the resistance of the
human host, and, most important of all, upon the exact path by which
the germ in question travels from one individual to another.

In the early days of preventive medicine, following shortly upon the
fundamental researches of Pasteur, several important contributions
were made by Americans. These include the brilliant investigations
of Theobald Smith on the etiology and mode of transmission of the
Texas fever of cattle, and, later on, the differentiation of bovine
and human tuberculosis. America had again reason to be proud when,
in 1901, Reed, Carroll, Agramonte, and Lazear demonstrated that
yellow fever was spread exclusively by the mosquito, _Ædes calopus_.
These investigators showed a beautiful spirit of self-sacrifice and
devotion to their science. The construction of the Panama Canal was
made possible by the application of these researches by Gorgas. Again,
the American Russell was the first to show that vaccination against
typhoid and allied infections is feasible. In the New York Board of
Health, Park, Krumwiede, and their associates have made careful and
valuable studies on the prevention of diphtheria. These constitute the
high lights of American achievement in preventive medicine. It must be
admitted that the majority of these examples are to be placed in the
category of the science of the study of disease, rather than in that of
its application--preventive medicine.

It is noticeable even by cursory survey of recent American work that
such striking achievements have become distinctly fewer in recent
years, despite an enormous increase in personnel, equipment, and money
devoted to the prevention of disease. Along with this decrease in solid
contributions there has been an augmentation of fatuous propaganda and
windy theory. All of the judicious must view this tendency with alarm
and sadness, since it seemed for a time that science was really about
to remove the vestigia of witchcraft and high-priesthood from this
branch of medicine at least.

What is the cause of this retrogression? It must be laid at the door
of _Religio Sanitatis_, the Crusade of Health. This is one of the most
striking examples of the delusion of most Americans that they are the
Heaven-appointed uplifters of the human race. Just as all Baptists,
Presbyterians, and Methodists deprecate the heathen happiness of
the benighted Oriental, so the International Health Board seeks to
mitigate his contented squalour and to eradicate his fatalistically
born disease. Just as Billy Sunday rages against John Barleycorn and
the Dionysians who worship him, so the Great Hygienists seek to point
out the multiform malaises arising from such worship. Just as the now
extinct Wilson strove to show the world that it was horrid and wrong to
fight, so the Public Health Service seeks to propagate the notion that
chastity and adherence to marital vows are the sole alternatives to a
universal syphilization.

Thus we observe with horror the gradual replacement of those Nestors
of preventive medicine who had the dispassionate view of science,
and who applied its methods of cold analysis, by a group of dubious
Messiahs who combine the zealous fanaticism of the missionary with the
Jesuitical cynicism of the politician. For most of the organizations
for the promotion of health are closely dependent upon state and
municipal politics, and must become contaminated with the obscenity of
political practice. Finally, it is apparent that the great privately
endowed foundations are animated by the spirit of proselytism common
to the majority of religions, but especially to Baptists. It will be
objected that such charges are vague generalizations. It is necessary,
therefore, to bring forward one or two specific instances in support of
these contentions.

The soldiers of the recent successful campaign for national prohibition
were supported by battalions of noted hygienists who made excellent
practice with a heavy artillery of so-called scientific evidence upon
the confused ranks of brewers, distillers, and their customers, the
American bibuli. What is the value of their “scientific evidence”? Two
charges are made against the use of alcohol as a beverage. _Primo_,
that its moderate or excessive use is the direct cause of various
maladies. _Secondo_, that the children of alcoholic parents are often
deformed, degenerates, or imbeciles, and that such lamentable stigmata
are the direct results of the imbibitions of their parents.

Now it is vain to argue that alcohol, taken in great excess, is not
injurious. Mania a potu (Korsakow’s disease) is without doubt its
direct result, at least in some instances. On the other hand, excessive
indulgence in water is also not without its harmful effects, and I,
for one, would predict evil days for our Great Commoner, should he so
far lose control of himself as to imbibe a gallon of grape juice _per
diem_. Many enthusiastic hygienists advance the opinion that alcohol is
filling our insane asylums! This generalization is a gorgeous example
of _post hoc propter hoc_ reasoning, and is based upon the idiotic
statistical research which forms so large a part of the activity of
the minions of public health. The recent careful work of Clouston and
others tends more and more to indicate that chronic alcoholics do
not go crazy because they drink, but become alcoholics because they
already were crazy, or had the inherited tendency toward insanity.
This embarrassing fact is carefully suppressed by the medico-hygienic
heavy artillerists of the prohibition army. What is more, diseases with
definite pathologic pictures, such as cirrhosis of the liver, have by
no means been definitely proved to be caused by alcohol. Indeed, the
researches of Friedenwald, who endeavoured to produce such effects by
direct experiment, have led to negative results.

The second indictment, i.e., that alcoholism in parents causes
degenerate offspring, rests upon still more dubious scientific
foundations. The most important animal experimentation in this field
is that of Stockard, who used guinea-pigs as his subjects, and of
Pearl, who had recourse to chickens. Both of these researches are
sound in scientific method. Unfortunately for hygienists, they lead to
completely contradictory conclusions. Stockard and his collaborators
found the offspring of alcoholic guinea-pigs to be fewer in number
than those of his normal controls. What is more, the children of the
alcoholics were frequently smaller, had a higher post-natal mortality,
and were prone to suffer from epileptiform convulsions. These results
brought forth _banzais_ from the hygienists and were extensively
quoted, though their application by analogy to the problems of human
heredity is not to be made too hastily.

Pearl, on the other hand, discovered that while the number of offspring
from his inebriated chickens was distinctly fewer, yet these were
unquestionably superior to normal chickens in eight of the twelve
hereditary characters amenable to quantitative measurement. Now if
one can generalize Stockard’s results to human beings, then it is
equally permissible to do the same with Pearl’s. Of the two, the latter
generalization would be preferable, and of greater benefit to the
human race, were the analogy valid. For who will not whoop for “fewer
children, but better ones”? Do the votaries of preventive medicine
place the results of Pearl along side of those of Stockard? Indeed,
who even mentions Pearl’s results at all? If satisfactory evidence is
adduced that this has been done, I hereby promise to contribute one
hundred dollars in cash toward the foundation of a home for inebriated
prohibition agents. Again, while much is heard of the results of
Bezzola in regard to the _Rauschkinder_ resulting from the Swiss
bacchanalia, the negative findings of Ireland in similar investigations
of the seasonal debauches of Scotland are carefully avoided. Once more,
Elderton and Karl Pearson have failed utterly to find increase in the
stigmata of degeneracy among the children of alcoholic parents as
compared with those of non-alcoholics. This research, published in a
monograph of the Francis Galton Laboratory of London, is the one really
careful one that has been made in the case of human beings. It was
directed by Pearson, admittedly a master of biometrical science. Yet,
turning to Rosenau’s “Preventive Medicine and Hygiene,” the bible of
this branch, I find the Elderton-Pearson report relegated to a footnote
in the edition of 1913, _and omitted completely from the 1920 edition_.

A discussion of the fatuity to which American preventive medicine
descends cannot be terminated without touching upon the current
propaganda of the syphilophobes. For just as practitioners of medicine
exploit human credulity, so the preventers of disease play upon
the equally universal instinct of fear. There is no intention of
minimizing the seriousness of syphilis. Along with cancer, pneumonia,
and tuberculosis, it is one of the major afflictions of humanity. It
causes thousands of deaths yearly; it leads to great misery. Paresis,
one of the important psychoses, is definitely known to be one of its
manifestations. It is obvious, therefore, that its eradication is one
of the major tasks of social hygiene.

But by what means? Let one of the most noted of our American
syphilophobes give the answer! This gentleman, a professor of pathology
in one of the most important medical schools of the Middle West, yearly
lectures over the length and breadth of the land on the venereal
peril. He begins his expostulation with reduction of his audiences to
a state of terror by a lantern-slide display of the more loathsome
manifestations of the disease. He does not state that modern treatment
makes these more and more rare. He insists upon the utter impossibility
of its cure, a fact by no means established. He advocates early
marriage to a non-syphilitic maiden as the best means of prevention,
and failing that, advises that chastity is both possible and
salubrious. Then follows a master stroke of advice by innuendo--_the
current belief that masturbation causes insanity is probably untrue_.
Finally he denies the value of venereal prophylaxis, which was first
experimentally demonstrated by Metchnikoff and Roux, and which the
medical department of the Army and Navy know to be of almost perfect
efficacy when applied early and thoroughly.

Lack of space prevents the display of further examples of the new
phenomenon of the entrance of religion and morals into medicine. It is
not my intention for a moment to adopt a nihilistic attitude toward the
achievement of preventive medicine. But it is necessary to point out
that its contamination by moralism, Puritanism, proselytism, in brief,
_by religion_, threatens to reduce it to absurdity, and to shake its
authority in instances where its functions are of unmistakable value to
our republic. At present the medical profession plays a minor rôle in
the more important functions of this branch. These are performed in the
first place by bacteriologists who need not be doctors at all, and in
the second by sanitary engineers, whose splendid achievements in water
supply and sewage disposal lead those of all other nations.

It has been remarked above that one of the chief causes of the
unscientific nature of medicine and the anti-scientific character
of doctors lies in their innate credulity and inability to think
independently. This contention is supported by the report on the
intelligence of physicians recently published by the National Research
Council. They are found by more or less trustworthy psychologic tests
to be the lowest in intelligence of all of the professional men
excepting only dentists and horse doctors. Dentists and horse doctors
are ten per cent. less intelligent. But since the quantitative methods
employed certainly carry an experimental error of ten per cent. or even
higher, it is not certain that the members of the two more humble
professions have not equal or even greater intellectual ability. It is
significant that engineers head the list in intelligence.

In fact, they are rated sixty per cent. higher than doctors. This
wide disparity leads to a temptation to interesting psychological
probings. Is not the lamentable lack of intelligence of the doctor
due to lack of necessity for rigid intellectual discipline? Many
conditions conspire to make him an intellectual cheat. Fortunately
for us, most diseases are self-limiting. But it is natural for the
physician to turn this dispensation of nature to his advantage and
to intimate that _he_ has cured John Smith, when actually nature has
done the trick. On the contrary, should Smith die, the good doctor can
assume a pious expression and suggest that, despite his own incredible
skill and tremendous effort, it was God’s (or Nature’s) will that John
should pass beyond. Now the engineer is open to no such temptation. He
builds a bridge or erects a building, and disaster is sure to follow
any mis-step in calculation or fault in construction. Should such a
calamity occur, he is presently discredited and disappears from view.
Thus he is held up to a high mark of intellectual rigour and discipline
that is utterly unknown in the world the doctor inhabits.

A survey of the present condition of American medical education offers
little hope for a higher intellectual status of the medical profession
or of any fundamental tendency to turn medicine as a whole from a
_mélange_ of religious ritual, more or less accurate folk-lore, and
commercial cunning, toward the rarer heights of the applied sciences.

Such a reform depends absolutely upon the recognition that the
bodies of all the fauna of the earth (including _Homo sapiens_) are
essentially physico-chemical mechanisms; that disease is a derangement
of one sort or another of this mechanism; and that real progress
in knowledge of disease can only come from quantitatively exact
investigation of such derangements.

Up to the present, the number of professors in any branch of medicine
who are aware of this fact is pitifully few. The men, who, being
aware of it, have the training in physics and chemistry to put their
convictions into practice are less in number. So, it is vain to hope
that medical students are being educated from this point of view.

This casual glance at American medicine may be thought to be an unduly
pessimistic one. It has not been my intention to be pessimistic or to
be impertinently critical. Indeed, turning from the art of the practice
of medicine, and the religion and folk-lore of sanitation, to the
science of the study of disease, we have much of which to be proud.
American biochemists of the type of Van Slyke and Folin are actually in
the lead of their European brothers. Their precise quantitative methods
furnish invaluable tools in the exact study of the ills that afflict us.

Finally, the greatest figure of all, Jacques Loeb, working in
an institution that declares its purpose to be the dubious one
of _medical_ research, has in the last three years published
investigations which throw a flood of light upon the dark problems
of the chemistry of proteins. His work is of most fundamental
significance, will have far-reaching results, and is measurably in
advance of that of any European in the same field. Loeb, like all men
of the first rank, has no spirit of propaganda or proselytism. His
exact quantitative experiments rob biology of much of its confused
romantic glamour. The comprehension of his researches demands thorough
knowledge of physical chemistry. However, it is encouraging to note
that among a few younger investigators his point of view is being
accepted with fervour and enthusiasm. But it is time to stop. We are
straying from our subject which was, if I remember, American medicine.

                                                           ANONYMOUS




SPORT AND PLAY


Bartlett does not tell us who pulled the one about all work and no
play, but it probably was the man who said that the longest way round
was the shortest way home. There is as much sense in one remark as in
the other.

Give me an even start with George M. Cohan, who lives in Great Neck,
where I also live, without his suspecting it--give us an even start in
the Pennsylvania Station and route me on a Long Island train through
Flushing and Bayside while he travels via San Francisco and Yokohama,
and I shall undertake to beat him home, even in a blizzard. So much for
“the longest way round.” Now for the other. If it were your ambition to
spend an evening with a dull boy, whom would you choose, H. G. Wells,
whose output indicates that he doesn’t even take time off to sleep, or
the man that closes his desk at two o’clock every afternoon and goes to
the ball-game?

You may argue that watching ball-games is not play. It is the American
idea of play, which amounts to the same thing, and seventy-five per
cent, of the three hundred thousand citizens who do it daily, in
season, will tell you seriously that it is all the recreation they get;
moreover, that deprived of it, their brain would crack under the strain
of “business,” that, on account of it, they are able to do more work in
the forenoon, and do it better, than would be possible in two or three
full days of close sticking on the job. If you believe them, inveterate
baseball fans can, in a single morning, dictate as many as four or five
twenty-word letters to customers or salesmen, and finish as fresh as a
daisy; whereas the non-fan, the grind, is logy and torpid by the time
he reaches the second “In reply to same.”

But if you won’t concede, in the face of the fans’ own statement, that
it is recreation to look on at baseball or any other sport, then let
me ask you to invite to your home some evening, not a mere spectator,
but an active participant in any of our popular games--say a champion
or near-champion golfer, or a first string pitcher on a big league
baseball club. The golfer, let us say, sells insurance half the year
and golfs the rest. The pitcher plays eight months of the year and
loafs the other four. Bar conversation about their specialty, and
you won’t find two duller boys than those outside the motion-picture
studios.

No, brothers, the bright minds of this or any other country are owned
by the men who leave off work only to eat or go to bed. The doodles are
the boys who divide their time fifty-fifty between work and play, or
who play all the time and don’t even pretend to work. Proper exercise
undoubtedly promotes good health, but the theory that good health
and an active brain are inseparable can be shot full of holes by the
mention of two names--Stanislaus Zbyzsk and Robert Louis Stevenson.

It is silly, then, to propound that sport is of mental benefit. Its
true, basic function is the cultivation of bodily vigour, with a view
to longevity. And longevity, despite the fact that we profess belief
in a post-mortem existence that makes this one look sick, is a thing
we poignantly desire. Bonehead and wise guy, believer and sceptic--all
of us want to postpone as long as possible the promised joy-ride to
the Great Beyond. If to participate in sport helps us to do that, then
there is good reason to participate in sport.

Well, how many “grown-ups” (normal human beings of twenty-two and under
need not be considered; they get all the exercise they require, and
then some) in this country, a country that boasts champions in nearly
every branch of athletics, derive from play the physical benefit there
is in it? What percentage take an active part in what the sporting
editors call “the five major sports”--baseball, football, boxing,
horse racing, and golf? Let us take them one by one and figure it out,
beginning with “the national pastime.”

_Baseball._ Twenty or twenty-one play. Three hundred to forty thousand
look on. The latter are, for two hours, “out in the open air,” and
this, when the air is not so open as to give them pneumonia and when
they don’t catch something as bad or worse in the street-car or subway
train that takes them and brings them back, is a physical benefit.
Moreover, the habitual attendant at ball-games is not likely to die of
brain fever. But otherwise, the only ones whose health is appreciably
promoted are the twenty or twenty-one who play. And they are not doing
it for their health.

_Football._ Thirty play. Thirty thousand look on. One or two of the
thirty may be killed or suffer a broken bone, but the general health
of the other twenty-nine or twenty-eight is improved by the exercise.
As for the thirty thousand, all they get is the open air--usually a
little too much of it--and, unless they are hardened to the present-day
cheer-leader, a slight feeling of nausea.

_Boxing._ Eight to ten play. Five thousand to sixty thousand look
on. Those of the participants who are masters of defence may profit
physically by the training, though the rigorous methods sometimes
employed to make an unnatural weight are certainly inimical to health.
The ones not expert in defensive boxing, the ones who succeed in the
game through their ability to “take punishment” (a trait that usually
goes with a low mentality) die, as a rule, before reaching old age,
as a result of the “gameness” that made them “successful.” There is a
limit to the number of punches one can “take” and retain one’s health.
The five or sixty thousand cannot boast that they even get the air. All
but a few of the shows are given indoors, in an atmosphere as fresh and
clean as that of the Gopher Prairie day-coach.

_Horse Racing._ Fifty horses and twenty-five jockeys play. Ten thousand
people look on. I can’t speak for the horses, but if a jockey wants to
remain a jockey, he must, as a rule, eat a great deal less than his
little stomach craves, and I don’t know of any doctor who prescribes
constant underfeeding as conducive to good health in a growing boy.

Racing fans, of course, are out for financial, not physical, gain.
They, like the jockeys, are likely to starve to death while still young.

_Golf._ Here is a pastime in which the players far outnumber the
lookers-on. It is a game, if it is a game, that not only takes you out
in the open air, but makes you walk, and walking, the doctors say, is
all the exercise you need, if you walk five miles or more a day. Golf,
then, is really beneficial, and it costs you about $25.00 a week the
year round.

So much for our “five major sports.” We look on at four of them, and if
we can support the family, and pay taxes and insurance, on $1250 a year
less than we earn, we take part in the fifth.

The minor sports, as the editor will tell you, are tennis, boating,
polo, track athletics, trap-shooting, archery, hockey, soccer, and so
on. Not to mention games like poker, bridge, bowling, billiards, and
pool (now officially known as “pocket billiards” because the Ladies’
Guild thought “pool” must have something to do with betting), which we
may dismiss as being of doubtful physical benefit, since they are all
played indoors and in a fog of Camel smoke.

Of the outdoor “minors,” tennis is unquestionably the most popular. And
it is one whale of a game--if you can stand it. But what percentage
of grown-ups play it? I have no statistics at hand, and must guess.
The number of adult persons with whom I am acquainted, intimately or
casually, is possibly two thousand. I can think of ten who play as many
as five sets of tennis a year.

How many of the two thousand play polo or have ever played polo? One.
How many are trap-shooters? Two. How many have boats? Six or seven. How
many run footraces or jump? None. How many are archers? None. How many
play hockey, soccer, la crosse? None.

If I felt like indulging in a game of cricket, which God forbid, whom
should I call up and invite to join me?

Now, how many of my two thousand acquaintances are occasional or
habitual spectators at baseball games, football games, boxing matches,
or horse races? All but three or four. The people I know (I do not
include ball-players, boxers, and wrestlers, who make their living
from sport) are average people; they are the people you know. And the
overwhelming majority of them don’t play.

Why not? If regular participation in a more or less interesting outdoor
game is going to lengthen our lives, why don’t we participate? Is it
because we haven’t time? It takes just as much time to look on, and we
do that. Is it because we can’t afford it? We can play tennis for as
little as it costs to go to the bail-game and infinitely less than it
costs to go to the races.

We don’t play because (1) we lack imagination, and because (2) we are a
nation of hero-worshippers.

When we were kids, the nurse and the minister taught us that, if we
weren’t good, our next stop would be hell. But, to us, there was no
chance of the train’s starting for seventy years. And we couldn’t
visualize an infernal excursion that far off. It was too vague to be
scary. We kept right on swiping the old man’s cigars and giggling in
the choir. If they had said that misdemeanours such as those would
spell death and eternal fire, not when we were old, but to-morrow, most
of us would have respected father’s property rights and sat through
the service with a sour pan. If the family doctor were to tell us now
that unless we got outdoors and exercised every afternoon this week,
we should die next Tuesday before lunch, you can bet we should get
outdoors and exercise every afternoon this week. But when he tells us
that, without healthful outdoor sport, we shall die in 1945 instead of
1949, why, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a chimera, a myth, like the
next war.

But hero-worship is the national disease that does most to keep the
grandstands full and the playgrounds empty. To hell with those four
extra years of life, if they are going to cut in on our afternoon at
the Polo Grounds, where, in blissful asininity, we may feast our eyes
on the swarthy Champion of Swat, shouting now and then in an excess
of anile idolatry, “Come on, you Babe. Come on, you Baby Doll!” And
if an hour of tennis is going to make us late at the Garden, perhaps
keep us out of our ringside seats, so close to Dempsey’s corner that
(O bounteous God!) a drop of the divine perspiration may splash our
undeserving snout--Hang up, liver! You’re on a busy wire!

                                                     RING W. LARDNER




HUMOUR


With the aid of a competent bibliographer for about five days I believe
I could supply the proof to any unreflecting person in need of it that
there is no such thing as an American gift of humorous expression, that
the sense of humour does not exist among our upper classes, especially
our upper literary class, that in many respects almost every other
civilized country in the world has more of it, that quiet New England
humour is exceedingly loud and does not belong to New England, that
British incomprehension of our jokes is as a rule commendable, the
sense of humour generally beginning where our jokes leave off. And
while you can prove anything about a race or about all races with the
aid of a bibliographer for five days, as contemporary sociologists are
now showing, I believe these things are true. Belief in American humour
is a superstition that seldom outlasts youth in persons who have been
exposed to American practice, and hardly ever if they know anything
of the practice elsewhere. Of course I am not speaking of the sad
formalism of the usual thing as we see it in newspapers and on movie
screens or of the ritual of magazines wholly or in part sanctified to
our solemn god of fun. I mean the best of it.

In the books and passages collated by my bibliographer the American
gift of humour would be distributed over areas of time so vast and
among peoples so numerous, remote, or savage, that no American
would have the heart to press his claim. The quaintness, dryness,
ultra-solemnity with or without the wink, exaggeration, surprise,
contrast, assumption of common misunderstanding, hyperbolical
innocence, quiet chuckle, upsetting of dignity, _éclat_ of spontaneity
with appeals to the everlasting, dislocation of elegance or
familiarity, imperturbability, and twinkle--whatever the qualities
may be as enumerated by the bacteriologists who alone have ever
written on the subject, the most American of them would be shown in
my bibliographer’s report to be to a far greater degree un-American.
Patriotic exultation in their ownership is like patriotic exultation
in the possession of the parts of speech. Humour is no more altered
by local reference than grammar is altered by being spoken through
the nose. And if the bibliography is an ideal one it will not only
present American humour at all times and places but will produce almost
verbatim long passages of American humorous text dated at any time and
place, and will show how by a few simple changes in local terms they
may be made wholly verbatim and American. It will show that American
humorous writing did in fact begin everywhere but only at certain
periods was permitted to continue and that these periods were by no
means the happiest in history. I have time to mention here only the
laborious section that it will probably devote to Mark Twain in the Age
of Pericles, though for the more active reader the one on Mr. Cobb,
Mr. Butler, and others around the walls of Troy might be of greater
contemporary interest.

Mark Twain, according to the citations in this section, would seem
actually to have begun all of his longer stories, including “Pudd’nhead
Wilson,” and most of the shorter ones, essays, and other papers, at
Athens or thereabouts during this period, but not to have finished a
single one, not even the briefest of them. He started, gave a clear
hint as to how the thing would naturally run, and then he stopped.
The reason for this was that owing to the trained imagination of the
people for whom he wrote, the beginning and the hint were sufficient,
and from that point on they could amuse themselves along the line
that Mark Twain indicated better than he would have amused them, had
he continued. Mark Twain finally saw this and that is why he stopped,
realizing that there was no need of his keeping the ball rolling when
to their imaginative intelligence the ball would roll of itself. He did
at first try to keep on, and being lively and observant and voluble
even for a Greek he held large crowds on street-corners by the sheer
repetition of a single gesture of the mind throughout long narratives
of varied circumstance. In good society this was not tolerated even
after supper, and there was never the slightest chance of publication.
But the streets of Athens were full of the suppressed writings of Mark
Twain.

Every man of taste in Athens loved Mark Twain for the first push of his
fancy but none could endure the unmitigated constancy of his pushing
of it, and as Mark Twain went everywhere and was most persistent,
the compression of his narrative flow within the limits of the good
breeding of the period was an embarrassing problem to hosts, unwilling
to be downright rude to him. Finally he was snubbed in public by his
friends and a few of the more intimate explained to him afterwards the
reason why.

The gist of their explanation was evidently this: The hypothesis of
the best society in town nowadays is that the prolongation of a single
posture of the mind is intolerable, no matter how variegated the
substance in which the mind reposes. That sort of thing belongs to an
earlier day than ours, although, as you have found, it is still much
relished in the streets. If all the slaves were writers; if readers
bred like rabbits so that the pleasing of them assured great wealth;
if the banausic element in our life should absorb all the rest of it
and if, lost in the external labour process, with the mechanism of it
running in our minds, we turned only a sleepy eye to pleasure; then
we might need the single thought strung with adventures, passions,
incidents and need only that--infinitudes of detail easily guessed but
inexorably recounted; long lists of sentiments with human countenances
doing this and that; physiological acts in millions of pages and
unchanging phrase; volumes of imaginary events without a thought among
them; invented public documents equalling the real; enormous anecdotes;
and all in a strange reiterated gesture, caught from machines,
disposing the mind to nod itself to sleep repeating the names of what
it saw while awake. But the bedside writer for the men in bed is not
desired at the present moment in our best society.

All these things are now carried in ellipsis to the reader’s head,
if the reader’s head desires them; they are implied in dots at ends
of sentences. We guess long narratives merely from a comma; we do
not write them out. In this space left free by us with deliberate
aposiopesis, a literature of countless simplicities may some day
arise. At present we do not feel the need of it. And in respect to
humour the rule of the present day is this: never do for another what
he can do for himself. A simple process of the fancy as in contrast,
incongruity, exaggeration, impossibility, must be confined in public
to one or two displays. Let us take the simplest of illustrations--a
cow in the dining-room, for example--and proceed with it as simply as
we can. If by a happy stroke of fancy a cow in the dining-room is made
pleasing to the mind, never argue that the pleasure is doubled by the
successive portrayal of two cows in two dining-rooms, assuming that the
stroke of fancy remains the same. Realize rather that it diminishes,
and that with the presentation of nine cows in nine dining-rooms it has
changed to pain. Now if for cows in dining-rooms be substituted gods in
tailor shops, tailors in the houses of gods, cobblers at king’s courts,
Thebans before masterpieces, one class against another, one age against
another, and so on through incalculable details, however bizarre, all
in simple combination, all easily gathered, without a shift of thought
or wider imagery, the fancy mechanistically placing the objects side
by side, picked from the world as from a catalogue--even then the
situation to our present thinking is not improved.

“Distiktos,” said they, playfully turning the name of the humourist
into the argot of the street, “we find you charming just at the turn of
the tide, but when the flood comes in, _ne Dia!_ you are certainly _de
trop_. And in your own private interest, Distiktos, unless you really
want to lead a life totally anexetastic and forlorn, how can you go on
in that manner?”

                                                   FRANK MOORE COLBY




_American Civilization from the Foreign Point of View_

    I. ENGLISH
   II. IRISH
  III. ITALIAN




I. AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT


A little less than two years ago--on the 14 July, 1919, to be exact--it
fell to my lot, as an officer attached to one of the many military
missions in Paris, to “assist,” from a reserved seat in a balcony of
the Hotel Astoria, at the _défilé_, or triumphal entry of the Allied
troops into Paris.

The march _à Berlin_ not having eventuated owing to the upset in
schedule brought about by the entry of dispassionate allies at the
eleventh hour, it was felt that the French must be offered something
in exchange, and this took the happy form of a sort of community march
along the route once desecrated by Prussian hoof-beats--a vast military
_corbeille_ of the allied contingents, with flags, drums, trumpets, and
all the rest of the paraphernalia that had been kept in cold storage
during four years of gas, shell, and barbed wire. Such a _défilé_, it
was calculated, would be something more than a frugal gratification
to the French army and people. It would offer to the world at large,
through the medium of a now unmuzzled press, a striking object lesson
in allied good feeling and similarity of aims.

My purpose in referring to the _défilé_ is merely to record one
unrehearsed incident in it but I would say in passing that the
affair, “for an affair,” as the French say, was extraordinarily well
stage-managed. A particularly happy thought was the marshalling of the
allied contingents by alphabetical order. This not only obviated any
international pique on what we all wanted to be France’s day, but left
the lead of the procession where everybody, in the rapture of delivery,
was well content it should remain. Handled with a little tact, the
alphabet had once more justified itself as an impartial guide:

  B is for Britain, Great.
  A is for America, United States of.

       *       *       *       *       *

For impressiveness I frankly and freely allot the palm to what it was
the fashion then to term the American effort. Different contingents
were impressive in different ways. The Republican Guard, jack-booted,
with buckskin breeches, gleaming helmets, flowing _crinières_, and
sabres _au clair_, lent just the right subtle touch of the _épopée_ of
Austerlitz and Jena to make us feel 1871 had been an evil dream; the
Highlanders, the voice of the hydra squalling and clanging from their
immemorial pipes, stirred all sorts of atavistic impulses and memories.
Nevertheless, had I been present that day in Paris as a newspaper man
instead of as the humblest and most obscure of soldiers, neither one
nor the other would have misled my journalistic instinct. I should have
put the lead of my “story” where alphabetical skill had put the lead of
the procession--in the American infantry.

In front the generalissimo, martial and urbane, on a bright coated
horse that pranced, curvetted, “passaged” from side to side under
a practised hand. At his back the band, its monster uncurved horns
of brass blaring out the Broadway air before which “over there”
the walls of pacifism had toppled into dust in a day. Behind them,
platoon by platoon, the clean shaved, physically perfect fighting
youth of the great republic. All six feet high--there was not one,
it was whispered, but had earned his place in the contingent by a
rigorous physical selection: moving with the alignment of pistons in
some deadly machine--they had been drilled, we were told, intensively
for a month back. In spotless khaki, varnished trench helmets, spick
and span, scarcely touched by the withering breath of war. Whenever
the procession was checked, platoon after platoon moved on to the
regulation distance and marked time. When it resumed, they opened out
link by link with the same almost inhuman precision, and resumed their
portentous progress. How others saw them you shall hear, but to me they
were no mere thousand fighting men; rather the head of a vast battering
ram, the simple threat of which, aimed at the over-taxed heart of the
German Empire, had ended war. A French _planton_ of the Astoria staff,
who had edged his way into the ticketed group was at my back. “Les
voilà qui les attendaient,” he almost whispered. “Look what was waiting
for _them_.”

The next balcony to mine had been reserved for the civil employés
of British missions, and here was gathered a little knot of average
English men and women--stenographers, typists, clerks, cogs of
commercialism pressed into the mechanical work of post-war settlement.
As the Americans moved on after one of the impressive checks of which
I have just spoken, something caught my ears that made me turn my head
quickly, even from a spectacle every lost moment of which I grudged. It
was, of all sounds that come from the human heart, the lowest and the
most ominous--the sound that makes the unwary walker through tropical
long grass look swiftly round his feet and take a firmer grasp on the
stick he has been wise enough to carry.

It is impossible--it is inconceivable--and it’s true. On this great
day of international congratulation, one of the two branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race was hissing the other.

       *       *       *       *       *

I spoke about the matter later to a friend and former chief, whom I
liked but whose position and character were no guarantee of tact or
good judgment. I said I thought it rather an ominous incident, but
he refused to be “rattled.” With that British imperturbability which
Americans have noted and filed on the card index of their impressions
he dismissed the whole thing as of slight import.

“Very natural, I dare say. Fine show all the same. Perhaps your friends
on the other balcony thought they were slopping over in front.”

“‘Slopping over...?’”

“Well--going a little too far. Efficiency and all that. Bit out of step
with the rest of the procession.”

I have often wondered since whether this homely phrase, uttered by a
simple soldier man, did not come nearer to the root of the divergence
between British and American character than all the mystifying and
laborious estimates which nine out of ten of our great or near-great
writers seem to think is due at a certain period in their popularity.

To achieve discord, you see, it is not necessary that two instruments
should play different tunes. It is quite sufficient that the tempo of
one should differ from the tempo of the other. All I want to indicate
in the brief space which the scope of this work, leaves at my disposal
are just a few of the conjunctures at which I think the beat of the
national heart, here and across the Atlantic, is likely to find itself
out of accord.

       *       *       *       *       *

Englishmen do not emigrate to the United States in any large numbers,
and it is many years since their arrival contributed anything but an
insignificant racial element to the “melting pot.” They do not come
partly because their own Colonies offer a superior attraction, and
partly because British labour is now aware that the economic stress is
fiercer in the larger country and the material rewards proportionately
no greater. Those who still come, come as a rule prepared to take
executive positions, or as specialists in their several lines. Their
unwillingness to assume American citizenship is notorious, and I think
significant; but it is only within quite recent years that it has been
made any ground of accusation--and among the class with which their
activities bring them into closest contact it is, or was until a year
or two ago, tacitly and tactfully ignored. During a review of the
“foreign element” in Boston to which I was assigned two years before
the war, I found business men of British birth not only reluctant to
yield “copy” but resentful of the publicity to which the enterprise of
my journal was subjecting them.

There are many reasons why eminent English writers and publicists are
of little value in arriving at an estimate of “how Americans strike an
Englishman.” While not asserting anything so crude as that commercial
motives are felt as a restraining force when the temptation arises to
pass adverse judgment on the things they see and hear, it is evident
that the conditions under which they come--men of achievement in their
own country accredited to men of achievement here--keep them isolated
from much that is restless, unstable, but vitally significant in
American life. None of them, so far as I know, have had the courage or
the enterprise to come to America, unheralded and anonymous, and to pay
with a few months of economic struggle for an estimate that might have
real value.

To this lack of real contact between the masses in America and Great
Britain is due the intrinsic falsity of the language in which the
racial bond is celebrated on the occasions when some political crisis
calls for its reiteration. It is felt easier and safer to utter it
in consecrated _clichés_--to refer to the specific gravity of blood
and water, or the philological roots of the medium used by Milton
and Arthur Brisbane. The banality, the insincerity, of the public
utterances at the time that America’s entry into the European struggle
first loomed as a possible solution of the agony on the Western Front
was almost unbelievable. Any one who cares to turn up the files of the
great dailies between September, 1916, and March, 1918, may find them
for himself.

To a mind not clouded by the will to believe, this constant invocation
of common aims, this perpetual tug at the bond to ensure that it has
not parted overnight, would be strong corroboration of a suspicion
that the two vessels were drifting apart, borne on currents that flow
in different directions. It is not upon the after-dinner banalities of
wealthy and class-conscious “pilgrims” nor the sonorous platitudes of
discredited laggards on the political scene, still less is it upon the
sporting proclivities of titled hoydens and hawbucks to whom American
sweat and dollars have arrived in a revivifying stream, that we shall
have to rely should the cable really part and the two great vessels of
State grope for one another on a dark and uncharted sea. It is upon
the sheer and unassisted fact of how American and Englishman like or
dislike one another.

It is a truism almost too stale to restate that we are standing to-day
on the threshold of great changes. What is not so well realized is
that many of these changes have already taken place. The passing of
gold in shipment after shipment from the Eastern to the Western side
of the Atlantic and the feverish hunt for new and untapped sources
of exploitation are only the outward signs of a profound European
impoverishment in which Britain for the first time in her history has
been called upon to bear her full share. The strikes and lock-outs that
have followed the peace in such rapid succession might possibly be
written off as inevitable _sequelæ_ of a great war. The feeble response
to the call for production as a means of salvation, the general change
in the English temper faced with its heavy task are far more vital and
significant matters. They seem to mark a shift in moral values--a
change in the faith by which nations, each in the sphere that character
and circumstance allot, wax and flourish.

Confronted with inevitable competition by a nation more populous,
more cohesive, and richer than itself, it seems to me that there are
three courses which the older section of the English race may elect
to follow. One is war, before the forces grow too disparate, and on
the day that war is declared one phase of our civilization will end.
It will really not matter much, to the world at large, who wins an
Anglo-American world conflict. The second, which is being preached
in and out of season by our politicians and publicists, who seldom,
however, dare to speak their full thought, is a girding up of the
national loins, a renewed consecration to the gospel of effort, a
curtailment, if necessary--though this is up to now only vaguely
hinted--of political liberties bestowed in easier and less strenuous
days. The third course may easily be guessed. It is a persistence in
proclivities, always latent as I believe in the English temperament,
but which have only revealed themselves openly since the great war,
a clearer questioning of values till now held as unimpeachable, a
readier ear to the muttering and murmuring of the masses in Continental
Europe, internationalism--revolution. No thoughtful man in England
to-day denies the danger. Even references to that saving factor, the
“common sense of the British workman,” no longer allays the spectre of
a problem the issues of which have only to be stated to stand forth in
all their hopeless irreconcilability. Years ago, long before the shadow
fell on the world, in a moment of depression or inspiration, I wrote
that cravings were stirring in the human heart on the very eve of the
day when the call would be to sacrifice. That is the riddle, nakedly
stated, to which workers and rulers alike are asked to find an answer
to-day.

In this choice that lies before the British worker a great deal may
depend upon how American experiments and American achievements strike
him. In England now there is no escaping from the big transatlantic
sister. Politicians use her example as a justification; employers hold
up her achievements as a reproach. A British premier dare not face the
House of Commons on an “Irish night” unequipped with artful analogies
culled from the history of the war of secession. The number of bricks
per hour America’s bricklayers will lay or the tons of coal per week
her stolid colliers will hew are the despair of the contractor face
to face with the loafing and pleasure-loving native born. You will
hear no more jokes to-day in high coalition places over her political
machine replacing regularly and without the litter and disorder of a
general election tweedledum Democrat by a tweedledee Republican. She is
recognized--and this, I think, is the final value placed upon her by
the entire ruling and possessing classes in my own country--as better
equipped in her institutions, her character, and her population for the
big economic struggle that is ahead of us.

This is the secret of the unceasing court paid to Washington by all
countries, but pre-eminently by Britain. It is not fear of her power,
nor hunger for her money bags and harvests, nor desire to be “on the
band-wagon,” as light-hearted cartoonists see it, that prompts the
nervous susceptibility and the instantaneous response to anything that
will offend those in high places on the banks of the Potomac. It is the
sense, among all men with a strong interest in maintaining the present
economic order, that the support in their own countries is crumbling
under their hands, and that that fresh support, stronger and surer, is
to be found in a new country with a simpler faith and a cleaner, or
at any rate a shorter, record. To fight proletarianism with democracy
is a method so obvious and safe that one only wonders its discovery
had to wait upon to-day. Its salient characteristic is a newly aroused
interest and enthusiasm in one country for the political forces that
seem to make stability their watchword in the other. The coalition has
become the hero of the New York _Times_ and _Tribune_--the triumph
of the Republican party was hailed almost as a national victory in
the London _Times_ and Birmingham _Post_. Intransigeance in foreign
policies finds ready forgiveness in London; in return, a blind eye is
turned to schemes of territorial aggrandisement at Washington.

If a flaw is to be discerned in what at first sight seems a perfectly
adjusted instrument for international comity, it is that this new
Anglo-American understanding seems to be founded on class rather
than on national sympathy. Even offhand some inherent inconsistency
would seem to be sensed from the fact that the appeal of the great
republic comes most home, in the parent country, to the class that is
least attached to democratic forms and the most fearful of change.
References to America arouse no enthusiasm at meetings of the labour
element in England, and it is still felt unwise to expose the Union
Jack to possible humiliation in parades on a large scale in New York or
Chicago. A sympathy that flowers into rhetoric at commercial banquets
or at meetings of the archæologically inclined may have its roots in
the soundest political wisdom. But to infer from such demonstrations
of class solidarity any national community of thought or aim is both
unwarranted and unsafe. This much is evident, that should a class
subversion, always possible in a country the political fluidity of
which is great, leave the destinies of Great Britain in the hands of
the class that is silent or hostile to-day when the name of America is
mentioned, an entire re-statement of Anglo-American unity would become
necessary, in terms palatable to the average Englishman.

       *       *       *       *       *

This average Englishman is a highly complicated being. Through the
overlay which industrialism has imposed on him, he has preserved to
quite an extraordinary extent the asperities, the generosities, the
occasional eccentricities of the days when he was a free man in a free
land. No melting process has ever subdued the sharp bright hues of
his individuality into the universal, all-pervading drab that is the
result of blending primary colours. No man who has employed him to
useful purpose has ever succeeded in reducing his personality to the
proportions of a number on a brass tag. The pirate and rover who looked
upon Roman villadom and found it not good, the archer who brought the
steel-clad hierarchy of France toppling from their blooded horses at
Crécy and Agincourt, the churl who struck off the heads of lawyers in
Westminster Palace yard survive in him.

If I am stressing this kink in the British character it is because one
of its results has been to make the Englishman of all men the least
impressed by scale, and the one to whom appeals made on the size of an
experiment or the vastness of a vision will evoke the least response,
and especially because I think I perceive a tendency to approach him
in the interests of Anglo-American unity precisely from the angle that
will awake antagonism where co-operation is sought. The attachment of
the Englishman to little things and to hidden things, which no one
except Chesterton has had the insight to perceive, or at all events
which Chesterton was the first to place in its full relation to his
inconsistencies, explains his strangely detached attitude to that
British Empire of which his country is the core. Its discovery as
an entity calling for a special quality in thought and action dates
no further back than that strange interlude in history, when the
personality of Roosevelt and the vision of Kipling held the imagination
of the world.

This refusal to be impressed by greatness, whether his own or others’,
has its disadvantages, but at least it has one saving element. It
leaves an Englishman quite capable of perceiving that it is possible
for a thing to be grandiose in scale and mean in quality. It leaves
intact his frank and childlike confidence that the little things of
the world confound the strong; his implicit conviction that David
will always floor Goliath, and that Jack’s is the destined sword to
smite off the giant’s head. The grotesqueness of the Kaiser’s upturned
moustaches, the inadequacy of a mythical “William the Weed” to achieve
results that would count, were his guiding lights to victory, the
touchstones by which he tested in advance the vast machine that finally
cracked and broke under its own weight. It was the “contemptible”
little army of shopmen and colliers which seized his imagination and
held his affection throughout, not the efficient mechanical naval
machine that fought one great sea battle, which was a revelation of
the risks inherent in its own monstrousness and complexity, and made
its headquarters in Scapa Flow. I recall the comments heard at the
time of Jutland in the artillery camp where fate had throwm me. They
served to confirm a dawning conviction that the navy, while it still
awes and impresses, lost its hold on the British heart the day wooden
walls were exchanged for iron and steel. It is perhaps the “silent
service” to-day because its appeal awakes so little response. It has
been specialized and magnified out of the average Englishman’s power to
love it.

In America the contrary seems the case. The American heart appears to
go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The American has neither
the time nor the temperament to test and weigh. His affections, even
his loyalties, seem to be at the mercy of aspects that impose and
impress. I know no other country where the word “big” is used so
constantly as a token of affection. Every community has its “Big Tims,”
“Big Bills,” “Big Jacks,” great hearty fellows who gambol and spout on
public occasions with the abandonment of a school of whales. Gargantuan
“Babe Ruth,” mountainous Jack Dempsey are the idols of its sport-loving
crowds. “Mammoth in character,” the qualification which on the lips of
the late Mr. Morgan Richards stirred laughter throughout England, is to
the American no inconsequential or slipshod phrase. He does perceive a
character and justification in bigness. It was perhaps to this trait
in his mental make-up that the puzzling shift of allegiance to the
beginning of the great war was due. The scale and completeness of the
German effort laid hold of his imagination to an extent that only
those who spent the first few months of agonizing doubt in the West
and the Middle West can appreciate. Something that was obscurely akin,
something that transcended racial affinities and antipathies, awoke
in him at the steady ordered flow of the field-grey legions Westward,
so adequately pictured for him by Richard Harding Davis. He is quite
merciless to defeat.

Nothing conceived on such a scale can indulge complexities. Its ideals
must be ample, rugged, and primitive, adequate to the vast task. Hence
the velocity, the thoroughness, the apparent ruthlessness with which
American enterprises are put through. It is the fashion among a certain
school of thought to call America the country of inhibitions. But there
is little inhibition to be perceived on that side of his temperament,
which the American has chosen to cultivate, leaving all else to those
who find perverse attraction in weed and ruin. His language--and he is
amazingly vocal--is as simple and direct as his thought. The appeals
and admonitions of his leaders reverberate from vast and resonant
lungs. They are calculated rather to carry far than to penetrate
deeply. They are statements and re-statements rather than arguments. If
their verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain the sublime,
if the American leader is forever dedicating, consecrating, inspiring
something, the altitude is like the elevation given a shell in order
that it may travel further. The nimble presentation of antithesis
of a Lloyd George, the dagger-play of sarcasm of an Asquith, are
conspicuously absent from the speeches of American leaders. There is
something arrogant and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before
the arm is raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already
securely rooted in the hearts of all its hearers.

This primitiveness and single-mindedness of the American seem to
intensify as his historical origins recede further and further into
the past. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had the
development of his country remained normal and homogeneous, as, up to
the Civil War, it admittedly did. It is an even less grateful task to
look back on the literature of the Transcendental period and register
all that American thought seems to have lost since in subtlety and
essential catholicity. What is really important is to realize that
not only the language but the essence of Occidental civilization has
called for simplification, for sacrifice, year by year. It is hard to
see what other choice has lain before the American, as wave after wave
of immigration diluted his homogeneity, than to put his concepts into
terms easily understood and quickly grasped, with the philological
economy of the traveller’s pocket manual and the categorical precision
of the drill book. If in the very nature of things, this evangel is
oftener pointed with a threat than made palatable with the honey of
reason and sympathy, the task and not the taskmaster is to blame. On
no other country has ever been imposed similar drudgery on a similar
scale. It is idle to talk about the spiritual contribution of the
foreigner when his first duty is to cast that contribution into the
discard. It is futile to appeal to his traditions where the barrier of
language rears itself in a few years between parents who have never
learnt the new tongue and children who are unable or ashamed to speak
the old.

But such a régime cannot endure for many years without a profound
influence, not only on those to whom it is prescribed, but on those
who administer it. The most heaven-born leader of men, put into a
receiving depot to which monthly and fortnightly contingents of bemused
recruits arrive, quickly deteriorates into something like a glorified
and commissioned drill sergeant. The schoolmaster is notoriously a
social failure in circles where intercourse must be held on the level
to which the elevation of his _estrade_ has dishabituated him. Exact
values--visions, to use a word that misuse has made hateful--disappear
under a multiplicity of minor tasks. It is one of the revenges taken by
fate that those who must harass and drive become harassed and sterile
in turn.

No one yet, so far as I know, has sought to place this amazing
simplification in its true relation to the aridity of American life,
an aridity so marked that it creates a positive thirst for softer and
milder civilizations, not only in the foreigner who has tasted of
them, but at a certain moment in their life in almost every one of the
native born whose work lies outside the realm of material production.
It is not that in England, as in every community, entire classes do
not exist who seek material success by the limitation of interests
and the retrenchment of sympathies. But in so doing they sacrifice
to a domestic, not a national God; they follow personal not racial
proclivities. There is no conscious subscription to a national ideal
in their abandonment of æsthetic impulses. Side by side with them
live other men whose apparent contentment with insecure and unstable
lives at once redresses their pride and curtails their influence. They
are conscious of the existence around them of a whole alien world,
the material returns from which are negligible but in which other
men somehow manage to achieve a fullness of experience and maintain
self-respect. This other world reacts not only on employer but on
employed. For the worker it abates the fervour and stress of his task,
lends meaning and justification to his demand for leisure in the face
of economic demands that threaten or deny. No one in England has yet
dared to erect into an evangel the obvious truth that poor men must
work. No compulsion sets the mental attitude a man may choose when
faced with his task. The speeder-up and the efficiency expert is
hateful and alien. “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” may seem
a loose and questionable phrase, but its implications go very deep. It
sets a boundary mark on the frontier between flesh and spirit by which
encroachments are registered as they occur.

In America no such frontier exists. Here the invasion seems to be
complete. The spirit that would disentangle material from immaterial
aims wanders baffled and perplexed through a maze of loftily conceived
phrases and exhortations each one of which holds the promise of rescue
from the drudgery of visionless life, yet each one of which leads back
to an altar where production is enthroned as God. Manuals and primers,
one had almost written psalters, pour out from the printing presses
in which such words as “inspiration,” “dedication,” “consecration”
urge American youth not to the renunciation of material aims but to
their intensive pursuit. This naïve and simple creed is quite free of
self-consciousness or hypocrisy. In its occasional abrupt transitions
from the language of prayer to such conscience-searching questions
as “Could you hold down a $100.00 a week job?” or “Would you hire
yourself?” no lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous, far less to the
squalid, is felt. It has the childlike gravity and reverence of all
religions that are held in the heart.

But its God is a jealous God. No faltering in his service, no divided
allegiance is permitted. His rewards are concrete and his punishments
can be overwhelming. For open rebellion, outlawry; for secret revolt,
contempt and misunderstanding are his inevitable visitations. For
this reason those who escape into heresy not unfrequently lose their
integrity and are gibbeted or pilloried for the edification of the
faithful. The man who will not serve because the service starves and
stunts his soul is all too likely to find himself dependent for company
upon the man who will not serve because his will is too weak or his
habits too dissipated.

That this service is a hard one, its most ardent advocates make no
attempt to conceal. Its very stringency is made the text of appeals for
ever and ever fresh efficiency, intensive training, specialization.
“The pace they must travel is so swift,” one advocate of strenuousness
warns his disciples, “competition has become so fierce that brains
and vision are not enough. One must have the _punch_ to put things
through.” The impression grows that the American business man, new
style, is a sombre gladiator, equipped for his struggle by rigorous
physical and mental discipline. The impression is helped by a host
of axioms, plain and pictured, that feature a sort of new cant of
virility. “Red-blooded men,” “Two-fisted men,” “Men who do things,”
“Get-there fellows,” are a few headliners in this gospel of push and
shove.

The service is made still more difficult by its uncertainty, since no
gospel of efficiency can greatly change the proportion of rewards,
though it can make the contest harder and the marking higher. Year in
year out, while competition intensifies and resources are fenced off,
insecurity of employment remains, an evil tradition from days when
opportunity was really boundless and competition could be escaped by
a move of a few score miles Westward. Continuity in one employment
still remains the exception rather than the rule, and when death or
retirement reveals an instance it is still thought worthy of space in
local journals. “Can you use me?” remains the customary gambit for the
seeker after employment. The contempt of a settled prospect, of routine
work, the conception of business as something to work _up_ rather
than to work _at_ is still latent in the imagination of atavistic and
ambitious young America. Of late years this restlessness, even though
in so worthy a cause as “getting on,” has been felt as a hindrance to
full efficiency, and the happy idea has been conceived of applying the
adventurous element of competition at home. Territorial or departmental
spheres are allotted within or without the “concern” to each employé;
the results attained by A, B, and C are then totalled, analyzed,
charted, and posted in conspicuous places where all may see, admire,
and take warning. In the majority of up-to-date houses “suggestions”
for the expansion or improvement of the business are not only welcomed
but expected, and the employé who does not produce them in reasonable
bulk and quality is slated for the “discard.” When inventiveness
tires, “shake-ups” on a scale unknown in England take place, and new
aspirants eager to “make good” step into the shoes of the old. The
business athletes strain and pant toward the goal. There is no rest for
the young man “consecrated” to merchandising effort. Like the fly in
the fable, he must struggle and swim until the milk around his legs is
churned into the butter of executive position.

The American press, hybrid, highly coloured, and often written by men
of erratic genius who prefer the poor rewards of news writing to the
commercial yoke, conveys but a partial idea of this absorption of an
entire race in a single function. A far more vivid impression is to be
gained from the “house organs,” and publicity pamphlets which pour from
the press in an unceasing stream and the production of which within
recent years has become a large and lucrative industry. Here articles
and symposia on such themes as “Building Character into Salesmanship,”
“Hidden Forces that bring Sales,” and “Capitalizing Individuality,”
often adorned with half-tones of tense and joyless faces, recur on
every page. No sanctuary is inviolable, no recess unexplored. The
demand of the commercial God is for the soul, and he will be content
with no less.

This demand implies a revised conception of the relation between
employé and employer. The old contract under which time and effort
were hired for so many hours a day at a stated remuneration, leaving
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outside those hours a
matter of personal predilection, is now abrogated, or at least sharply
questioned. It is recognized, and with entire logic, that the measure
of accomplishment within working hours will depend largely on the
environment amid which hours of recreation are spent; and that though
detection of inefficiency is a task of keen brains that seldom fail,
this detection, in the nature of things, may not take place until
damage has been done the commercial structure. This is the real
inwardness of a whole new gospel of “Welfare” and “Uplift,” under whose
dispensation employés are provided with simple and tested specifics
for recreation, with the watchful and benevolent eye of department
heads upon them, in which it is presumed and stated with entire candour
that the physical, moral, and mental efficiency of the staffs and
“salesforce” has become the concern of the organization that has
allotted them a place in its economy. The organism works, plays, rests,
moves on together.

Nothing is more terrifying, as that master of terror, Edgar Allan
Poe, perceived, than an organism that is at once mean and colossal.
Properties of efficiency and adaptation to one definite end are
bestowed in an eminent degree only on the lower orders of animal life.
With rigid bodies, encasing organs that are designed for simple,
metabolic purposes, armed with an elaborate mechanism of claws, hinges,
borers, valves, and suckers the lepidoptera are living tools that fly
or creep. Absorbed in one tireless function, with all distractions of
love and war delegated to specialized subspecies, they neither love,
hate, nor rebel. As the scale ascends, efficiency dwindles, until in
the litter and loneliness of the den, lazy domesticity with dam and
cubs, the joy of prey hunt and love hunt, between the belly pinch of
hunger and the sleep of repletion, the lives of the big carnivora pass
in a sheer joy of living for living’s sake until the gun of the hunter
ends the day dream.

It has been left for man--hapless and inventive--to realize a life
that touches both ends of the scale, to feel at his heart the pull of
hive-life and jungle-life in turn. Something of the ant and something
of the tiger lurks in every normal human creature. If he has immense
powers of assertion, his faculty for abdication seems to be as
limitless. It is just this dual nature in man that makes prophecy as to
what “will happen the world” so difficult and unsafe. But one prophecy
may be ventured on and that is, that in proportion as acquiescence or
revolt seize the imaginations of separated nations will those nations
coalesce or drift apart into antagonism.

If a life spent during the last twenty years between England and
the United States is any title to judge, I should say that at the
present moment the dominant note in America is acquiescence in, and in
England revolt against the inordinate demands of commercialism. Here,
to all appearances, the surrender for the moment is complete. There
are revolts, but they are sporadic and misguided and their speedy
suppression seems to stir no indignation and to awaken no thrill of
common danger among the body of workers. Strikes confined to wage
issues are treated more indulgently, but even they are generally
strangled at their birth by injunctions, and a sour or hostile attitude
of authority makes success difficult. In any display of opposition
to established conditions, even when based on the most technical
grounds, authority appears to sense a challenge to larger issues and
to meet them half way with a display of force that to an Englishman
appears strangely over-adequate. It is evident the ground is being
tested. Interpretations of liberty that date from easier and roomier
days are under revision, and where they are found at variance with
a conception of society as a disciplined and productive force, they
are being roughly retrenched. The prevailing character of the labour
mass, at once heterogeneous and amorphous, makes it a safe and ductile
medium for almost any social experiment. “If you don’t like it, go
back,” is an argument to which no answer has been found. Native-born
labour shares in the universal dis-esteem and takes refuge from it
in aristocratic and doctrinaire federations whose ineffectiveness is
apparent whenever a labour issue arises. For the rebel who, under these
conditions, chooses to fight on, rougher methods are found. He may
become _fera natura_. Tarring and feathering, ducking and rubbing with
acid, and deportation from State to State may be his portion. Under any
social condition conformity is the easiest course. When the prison cell
and social pillory are its alternatives, to resist requires a degree
of fanatical courage and interior moral resources possessed only by a
handful of men in a generation.

To this conception of a disciplined community harnessed to the purpose
of production, thousands of the possessing and capitalistic classes
look wistfully from the other side of the Atlantic. But there are many
obstacles to its realization in England. The English proletarian is no
uprooted orphan, paying with docile and silent work for the citizenship
of his children and grandchildren. That great going concern, the
British Empire, is his personal work, built on the bones and cemented
with the blood of his forebears. His enfranchisement is as complete as
his disinheritance, and the impoverishment of his country, evidenced
in the stream of gold that pours Westward like arterial blood, has
not reached to his spirit. Even the Great War, with its revelation
to him of how ruthless and comprehensive the demands of the State on
the individual can be, has only reinforced his sense of being a very
deserving person and has added to the long debt which he is frankly
out to collect. The promises, the appeals to national pride and
tradition with which he had to be appeased while, for the first time
in his history, the yoke of universal service was laid upon his neck,
trip up the feet of his rulers to-day. It is difficult to tell him to
go elsewhere, for he “belongs” in England. Even suggestions that he
should emigrate wholesale to British colonies in order to relieve the
congested labour market are received with mocking laughter in which a
threat lurks. He is, I am sure, because I know him, looking on with a
certain sardonic relish and enjoyment at the flurries, the perplexities
of his rulers, their displays of force alternated with appeals to
sweet reason, their brave words succeeded by abject denials and
qualifications. He is waiting until the naked economic question, which
he knows well underlies all the rhodomontade of national greatness
and imperial heritage, shall be put to him. It will be a great and
momentous day when the Englishman is given his choice. A choice it must
be. The means to compulsion are not here.

       *       *       *       *       *

To America just now Europeans as a whole must seem a helpless race,
bewildered actors in a vast and tragic blunder. To thousands of
Red Cross workers, Knights of Columbus, and welfare auxiliaries in
devastated districts, the spectacle of suffering and want must have
come home to reinforce impressions already gained from sights witnessed
at Ellis Island or Long Wharf. None the less, it is an historical
misfortune that the first real contact between the people of the two
continents should have come at a time when the older was bankrupt and
had little to show save the rags and tatters of its civilization. The
reverse of the tenderness to the stricken European abroad has been a
hardening of the heart to the immigrant at home, and it is difficult
for the American, schoolmaster and lawgiver to so many alien peoples
in his own country, to divest himself of a didactic character in his
foreign relations. To many countries he is “saying it with flour,” and
those who accept the dole can do little else than swallow the sermon.
Even to those countries who were his allies he does shine forth in a
certain splendour of righteousness. His sacrifice was deliberate--which
is, perhaps, its best excuse for being a little conscious. It was
self-imposed, and fifty thousand of his dead, wrested from productive
enterprises to lie in France, attest its sincerity. No Englishman,
at any rate, believes in his heart that its material reward, great
and inevitable as it is now seen to be, was the driving force at the
time the sacrifice was accepted. There are a host of reasons, some
creditable, others less so, that make Europe curb its restiveness under
American homilies.

With England the case is different. No one knows just how hard Britain
has been hit, but she is managing to put a good face on her wounds.
No relief organization from the big sister has landed its khaki-clad
apostles of hygiene and its grey-cloaked sisters of mercy on English
shores. The façade is intact, the old masters in possession. With a
few shifts and changes in political labelling that are a matter of
domestic concern, those who steered the big concern into the bankruptcy
of war are still entrusted with its extrication. No great subversion
stands as a witness of a change of national faith. The destinies, the
foreign relations, the aspects that attract or antagonize remain in the
hands of men who secured a fresh lease of power by a clever political
trick. The skeleton at the feast of racial reunion is not Ireland, nor
Mesopotamia, nor Yap, nor the control of the seas. It is the emergence
into political power, sooner or later, but inevitably from the very
nature of British political institutions, of the British proletariat.

Frankly I do not see, when this moment arrives, who is going to
put the gospel of American civilization into terms that will be, I
shall not say acceptable, but even significant, to the emancipated
British worker. Ruling classes in the older country who rely on
a steadying force from across the Atlantic in possible political
upheavals must have strange misgivings when they take account of
their own stewardship. It will be an ungrateful task to preach the
doctrine of salvation through work to a people that has tried it
out so logically and completely that the century which has seen the
commercial supremacy of their country has witnessed the progressive
impoverishment and proletarization of its people. Homilies on
discipline will sound strangely in the ears of those who, while America
was enjoying her brief carnival of spacious and fruitful endeavour in
a virgin land, went under an industrial yoke that has galled their
necks and stunted their physical growth. Appeals to pride of race
will have little meaning coming from a stock that has ceased through
self-indulgence or economic upward pressure to resist ethnologically
and whose characteristics are disappearing in the general amalgam.

The salient fact that stands out from all history is that
inordinateness of any sort has never failed to act upon the English
character as a challenge. His successes, whatever his libellists may
seek to believe, have seldom been against the small or weak. It has
been his destiny, in one recurrent crisis after another, to find
himself face to face with some claimant to world power, some “cock of
the walk.” To use a homely phrase, it has always been “up to him.”
And the vision of his adversary which has nerved his arm has always
been an excess in some quality easily understandable by the average
man. Bigotry is not the monopoly of the Spaniard, nor commercial greed
of the Hollander, nor vanity of the Frenchman, nor pomposity of the
German. It would be an easy task to convict the Englishman of some
share in each vice. Nevertheless history in the main has justified his
instinct for proportion, his dislike for “slopping over.” In something
far beyond the accepted phrase, the English struggle has been a
struggle for the “balance of power.”

                                                     HENRY L. STUART




II. AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT


The application of the term “shirt-sleeve” to American diplomacy
is perhaps the most concise expression of the conception we have
formed in Europe of life in the United States. We imagine that it is
only necessary to cross the Atlantic Ocean to find a people young
and vigorous in its emancipation from ancient forms and obsolete
ceremonies. The average visitor returns, after a brief tour through
the more urbane centres of European imitation, and tries to startle
us with a narrative in which a few picturesque crudities are supposed
to indicate the democratic ease of American civilization. His mind is
filled with an incoherent jumble of skyscrapers, express elevators,
ice water, chewing-gum, and elevated railroads, so that his inevitable
contribution to the literature relating to America becomes the
mere chronicle of a tourist’s experiences. Every deviation from
European practice is emphasized, and in proportion to the writer’s
consequent personal discomfort, he will conjure up a hideous picture
of uncouthness, whose effect is to confirm us in our estimate of
American progress ... or barbarism, as the case may be. If the critical
stranger happens to be a well-known poet or dramatist, he will probably
succeed in passing lightly over those minor inconveniences, which the
generosity of wealthy admirers has prevented him from experiencing at
first hand.

The consequence is that there is no subject more hopelessly involved in
a cloud of voluminous complaint and banal laudation than American life
as seen by the foreigner. Neither the enthusiasts nor the fault-finders
have contributed much of any assistance either to Europeans or to the
Americans themselves. The former accept America at its own valuation,
the latter complain of precisely those things upon which the average
citizen prides himself. It is not easy to decide which class of critics
has helped most effectively to perpetuate the legend of American
freedom; the minor commentators who hold democracy to be the cause of
every offence, or the higher critics, like Viscount Bryce, who, finding
no American commonwealth, proceeded to invent one. The objectors are
dismissed as witnesses to the incapacity of the servile European to
appreciate true liberty and equality; the well-disposed are gratefully
received as evangelists of a gospel to which Americans subscribe
without excessive introspection. There is something touching in the
gratitude felt towards the author of “The American Commonwealth.” Who
would have believed that a foreigner, and a Britisher at that, could
make a monument of such imposing brick with the straws of political
oratory in the United States?

On one point all observers have involuntarily agreed. Whether with
approval or disapproval, they have depicted for us a society which
presents such marked divergencies from our own manners and customs that
there is not one of us but comes to America believing that his best or
worst hopes will be confirmed. It is, therefore, somewhat disconcerting
to confess that neither presentment has been realized. To have passed
from Continental Europe to New York, via London, is to deprive oneself
of that social and intellectual shock which is responsible for the
uniformly profound impression which transatlantic conditions make
upon the European mind. So many continentals enjoy in the United
States their first direct contact with Anglo-Saxon institutions and
modes of thought that the revelation cannot fail to stimulate them.
Their writings frequently testify to a naïve ignorance of the prior
existence in England of what excites their dismay or admiration in
America. If it be asked why, then, have Englishmen similarly reacted
to the same stimuli, if acquaintance with England blunts the fine
edge of perception, the reply must be: the quality of their emotion
is different. The impression made upon a mind formed by purely Latin
traditions necessarily differs from that received by a mind previously
subjected to Anglo-Saxon influences. Consequently, the student of
American life who has neither the motive of what might be called
family jealousy, in the Englishman, nor the mentality, wholly innocent
of alien culture, of the Latin, would seem well equipped to view the
subject from another angle.

To the good European the most striking characteristic of the United
States is a widespread intellectual anæmia. So far from exhibiting
those traits of freedom and progress which harrow the souls of
sensitive aristocrats in Europe, the American people alarm the outsider
in search of stimulating ideas by their devotion to conventions
and formulæ. As soon as one has learnt to discount those lesser
manifestations of independence, whose perilous proximity to discourtesy
gives them an exaggerated importance in the eyes of superficial
critics, the conventionality of the American becomes increasingly
evident. So many foreigners have been misled--mainly because of an
apparent rudeness--by this show of equality, this ungraciousness
in matters of service, that one hesitates at first to dismiss the
unconventional American as a myth closely related to that of the
“immoral Frenchman.” It is only when prolonged association has revealed
the timid respectability beneath this veneer of informality that it
becomes possible to understand the true position of America. From
questioning individuals one proceeds to an examination of the public
utterances of prominent men, and the transition from the press to
literature is easily made. At length comes the discovery that mentally
the United States is a generation or two behind Western Europe. The
rude and vigorous young democracy, cited by its admirers in extenuation
of æsthetic sins of omission and commission, suddenly stands forth
attired in the garment of ideas which clothed early Victorian England.

This condition is largely due to the absence of an educated class
accustomed to leisure. To the American work for work’s sake has a
dignity unknown in Europe, where it is rare to find anybody working
for mere wages if he has any means of independent subsistence, however
small. In America the contrary is the case, and people who could afford
to cultivate their own personalities prefer to waste their energies
upon some definite business. Almost all the best that has come out
of Europe has been developed in that peculiar class which sacrificed
money-making for the privilege of leisure and relative independence.
The only corresponding class in the United States is that of the
college professors, who are an omnipresent menace to the free interplay
of ideas. Terrorized by economic fears and intellectual inhibitions,
they have no independence. They are despised by the plain people
because of their failure to make money; and to them are relegated all
matters which are considered of slight moment, namely, learning and
the arts. In these fields the pedants rule unchallenged, save when
some irate railroad presidents discover in their teachings the heresy
of radicalism. Æsthetics is a science as incomprehensible to them as
beauty, and they prefer to substitute the more homely Christian ethics.
Moral preoccupations are their sole test of excellence. The views of
these gentlemen and their favourite pupils fill the bookshelves and the
news-stands.

The professorial guardians of Colonial precedents and traditions
determine what the intellectual life of America shall be. Hence the
cult of anæmia. Instead of writing out of themselves and their own
lives, they aspire to nothing greater than to be classed as English.
They are obsessed by the standards imposed from without, and their
possible achievement is thwarted. While they are still shaking their
heads over Poe, and trying to decide whether Whitman is respectable, a
national literature is growing up without the guidance and help which
it should expect from them. At the same time, as the official pundits
have the ear of Europe, and particularly of England, American culture
is known only as they reflect it. It is natural, therefore, that the
European attitude should be as contemptuous as it so often is.

When the reviews publish some ignorant and patronizing dissertation on
the American novel or American poetry, by an English writer, they are
pained by the evident lack of appreciation. The ladies and gentlemen
whose works are respectfully discussed by the professors, and warmly
recommended by the reviewers, do not seem to receive the consideration
due to them for their unflinching adherence to the noblest standards
of academic criticism. When these torch-bearers of the purest Colonial
tradition are submitted to the judgment of their “big” cousins in
England, there is a noticeable condescension in those foreigners.
But why should they profess to admire as the brightest stars in the
American firmament what are, after all, the phosphorescent gleams of
literary ghosts? Is it any wonder that the majority of Britishers
can continue in the comfortable belief that there is practically no
American literature worthy of serious attention?

The academic labours of American professors of literature are an
easy and constant butt for English critics. Yet, they rarely think
of questioning the presentation of literary America for which these
gentlemen are so largely responsible. When have the Stuart Shermans and
Paul Elmer Mores (and their diminutives) recognized the existence of
a living American writer of genius, originality, or distinction? The
only justification for their existences is their alleged capacity to
estimate literary values. If they cannot do so, it is hardly surprising
that their English patrons, who imagine that they are representative
men, do not often penetrate the veil of Colonialism. Whatever their
outward professions, the majority of Englishmen regard all other
English-speaking countries as Colonies. Since they are stubborn enough
when faced with undeniable proof of the contrary, as in Ireland, it is
unlikely they will persuade themselves unaided that they are mistaken.
When will American criticism have the courage to base the claims of
contemporary literature on those works which are essentially and
unmistakably American?

The mandarins, of course, have stood for reaction in all countries,
and there is no intention here to acquit the European of the species.
So many of his worst outrages are matters of history that it would be
futile to pretend that he is untrue to type. Nevertheless, his position
in Europe is measurably more human than in this country, owing to the
greater freedom of intellectual intercourse. In America the mandarin is
firmly established on a pedestal which rests upon the vast unculture
of an immense immigrant population, enjoying for the first time the
benefits of sufficient food and heat. He is obviously secure in his
conviction that those qualified to challenge him--except perhaps
some isolated individual--are not likely to do so, being of the same
convention as himself. He belongs to the most perfect trade-union, one
which has a practical monopoly of its labour. His European colleagues,
on the contrary, live in constant dread of traitors from their ranks,
or worse still, the advance of an opposing force manned with brains of
no inferior calibre. France, for example, can boast of a remarkable
roll of names which never adorned the councils of pedantry, or not
until they had imposed a new tradition. The two finest minds of
modern French literature, Anatole France and Rémy de Gourmont, are
illustrations of this fact. France has never allowed his academic
honours to restrict the daring play of his ideas; Gourmont died in the
admiration of all cultivated men, although his life was a prolonged
protest against the orthodox, who never succeeded in taming him.

What America requires is an unofficial _intelligentsia_ as strong and
as articulate as the political and literary pundits, whose purely
negative attitude first exasperates, and finally sterilizes, every
impulse towards originality. Only when a survey is made of the leading
figures in the various departments of American life is it possible
fully to realize the weight of inertia which presses upon the intellect
of the country. While the spirit of enterprise and progress is
stimulated and encouraged in all that relates to material advancement,
the artistic and reasoning faculties are deadened. Scientific study,
when directed to obviously practical ends, is the only form of mental
effort which can count upon recognition and reward. It is not without
its significance that the Johns Hopkins Medical School is the one
learned institution in America whose fame is world-wide amongst
those who appreciate original research, otherwise the names of few
universities are mentioned outside academic circles. Even in the field
of orthodox literary culture the mandarins have, in the main, failed
to do anything positive. They have preferred to bury their talent
in anæmic commentary. The reputed intellectuals are still living on
a tradition bequeathed by the attenuated transcendentalism of the
Bostonian era.

That tradition was, after all, but a refinement of the notorious
Puritanism of New England. Having lost whatever semblance of
dignity the Emersons and Thoreaus conferred upon it, its subsequent
manifestations have been a decadent reversion to aboriginal barbarism.
This retrograde movement, so far as it affects social life, is
noticeable in the ever-increasing number of crusades and taboos, the
constant probing of moral and industrial conditions, unrelated to any
well-considered desire for improvement, or intelligent conception of
progress. The orgies of prohibition and suppression are unbelievable to
the civilized European, who has no experience of a community in which
everything from alcohol to Sunday tennis has attracted the attention
of the “virtuosi of vice”--to quote the phrase of a discerning critic.
Innumerable commissions, committees, and boards of enquiry supplement
the muck-raking of yellow journalism, and encourage espionage in social
reformers. But what has the country to show for this? Probably the
greatest number of bungled, unsolved, and misunderstood problems of all
industrial nations of the same rank.

These debauches of virtue, however, are the direct outcome of the
mental conditions fostered by those who are in a position to mould
public opinion. The crowd which tolerates, or participates in, the
Puritanical frenzy is merely reflecting the current political and
social doctrine of the time. Occasionally the newspapers will hold a
symposium, or the reviews will invite the aid of some foreign critic,
to ascertain the reasons for the prevailing puerility of American
fiction. Invariably it is urged, and rightly, that the novel is
written by women for women. Where almost all articles of luxury are
produced for female consumption, and the arts are deemed unessential to
progress, the latter are naturally classed with uneconomic production
destined to amuse the idle. They are left to the women, as the men
explain, who have not yet understood the true dignity of leisure.
They are abandoned, in other words, to the most unreal section of the
community, to those centres of culture, the drama leagues and literary
clubs, composed of male and female spinsters. Needless to say, any
phrase or idea likely to have disturbed a mid-Victorian vicarage will
be ruled out as unseemly.

The malady of intellectual anæmia is not restricted to any one
department of American life. In politics, as in art and literature,
there is a dread of reality. The emasculation of thought in general
is such as to render colourless the ideas commonly brought to the
attention of the public. Perhaps the most palpable example of
this penchant for platitude is the substantial literature of a
pseudo-philosophic character which encumbers the book-stores, and is
read by thousands of right-thinking citizens. Namby-pamby works, it
is true, exist to some extent in all Protestant countries, but their
number, prevalence, and cost in America are evidence of the demand they
must meet. It is not for nothing that the books of thoughtful writers
are crowded from shelves amply stocked with the meditations of an
Orison Swett Marden, a Henry van Dyke, or a Hamilton Wright Mabie--to
mention at random some typical authors.

These moral soothsayers successfully compete with moving-picture
actors, and novelists whose claim to distinction is their ability to
write the best-seller of the season. If they addressed themselves only
to the conventicles, the phenomenon would have less significance,
but the conventicles have their own minor prophets. The conclusion,
therefore, suggests itself, that these must be the leaders and moulders
of American thought. The suspicion is confirmed when men of the same
stamp, sometimes, indeed, the actual authors of this evangelical
literature, are found holding the most important public offices.
To have written a methodist-tract would appear to be an unfailing
recommendation for promotion. It is rare to find the possessor of such
a mentality relegated to the obscurity he deserves.

A wish to forestall the accusation of exaggeration or inaccuracy
imposes the painful obligation of citing specific instances of the
tendency described. Who are the leading public men of this country,
and what have they written? Besides the classic volumes of Thiers and
Guizot must we set such amiable puerilities as “The New Freedom,” “On
Being Human,” and “When a Man Comes to Himself.” Even the essays of
Raymond Poincaré do not sound the depths indicated by the mere titles
of these presidential works. But the author of “The State,” for all
his antiquated theories of government, writes measurably above the
level of that diplomatist whose copious bibliography includes numerous
variations upon such themes as “The Gospel for a World of Sin,” “The
First Christmas Tree,” and “The Blue Flower.” A search through the
underworld of parish magazines in England, France, and Germany would
probably reveal something to be classed with the works of Dr. Lyman
Abbott, but the authors would not be entrusted with the editorship of
a leading weekly review. As for the writings of his associate, the
existence of his book on Shakespeare is a testimony to Anglo-Saxon
indifference to the supreme genius of the race.

It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the literary labours of William
Jennings Bryan, ex-Secretary of State, except to wonder that they did
not alone suffice to disqualify him for such an office. They belong
to the same category as those volumes of popular American philosophy
whose titles are: “Character the Grandest Thing in the World,”
“Cheerfulness as a Life Power,” and “The Miracle of Right Thought.” If
those quoted are to be laid to the charge of Mr. Orison Swett Marden,
every department of American life contains prominent men who might say:
There, but for the grace of God, speak I. The sanctimonious breath of
the uplifter tarnishes the currency of ideas in almost every circle of
society. Irrespective of party, Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists
help to build up this monument of platitude which may one day mark
the resting place of the American brain. Books, reviews, magazines,
and newspapers are largely conceived in the evangelical spirit. The
average contributor, when not a foreigner, suggests a Sunday-school
superintendent who has (perhaps) missed his vocation. Where the
subject excludes the pedantry of the professors, the tone is intensely
moral, and the more it is so the surer one may be that the writer is
a colonel, a rear-admiral, or a civil officer of the State or Federal
government. Imagination refuses to conceive these functionaries as
fulfilling their duties efficiently in any service, other than that of
the Salvation Army or a revivalist campaign.

The stage of culture which these phenomena presuppose cannot but be
hostile to artistic development in such as escape contamination. It has
already been postulated that the just claims of ethics and æsthetics
are hopelessly confounded in America, to the evident detriment of art
in all its branches. To the poor quality of the current political and
social philosophy corresponds an equally mediocre body of literary
criticism. A recent historian of American literature accords a high
place amongst contemporary critics, to the author of “Shelburne
Essays,” and other works. These volumes are dignified as “our nearest
approach to those ‘Causeries du Lundi’ of an earlier age,” and may well
be taken as representative. Typical of the cold inhumanity which a
certain type of “cultured person” deems essential is the circumstance
related, by Mr. Paul Elmer More himself, in explanation of the genesis
of these essays. “In a secluded spot,” he writes, “in the peaceful
valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as
a hermit,” and “Shelburne Essays” was the fruit of his solitary
mediations. The historian is mightily impressed by this evidence of
superiority. “In another and far more unusual way he qualified himself
for his high office of critic,” says Professor Pattee, “he immured
himself for two years in solitude.”... “The period gave him time to
read leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the
product of that reading was to be marketable.”

What a revelation of combined timidity and intellectual snobbishness
there is in this attitude so fatuously endorsed by a writer for the
schools! We can imagine what the effect of such a pose must be upon the
minds of the students whom the professor would constrain to respect.
Only a young prig could pretend to be favourably impressed by this
pseudo-Thoreau in the literary backwoods. The impulse of most healthy
young men would be to turn in contempt from an art so unnatural as this
conception of criticism implies. How are they to know that the Taines,
Sainte-Beuves, Brunetières, and Arnolds of the world are not produced
by expedients so primitive as to suggest the _mise en scène_ of some
latter-day Messiah, a Dowie, or a Mrs. Baker Eddy? The heralds of new
theologies may find the paraphernalia of asceticism and aloofness a
useful part of their stock in trade--neither is associated with the
great criticism of literature. The _causeries_ of Sainte-Beuve were not
written in an ivory tower, yet they show no traces of that “nervous
subconsciousness” which our professor finds inseparable from reading
that is “marketable.”

The suspicion of insincerity in this craving for the wilderness will be
strengthened by reference to the first of Mr. More’s volumes. Whatever
may have been the case of its successors, this work was certainly
the product of his retirement. What, then, are the subjects of such
a delicate nature that they could not be discussed within the sound
of “the noisy jargon of the market-place”? Of the eleven essays, only
four deal with writers whose proximity to the critic’s own age might
justify a retreat, in order that they be judged impartially, and
without reference to popular enthusiasm and the prevalent fashion of
the moment. The seven most substantial studies in the book are devoted
to flogging horses so dead that no fear of their kicking existed. “A
Hermit’s Notes on Thoreau,” “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” “The
Origins of Hawthorne and Poe,” “The Influence of Emerson,” “The Spirit
of Carlyle”--these are a few of the startling topics which Mr. More
could discuss only with fasting and prayer! Any European schoolmaster
could have written these essays in the leisure moments of his Sunday
afternoons or Easter vacation.

No more remarkable profundity or originality will be found in the
critic’s essays in contemporary literature. His strictures upon Lady
Gregory’s versions of the Irish epic, and his comments upon the Celtic
Renaissance in general are the commonplaces of all hostile English
criticism. “The shimmering hues of decadence rather than the strong
colours of life” is the phrase in which he attempts to estimate the
poetry of the Literary Revival in Ireland. In fact, for all his
isolation Mr. More was obsessed by the critical cant of the hour, as
witness his readiness to apply the term “decadent” to all and sundry.
The work of Arthur Symons is illuminated by this appellation, as is
also that of W. B. Yeats. The jargon of the literary market-place,
to vary Mr. More’s own _cliché_, is all that he seems to have found
in that “peaceful valley of the Androscoggin.” Even poor Tolstoy
is branded as “a decadent with the humanitarian superimposed,”
an application of the word which renders its previous employment
meaningless. As a crowning example of incomprehension may be cited Mr.
More’s opinion that the English poet, Lionel Johnson, is “the one great
... and genuinely significant poet of the present Gaelic movement.”
In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he should pronounce
Irishmen incapable of exploiting adequately the themes of Celtic
literature. For this task he considers the Saxon genius more qualified.

With these examples before us it is unnecessary to examine the
remaining volumes of “Shelburne Essays.” Having started with a
distorted conception of the critical office, the author naturally
contributed nothing helpful to the literature of American criticism.
His laborious platitudes do not help us to a better appreciation of
the dead, his dogmatic hostility nullifies his judgments upon the
living. Not once has he a word of discerning censure or encouragement
for any rising talent. Like most of his colleagues, Mr. More prefers
to exercise his faculties at the expense of reputations already
established, save when he condescends to repeat the commonplaces of
complaint against certain of the better known modern writers. He is so
busy with Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Lamb, Milton, Plato, and Dickens that
he can find time to mention only some fifteen Americans, not one of
them living.

Such is the critic whom Professor Pattee salutes as “consistent” and
“courageous,” having “standards of criticism” which make him comparable
to Sainte-Beuve. As editor of “the leading critical review of America,”
we are assured that Mr. More had “a dominating clientèle and a leader’s
authority.” Alas! There can be no doubt as to this, though it is very
doubtful if the fact can be regarded as “one of the most promising
signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.” That era
will long continue overdue while criticism remains absorbed in the
past, aloof from life and implacably hostile to every manifestation of
originality. If the new literary generation were merely ignored its lot
would be comparatively happy. But the mandarins come down periodically
from their Olympic communings with George Eliot and Socrates, to fill
the reviews with verbose denunciations of whatever is being written
independently of their idols. The oracles having spoken, the newcomers
are left with an additional obstacle in the way of their reaching
the indifferent ear of the crowd. The crowd wallows in each season’s
literary novelties, satisfied that whatever is well advertised is good.
Rather than face the subjects endorsed by the frigid enthusiasm of Mr.
Paul Elmer More or Stuart Sherman, Mr. W. C. Brownell and Professor
Brander Matthews, it takes refuge in fields where the writ of pedantry
does not run. Meanwhile, the task of welcoming new talent is left to
amiable journalists, whose casual recommendations, usually without any
background of critical experience, are accepted as the judgments of
competent experts. The “colyumist” has to perform the true function of
the critic.

Although anæmia is the dominant characteristic of intellectual life in
the United States, the reaction against that condition is none the less
worthy of notice. When we remember that the fervour of righteousness
is the very breath of current philosophy, we are also reminded that
crudeness, sensationalism, and novelty are commonly held by Europeans
to be the quintessence of America. It might be replied, in answer to
this objection, that Hearst newspapers, and the vaudeville theology of
Billy Sunday, are the only alternatives to the prim conventionality of
authoritative journalism, and the sanctimoniousness of popular leaders.
The man in the street obtains the illusion of strenuous cerebral
activity when he contrasts the homely qualities of those prophets of
democracy with the spinster-like propriety and beatific purity of
prominent publicists and statesmen. He likes to hear his master’s
voice, it is true, but he likes even more to hear his own, especially
where his personal interests are at issue. The æsthetic _obiter dicta_
of the professors, like the language of diplomacy, are concerned with
questions sufficiently remote to make sonority an acceptable substitute
for thought.

In the realm of ideas, nevertheless, there is a more or less articulate
expression of reaction, mainly concentrated in the larger cities of the
East. There the professional supermen and their female counterparts
have come together by tacit agreement, and have attempted to shake off
the incubus of respectability. The extremists impress one as being
overpowered by a sense of their own sinful identity. In a wild burst of
hysterical revolt they are plunged into a debauch of ideas from which
they are emerging in a very shaken and parlous condition. For the most
part their adventures, mental and otherwise, have been in the domain
of sex, with a resultant flooding of the “radical” market by varied
tomes upon the subject. What the bookstores naïvely catalogue as the
literature of advanced thought is a truly wonderful _salade russe_, in
which Krafft-Ebbing and Forel compete with Freud and Eugene Debs. Karl
Marx, and Signora Montessori, Professor Scott Nearing, and Havelock
Ellis engage the same attention as the neo-Malthusian pamphleteers,
and the young ladies whose novels tell of what Flaubert called “_les
souillures du mariage et les platitudes de l’adultère_.”

The natural morbidity of the Puritan mind is exasperated in advanced
circles, whose interest is nothing if not catholic. Let Brieux
discourse of venereal disease, or Strindberg expound his tragedies of
prurience, their success is assured amongst those who would believe
them geniuses, rather than risk the ignominy of agreement with the
champions of orthodoxy. So long as our European pornographers are
serious and inartistic, they need have no fear of America. Unbalanced
by prolonged contemplation of the tedious virtues of New England, a
generation has arisen whose great illusion is that the transvaluation
of all values may be effected by promiscuity. Lest they should ever
incur the suspicion of conservatism the emancipated have a permanent
welcome for everything that is strange or new. The blush on the cheek
of the vice-crusader is their criterion of excellence.

By an irony of fate, however, they are condemned to the disheartening
spectacle of their moral bogies being received into a society but one
removed from the Olympians themselves. In recent years it has been
the practice of the latter to accept certain reputations, when they
have passed through the sieve of the literary clubs and drama leagues.
In fact, candidates for academic immortality frequently serve on the
board of these literary filtration plants. While the mandarins execute
their ritual in the cult of Longfellow and Bryant, and excommunicate
heretical moderns, their servitors are engaged upon an ingenious task.
They discover the more innocuous subjects of “radical” enthusiasm,
deprive them of whatever sting of originality their work possessed,
and then submit the result discreetly to the official pundits. When
these judges have satisfied themselves as to the sterility of the
innovations, their imprimatur is granted, and another mediocrity is
canonized. Ibsen is saluted because of his “message,” and “Anna
Karenina” becomes a masterpiece, because Tolstoy was a Christian. While
remarkable talents at home are ignored or vilified, the fifth-rate
European is in the process of literary naturalization. Mr. Masefield
receives the benediction of Paul Elmer More, who in the same breath
tries to convince us that he is qualified to pronounce “The Spoon River
Anthology” a bad joke.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the futility and disrepute of
criticism in this country than the constant surrenders to the prestige
of the foreigner. A cheap fashion in European literature has only to be
thrust with sufficient publicity upon the women’s literary clubs, and
parish meeting-houses, to ensnare the uneasy wearers of the academic
crown. Give them time and they will be found praising a translated
French poet for precisely those qualities which offend them in the
protégés of Miss Harriet Monroe. The young Englishman, Rupert Brooke,
might have contributed to “Poetry” for ten years without securing any
more recognition than did the American, Robert Frost. But now both
reputations, made in England, are widely accepted, and the inevitable
professor is found to tread respectfully where Henry James rushed in.
Compare the critical essays which James wrote during a period of thirty
years with the stereotyped Bostonian theses of the men he left behind
him. Yet nobody will accuse James of a disregard for tradition.

The American word “standpatter” is curiously precise as a designation
of the species. The conservative critic in Europe, Brunetière, for
example, is never so purely negative as his counterpart on this side
of the Atlantic. When Brunetière adversely criticized the Symbolist
movement in French poetry he did so intelligently, not in that
laboriously facetious fashion which is affected by the Stuart Shermans
and W. H. Boyntons when they are moved to discuss _les jeunes_.
Brunetière, in a word, was a man of education and culture, capable of
defending rationally his own theories, without suggesting that the
unfamiliar was necessarily bad. He condemned the excesses of the new
school, not the school itself. If he had been in America, he would
have denied the Symbolists even the right to exist. Edward Dowden
might also be cited as a similar example, in English literature, of
enlightened conservatism. Dowden was partly responsible for bringing
Whitman to the favourable notice of the English public, and his work
stands as a proof that respect for the classics does not involve
hostility to the moderns. Just as he was able to write a masterpiece
of Shakespearean criticism without retiring into hermitage, so he was
qualified to appreciate original genius when it presented itself. He
was not paralyzed, in short, by the weight of his literary traditions
and conventions.

A thousand and one reasons have been advanced to explain the absence
of a genuine American literature, and all of them are probably true.
The country is comparatively young, and its energies have been, are
still, directed chiefly towards the exploitation of material resources
and the conquest of natural difficulties. Racially the nation is
in an embryonic stage, and until some homogeneity is attained the
creation of a native tradition must be slow. Moreover, the conflict
of diverse races implies, in a broad sense, the clash of two or more
civilizations, one of which must impose its culture if any organized
progress is to be made. The language of the Hyphenated States is
English, but to what extent will the nation in being evolve in
accordance with this linguistic impulse? Will it be Anglo-Saxon,
Teutonic, Latin, or Slav? These are a few of the problems which have a
direct bearing upon the intellectual development of the country. They
must be solved before America can give her imprint to the arts. They
cannot be solved by the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon hyphen is alone
authentic. The permanent hypothesis of Colonialism must be abandoned,
if “Americanization” is ever to be more than the silliest political
cant. Puritanism must be confined to the conventicles, to its natural
habitat. It must not be allowed to masquerade as art, philosophy, and
statesmanship. The evangelical tyranny exists elsewhere, but only in
America has it invaded every branch of the national life. In the more
impatient and realistic generation which has emerged from the world
war this monstrous extension of prohibitions is arousing a violent
reaction. It is rare now to find a young American who does not cry out
against American civilization.

To the disinterested European, this spectacle is an affecting
illustration of what may be called the enchantment of distance.
Evidently these disconsolate citizens imagine that there is a way of
escape from the Presbyterian wilderness, an oasis in the desert of one
hundred per cent. Americanism, where every prospect pleases and man is
only relatively vile. One listens to the _intelligentsia_, rendered
more than usually loquacious by generous potations of unconstitutional
Scotch whiskey, cursing the subtle blow to the arts administered by the
Volstead denial of the necessary ambrosia. Advanced thinkers revelling
in the delights of a well-organized polygamy, have taken me aside to
explain how the prophets of Methodism have laid waste this fair land.
I have read desperate appeals to all young men of spirit to shake off
the yoke of evangelistic philistinism by expatriation to more urbane
centres of culture.

These are brave words, coming as they do, for the most part, from those
who are in no wise incommoded by the ukases of the gospel-tent tyrants,
and who have taken appropriate measures to defeat the Eighteenth
Amendment. Back of all their plaints is the superstition that Europe
is free from the blight which makes America intolerable in their eyes.
They do not know that the war has almost destroyed the Europe of a
civilized man’s affections. Socially, politically, and intellectually
that distracted continent is rapidly expiring in the arms of profiteers
and class-conscious proletarians, who have decided between them to
leave not a blade of culture upstanding. The leisured class, which
was rarely the wealthiest, is being ground out of existence by the
plutocracy and the proletariat. That was the class which made the old
Europe possible, yet there are Americans who go on talking as if its
extinction did not knock the bottom out of their utopia. Most of these
disgruntled Americans are radicals, who strive to forward the designs
of the plain people and their advocates.

Yet, every European knows that if prohibition is making the headway it
surely is, the chief reason must be sought in the growth of radicalism.
From Bernard Shaw to Trotsky, our revolutionaries are “dry.” Their
avowed ideal is a state of society in which the allurements of love
are reduced to a eugenic operation, the mellowing influences of liquor
are abolished, and compulsory labour on the Taylor efficiency plan of
scientific management is substituted. In fine, by the benign workings
of democratic progress Europe is moving steadily toward the state of
affairs attributed here by disillusioned intellectuals to the sinister
machinations of Wall Street and the evangelists.

No doubt America was a purer and happier place in 1620 than in 1920.
No Sumner was needed to keep the eyes of the settlers from the dimpled
knees of Ziegfeld’s beauties, and the platitudes of the Wilsonian epoch
were the brightest flowers of wisdom in 1776. Alas! that it should be
so, and in every country of our Western World. If the Magna Charta were
to be offered for signature in London now, some nasty Bolshevik would
be sure to prove that the document was drawn up in a private conclave
of the international financiers. If Lincoln were to make his Gettysburg
speech to-day the world would snicker irreverently, and a dreadfully
superior person, with a Cambridge accent (like John Maynard Keynes,
C.B.), would publish the “Economic Consequences of the Civil War,” full
of sardonic gibes at the innocent evangelism of Springfield. As for the
Declaration of Independence--well, during “the late unpleasantness” we
saw what happened to such un-American sedition-mongers. In fine, things
are not what they used to be; we pine for what is not, and so forth.
Of this only we may be sure, that America corresponds neither more nor
less than any other country to the dreams of its ancestors.

Indeed, to be more affirmative in this plea for America, it is probable
that this country has followed more closely the intentions of its
founders than the critics will admit. Unlike most European nations, the
Americans have preserved, with an almost incomprehensible reverence,
the constitution laid down to meet conditions entirely unlike those of
the 20th century. Ancestor worship is the cardinal virtue of America
and surpasses that of China and Japan, where revolutionary changes
have been made in the whole social and political structure. America
was created as a political democracy for the benefit of staunch
individualists, and both these ends have been achieved to perfection.
Everything against which the super-sensitive revolt has come about
_planmaessig_, and existed in the germ from the day when the Pilgrim
Fathers first brought the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the
shores of Cape Cod.

In the South alone were traces of a _Weltanschauung_ which might have
given an impulse in another direction, but the South went under, in
obedience to the rules of democratic Darwinism. Once the dissatisfied
American can bring himself to look the facts of his own history and
of contemporary Europe in the face, he may be forced to relent. He
will grant, at least, that it is useless to cherish the notion that
the ills the American mind is heir to are spared to other peoples. He
may even come to recognize the positive virtues of this country, where
the stories in the _Saturday Evening Post_ actually come true. Here a
man can look his neighbour straight in the eye and subscribe--without
a smile--to the romantic credo that all men are equal, in so far as
it is possible by energy, hard work, and regular attendance at divine
service, to reach the highest post in any career. Class barriers are
almost unknown, and on all sides there is an endlessly generous desire
to learn, to help, and to encourage. The traditional boy can still
arrive from the slums of Europe and finish up in the editorial chair of
a wealthy newspaper. If he ever fails to do so it can only be because
he starts by reading the _Liberator_, and devotes to the deciphering
of Thorstein Veblen’s hieroglyphics of socialism the time which
should have been given to mastering the more profitable technique of
Americanism.

                                                         ERNEST BOYD




III. AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT


In a typical form of primitive society, where institutions and ideals,
collective representations and individual reactions, coincide, no
distinction can be made between culture and civilization. Every element
of the practical culture is a spiritual symbol, and there is no other
logic or reason than that which is made manifest by the structure and
habits of the social group. Life is a religion, in the two meanings of
the word, that of a binding together of men, and the deeper one--of
gathering the manifold activities of the individual in one compact
spiritual mass. The mythical concepts, which limit and integrate the
data of experience, in a sphere which is neither purely imaginative nor
purely intellectual, present to the individual mind as irresistibly
as to the mind of the group, a world of complementary objects which
are of the same stuff as the apprehended data. Thought--practical,
æsthetic, ethical--is still undifferentiated, unindividualized, as if a
collective mind were an active reality, a gigantic, obscure, coherent
personality, entering into definite relations with a world homogeneous
with itself.

Such an abstract, ideal scheme of the life of the human spirit before
it has any history, before it is even capable of history, affords,
in its hypothetical indistinction (within the group, within the
individual), a prefiguration of a certain higher relationship of
culture with civilization, of a _humana civilitas_, in which the
practical should be related to the spiritual, nature to the mind,
in the full light of consciousness, with a perfect awareness of the
processes of distinction and individualization. In the twilight and
perspective of historical knowledge, if not in their actuality, Greece
before Socrates, Rome before Christ, the Middle Ages before Saint
Francis (each of them, before the apparition of the disrupting and
illuminating element of growth), are successive attempts or _étapes_
towards the creation of a civilization of such a kind--a human
civilization.

Between these two limits--the primitive and the human--the ideal
beginning and the ideal end--we can recognize, at any given moment in
history, through the segmentation and aggregation of a multitude of
cultures, different ages and strata of culture coexisting in the same
social group; and the individual mind emerges at the confluence of
the practical cultures, with science and philosophy and the ethical,
non-tribal ideals, germs and _initia_, of the human civilization
remaining above the given society as a soul that never entirely
vivifies its own body. History begins where first the distinction
between civilization and culture appears, or, to state the same fact
from a different angle, where individual consciousness is born. It
ends, ideally, where the same distinction fades away into Utopia, or
death, or the Kingdom of Heaven; where the highest form of individual
consciousness is at no point higher than the consciousness of the group
from which it originally differentiated itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

The writer of these pages belongs, by birth, education, and election,
to the civilization of Rome and to the culture, or cultures, of Italy.
The civilization of Rome, the _latina civilitas_, is a complex mind,
whose successive phases of growth are the abstract humanism of ancient
Greece, the civic and legal humanism of Rome, the moral and spiritual
humanism of the Latin church, the æsthetic and metaphysical humanism
of the Renaissance. Each phase is an integration of the preceding one
and the acquisition of a new universal principle, made independent of
the particular social body in which it has partially realized itself
before becoming a pure, intelligible ideal, an essential element of
the human mind. The first three phases, Greece, Rome, and the Church,
are still more or less closely associated, in relation to the forms of
humanism which are peculiar to each of them, with particular cultures.
But the last one, which, in its progress from the 13th century to
our days, has been assimilating, purifying, and clarifying all the
preceding ones, does not, at any given moment, directly connect itself
with any definite social body. In its inception, as a purely Italian
Renaissance, it may appear as the spiritual form of Italian society
from the 13th to the 15th century; but its apparition coincides
with the natural growth of the several, sharply defined European
nationalities, and very soon (and apart from the evident insufficiency
of any individual nation to fulfil its spiritual exigencies) it
manifests its intrinsic character of universality by overflowing the
frontiers of Italy and becoming the law of the whole Western European
world.

The history of Europe during the last six centuries is the history
of the gradual penetration of that idea within the circle of the
passively or actively resistant, or inert, local, national cultures.
The Reformation, of all active resistances, is the strongest and
most important. The Germanic tribes rebel against the law of Rome,
because a delay of from five to ten centuries in the experience of
Christianity, and an experience of Christianity to be made not on a
Græco-Roman, but on an Odinic background, create in them the spiritual
need of an independent elaboration of the same universal principles.
Germany is practically untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance until
the 18th century, and Italy herself is for two centuries reduced to
spiritual and political servitude by the superior material strength
which accompanies and sustains the spiritual development of the
nations of the North. Through the whole continent, within the single
national units, as well as between nation and nation, the contrast and
collaboration of the Romanic and Germanic elements, of Renaissance and
Reformation, is the actual dialectic of the development of European
civilization: of the successive approximations of the single cultures,
or groups of cultures, in a multitude of more or less divergent
directions, with alternating accelerations and involutions, towards the
common form, the _humana civilitas_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of all the nations of Europe, Italy is the only one that, however
contingently and imperfectly, has actually realized all of the four
phases of humanism in a succession of historical cultures: Magna
Græcia, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Renaissance. And
as each of these successive cultures was trying to embody in itself
a universal, not a particular, principle, nationality in Italy is
not, as for other nations, the acceptance of certain spiritual limits
elaborated from within the social body, but a reaction to the pressure
of adjoining nationalities, which presented themselves as obstacles and
impediments, even within the life of Italy herself, to the realization
of a super-national principle. This is the process through which
the humanism of the Renaissance, after having received its abstract
political form at the hands of the thinkers and soldiers of the French
Revolution, becomes active and militant in Mazzini’s principle of
nationality, which is a heroic effort towards the utilization of the
natural growth of European nations for the purposes of a universal
civilization.

The distance between that civilization and the actual cultures of the
nations of Europe can easily be measured by the observer of European
events during the last seven years. To that civilization belong the
ideals, to those cultures, the realities, of the Great War. And all of
us who have thought and fought in it have souls which are irremediably
divided between that civilization and those cultures. If we should
limit ourselves to the consideration of present facts and conditions,
we might well give way to despair: not for a good many years in the
past have nationalities been so impervious to the voice of the common
spirit as they are in Europe to-day. And the sharp contrast between
ideals and realities which has been made visible even to the blind by
the consequences of the war, has engendered a temper of violence and
cynicism even among those rare men and parties who succeeded in keeping
their ideals _au dessus de la mêlée_, and therefore did not put them to
the destructive test of a promise which had to be broken.

The moral problem which every nation of Europe will have to labour at
in the immediate future, is that of the relations of its historical
culture or cultures with the exigencies of the _humana civilitas_. It
is the problem that presents itself more or less dimly to the most
earnest and thoughtful of Europeans, when they speak of the coming
“death of our civilization,” or of the “salvaging of civilization.” To
many of them, it is still a problem of institutions and technologies:
its essentially spiritual quality does not seem to have been thoroughly
grasped as yet. But it is also the problem that confronts, less
tragically, with less urgency, but not less inevitably, this great
European Commonwealth which has created its own life on the North
American continent for the space of the last three centuries.

       *       *       *       *       *

This European Commonwealth of America owes its origin to a small number
of adventurers and pilgrims, who brought the seeds of English culture
to the new world. Let us very rapidly attempt a characterization of
that original culture.

England holds as peculiar and distinctive a position among the nations
of Europe as Italy. She is the meeting-point of the Romanic and
Germanic elements in European history; and if her culture may appear
as belonging to the family of mediterranean cultures (to what we have
called the _latina civilitas_), to an English Catholic, like Cardinal
Newman, there was a time, and not very remote, when the Protestant
could be proud of its Teutonic associations. From a Catholic and
Franco-Norman mediæval England, logically emerges, by a process similar
to that exemplified by Italy and France and Spain, the England of Henry
VIII and Elizabeth, of Shakespeare and the Cavaliers: Renaissance
England. She flourishes between the suppression of the monasteries
and the suppression of the theatres. She moulds, for all centuries
to come, the æsthetic and political mind of the English people. But
she carries the germs of a widely different culture in her womb: she
borrows from them, already during the Elizabethan age, some traits that
differentiate her from all other Renaissance cultures. And these germs,
slowly gaining impetus through contrast and suppression, ultimately
work her overthrow with the short-lived triumph of Cromwell and the
Puritans.

After 1688, the law of English life is a compromise between Puritan and
Cavalier, between Renaissance and Reformation, which sends the extreme
representatives of each type out of the country, builders of an Empire
of adventurers and pilgrims--while at home the moderate Cavalier, and
the moderate Puritan, the Tory and the Whig, establish a Republic with
a King, and a Parliamentary feudal régime. But the successive stages
of English culture do not interest us at this point, except in so far
as America has always remained closer to England than to any other
European nation, and has again and again relived in her own life the
social, political, spiritual experiences of the Mother Country.

It is from the two main directions of English spiritual life that
America, through a double process of segmentation, Elizabethan or
Cavalier in the South, Puritan in the North, draws the origins of her
own life. It is in the Cavalier and the Puritan, still within the
circle of English life, that the germs of American culture must be
sought. The peculiar relations of the Cavalier and the Puritan to the
general design of European civilization define the original attitude of
this Commonwealth beyond the sea towards the other European cultures,
and are the origins of the curves which, modified in their development
by the addition of new elements and by the action of a new, distinctive
environment, American culture has described and will describe in the
future.

       *       *       *       *       *

Puritanism is essentially a culture and not a civilization. The Puritan
mind, in its quest for an original Christian experience, falls upon
the Old Testament and the Ancient Law. The God of the tribes of Israel
becomes its God, a God finding a complete expression in the law that
rules his chosen people. A compact, immovable spiritual logic, a set
of fixed standards, a rhetoric of the virtues, the identification of
any element of growth and change with the power of evil, a dualistic
morality, and the consequent negation of a spiritually free will,
these are the characteristics of Puritanism, constituting at the same
time, and with the same elements, a system of truth and a system of
conduct. In both the meanings in which we have used the word religion
at the beginning of this essay, Puritanism is a perfect, final
religion. Transplanted to America when Europe was slowly becoming
conscious of the metaphysical implications of the destruction of the
old Cosmology--when the discovery of an infinite universe was depriving
a purely transcendent divinity of the place it had been given beyond
the limits of a finite universe--the infinite universe itself being
manifest, in the words of Bruno, as _lo specchio della infinita
deità_,--it gave birth to an intrinsically static culture, standing out
against a background of transcendental thought.

The principles of growth in Puritanism were not specifically
Puritan: they were those universal values that Puritan discipline
succeeded in rediscovering because every moral discipline, however
fettered by its premises, will inevitably be led towards them. Quite
recently, a sincere and ardent apologist of Puritanism recognized
in a document which he considers as the highest expression of that
culture in America, a paraphrase of the Roman _dulce et decorum_.
The irrationality which breaks through the most hermetically closed
system of logic, in the process of life, asserts itself by extracting
from a narrowly institutional religion values which are not dependent
upon a particular set of institutions, nor are valid for one people
only. But we might detect the germs of that irrationality already in
the very beginnings of the system, when Milton adds the whole weight
of the Roman tradition to the Puritan conception of democracy--or
in the divine words of the Gospels, through which in all times and
places every _anima naturaliter christiana_ will hear the cry of Love
rebelling against the letter of the Ancient Law.

What the Cavalier brought to America, we should have to investigate
only if we were tracing the history of divergent directions, of local
cultures: because the original soul of America is undoubtedly the
Puritanic soul of New England, and the South, even before the War of
Secession, in relation to the main direction, to the general culture,
has a merely episodical significance. Yet, though the founders of New
England were only Puritans, certain traits of the Cavalier spirit,
the adventurer in the pilgrim, will inevitably reappear in their
descendants, repeating the original dichotomy in the generations
issuing from an apparently pure stock: partly, because a difference
in beliefs is not always the mark of a fundamental difference in
temperaments, and partly because those traits correspond to some of the
generally human impulses suppressed by the choice of the Puritan.

There is one element which is common to Puritan and Cavalier in
America, and which cannot be said to belong in precisely the same
fashion to their ancestors in England. It is, in England and the rest
of Europe, a mythology formed by similar hopes and desires, by a
similar necessity of giving an imaginary body to certain thoughts and
aspirations, on the part of the spirit of the Renaissance as well as
of the spirit of the Reformation: a mythology which, in the mind of
the European during the centuries between the discovery of America
and the French Revolution, inhabits such regions as the island of
Utopia, the city of the Sun, and the continent of America. In that
mythology, Utopism and American exoticism coincide. But the adventurer
and the pilgrim were actually and firmly setting their feet on one
of the lands mapped in that purely ideal geography, and thoughts and
aspirations confined by the European to the continent of dreams, became
the moral exigencies of the new Commonwealth. Thus America set herself
against Europe as the ideal against the real, the land of the free,
and the refuge of the oppressed; and was confirmed in such a position
by her natural opportunities, by the conditions of pioneer life, by
contrast to European despotism--finally, by the Revolution and the
Constitution, in which she felt that the initial moral exigencies were
ultimately fulfilled. It is to this myth of a Promised Land, which
is neither strictly Puritan nor strictly Cavalier, and yet at times
seems to coincide with the less static aspects of Puritanism, that a
peculiarly American idealism, unconquerable by defeat and even by the
evidence of facts, abstract, self-confident, energetic, youthful and
optimistic, owes its strength and its courage: an idealism which is
hardly conscious of what Europe has been taught by centuries of dire
experience--the irreparable contingency and imperfection of history;
and which believes, as firmly as the Puritan legislator believes it,
that such institutions have been devised, or can be devised, through
which the ideal law, when thought out and written, will not fail to
become the law of reality for all times to come.

From two contrasting elements, a firm belief in a Law which was at the
beginning, and a romantic mythology, a third characteristic of the
American mind is thus engendered: a full confidence in the power of
intellect conceived as a mechanism apt to contrive practical schemes
for the accomplishment of ideal ends. This intellectual faith is
similar in its static nature to the moral faith of the Puritan: it is
the material weapon of Puritanism. Perfectibility is within its reach,
but not the actual processes of evolution. The intellect that does not
conceive itself as a process or function, but as a mechanism, can
tend towards, and theoretically possess, a state of perfection, but
will resent and condemn the gropings and failings of actual, imperfect
growth and change. Not without reason, the greatest individual tragedy
of the war, in a typically American mind confronted with the sins and
misery of Europe, was a tragedy of intellectual pride: of the inability
of a static intellect to become charitably active in the tragic flux of
European life; a tragedy which a little moral and intellectual humility
might well have spared to the generous hopes of America, and the
childish, messianic faith which irradiated for only too short a time
the bleeding soul of Europe.

       *       *       *       *       *

If we have called Puritanism a culture, what name shall we reserve for
that vast and complicated collection of mechanical contrivances which
constitute the material body of American society to-day? We are in the
presence of a technology, a more highly developed one, perhaps (with
the possible exception of Germany before the war), than any that has
ever existed in the world. Technologies have a logic of their own, and
that logic is apt to take the place of higher spiritual constructions;
either when conditions of life lend a miraculous character to the
means of sustaining life itself and invest the practical actions of
hunting or agriculture with a religious significance; or when the
complexity of their organization is such that the workings of that
practical logic inevitably transcend the power of observation of the
individual agent, however highly placed in the machinery itself, and
moral or intellectual myths are born of an imperfect knowledge. This is
the case of America, and in America this technological or industrial
mythology has crushed out of existence the rival myths of the farms
and the prairie, allowing them a purely romantic value and decorative
function, through the industrially controlled power of the press.
Even pioneering, and the conquest of the West, a process in which
Americans of another age found an energetic, if partly vicarious,
satisfaction for certain moral and ideal yearnings, has receded, in the
mind of Americans of to-day, into the shades of a fabulous and solemn
background.

The industrial revolution followed in America the lines of development
of its early English model. This commonwealth beyond the sea,
agricultural and democratic, found in itself the same elements which
gave birth in the original country to an industrial feudalism, grafting
itself, without any solution of continuity, on a feudalism of the
land. The ineradicable optimism of the American invested the whole
process with the same halo of moral romance which had coloured the age
of pioneering, and accepted as a useful substitute (or rather, as a
new content) for Puritanic moralism the philosophy of opportunity and
of success constantly commensurate with true merit. The conception of
intellect as a mechanism to be used for moral and ideal ends, gave
way to a similar though more complex conception, modelled not on the
methods of pure science, from whose early conquests the revolution
itself had been started, but on those of applied science or of
practical machinery.

When, in the natural course of events, the bonds which kept together
the purely economic elements of the country became more powerful and
real than any system of political institutions, when, in fact, a
financial syndicalism became the structure underlying the apparent
organs of government, all the original ideals of America had already
gathered to the defence of the new order. Hence the extraordinary
solidity of the prevailing economic system in this country, when
compared with any European country. Economic, as well as political
systems, ultimately rest on convictions rather than on sheer force,
and the radical in America, in all spheres of thought, is constantly
in the necessity of fighting not mere institutions, as in Europe, but
institutionalized ideals, organisms and personalities which establish
their right on the same assumptions which prompt him in his rebellion.
There is less difference in fundamentals between a Carnegie and a Debs
than between any two individuals placed in similar positions in Europe.

An interesting by-product of this particular development is the myth of
the captain of industry, possessed, in the popular imagination, of all
the virtues. And a consequence of this myth is an unavoidable revision
of the catalogue of virtues, from which some were expunged that do
not lead to industrial success, and others were admitted because
industrial success is thought to be impossible without them. This myth
is not believed in by the aspiring multitudes only, but by a good many
among the captains of industry themselves, who accept their wealth as a
social trust, and conceive of their function in a manner not dissimilar
from that of the old sovereign by the grace of God.

       *       *       *       *       *

This transposition of ideals from the religious and moral field to the
practical and economic, leaves only a very thin ground for personal
piety and the religion of the Churches. Yet there is no country in
the world (again, with the only possible exception of Northern Africa
during the first centuries of the Christian Era) which has produced
such a wealth and such a variety of religious movements as America. The
substance of that very thin ground is diluted Puritanism, Puritanism
which, in a vast majority of the population, converts itself, strangely
enough, as we have seen, into social optimism, a belief sufficient to
the great active masses, but not to the needs of “the heart,” when the
heart is given enough leisure to consider itself, through either too
much wealth or too little hope: through the discovery of its emptiness,
when the possession of the means makes manifest the absence of an end,
or through the spasms of its hunger, when means are beyond reach,
in the hands of the supposed inferior and unworthy. In this second
case, even a purely sensual craving dignifies itself with the name
of the Spirit. The more or less official Churches, in an attempt to
retain the allegiance of their vast congregations, have followed the
masses in their evolution: they pride themselves essentially on their
social achievements, a little doubtfully, perhaps, knowing that their
particular God has no more reason to inhabit a church than a factory,
and that the highest possible embodiment of their doctrine is an
orderly and paternally governed industrial organization.

To the needs of “the heart” minister the innumerable sects (and
here again, the American religious history repeats, in magnified
proportions, the characteristics of English religious life). But
because of the gradual impoverishment of the central religious
tradition of the country, because of the scanty cultural background
of both apostles and neophytes, it is hard to recognize in the whole
movement an intimate spiritual dialectic which might lend strength and
significance to the individual sects. A vague mysticism appropriates to
itself, in a haphazard and capricious fashion, shadows and ghosts of
religious experiences and opinions, whose germs of truth lie in other
ages and other climates. The only common feature seems to be a distrust
of intellect, derived from the original divorce of the intellectual
from the spiritual in the Puritan, a distrust which at times becomes
active in the denunciation of the supposed crimes of science. It is
this fundamental common feature which will for ever prevent any of them
from becoming what all sects fail to be, a religion.

The two states of mind which are nearer to-day to being true religions
are, on one side, Americanism (a religion as a common bond), and on the
other, Radicalism (a religion as a personal experience). Americanism is
the more or less perfect expression of the common belief that American
ideals realize themselves in American society. Radicalism is the more
or less spasmodic protest against such a belief, sometimes coupled
with an individual attempt at realizing those ideals in one’s life
and actions. The sharpest contrast between the two attitudes is to be
found in their ideas of political and spiritual freedom; which to one
is a condition actually existing by the mere fact of the existence of
American society such as it is, and to the other a dynamic principle
which can never be permanently associated with any particular set of
institutions.

The original spirit of Puritanism can hardly be said to be alive to-day
in America. In a few intellectuals, it confuses itself with other high
forms of moral discipline in the past, and reappears with a strange
fidelity to form rather than substance, as Platonism, Classicism,
Mediævalism, Catholicism, or any other set of fixed standards that can
be accepted as a whole, and can give the soul that sense of security
which is inherent in the illusion of possessing the final truth.
The consequence of such a deviation is that these truly religious
souls, after having satisfied themselves with a sufficiently vast and
beautiful interpretation of their creed, resent any cruder and more
dangerous form of intellectual experience much more keenly than they
resent crudities and dangers actually present in the nature of things.
They are intellectuals, but again, with no faith in intellect; they
are truly isolated among their fellow-countrymen, and yet they believe
in conformity, and assume the conformity of American society to be the
conformity of their dreams.

Such a static apprehension of truth, such an identification of
universal spiritual values with one or another particular tradition,
is in fact as much an obstacle to the new life of the human spirit as
the external conformity enforced by social optimism. But the polemic
against the older intellectuals is carried on by younger men, many
of them of recent immigrant blood, but all of them reared in the
atmosphere of American culture, and who differ from them more in the
objects of their preference than in the vastness or depth of their
outlook. There is a way of clinging to the latest fashion in philosophy
or in art which is not a progress in any sense in relation to older
faiths; of combating a manifest logical fallacy by the use of the same
sophism; of embracing sin with the same moral enthusiasm that in less
enlightened times was kept in reserve for the highest virtues only.

More important, for their influence on certain phases of American
life, than these intellectual echoes, are the moralistic remnants of
Puritanism. It is always possible, for small groups of people, strongly
endowed with the sense of other people’s duties, to intimidate large
sections of public opinion into accepting the logical consequences of
certain undisputed moral assumptions, however widely they may differ
from the realities of American life. It is under such circumstances
that the kind-hearted, easy-going American pays the penalty for his
identification of realities with ideals, by being deprived of some very
dear reality in the name of an ideal which had long since ceased to
have any meaning for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

From whatever side we look at American culture, we are constantly
brought face to face with a disregard or distrust, or a narrow
conception, of purely intellectual values, which seems to be the common
characteristic of widely divergent spiritual attitudes. The American
does not, as the Englishman, glory in his capacity for muddling
through: he is proud of certain logical achievements, and has a
fondness for abstract schemes, an earnest belief in their validity and
efficiency; but no more than the English does he believe that intellect
is an integral part of the human personality. He recognizes the
identity of goodness and truth, provided that truth can be found out by
other means than purely intellectual: by common sense, by revelation,
by instinct, by imagination, but not by intellect. It is here that even
the defenders, among Americans, of the classical tradition miss the
true meaning of the message of Socrates and Plato, the foundation of
humanism.

What is peculiarly American in the opinions of American philosophers is
a clear and distinct expression of the common attitude. The official
philosophy of America has repeated for a century the views of English
empiricists and of German idealists, sometimes with very interesting
and illuminating personal variations. It has even, and it is an
original achievement, brought them to lose their peculiar accents and
to coincide in new theories of knowledge. But the heart of American
philosophy is not there: it is in pragmatism, in instrumentalism,
in whatever other theory clearly establishes the purely functional
character of truth, the mechanical aspect of intellect. Having put the
criterion of truth outside the intellect, and considered intellect as
the mere mechanism of belief, these doctrines try to re-establish the
dignity of intellect by making of it a machine for the reproduction of
morally or socially useful beliefs. The operation is similar to that of
an anatomist who, having extracted the heart from a living body, would
presume to reconstruct the body by artificially promoting the movements
of the heart. The doctrine of the purely pragmatic or instrumental
nature of intellect, which is the logical clarification of the
popular conception, is a doctrine of radical scepticism, whatever the
particular declarations of faith of the philosophers themselves might
say to the contrary: it destroys not the objects of knowledge only, but
the instrument itself.

American philosophers came to this doctrine through the psychological
and sociological approach to the problems of the mind. Such an
approach is in keeping with the general tendency towards assuming
the form of natural and mathematical sciences, which moral sciences
in American universities have been obeying during the last thirty or
forty years, partly under the influence of a certain kind of European
positivism, and partly because of the prestige that natural and
mathematical sciences gained from their practical applications. Even
now it is easier to find a truly humanistic mind, a sound conception
of intellectual values, among the great American scientists than among
the philosophers and philologists: but pure science has become the
most solitary of occupations, and the scientist the most remote of
men, since his place in society has been taken by the inventor and
by the popularizer. Psychology and sociology, those half-literary,
half-scientific disciplines, gave as a basis to philosophy not the
individual effort to understand and to think, but the positive
observation of the more or less involuntary processes of thought in
the multitude. Intellect was sacrificed to a democratic idea of the
equality of minds: how could the philosopher presume to think, I do
not say better or more efficiently than, but differently from the
multitude? To European philosophy the reproach has been made again and
again, and with some justice, of imposing laws upon reality which are
only the laws of individual philosophic thought; and yet what else
does the scientist ultimately do? But both scientist and philosopher
find their justification in their faith in the validity of their
instruments: in a spirit of devotion and humility, not in a gratuitous
presumption. The typical American philosopher has sold his birthright,
not for a pottage of lentils, but for mere love.

       *       *       *       *       *

I am painfully aware of the fact that, through the meshes of this
necessarily abstract and sketchy analysis, a good deal of the beauty
and vastness, the vigour and good-humour of American life inevitably
escapes. The traveller from the old countries experiences here a sense
of great spaces and of practically unbounded possibilities, which
reflects itself in an unparalleled gaiety and openness of heart, and
freedom of social intercourse. The true meaning of the doctrine of
opportunity lies much more in these individual attitudes than in any
difference between the structures of American and European societies.
And I do not believe that the only explanation for them is in the
prosperity of America when compared to the misery of Europe, because
this generosity stands in no direct relation with individual wealth.
The lumberman and the longshoreman are as good as, if not better than,
the millionaire.

These individual attitudes find their collective expression in the idea
of, and readiness for, service, which is universal in this country.
Churches, political parties, movements for social reform, fraternal
orders, industrial and business organizations, meet on this common
ground. There is no material interest or spiritual prejudice that
will not yield to an appeal for service: and whenever the object of
service is clearly defined, action follows the impulse, intolerant of
any delay. But Service is a means and not an end: you can serve a God,
or a man, or a group of men, and in that man or group of men what you
conceive to be his or their need, but you cannot serve Service. And
the common end can only be given by a clear intellectual vision of the
relations between a set of ideals and the realities of life.

This intrinsic generosity of the American people is the motive of
the song, and the substance of the ideal, of the one great poet that
America has added to the small family of European poets: Walt Whitman.
In him that feeling and that impulse became a vision and a prophecy.
There is a habit on the part of American intellectuals to look with a
slight contempt on the admiration of Europeans for the poetry of Walt
Whitman, as just another symptom of their ignorance of American things.
But I, for one, will confess that what I have loved passionately, as
little more than a boy, in that poetry, is that same quality whose
presence I have now recognized as the human flower of American culture,
and which makes me love this country as passionately as I loved that
poetry.

It is one of the many paradoxes of American intellectual life that
even the cultural preparation of a Walt Whitman should have been
deeper and more substantial, if not more systematic, than that of any
professor or writer of his times. These were minds which had as fully
imbibed European thought and imagination as any professor or writer in
Europe: but that thought, that imagination, transplanted to the new
country, stood in no real relation with the new practical and moral
surroundings, and were therefore thin and sterile. Walt Whitman knew
and understood the great traditions of European civilization, and tried
to express them in the original idiom, moral and literary, of his
America.

But _nemo propheta_, and it takes centuries to understand a poet. Walt
Whitman still waits for his own generation. The modern schools of
American poetry, curious of all winds of fashion, working for the day
rather than for the times, have not yet fully grasped, I do not say
the spirit of his message, but even, for all their free-versifying,
the mystery of his magnificent rhythms. His successors are rather
among some of the younger novelists, and in a few men, spiritually
related to them, who approach the study of American conditions from a
combined economic and psychological point of view. The novelists are
busy in discovering the actual traits of the American physiognomy, with
sufficient faith in the future to describe the shades with as much care
as the lights, and with a deeper passion; the economists are making way
for the highest and purest American ideals by revealing the contingent
and merely psychological basis of the supposedly scientific axioms of
classical economics.

       *       *       *       *       *

My own experience of American life, between the autumn of 1919 and the
summer of 1921, has brought me in contact with all sorts and manners of
people from one end to the other of the country, from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. It is from this direct intercourse with Americans, rather
than from my readings of American literature, continued for a much
longer time, that I have formed the opinions expressed in this paper.
But as my work has brought me in closer communion with colleges and
universities than with any other kind of institutions, I feel a little
more assured in writing of the educational aspect of the American
problem.

A university is in any case more a _universitas studentium_ than
a corporation of professors. I have enjoyed my life in American
faculties, and I have gained a good deal from the many noble souls
and intellects that I have met among them; but, whenever it has been
possible to me, I have escaped from the faculties to the students and
tried to understand the tendencies of the coming generations.

The students of the American college or university, from the
comparatively ancient institutions of the East, to the young
co-educational schools of the Middle and Far West, form a fairly
homogeneous, though very widely representative, cross-section of
the American community. They are, in a very precise and inclusive
meaning, young America, the America of to-morrow. A good many of their
intellectual and spiritual characteristics are the common traits of
American culture which we have studied in the preceding paragraphs;
and yet, because of the social separation of individuals according
to ages, which is carried in this country much farther than in any
European country, they develop also a number of independent traits,
which are peculiar to each one of the “younger generations” in their
turn. The life of the American boy or girl, up to the time of their
entrance into college, is mainly the life of a beautiful and healthy
young organism, not subject to any too strict intellectual or spiritual
discipline. The High Schools seem to understand their function in a
spirit which is substantially different from that of the European
secondary schools, owing especially to certain prevailing educational
doctrines founded on a fiction which is used also in many other fields
of American life, but which in the field of education has wrought
more harm than in any other one, the fiction of the public demand--in
this particular case of one or another type of education. A fiction
undoubtedly it is, and used to give prestige and authority to the
theories of individual educationalists, since in no country and in no
time there have existed educational opinions outside the circle of the
educators themselves. But this fiction has unfortunately had practical
consequences because American educators, subject to big business in the
private institutions, and to the politicians in the State schools and
universities, have not found in themselves the energy, except in a few
isolated instances, to resist what came to them strengthened by such
auspices. And the public itself was easily convinced that it wanted
what it was told that it wanted. The students, more sinned against
than sinning, enjoy the easy atmosphere of the school, and it is only
when they reach college that they become aware of their absolute
unpreparedness for the higher studies.

This consciousness of their inferiority manifests itself in an attitude
of “low-browism,” which is not contempt of that which they think is
beyond them, but rather an unwillingness to pretend that they are
what they know they are not. It is practically impossible for them to
acquire any standards in matters of scholarship, and they are thus
forcibly thrown back on that which they know very well, the sports, and
social life among themselves. A Chinese friend of mine once quaintly
defined an American university as an athletic association in which
certain opportunities for study were provided for the feeble-bodied.
Now, in athletics and social life, the student finds something that
is real, and therefore is an education: there is no pretence or fraud
about football, and in their institutions within the college and the
university the students obey certain standards and rules which are
not as clearly justified as those of athletics, but still are made by
themselves, and therefore readily understood. They are standards and
rules that sometimes strangely resemble those of primitive society,
as it is only too natural when the ground on which they grow is a
community of the very young only, and yet undoubtedly they are a
preparation for a life after college in which similar features are
very far from being the exception. And besides, that social life
has a freedom and beauty of its own, evident in one at least of its
most hallowed institutions, the dance. American dances, with those
captivating and vital rhythms which American music has appropriated
for itself from the Negro, are a perfect expression of the mere joy
of life. The older generations are shocked and mystified by these
dances, and also by many other ways and by the implicit opinions of
the young; but so they have been in all ages and countries. To a
curious and passionate observer, the youth of America seems to be
obscurely labouring at a liberation of the sexual life from pretences
and unjustified inhibitions, and, through an original experience of
the elements of love, at a creation of new values, perhaps of a new
morality.

But the student is an object of perplexity and wonder to the professor,
who generally ends by taking very seriously, very literally, as
something that cannot be changed, his attitude towards athletics and
the social life of the college. Starting from such an assumption,
the professor becomes shy of teaching; that is, he keeps for himself
whatever true intellectual and spiritual interests he may have, and
deals out to the students in the classroom rations of knowledge, which
go up to form a complicated system of units and credits symbolizing
the process of education. There is, to my mind, no more tragic
misunderstanding in American life.

My own experience (and I give it for what it is worth) tells me that
athletics and the social life are vicarious satisfactions for much
deeper spiritual and intellectual needs. The student receives from
the common American tradition a desire for spiritual values; from his
individual reaction to that tradition, a craving for intellectual
clarity. But he is handicapped by his scholastic unpreparedness, and
disillusioned by the aloofness of the professor, by the intricacies
and aridity of the curriculum: by the fact, only too evident to him,
that what he is given is not science or thought, but their scholastic
version. Whenever a man stands before him, and without trying to “put
himself at his level,” talks to him as one talks to a man, thinking for
him as one thinks for oneself, there is no more ready and enthusiastic
response to be had than from the American student. He is not afraid of
the difficulties or dangers, but he must trust his guide, and know that
his guide trusts him. There is evidence for this in the cases which are
too frequent to be called mere exceptions, of those American professors
who are truly popular in the colleges and universities. But until many
more of them realize what splendid material is in their hands, what big
thirst there is for them to quench, and go back to their work with this
new faith, the gulf will not be bridged, and young America will have
to attempt to solve her own problems without the help of the spiritual
experience of the centuries.

       *       *       *       *       *

This condition in the institutions of higher learning is a symbol and a
mirror of the condition of the country. With an impoverished religious
tradition, with an imperfect knowledge of the power of intellect,
America is starving for religious and intellectual truth. No other
country in the world has, as the phrase goes, a heart more full of
service: a heart that is constantly _quaerens quem amet_. With the war,
and after the war, America has wished to dedicate herself to the world,
and has only withdrawn from action when she has felt that she could not
trust her leaders, what was supposed to be her mind.

In a few years, the children of the recent millions of immigrants
from all regions of Europe will come forward in American life and ask
for their share in the common inheritance of American tradition, in
the common work of American civilization. They will not have much to
contribute directly from their original cultures, but they will add an
unexampled variety of bloods, of intellectual and moral temperaments,
to the population of America. Their Americanization, in habits and
language and manners, is a natural process which, left to itself,
invariably takes place in the second generation. America must clarify
and intensify her tradition, the moral discipline of the Puritan,
the moral enthusiasm of the Discoverers and Pioneers, for them, and
they will gladly embrace her heritage; but this clarification and
intensification is only possible through the revision of the original
values in the light of the central humanistic tradition of European
thought.

The dreams of the European founders of this Commonwealth of Utopia may
yet come true, in the way in which human dreams come true, by becoming
the active, all-pervading motive of spiritual effort, the substance
of life. Exiles, voluntary or forced, from England and Ireland, from
Russia and Italy, from Germany and Israel, children of one mother,
unified in America as they will not be unified for centuries to come
in Europe, will thus have a chance to anticipate, in the _civilitas
americana_, the future developments of the _humana civilitas_.

And if this generation needs a motto, I would suggest one line of Dante:

      _luce intellettual piena d’amore_:
      the light of intellect, in the fulness of love.

                                       RAFFAELLO PICCOLI




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES


THE CITY

There is no adequate literature of cities in America. Some of the
larger cities possess guide-books and local histories; but the most
valuable illuminations on the history and development of the American
city lie buried in contemporary papers, narratives of travel, and
speeches. The reader who wishes to explore the ground farther should
dip into volumes and papers drawn from all periods. The recent editions
of “Valentine’s Manual” should be interesting to those who cannot
consult the original “Manual of the Common Council of New York.”
During the last twenty years a great many reports and surveys have
been printed, by city planning commissions and other bodies: these are
valuable both for showing the limitations of the established régime
and for giving hints of the forces that are working, more or less,
for improvement. “The Pittsburgh Survey” (Russell Sage Foundation) is
the great classic in this field. A compendious summary of American
city developments during the last generation is contained in Charles
Zueblin’s “American Municipal Progress” (Macmillan). Standing by
itself in this literature is a very able book by Paul Harlan Douglass,
called “The Little Town,” published by Macmillan. (A book which
shall deal similarly with the Great Town is badly needed.) The best
general approach to the city is that of Professor Patrick Geddes in
“Cities in Evolution” (Williams and Norgate, London.) Those who are
acquainted with Professor Geddes’s “A Study in City Development” or his
contributions to “Sociological Papers” (Macmillan, 1905, 1906, 1907)
will perhaps note my debt to him: I hasten heartily to acknowledge
this, as well as my debt, by personal intercourse, to his colleague,
Mr. Victor V. Branford. If the lay reader can learn nothing else
from Professor Geddes, he can learn the utility of throwing aside
the curtains of second-hand knowledge and studying cities and social
institutions by direct observation. The inadequacy of American civic
literature will not be altogether a handicap if it forces the reader to
obtain by personal explorations impressions which he would otherwise
get through the blur of the printed page. Every city and its region
is in a sense an exhibition of natural and social history. Let the
reader walk the streets of our cities, as through the halls of a
museum, and use the books that have been suggested only as so many
tickets and labels. Americans have a reputation in Europe as voracious
sightseers. One wonders what might not happen if Americans started to
see the sights at home--not the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite, but a
“Broadway,” and its back alleys, and the slums and suburbs that stretch
beyond. If observation led to criticism, and criticism to knowledge,
where might not knowledge lead?

                                                               L. M.


POLITICS

The standard works on the history of American politics are so well
known (and so few) that they scarcely need mention. Bryce, Ostrogorski
and de Tocqueville, I assume, have been read by all serious students,
as have also such personal memoirs as those of Blaine and John Sherman.
Bryce’s work is a favourite, but it suffers from the disingenuousness
of the man. Dr. Charles A. Beard’s “Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution” is less a complete treatise than a prospectus of a
history that is yet to be written. As far as I know, the valuable
suggestions in his preface have never inspired any investigation of
political origins by other American historians, most of whom are simply
unintelligent school-teachers, as their current “histories” of the
late war well show. All such inquiries are blocked by the timorousness
and stupidity that are so characteristic of American scholarship. Our
discussion of politics, like our discussion of economics, deals chiefly
with superficialities. Both subjects need ventilation by psychologists
not dependent upon college salaries, and hence free to speak. Certainly
the influence of religious enthusiasm upon American politics deserves
a careful study; nevertheless, I have never been able to find a book
upon it. Again, there is the difficult question of the relations
between politics and journalism. My belief is that the rising power of
newspapers has tended to drive intelligent and self-respecting men out
of politics, for the newspapers are chiefly operated by cads and no
such man wants to be at their mercy. But that sort of thing is never
studied in the United States. We even lack decent political biography,
so common in England. The best light to be obtained upon current
politics is in the _Congressional Record_. It costs $1.50 a month and
is well worth it. Soon or late the truth gets into the _Record_; it
even got there during the war. But it seldom gets into the newspapers
and it never gets into books.

                                                            H. L. M.


JOURNALISM

I know of no quite satisfactory book on American journalism. “History
of Journalism in the United States” by George Henry Payne and “History
of American Journalism” by James Melvin Lee are fairly good in their
treatment of the past, but neither of them shows any penetration in
analyzing present conditions. The innocence of Mr. Payne may be judged
by his opinion that the Kansas City _Star_, under Nelson, exemplifies
a healthier kind of “reform journalism” than the _Post_ under Godkin!
“Liberty and the News” by Walter Lippmann is suggestive, but it does
not pretend to contain any specific information. More specific in
naming names and giving modern instances is a short essay by Hamilton
Holt, “Commercialism and Journalism.” “The Brass Check” by Upton
Sinclair contains much valuable material, and perhaps what I have said
of it does not do it justice; certainly it should be read by everybody
interested in this subject. Will Irwin published in _Collier’s Weekly_
from January to July, 1911, a valuable series of articles, “The
American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism.” I cannot find that these
articles have been reprinted in book form. There is some information
in autobiographies and biographies of important journalists, such as
“Recollections of a Busy Life” by Horace Greeley, “Life of Whitelaw
Reid” by Royal Cortissoz, “Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin” by
Rollo Ogden, “Life of Charles A. Dana” by J. H. Wilson, “Life and
Letters of John Hay” by William Roscoe Thayer, “An Adventure with
Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer,” by Alleyne Ireland; also
“The Story of the _Sun_” by Frank M. O’Brien. Biographies, however,
celebrate persons and only indirectly explain institutions. A useful
bibliography, which includes books and magazine articles, is “Daily
Newspapers in U. S.” by Wieder Callie of the Wisconsin University
School of Journalism. But after all the best source of information is
the daily newspaper, if one knows how to read it--and read between the
lines.

                                                               J. M.


THE LAW

“Bryce’s Modern Democracies,” Chapter XLIII, is a recent survey of the
American legal system; Raymond Fosdick, “American Police Systems,”
Chapter I, states the operation of criminal law. For legal procedure,
see Reginald Heber Smith, “Justice and the Poor,” published by the
Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching and dealing with
legal aid societies and other methods of securing more adequate legal
relief; Charles W. Eliot and others, “Efficiency in the Administration
of Justice,” published by the National Economic League; Moorfield
Storey, “The Reform of Legal Procedure;” and many other books and
articles; the reports of the American and New York Bar Associations
are of especial value. John H. Wigmore, “Evidence,” vol. V (1915
edition) discusses recent progress; see his “Cases on Torts, Preface,”
on substantive law. A very wide range of topics in American law,
philosophical, historical, procedural, and substantive, is covered
by the writings of Roscoe Pound, of which a list is given in “The
Centennial History of the Harvard Law School.” The same book deals with
many phases of legal education; see also “The Case Method in American
Law Schools,” Josef Redlich, Carnegie Endowment. For the position of
lawyers, the best book is, Charles Warren, “A History of the American
Bar;” a recent discussion of their work is Simeon E. Baldwin, “The
Young Man and the Law.” No one interested in this field should fail to
read the “Collected Legal Papers of Justice Holmes;” see also John H.
Wigmore, “Justice Holmes and the Law of Torts” and Felix Frankfurter,
“The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes,” both in the
_Harvard Law Review_, April, 1916, and Roscoe Pound, “Judge Holmes’s
Contributions to the Science of Law,” _ibid._, March, 1921. A valuable
essay on Colonial legal history is Paul S. Reinsch, “English Common
Law in the Early American Colonies.” A mass of material will be found
in the law reviews, which are indexed through 1907 by Jones, “Index
to Legal Periodicals,” 3 vols., and afterwards in the _Law Library
Journal_, cumulative quarterly.

                                                          Z. C., JR.


EDUCATION

The ideas contained in the article are so commonplace and of such
general acceptance among educators that it is impossible to give
specific authority for them. In addition to the articles mentioned,
one of the latest by Dr. D. S. Miller, “The Great College Illusion”
in the _New Republic_ for June 22, 1921, should be referred to. For
the rest the report of the Committee of Ten of the National Education
Association, and the reports of President Eliot and President Lowell
of Harvard, President Meiklejohn of Amherst, and President Wilson of
Princeton, may be cited, with the recognition that any such selection
is invidious.

                                                            R. M. L.


SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM

There has been no really fundamental discussion of American scholarship
or American criticism. Those who merely seek a good historical sketch
of our older literary scholarship, along conventional lines, will
find one in the fourth volume of the “Cambridge History of American
Literature” that is at all events vastly superior to the similar
chapters in the “Cambridge History of English Literature.” But more
illuminating than any formal treatise are the comments on our scholarly
ideals and methods in Emerson’s famous address on “The American
Scholar,” in “The Education of Henry Adams,” and in the “Letters” of
William James. The “Cambridge History of American Literature” contains
no separate chapter on American criticism, and the treatment of
individual critics is pathetically inadequate. The flavour of recent
criticism may be savoured in Ludwig Lewisohn’s interesting anthology,
“A Modern Book of Criticism,” where the most buoyant and “modern” of
our younger men are set side by side with all their unacademic masters
and compeers of the contemporary European world. All that can be said
in favour of the faded moralism of the older American criticism is
urged in an article on “The National Genius” in the _Atlantic Monthly_
for January, 1921, the temper of which may be judged from this typical
excerpt: “When Mr. Spingarn declares that beauty is not concerned with
truth or morals or democracy, he makes a philosophical distinction
which I have no doubt that Charles the Second would have understood,
approved, and could, at need, have illustrated. But he says what the
American schoolboy knows to be false to the history of beauty in
this country. Beauty, whether we like it or not, has a heart full of
service.” The case against the conservative and traditional type of
criticism is presented with slapdash pungency in the two volumes of
H. L. Mencken’s “Prejudices.” But any one can make out a case for
himself by reading the work of any American classical scholar side by
side with a book by Gilbert Murray, or any history of literature by an
American side by side with Francesco de Sanctis’s “History of Italian
Literature,” or the work of any American critic side by side with the
books of the great critics of the world.

                                                            J. E. S.


SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE

The “distinguished Englishman” to whom the Martian refers is of course
Viscount Bryce, whose “American Commonwealth” discusses the external
aspects of our uniformity, the similarity of our buildings, cities,
customs, and so on. Our spiritual unanimity has been most thoroughly
examined by George Santayana, both in his earlier essays--as notably in
“The Genteel Tradition”--and in his recent “Character and Opinion in
the United States.”

For all the welter of writing about our educational establishment,
only infrequent and incidental consideration has been bestowed, either
favourably or unfavourably, on its regimental effect. As custodians of
a going concern, the educators have busied themselves with repairs and
replacements to the machinery rather than with the right of way; and
lay critics have pretty much confined themselves to selecting between
machines whose slightly differing routes all lie in the same general
direction. The exception that proves the rule is “Shackled Youth,” by
Edward Yeomans.

But undergraduate life in America has a genre of its own, the form
of fiction known as “college stories.” Nearly every important school
has at some time had written round it a collection of tales that
exploit its peculiar legends, traditions, and customs--for the most
part a chafing-dish literature of pranks, patter, and athletic prowess
whose murky and often distorted reflection of student attitudes is
quite incidental to its business of entertaining. Owen Johnson’s
Lawrenceville stories--“The Prodigious Hickey,” “Tennessee Shad,” “The
Varmint,” “The Humming Bird”--are the classics of preparatory school
life. Harvard has “Pepper,” by H. E. Porter, “Harvard Episodes” and
“The Diary of a Freshman,” by Charles Flandrau, and Owen Wister’s
“Philosophy 4,” the best of all college yarns. Yale has the books
of Ralph D. Paine and of others. The Western universities have such
volumes as “Ann Arbor Tales,” by Karl Harriman, for Michigan, and
“Maroon Tales,” by W. J. Cuppy, for Chicago. George Fitch writes
amusingly about life in the smaller Western colleges in “Petey Simmons
at Siwash” and “At Good Old Siwash.”

The catalogue of serious college fiction is brief, and most of the
novels are so propagandist that they are misrepresentative. For
example, Owen Johnson’s “Stover at Yale,” which was some years out of
date when it was published, misses the essential club spirit in New
Haven by almost as wide a margin as Arthur Train’s “The World and
Thomas Kelly” departs from the normal club life in Cambridge; both
authors set up the straw man of snobbery where snobs are an unimportant
minority. Two recent novels, however, deal more faithfully with
the college scene for the very reason that their authors were more
interested in character than in setting: “This Side of Paradise,” by
Scott Fitzgerald, is true enough to have provoked endless controversy
in Princeton; and “Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams,” by Charles
G. Norris, is a memorable appraisal of student ideals in a typical
co-educational institution. Dorothy Canfield’s “The Bent Twig” is
also laid in a co-educational college. Booth Tarkington’s “Ramsay
Milholland” attends a State University; and the hero of “Gold Shod,” by
Newton Fuessle, is a revelatory failure of the University of Chicago
regimen. To these add an autobiography--“An American in the Making,
The Life Story of an Immigrant,” by M. E. Ravage, whose candid report
on his fellows at the Missouri State University is a masterpiece of
sympathetic criticism.

                                                               C. B.


THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

To attempt to give references to specific books on so general and
inclusive a topic would be an impertinence. But one may legitimately
suggest the trends of investigation one would like to see thoroughly
explored. In my own case they would be: (1) a study of the pioneer from
the point of view of his cultural and religious interests, correlating
those interests with his general economic status; (2) a study of the
revolutionary _feeling_ of America (not formulas) in psychological
terms and of its duration as an emotional driving force; (3) a study of
the effects of the post-Civil War period and the industrial expansion
upon the position of upper-class women in the United States; (4) a
study of sexual maladjustment in American family life, correlated
again with the economic status of the successful pioneer; (5) a very
careful study of the beginnings, rise, and spread of women’s clubs,
and their purposes and accomplishments, correlated chronologically
with the development of club life of men and the extent of vice,
gambling, and drunkenness; (6) a study of American religions in more
or less Freudian terms as compensations for neurotic maladjustment;
(7) a study of instrumentalism in philosophy and its implications for
reform; (8) a serious attempt to understand and appraise the more
or less disorganized _jeunes_, with some attention to comparing the
intensity of their bitterness or optimism with the places of birth and
upbringing. No special study of American educational systems or of the
school or college life would be necessary, it seems to me, beyond, of
course, a general knowledge. The intellectual life of the nation, after
all, has little relation to the academic life.

When such special studies had been finished by sympathetic
investigators, probably one of several writers could synthesize the
results and give us a fairly definitive essay on the intellectual life
of America. Such studies, however, have not yet been done, and without
them I have had to write this essay to a certain extent _en plein air_.
Thus it has been impossible entirely to avoid giving the impression of
stating things dogmatically or intuitively. But as a matter of fact on
all the topics I have suggested for study I have already given much
thought and time, and consequently, whatever its literary form, the
essay is not pure impressionism.

                                                            H. E. S.


SCIENCE

There is no connected account of American achievement in science.
Strangely enough, the most pretentious American book on the history
of science, Sedgwick and Tyler’s “Short History of Science” (New
York: Macmillan, 1917), ignores the most notable figures among the
author’s countrymen. A useful biographical directory under the title of
“American Men of Science” (New York Science Press, 1910, 2d edition),
has been compiled by Professor James McKeen Cattell; a third revised
edition has been prepared and issued this year prior to the appearance
of the present volume.

On the tendencies manifest in the United States there are several
important papers. An address by Henry A. Rowland entitled “A Plea
for Pure Science” (_Popular Science Monthly_, vol. LIX, 1901, pp.
170–188), is still eminently worth reading. The external conditions
under which American scientists labour have been repeatedly discussed
in recent years in such journals as _Science_ and _School and
Society_, both edited by Professor Cattell, who has himself appended
very important discussions to the above-cited biographical lexicon.
Against over-organization Professor William Morton Wheeler has recently
published a witty and vigorous protest (“The Organization of Research,”
_Science_, January 21, 1921, N. S. vol. LIII, pp. 53–67).

In order to give an understanding of the essence of scientific activity
the general reader cannot do better than to trace the processes by
which the master-minds of the past have brought order into the chaos
that is at first blush presented by the world of reality. In this
respect the writings of the late Professor Ernst Mach are unsurpassed,
and even the least mathematically trained layman can derive much
insight from portions of his book “Die Mechanik” (Leipzig, 7th edition,
1912), accessible in T. J. McCormack’s translation under the title of
“The Science of Mechanics” (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.). The
section on Galileo may be specially recommended. Mach’s “Erkenntnis
und Irrtum” (Leipzig, 1906) contains most suggestive discussions of
the psychology of investigation, dealing with such questions as the
nature of a scientific problem, of experimentation, of hypothetical
assumptions, etc. Much may also be learned from the general sections
of P. Duhem’s “La theorie physique, son objet et sa structure” (Paris,
1906). E. Duclaux’s “Pasteur: Histoire d’un Esprit” has fortunately
been rendered accessible by Erwin F. Smith and Florence Hedges under
the title “Pasteur, the History of a Mind” (Philadelphia; Saunders,
1920). It reveals in masterly fashion the methods by which a great
thinker overcomes not only external opposition but the more baneful
obstacles of scientific folk-lore.

                                                            R. H. L.


PHILOSOPHY

The omission of Mr. Santayana’s philosophy from the above account
indicates no lack of appreciation of its merits. Although written
at Harvard, it is hardly an American philosophy. On one hand, Mr.
Santayana is free from the mystical religious longings that have
given our Idealisms life, and on the other, he is too confident of
the reality of culture and the value of the contemplative life to
sanction that dominance of the practical which is the stronghold of
instrumentalism.

The only histories of American Philosophy are those by Professor
Woodbridge Riley. His “Early Schools” (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1907), is a
full treatment of the period in question, but his “American Thought
from Puritanism to Pragmatism” (H. Holt, 1915) is better reading and
comes down to date. These are best read in connection with some history
of American Literature such as Barrett Wendell’s “Literary History
of America” (Scribner’s Sons, 1914). Royce’s system is given in good
condensed form in the last four chapters of his “Spirit of Modern
Philosophy” (Houghton Mifflin, 1899). Its exhaustive statement is “The
World and the Individual” (2 vols., Macmillan, 1900–1). The “Philosophy
of Loyalty” (Macmillan, 1908) develops the ethics, and the “Problem of
Christianity” (2 vols., Macmillan, 1913), relates his philosophy to
Christianity. Hocking’s religious philosophy is given in his “Meaning
of God in Human Experience” (Yale University Press, 1912). His general
position is developed on one side in “Human Nature and Its Remaking”
(Yale University Press, 1918). Anything of James is good reading. His
chief work is the “Principles of Psychology” (H. Holt, 1890), but the
“Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Some of Life’s Ideals” (H. Holt,
1907) and the “Will to Believe” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), better
illustrate his attitude toward life. “Pragmatism” (Longmans, Green
& Co., 1907) introduces his technical philosophizing. His religious
attitude can be got from the “Varieties of Religious Experience”
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). Dewey has nowhere systematized his
philosophy. Its technical points are exhibited in the “Essays in
Experimental Logic” (University of Chicago Press, 1916). The “Influence
of Darwin on Philosophy” (H. Holt, 1910) has two especially readable
essays, one the title-essay, the other on “Intelligence and Morals.”
The full statement of his ethics is the “Ethics” (Dewey and Tufts, H.
Holt, 1908). He is at his best in “Education and Democracy” (Macmillan,
1916). “German Philosophy and Politics” (H. Holt, 1915) is a war-time
reaction giving an interesting point of view as to the significance
of German Philosophy. “The New Realism” (Macmillan, 1912) is a volume
of technical studies by the Six Realists. “Creative Intelligence”
(H. Holt, 1917), by John Dewey and others, is a similar volume of
pragmatic studies. The reviews are also announcing another co-operative
volume, “Essays in Critical Realism” by Santayana, Lovejoy and others.
In a technical fashion Perry has discussed the “Present Tendencies
in Philosophy” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), but the best critical
reaction to American philosophy is that of Santayana: “Character and
Opinion in the United States” (Scribner’s Sons, 1920). Santayana’s own
chief philosophic contributions are the “Sense of Beauty” (Scribner’s
Sons, 1896), and the “Life of Reason” (5 vols., Scribner’s Sons,
1905–6). The first two chapters of his “Winds of Doctrine” (Scribner’s
Sons, 1913), on the “Intellectual Temper of the Age” and “Modernism and
Christianity,” are also relevant. Brief but excellent expositions of
Royce, Dewey, James, and Santayana by Morris R. Cohen have appeared in
the _New Republic_, vols. XX-XXIII.

                                                            H. C. B.


LITERATURE

Perhaps the most illuminating books for any one interested in the
subject of the essay on literature are the private memorials of
certain modern European writers. For a sense of everything the
American literary life is _not_, one might read, for instance,
the Letters of Ibsen, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Flaubert, Taine and
Leopardi--all of which have appeared, in whole or in part, in English.

                                                            V. W. B.


MUSIC

What little there is that is worth reading concerning American music is
scattered through magazine articles and chapters in books upon other
musical subjects. Daniel Gregory Mason has a sensible and illuminating
chapter, “Music in America,” in his “Contemporary Composers.” The
section, “America,” in Chapter XVI of the Stanford-Forsyth “History of
Music” contrives to be tactful and at the same time just. Two books
that should be read by any one interested in native composition are
Cecil Forsyth’s “Music and Nationalism” and Lawrence Gilman’s “Edward
MacDowell.” Rupert Hughes’s “Contemporary American Composers” is twenty
years old, but still interesting; it contains sympathetic--not to say
glowing--accounts of the lives and works of an incredibly large number
of Americans who do and did pursue the art of musical composition. To
know what an artist means when he asks to be understood read pages 240
and 241 of Cabell’s “Jurgen”--if you can get it; also the volume, “La
Foire sur la Place,” of “Jean Christophe.”

                                                               D. T.


POETRY

Bodenheim, Maxwell: “Minna and Myself” (Pagan Publishing Co.); “Advice”
(Alfred A. Knopf).

“H. D.”: “Sea-Garden” (Houghton Mifflin).

Eliot, T. S.: “Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf).

Fletcher, John Gould: “Irradiations: Sand and Spray” (Houghton
Mifflin); “Goblins and Pagodas” (Houghton Mifflin); “The Tree of Life”
(Macmillan); “Japanese Prints” (Four Seas Co.); “Breakers and Granite”
(Macmillan).

Frost, Robert: “North of Boston” (Holt); “A Boy’s Will” (Holt);
“Mountain Interval” (Holt).

Kreymborg, Alfred: “Plays for Poem-Mimes” (Others); “Blood of Things”
(Nicholas Brown); “Plays for Merry Andrews” (Sunwise Turn).

Lindsay, Vachel: “The Congo” (Macmillan); “The Chinese Nightingale”
(Macmillan).

Lowell, Amy: “Men, Women and Ghosts” (Houghton Mifflin); “Can Grande’s
Castle” (Houghton Mifflin); “Pictures of the Floating World” (Houghton
Mifflin); “Legends” (Houghton Mifflin).

Masters, Edgar Lee: “Spoon River Anthology” (Macmillan); “The Great
Valley” (Macmillan); “Domesday Book” (Macmillan).

Pound, Ezra: “Umbra” (Elkin Matthews); “Lustra” (Alfred A. Knopf).

Robinson, Edwin Arlington: “Children of the Night” (Scribners);
“The Town Down the River” (Scribners); “The Man Against the Sky”
(Macmillan); “Merlin” (Macmillan); “Captain Craig” (Macmillan); “The
Three Taverns” (Macmillan); “Avon’s Harvest” (Macmillan); “Lancelot”
(Scott and Seltzer).

Sandburg, Carl: “Smoke and Steel” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.).

Stevens, Wallace: See “The New Poetry;” “Others” Anthology.

Teasdale, Sara: “Rivers to the Sea” (Macmillan).

Untermeyer, Louis: “The New Adam” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.); “Including
Horace” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.).

Anthologies: “The New Poetry.” Edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice
Corbin Henderson (Macmillan); “An American Miscellany” (Harcourt, Brace
& Co.); “Others for 1919” edited by Alfred Kreymborg (A. A. Knopf);
“Some Imagist Poets” First, Second and Third Series (Houghton Mifflin).

Criticism: Untermeyer, Louis, “The New Era in American Poetry” (Henry
Holt), a comprehensive, lively, but sometimes misleading survey.

                                                               C. A.


ART

The reader may obtain most of the data on the history of American
art from Samuel Isham’s “History of American Painting,” and Charles
H. Caffin’s “Story of American Painting.” Very little writing of an
analytical nature has been devoted to American art, and nearly all of
it is devoid of a sense of perspective and of anything approaching a
realization of the position that American work holds in relation to
that of Europe. Outside of the writing that is only incompetent, there
are the books and articles by men whose purpose is to “boost” the home
product for nationalistic or commercial reasons. In contrast with all
this is Mr. Roger E. Fry’s essay on Ryder, in the _Burlington Magazine_
for April, 1908--a masterful appreciation of the artist.

                                                               W. P.


THE THEATRE

The bibliography of this subject is extensive, but in the main
unilluminating. It consists chiefly in a magnanimous waving aside of
what is, and an optimistic dream of what is to be. Into this category
fall most, if not all, of the many volumes written by the college
professors and such of their students as have, upon graduation, carried
with them into the world the college-professor manner of looking at
things. Nevertheless, Professor William Lyon Phelps’ “The Twentieth
Century Theatre,” for all its deviations from fact, and Professor
Thomas H. Dickinson’s “The Case of American Drama,” may be looked
into by the more curious. Mr. Arthur Ruhl’s “Second Nights,” with its
penetrating humour, contains several excellent pictures of certain
phases of the native theatre. Section IV of Mr. Walter Prichard Eaton’s
“Plays and Players,” Mr. George Bronson-Howard’s searching series of
papers entitled, “What’s Wrong with the Theatre,” and perhaps even Mr.
George Jean Nathan’s “The Popular Theatre,” “The Theatre, The Drama,
The Girls,” “Comedians All,” and “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents” may
throw some light upon the subject. Miss Akins’ “Papa” and all of Mr.
O’Neill’s plays are available in book form. The bulk of inferior native
dramaturgy is similarly available to the curious-minded: there are
hundreds of these lowly specimens on view in the nearest book store.

                                                            G. J. N.


ECONOMIC OPINION

The literature of economic opinion in America is almost as voluminous
as the printed word. It ranges from the ponderous treatises of
professed economists, wherein “economic laws” are printed in italics,
to the sophisticated novels of the self-elect, in which economic
opinion is a by-product of clever conversation. Not only can one find
economic opinion to his taste, but he can have it in any form he likes.
Perhaps the most human and reasonable application of the philosophy
of laissez-faire to the problems of industrial society is to be found
in the pages of W. G. Sumner. Of particular interest are the essays
contained in the volumes entitled “Earth Hunger,” “The Challenge of
Facts,” and “The Forgotten Man.” The most subtle and articulate account
of the economic order as an automatic, self-regulating mechanism
is J. B. Clark, “The Distribution of Wealth.” An able and readable
treatise, characterized alike by a modified classical approach and
by a recognition of the facts of modern industrial society, is F. W.
Taussig, “The Principles of Economics.” The “case for capitalism”
has never been set forth as an articulate whole. The theoretical
framework of the defence is to be found in any of the older treatises
upon economic theory. A formal _apologia_ is to be found in the last
chapter of almost every text upon economics under some such title
as “A Critique of the Existing Order,” “Wealth and Welfare,” or
“Economic Progress.” A defence of “what is,” whatever it may chance
to be, characterized alike by brilliancy and ignorance, is P. E.
More’s “Aristocracy and Justice.” Contemporary opinion favourable to
capitalism may be found, in any requisite quantity and detail, in
_The Wall Street Journal_, _The Commercial and Financial Chronicle_,
and the publications of the National Association of Manufacturers.
_The Congressional Record_, a veritable treasure house of economic
fallacy, presents fervent pleas both for an unqualified capitalism
and for capitalism with endless modifications. The literature of the
economics of “control” is beginning to be large. The essay by H. C.
Adams, “The Relation of the State to Industrial Activity,” elaborating
the thesis that the function of the state is to regulate “the plane of
competition,” has become a classic. The best account of the economic
opinion of organized labour is to be found in R. F. Hoxie, “Trade
Unionism in the United States.” Typical examples of excellent work done
by men who do not profess to be economists are W. Lippmann, “Drift and
Mastery,” the opinions (often dissenting) delivered by Mr. Justice
Holmes and Mr. Justice Brandeis, of the United States Supreme Court,
and the articles frequently contributed to periodicals by T. R. Powell
upon the constitutional aspects of economic questions. The appearance
of such studies as the brief for the shorter working day in the case
of _Bunting v. Oregon_, prepared by F. Frankfurter and J. Goldmark,
and of the “Report on the Steel Strike of 1919,” by the Commission
of Inquiry of the Interchurch World Movement indicates that we are
beginning to base our opinions and our policies upon “the facts.” Among
significant contributions are the articles appearing regularly in
such periodicals as _The New Republic_ and _The Nation_. At last the
newer economics of the schools is beginning to assume the form of an
articulate body of doctrine. The books of T. B. Veblen, particularly
“The Theory of Business Enterprise,” and “The Instinct of Workmanship,”
contain valuable pioneer studies. In “Personal Competition” and in the
chapters upon “Valuation” in “Social Process,” C. H. Cooley has shown
how economic institutions are to be treated. The newer economics,
however, begins with the publication in 1913 of W. C. Mitchell,
“Business Cycles.” This substitutes an economics of process for one of
statics and successfully merges theoretical and statistical inquiry. It
marks the beginning of a new era in the study of economics. The work
in general economic theory has followed the leads blazed by Veblen,
Cooley, and Mitchell. W. H. Hamilton, in “Current Economic Problems,”
elaborates a theory of the control of industrial development,
interspersed with readings from many authors. L. C. Marshal, in
“Readings in Industrial Society,” attempts, through selections drawn
from many sources, an appraisal of the institutions which together make
up the economic order. D. Friday, in “Profits, Wages, and Prices,”
shows how much meaning a few handfuls of figures contain and how much
violence they can do to established principles. The National Bureau
of Economic Research is soon to publish the results of a careful
and thorough statistical inquiry into the division of income in the
United States. Upon particular subjects such as trusts, tariffs,
railroads, labour unions, etc., the literature is far too large to be
catalogued here. There is no satisfactory history of economic opinion
in the United States. T. B. Veblen’s “The Place of Science in Modern
Civilization” contains a series of essays which constitute the most
convincing attack upon the classical system and which point the way to
an institutional economics. Many articles dealing with the development
of economic doctrines are to be found in the files of _The Quarterly
Journal of Economics_ and of _The Journal of Political Economy_.
An excellent statement of the present situation in economics is an
unpublished essay by W. C. Mitchell, “The Promise of Economic Science.”

                                                            W. H. H.


RADICALISM

For exposition of the leading radical theories the reader is urged to
go, not to second-hand authorities, but to their foremost advocates.
“Capital” by Karl Marx (Charles H. Kerr) is of course the chief basis
of Socialism. There is nothing better on Anarchism than the article in
the “Encyclopedia Britannica” by Prince Kropotkin. For revolutionary
industrial unionism it is important to know “Speeches and Editorials”
by Daniel de Leon (New York Labor News Co.). De Leon was one of
the founders of the I.W.W., and his ideas not only influenced the
separatist labour movements in the United States but the shop-steward
movement in England and the Soviets of Russia. “Guild Socialism” by
G. D. H. Cole is the best statement of this recent theory, while “The
State and Revolution” by Nikolai Lenin (George Allen and Unwin)
explains the principles and tactics of modern Communism. To these
should be added another classic, “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George
(Doubleday Page).

On the origins of the American government it is important to
read “Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy” and “Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution” by Charles A. Beard (Macmillan).

The “History of Trade Unionism” by Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Longmans,
Green), is an invaluable account of the growth of the British labour
movement, which has many similarities to our own. “Industrial
Democracy” by the same authors, issued by the same publisher, is the
best statement of the theories of trade unionism. The “History of Labor
in the United States” by John R. Commons and associates (Macmillan), is
a scholarly work, while “Trade Unionism in the United States” by Robert
F. Hoxie (Appleton), is a more analytical treatment. “The I. W. W.” by
Paul F. Brissenden (Longmans, Green), is a full documentary history.
Significant recent tendencies are recorded in “The New Unionism in
the Clothing Industry” by Budish and Soule (Harcourt, Brace). The
last chapters of “The Great Steel Strike” by William Z. Foster (B. W.
Huebsch), expound his interesting interpretation of the trade unions.

For a statement of the functional attitude toward public problems one
should read “Authority, Liberty and Function” by Ramiro de Maeztu (Geo.
Allen and Unwin). For a brief and readable application of this attitude
to economics, “The Acquisitive Society” by R. H. Tawney (Harcourt,
Brace), is to be recommended.

“Modern Social Movements” by Savel Zimand (H. W. Wilson), is an
authoritative guidebook to present radical movements throughout the
world, and contains an excellent bibliography. And we must not forget
the voluminous Report of the New York State Legislative Committee on
Radicalism (the Lusk Committee), which not only collects a wealth of
current radical literature, but offers an entertaining and instructive
example of the current American attitude toward such matters.

                                                               G. S.


THE SMALL TOWN

Bibliography: “A Hoosier Holiday,” by Theodore Dreiser. “Winesburg,
Ohio,” by Sherwood Anderson. “Main Street,” by Sinclair Lewis.

                                                            L. R. R.


HISTORY

The late Henry Adams had much in common with Samuel Butler, that other
seeker after an education. He knew that he had written a very good
book (his studies on American history were quite as excellent in their
way as “Erewhon” was in a somewhat different genre) and he was equally
aware of the sad fact that his work was not being read. In view of
the general public indifference towards history it is surprising how
much excellent work has been done. Three names suggest themselves when
history in America is mentioned, Robinson, Beard, and Breasted. Their
works for the elementary schools have not been surpassed in any country
and their histories (covering the entire period from ancient Egypt down
to the present time) will undoubtedly help to overcome the old and
firmly established prejudice that “history is dull” and will help to
create a new generation which shall prefer a good biography or history
to the literature of our current periodicals.

The group of essays published last year by Professor Robinson--the
pioneer of our modern historical world--under the title of “The New
History” contains several papers of a pleasantly suggestive nature and
we especially recommend “History for the Common Man” for those who want
to investigate the subject in greater detail, and “The New Allies of
History” for those who want to get an idea of the struggle that goes on
between the New and the Old Movements in our contemporary historical
world.

But it is impossible to suggest a three- four- or five-foot bookshelf
for those who desire to understand the issues of the battle that is
taking place. The warfare between the forces of the official School
and University History and those who have a vision of something quite
different is merely a part of the great social and economic and
spiritual struggle that has been going on ever since the days of the
Encyclopedists. The scene is changing constantly. The leaders hardly
know what is happening. The soldiers who do the actual fighting are too
busy with the work at hand to waste time upon academic discussions of
the Higher Strategy. And the public will have to do what the public did
during the great war--study the reports from all sides (the relevant
and the irrelevant--the news from Helsingfors-by-way-of-Geneva and from
Copenhagen-by-way-of Constantinople) and use its own judgment as to the
probable outcome of the conflict.

                                                         H. W. V. L.


SEX

As might be supposed, there has been little writing on sex in this
country--such discussion, more or less superficial, of the social
aspects as may be found in books on the family, on marriage or
prostitution, some quasi-medical treatises and of late a few books
along the lines of Freudian psychology, that is all. Among all the
organizations of the country there is no society corresponding to
the British Society for the Study of Sex. I doubt if such a society
or its publications would be tolerated, since even novelists who,
like Dreiser, express an interest in sex comparatively directly, run
afoul of public opinion, and a book such as “Women in Love” by D. H.
Lawrence, its publisher felt called upon to print without his name.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in English the most adequate
discussions of sex have been made by an Englishman, Havelock
Ellis--“Studies in the Psychology of Sex.” Among less well known
writing on the subject by Ellis I would note in particular an
illuminating page or two in his essay on Casanova (“Affirmations”).

Discussion of the theories of distinguishing between mating and
parenthood and of crisis psychology may be found in articles by the
writer in the _International Journal of Ethics_, July, 1915, January,
1916, October, 1917, and in _The American Anthropologist_, March, 1916,
and _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_,
March, 1918.

“The Behaviour of Crowds” by E. D. Martin, and “French Ways and
Their Meaning” by Edith Wharton are recent books that the reader of
a comparative turn of mind will find of interest, and if he is not
already familiar with the writings of the Early Christian Fathers I
commend to him some browsing in the “Ante-Nicene Christian Library” and
the “Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.”

                                                            E. C. P.


THE FAMILY

For statistical facts which have a bearing on the tendencies of the
family in the United States, the following group of sources has been
consulted:

“Abstract of the Census, 1910;” the preliminary sheets of the “Census
of 1920;” Report on “Marriage and Divorce in 1916,” published by
the Bureau of the Census; Bulletin of the Woman’s Bureau, U. S.
Department of Labour on “What Became of Women Who Went Into War
Industries;” Bulletin of the U. S. Department of Agriculture on “The
Farm Woman;” Bulletin of the U. S. Children’s Bureau on “Standards
of Child Welfare.” Economic aspects of the family and income data
were acquired from “Conditions of Labour in American Industries,” by
Edgar Sydenstricker, and “The Wealth and Income of the People of the
United States,” by Willford I. King. For facts concerning longevity,
the aid of the Census was supplemented by “The Trend of Longevity in
the United States,” by C. H. Forsyth, in the _Journal of the American
Statistical Association_, Vol. 128. For the long biological perspective
to counteract the near-sighted view of the Census, “The New Stone Age
in Northern Europe,” by John M. Tyler may be commended. Psychological
aspects of family relationships are discussed in a scientific and
stimulating way in the published “Proceedings of the International
Women Physicians’ Conference, 1919.”

                                                               K. A.


RACIAL MINORITIES

No author or group of authors has yet attempted to treat in any
systematic and comprehensive way the position and the problem of the
several racial minorities in the United States. A perfect bibliography
of existing materials on the subject would be most helpful, but it
could not make good the existing shortage of fact, and of thoughtful
interpretation.

The anthropological phase of the subject is discussed with authority
by Franz Boas in “The Mind of Primitive Man” (Macmillan, 1913), and
by Robert H. Lowie in “Culture and Ethnology” (McMurtrie, 1917). Some
information on racial inter-marriage is to be found in Drachsler’s
“Democracy and Assimilation--The Blending of Immigrant Heritages in
America” (Macmillan, 1920). Among recent reports of psychological
tests of race-difference, the following are of special interest: “A
Study of Race Differences in New York City,” by Katherine Murdock,
(_School and Society_, vol. XI, no. 266, p. 147, 31 January, 1920);
“Racial Differences in Mental Fatigue,” by Thomas R. Garth (_Journal
of Applied Psychology_, vol. IV, nos. 2 and 3, p. 235, June-Sept.
1920); “A Comparative Study in the Intelligence of White and Colored
Children,” by R. A. Schwegler and Edith Winn (_Journal of Educational
Research_, vol. II, no. 5, p. 838, December, 1920); “The Intelligence
of Negro Recruits,” by M. R. Trabue (_Natural History_, vol. XIX, no.
6, p. 680, 1919); “The Intelligence of Negroes at Camp Lee, Virginia,”
by George Oscar Ferguson, Jr. (_School and Society_, vol. IX, no. 233,
p. 721, 14 June, 1919); and the Government’s official report of all the
psychological tests given in the cantonments (“Memoirs of the National
Academy of Science,” vol. XV, Washington, Government Printing Office,
1921).

The most important single source of information on the present status
of the coloured race in the United States is “The Negro Year Book,”
edited by Monroe N. Work (Negro Year Book Pub. Co., Tuskegee Institute,
Alabama); the edition for 1918–19 contains an extensive bibliography.
Brawley’s “Short History of the American Negro” (Macmillan, rev. ed.,
1919) presents in text-book form a general narrative, together with
supplementary chapters on such topics as religion and education among
the Negroes. The Government report on “Negro Population, 1790–1915”
(Washington, Bureau of the Census, Government Printing Office, 1918),
is invaluable. Important recent developments are treated in “Negro
Migration in 1916–17” and “The Negro at Work During the World War and
During Reconstruction” (Washington, Dep’t of Labour, 1919 and 1920
respectively). Some notion of the various manifestations of prejudice
against the Negro may be gathered from the following sources: “Negro
Education” (_U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin_, 1916, nos. 38 and
39); “The White and the Colored Schools of Virginia as Measured by the
Ayres Index,” by George Oscar Ferguson, Jr. (_School and Society_, vol.
XII, no. 297, p. 170, 4 Sept., 1920); “Thirty Years of Lynching in the
United States, 1889–1918,” and “Disfranchisement of Colored Americans
in the Presidential Election of 1920” (New York, National Association
for the Advancement of Coloured People, 1919 and 1921 respectively).
A few representative expressions from the Negroes themselves are: “Up
from Slavery, an Autobiography,” by Booker T. Washington (Doubleday,
1901); “Darkwater,” by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Harcourt, 1920); _The
Messenger_ (a Negro Socialist-syndicalist magazine, 2305 Seventh
Avenue, New York); and the “Universal Negro Catechism” (Universal Negro
Improvement Association, 56 West 135th Street, New York).

A great body of valuable information on the Indians is collected in two
publications of the Government, the second of which contains a very
extensive bibliography; “Indian Population in the United States and
Alaska, 1910” (Washington, Bureau of the Census, Government Printing
Office, 1915), and the “Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico,”
edited by Frederick Webb Hodge (Washington, Bureau of Ethnology,
Government Printing Office, 1907–10, 2 vols.). An annual report
containing current data on the status of the Indian is published by
the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Francis Ellington Leupp, who held
this title from 1905 to 1909, was the author of a volume which presents
in popular form the results of official experience (“The Indian and His
Problem,” Scribner, 1910).

The “American Jewish Year Book” (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication
Society of America) is an extremely useful volume, and particularly
so because one must refer to it for statistical information which in
the case of the other racial minorities is available in the reports
of the national census. In the _American Magazine_ for April, 1921,
Harry Schneiderman, the editor of the “Year Book,” assembles a great
many facts bearing upon the relation of the Jews to the economic,
social, political, and intellectual life of the country (“The Jews of
the United States,” p. 24). Of special interest to students of the
Semitic problem is Berkson’s “Theories of Americanization; a Critical
Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group” (Teachers’ College,
Columbia University, 1920).

The standard works on the Oriental question are Coolidge’s “Chinese
Immigration” (Holt, 1909), and Millis’s “Japanese Problem in the United
States” (Macmillan, 1915). The Japanese problem in California is
treated statistically in a booklet prepared recently by the State Board
of Control (“California and the Oriental,” Sacramento, State Printing
Office, 1920), and in a symposium which appeared in _The Pacific
Review_ for December, 1920 (Seattle, University of Washington).

                                                            G. T. R.


ADVERTISING

Expect from me no recommendation of the “scientific” treatises on
advertising or of the professional psychological analyses of the
instincts. Books, books in tons, have been written about advertising,
and as far as I am concerned, every single one of them is right. Read
these, if you have the hardihood, and remain mute. Read them, I should
say, and be eternally damned. Read them and retire rapidly to a small
room comfortably padded and securely locked.

                                                            J. T. S.


BUSINESS

Within the limits of this space anything like an adequate reference
to the source books of fact and thought is impossible. All that
may be attempted is to suggest an arbitrary way through the whole
of the subject--a thoroughfare from which the reader may take off
where he will as his own interests develop. For the foundations of an
economic understanding one needs only to read “Principles of Political
Economy,” by Simon Newcomb, the American astronomer, who in a mood
of intellectual irritation inclined his mind to this mundane matter
and produced the finest book of its kind in the world. For the rough
physiognomy of American economic phenomena there is “A Century of
Population Growth,” Bureau of the Census, 1909, a splendid document
prepared under the direction of S. N. D. North. Katharine Coman’s
“Industrial History of the United States” is an important work in
itself and contains, besides, an excellent and full bibliography.
“Crises and Depressions” and “Corporations and the State,” by Theodore
E. Burton; “Forty Years of American Finance,” by Alexander D. Noyes;
“Railroad Transportation, Its History and Its Laws,” by A. T. Hadley;
“Trusts, Pools and Corporations,” by Wm. Z. Ripley; and “The Book of
Wheat,” by Peter Tracy Dondlinger, are books in which the separate
phases indicated by title are essentially treated. For dissertation,
interpretation, and universal thought every student will find himself
deeply indebted to “Trade Morals, Their Origin, Growth and Province,”
by Edward D. Page; “The Economic Interpretation of History,” by James
E. Thorold Rogers; “History of the New World Called America,” by E. J.
Payne; “Economic Studies,” by Walter Bagehot; “Essays in Finance,”
by R. Giffen; “Recent Economic Changes,” by David A. Wells, and “The
Challenge of Facts and Other Essays,” by William Graham Sumner.

                                                               G. G.


ENGINEERING

Literature covering the function of the engineer in society, especially
in America, is very limited compared with books of information on
most subjects. Engineering activities such as are usually described
cover the technical achievements of the profession. Useful material,
however, will be found scattered throughout the technical literature
and engineering society proceedings especially among the addresses
and articles of leading engineers prepared for special occasions. A
comprehensive history of engineering has never been written, although
there are many treatises dealing with particular developments in this
field. Among these may be mentioned Bright’s “Engineering Science,
1837–1897”; Matschoss’s “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technik und
Industrie” (“Jahrbuch des Vereines deutscher Ingenieure”); and Smiles’s
“Lives of the Engineers.” On engineering education, the “Proceedings of
the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education” and Bulletin
No. 11 of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
“A Study of Engineering Education,” by Charles R. Mann, offer useful
information. Concerning the status of the engineer in the economic
order, Taussig’s “Inventors and Money Makers,” Veblen’s “The Engineers
and the Price System,” together with Frank Watts’s “An Introduction to
the Psychological Factors of Industry,” will be found of value. On the
relation between labour and the engineer, much can be found in _The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ for
September, 1920, on “Labor, Management and Production.”

                                                       O. S. B., JR.


NERVES

Complete works of Cotton Mather; also of Jonathan Edwards. Complete
works of Dr. George M. Beard, notably his “American Nervousness,”
Putnam, 1881. Medical publications of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Dr. George
M. Parker: “The Discard Heap--Neurasthenia,” _N. Y. Medical Journal_,
October 22, 1910. Dr. William Browning: “Is there such a thing as
Neurasthenia?” _N. Y. State Medical Journal_, January, 1911. Dr. Morton
Prince: “The Unconscious,” Macmillan, 1914. Professor Edwin B. Holt:
“The Freudian Wish.” Dr. Edward J. Kempf: “The Autonomic Function and
the Personality.” Complete works of Professor Freud, in translation and
in the original.

Files of _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, to date. Files of
_Psychoanalytic Review_, to date. Files of _Imago_, to date. Files
of _Internationale Zeitschrift fuer Aerztliche Psychoanalyse_, to
date. Dr. A. A. Brill, “Psychoanalysis,” third edition. “Character
and Opinion in the United States,” by George Santayana. “Studies in
American Intolerance,” by Alfred B. Kuttner, _The Dial_, March 14 and
28, 1918.

                                                            A. B. K.


MEDICINE

No attempt is here made to give any exhaustive, or even suggestive,
bibliography. Only specific references in the text itself are here
given in full, so that the reader may find them for himself, if he so
desires. But on the general subject of “Professionalism,” although it
deals more with the profession of law than of medicine, some valuable
and stimulating observations can be found in the chapter of that name
in “Our Social Heritage,” by Graham Wallas (Yale University Press,
1921).

Bezzola: Quoted from “Preventive Medicine and Hygiene,” Rosenau, 1920,
p. 340.

Clouston: “The Hygiene of the Mind,” 1909.

Cole: “The University Department of Medicine,” Science, N. S., vol. LI,
No. 1318, p. 329.

Elderton and Pearson: “A First Study of the Influence of Parental
Alcoholism on the Physique and Ability of the Offspring,” Francis
Galton Eugenics Laboratory _Memoirs_, 1910, No. 10.

Pearl: “The Effect of Parental Alcoholism upon the Progeny in the
Domestic Fowl,” _Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci._, 1916, vol. II, p. 380.

Peterson: “Credulity and Cures,” _Jour. Amer. Med. Assn._, 1919, vol.
LXXIII, p. 1737.

Rosenau: “Preventive Medicine and Hygiene,” 1920.

Stockard: _Interstate Medical Jour._, 1916, vol. XXIII, No. 6.

Vaughan: “The Service of Medicine to Civilization,” _Jour. Amer. Med.
Assn._, 1914, vol. LXII, p. 2003.

Vincent: “Ideals and Their Function in Medical Education,” _Jour. Amer.
Med. Assn._, 1920, vol. LXXIV, p. 1065.

                                                               ANON.


SPORT AND PLAY

Mr. Spalding, the well-known sporting goods manufacturer, is also the
publisher of the Spalding Athletic Library, which contains, besides
rule books and record books of various sports, a series of text-books,
at ten cents the copy, bearing such titles as “How to Play the
Outfield,” “How to Catch,” “How to Play Soccer,” “How to Learn Golf,”
etc. Authorship of these works is credited to famous outfielders,
catchers, soccer players, and golfers, but as the latter can field,
catch, play soccer, and golf much better than they can write, the
actual writing of the volumes was wisely left to persons who make their
living by the pen. The books are recommended, as a cure for insomnia
at least. The best sporting fiction we know of, practically the only
sporting fiction an adult may read without fear of stomach trouble, is
contained in the collected works of the late Charles E. Van Loan.

                                                            R. W. L.


AMERICAN CIVILIZATION FROM THE FOREIGN POINT OF VIEW[1]

Frances Milton Trollope: “The Domestic Manners of the Americans,”
London, 1832.

      The rest is silence ... or repetition.

                                           E. B.

    [1] The views of foreign travellers in the United States are
        summarized in John Graham Brooks’s “As Others See Us,” New
        York, 1908.--_The Editor._




WHO’S WHO OF THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS VOLUME


=Conrad Aiken= was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1889, and was
graduated from Harvard in 1912. His books include several volumes of
poems, “Earth Triumphant,” “Turns and Movies,” “The Jig of Forslin,”
“Nocturne of Remembered Spring,” “The Charnel Rose,” “The House of
Dust,” and “Punch: The Immortal Liar,” and one volume of critical
essays, “Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry.”

=Anonymous=, the author of the essay on “Medicine,” is an American
physician who has gained distinction in the field of medical research,
but who for obvious reasons desires to have his name withheld.

=Katharine Anthony= was born in Arkansas, and was educated at the
Universities of Tennessee, Chicago, and Heidelberg. She has done
research and editorial work for the Russell Sage Foundation, National
Consumers’ League, The National Board, Y. W. C. A., and other national
reform organizations, and is the author of “Feminism in Germany and
Scandinavia,” “Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography,” and other
books.

=O. S. Beyer, Jr.=, was graduated from the Stevens Institute of
Technology as a mechanical engineer in 1907, and did graduate work in
railway and industrial economics in the Universities of Pennsylvania
and New York. After some experience as an engineering assistant and
general foreman on various railways, and as research engineer in the
University of Illinois, he helped organize the U. S. Army School of
Military Aeronautics during the War, and later took charge of the
Department of Airplanes. He was subsequently requested by the U. S.
Army Ordnance Department to organize and operate schools for training
ordnance specialists and officers, and in order to conduct this
work, he was commissioned Captain. After the termination of the War,
he helped promote, and subsequently assumed charge in the capacity
of Chief, Arsenal Orders Section, of the significant industrial
developments carried forward in the Army arsenals. He has contributed
numerous articles to technical periodicals and proceedings of
engineering and other societies.

=Ernest Boyd= is an Irish critic and journalist, who has lived in
this country for some years, and is now on the staff of the New York
_Evening Post_. He was educated in France, Germany, and Switzerland
for the British Consular Service, which he entered in 1913. After
having served in the United States, Spain, and Denmark, he resigned
from official life in order to take up the more congenial work of
literature and journalism. He has edited Standish O’Grady’s “Selected
Essays” for Every Irishman’s Library and translated Heinrich Mann’s
“Der Untertan” for the European Library, and is the author of three
volumes dealing with modern Anglo-Irish Literature: “Ireland’s Literary
Renaissance,” “The Contemporary Drama of Ireland,” and “Appreciations
and Depreciations.”

=Clarence Britten= was born in Pella, Iowa, in 1887, and was graduated
from Harvard in 1912 as of 1910. He was Instructor of English in the
Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, in the Department of
University Extension, State of Massachusetts, and in the University of
Wisconsin. He has been editor of the _Canadian Journal of Music_, and
from 1918 to 1920 was an editor of the _Dial_.

=Van Wyck Brooks= was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1886, and
was graduated from Harvard in 1907, as of 1908. He was instructor in
English in Leland Stanford University from 1911 to 1913, and is now
associate editor of the _Freeman_. Among his books are “America’s
Coming-of-Age,” “Letters and Leadership,” and “The Ordeal of Mark
Twain.”

=Harold Chapman Brown= was born in Springfield, Mass., in 1879, and
was educated at Williams and Harvard, from which he received the
degree of Ph.D. in 1905. He was instructor in philosophy in Columbia
University until 1914, and since then has been an instructor in Leland
Stanford University. During the War he was with the American Red Cross,
Home Service, at Camp Fremont. He has contributed numerous articles
on philosophy to technical journals, and is co-author of “Creative
Intelligence.”

=Zechariah Chafee, Jr.=, was born in Providence, R. I., in 1885, and
was educated at Brown University and the Harvard Law School. After
several years’ practice of the law in Providence, and executive work in
connection with various manufacturing industries, he became Assistant
Professor of Law in Harvard University in 1916, and Professor of Law in
1919. He is the author of “Cases on Negotiable Instruments,” “Freedom
of Speech,” and various articles in law reviews and other periodicals.

=Frank M. Colby= was born in Washington, D. C., in 1865, and was
graduated from Columbia in 1888. He was Professor of Economics in New
York University from 1895 to 1900, and has been editor of the “New
International Encyclopedia” since 1900, and of the “New International
Year Book” since 1907. He is the author of “Outlines of General
History,” “Imaginary Obligations,” “Constrained Attitudes,” and “The
Margin of Hesitation.”

=Garet Garrett= was born in Pana, Ill., in 1878, and from 1900 to 1912
was a financial writer on the New York Sun, the _Wall Street Journal_,
the New York _Evening Post_, and the New York _Times_. He was the first
editor of the New York _Times Annalist_ in 1913–1914, and was executive
editor of the New York _Tribune_ from 1916 to 1919. He is the author
of “The Driver,” “The Blue Wound,” “An Empire Beleaguered,” “The Mad
Dollar,” and various economic and political essays.

=Walton H. Hamilton= was born in Tennessee in 1881, was graduated from
the University of Texas in 1907, and received the degree of Ph.D. from
the University of Michigan in 1913. After teaching at the Universities
of Michigan and Chicago, he became Olds Professor of Economics in
Amherst College in 1915. He was formerly associate editor of the
_Journal of Political Economy_, and is associate editor of the series,
“Materials for the Study of Economics,” published by the University of
Chicago Press. During the War he was on the staff of the War Labour
Policies Board. He is co-editor with J. M. Clark and H. G. Moulton of
“Readings in the Economics of War,” and the author of “Current Economic
Problems” and of various articles in economic journals.

=Frederic C. Howe= was born in Meadville, Pa., in 1867, and was
educated at Allegheny College and Johns Hopkins University, from the
latter receiving the degree of Ph.D. in 1892. After studying in the
University of Maryland Law School and the New York Law School, he was
admitted to the bar in 1894, and practised in Cleveland until 1909. He
was director of the People’s Institute of New York from 1911 to 1914,
and Commissioner of Immigration in the Port of New York from 1914 to
1920. He has been a member of the Ohio State Senate, special U. S.
commissioner to investigate municipal ownership in Great Britain,
Professor of Law in the Cleveland College of Law, and lecturer on
municipal administration and politics in the University of Wisconsin.
Among his books are “The City, the Hope of Democracy,” “The British
City,” “Privilege and Democracy in America,” “Wisconsin: An Experiment
in Democracy,” “European Cities at Work,” “Socialized Germany,” “Why
War?” “The High Cost of Living,” and “The Land and the Soldier.”

=Alfred Booth Kuttner= was born in 1886, and was graduated from Harvard
in 1908. He was for two years dramatic critic of the _International
Magazine_, and is a contributor to the _New Republic_, _Seven Arts_,
_Dial_, etc. He has pursued special studies in psychology, and has
translated several of the books of Sigmund Freud.

=Ring W. Lardner= was born in Niles, Michigan, in 1885, and was
educated in the Niles High School and the Armour Institute of
Technology at Chicago. He has been sporting writer on the Boston
_American_, Chicago _American_, Chicago _Examiner_, and the Chicago
_Tribune_, and writer for the Bell Syndicate since 1919. Among his
books are “You Know Me Al,” “Symptoms of Thirty-five,” “Treat ’Em
Rough,” and “The Big Town.”

=Robert Morss Lovett= was born in Boston in 1870, and was graduated
from Harvard in 1892. He has been a teacher in the English Departments
of Harvard and the University of Chicago, and dean of the Junior
Colleges of the latter institution from 1907 to 1920. He was formerly
editor of the _Dial_, and is at present on the staff of the _New
Republic_. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and
Letters, and is the author of two novels, “Richard Gresham” and “A
Winged Victory,” of a play, “Cowards,” and with William Vaughn Moody of
“A History of English Literature.”

=Robert H. Lowie= was born in Vienna in 1883, and came to New York at
the age of ten. He was educated at the College of the City of New York
and Columbia University, from which he received the degree of Ph.D. in
1908. He has made many ethnological field trips, especially to the Crow
and other Plains Indians. He was associate curator of Anthropology in
the American Museum of Natural History, New York, until 1921, and since
then has become Associate Professor of Anthropology in the University
of California. He is associate editor of the _American Anthropologist_,
and was secretary of the American Ethnological Society from 1910
to 1919, and president, 1920–1921. He is the author of “Culture
and Ethnology” and “Primitive Society,” as well as many technical
monographs dealing mainly with the sociology and mythology of North
American aborigines.

=John Macy= was born in Detroit in 1877, and was educated at Harvard,
from which he received the degree of A.B. in 1899, and A.M. in 1900.
After a year as assistant in English at Harvard, he became associate
editor of _Youth’s Companion_, and later literary editor of the Boston
_Herald_. Among his books are “Life of Poe” (Beacon Biographies),
“Guide to Reading,” “The Spirit of American Literature,” “Socialism in
America,” and “Walter James Dodd: a Biography.”

=H. L. Mencken= was born in Baltimore in 1880, and was educated in
private schools and at the Baltimore Polytechnic. He was engaged in
journalism until 1916, and is now editor and part owner with George
Jean Nathan of the _Smart Set Magazine_, and a contributing editor
of the _Nation_. His books include “The Philosophy of Friedrich
Nietzsche,” “A Book of Burlesques,” “A Book of Prefaces,” “The
American Language,” and two volumes of “Prejudices.” In collaboration
with George Jean Nathan he has published “The American Credo,” and
“Heliogabalus,” a play.

=Lewis Mumford= was born in Flushing, Long Island, in 1895. He
was associate editor of the Dial in 1919, acting editor of the
_Sociological Review_ (London), a lecturer at the Summer School of
Civics, High Wycombe, England, and has contributed to the _Scientific
Monthly_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Nation_, the _Freeman_, the _Journal of
the American institute of Architects_, and other periodicals. He was a
radio operator in the United States Navy during the War.

=George Jean Nathan= was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1882, and was
graduated from Cornell University in 1904. He has been dramatic critic
of various newspapers and periodicals, and is at present editor and
part owner with H. L. Mencken of the _Smart Set Magazine_. Among his
books are “The Popular Theatre,” “Comedians All,” “Another Book on the
Theatre,” “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents,” “The Theatre, the Drama,
the Girls,” and, with H. L. Mencken, of “The American Credo,” and
“Heliogabalus.”

=Walter Pach= was born in New York in 1883, and was graduated from the
College of the City of New York in 19013. He studied art under Leigh
Hunt, William M. Chase, and Robert Henri, and worked during most of the
eleven years before the War in Paris and other European art-centres,
exhibiting both here and abroad. He was associated with the work of
the International Exhibition of 1913, as well as other exhibitions of
the modern masters in America, and with the founding and carrying on
of the Society of Independent Artists. He is represented by paintings
and etchings in various public and private collections, has lectured
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, University of California,
Wellesley College, and other institutions, has contributed articles on
art subjects to the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, _L’Arts et les Artistes_,
_Scribner’s_, the _Century_, the _Freeman_, etc., and is the translator
of Elie Faure’s “History of Art.”

=Elsie Clews Parsons= was graduated from Barnard College in 1896, and
received the degree of Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1899. She has
been Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology at Barnard College, Lecturer in
Anthropology in the New School of Social Research, assistant editor
of the _Journal of American Folk-Lore_, treasurer of the American
Ethnological Society, and president of the American Folk-Lore Society.
She is married and the mother of three sons and one daughter. Among
her books are “The Family,” “The Old-Fashioned Woman,” “Fear and
Conventionality,” “Social Freedom,” and “Social Rule.”

=Raffaello Piccoli=, who has written the article on “American
Civilization from an Italian Point of View,” was born in Naples in
1886, and was educated at the Universities of Padua, Florence, and
Oxford. In 1913 he was appointed Lecturer in Italian Literature in the
University of Cambridge, and in 1916 was elected Foreign Correspondent
of the Royal Society of Literature. During the War he was an officer
in the First Regiment of Italian Grenadiers, was wounded and taken
prisoner while defending a bridge-head on the Tagliamento, and spent a
year of captivity in Hungary. After the Armistice he was appointed to
the chair of English Literature in the University of Pisa. During the
years 1919–21 he has acted as exchange professor at various American
universities. He has published a number of books, including Italian
translations of Oscar Wilde and of several Elizabethan dramatists.

=Louis Raymond Reid= was born in Warsaw, N. Y., and was graduated from
Rutgers College in 1911. Since then he has been engaged in newspaper
and magazine work in New York City. He was for three years the editor
of the _Dramatic Mirror_.

=Geroid Tanquary Robinson= was born in Chase City, Virginia, in 1892,
and studied at Stanford, the University of California, and Columbia. He
was a member of the editorial board of the _Dial_ at the time when it
was appearing as a fortnightly, and is now a member of the editorial
staff of the _Freeman_, and a lecturer in Modern European History at
Columbia University. He served for sixteen months during the War as a
First Lieutenant (Adjutant) in the American Air Service. Residence in
Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, and California has given
him the opportunity to observe at first hand some of the modes and
manners of race-prejudice.

=J. Thorne Smith, Jr.=, was born in Annapolis, Md., in 1892, and was
graduated from Dartmouth College in 1914. He was Chief Boatswain’s
Mate in the U. S. Naval Reserve during the War, and editor of the navy
paper, _The Broadside_. He is the author of “Haunts and By-Paths and
Other Poems,” “Biltmore Oswald,” and “Out-O’-Luck.”

=George Soule= was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1887, and was graduated
from Yale in 1908. He was a member of the editorial staff of the _New
Republic_ from 1914 to 1918, and during 1919 editorial writer for the
New York _Evening Post_. He drafted a report on the labour policy of
the Industrial Service Sections, Ordnance Department and Air Service,
for the War Department, and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in
the Coast Artillery Corps. He is a director of the Labour Bureau,
Inc., which engages in economic research for labour organizations, and
is co-author with J. M. Budish of “The New Unionism in the Clothing
Industry.”

=J. E. Spingarn= was born in New York in 1875, was educated at Columbia
and Harvard, and was Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia
University until 1911. Among his other activities he has been a
candidate for Congress, a delegate to state and national conventions,
chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People, vice-president of a publishing firm,
and editor of the “European Library.” During the War he was a Major of
Infantry in the A. E. F. His first book, “Literary Criticism in the
Renaissance,” was translated into Italian in 1905, with an introduction
by Benedetto Croce; he has edited three volumes of “Critical Essays of
the 17th Century” for the Clarendon Press of Oxford, and contributed a
chapter to the “Cambridge History of English Literature;” his selection
of Goethe’s “Literary Essays,” with a foreword by Lord Haldane, has
just appeared; and his other books include “The New Hesperides and
Other Poems” and “Creative Criticism.”

=Harold E. Stearns= was born in Barre, Mass., in 1891, and was
graduated from Harvard in 1913. Since then he has been engaged in
journalism in New York, and has been a contributor to the _New
Republic_, the _Freeman_, the _Bookman_, and other magazines and
newspapers. He was associate editor of the _Dial_ during the last six
months of its appearance as a fortnightly in Chicago. Among his books
are “Liberalism in America” and “America and the Young Intellectual.”

=Henry Longan Stuart= is an English author and journalist who has
spent a considerable part of his life since 1901 in the United States.
He served through the War as a Captain in the Royal Field Artillery,
was attached to the Italian Third Army after Caporetto, and was press
censor in Paris after the Armistice and during the Peace Conference.
He is the author of “Weeping Cross,” a study of Puritan New England,
“Fenella,” and a quantity of fugitive poetry and essays.

=Deems Taylor= was born in New York in 1885, and was graduated from
New York University in 1906. He studied music with Oscar Coon from
1908 to 1911. He has been connected with the editorial staff of the
“Encyclopedia Britannica,” and has been assistant Sunday editor of the
New York _Tribune_ and associate editor of _Collier’s Weekly_, and at
present is a critic of the New York _World_. He has composed numerous
musical works, including “The Siren Song” (symphonic poem, awarded the
orchestral prize of the National Federation of Music Clubs in 1912),
“The Chambered Nautilus” (cantata), “The Highwaymen” (cantata written
for the MacDowell festival), and “Through the Looking Glass” (suite for
symphonic orchestra).

=Hendrik Willem Van Loon= was born in Holland in 1882, and received
his education in Dutch schools, at Cornell and Harvard, and at the
University of Munich, from which he received his Ph.D., magna cum
laude, in 1911. He was a correspondent of the Associated Press in
various European capitals, and for some time was a lecturer on modern
European history in Cornell University. He is at present Professor
of the Social Sciences in Antioch College, and is the author of “The
Fall of the Dutch Republic,” “A Short History of Discovery,” “Ancient
Man,” “The Story of Mankind for Boys and Girls,” “The Rise of the Dutch
Kingdom,” etc.




INDEX


  Abbott, Lyman, 497

  Abolitionists, 58

  Absolute, 166

  Academic life, 95

  Accident lawyers, 59

  Acoustics, 159

  Adams, Henry, 11, 77, 303, 547;
    quoted on a school of literature, 196

  Ade, George, 249

  Administrative officers, 32, 33

  Adolescence, 436

  Adulteration, 406

  Advertising, 381–395;
    appeal, 383;
    bibliography, 551;
    effects on the writers, 384;
    efficacy, 389;
    honest, 387;
    justification, 388;
    newspaper, 44;
    newspaper control, 46, 47;
    objectionable, 395;
    outdoor, 395;
    over-production and, 390;
    pro and con, 391;
    signs, 293, 395;
    solicitor and writer, 387;
    value, 391, 392;
    writers, 387

  Æsthetic emotion, 204, 214, 480

  Æsthetics, vii, 14, 100, 105, 108, 492, 497

  Africa, association of negroes to establish empire, 369

  “Age of Innocence, The,” 179

  Agnosticism, 171

  Agricultural implements, 402

  Aiken, Conrad, on poetry, 215–226

  Akins, Zoë, 248, 253

  Alcohol, 451

  Alcoholics, children of, 452, 453

  Alien Land Laws, 364

  Aliens, 337–350;
    economics and, 339;
    legislative attitude to, 343;
    protection, 349

  Alfieri, Vittorio, 104

  Alimony, 331

  Alleghany mountains, 4, 30, 399

  Allied troops, 469

  Alphabetical order, 469

  Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 346

  America, as economic support for Europe, 475;
    feminization, 135, 143;
    germinal energy, 148, 150;
    original culture, 512;
    provincialism, 286;
    “real America,” 138

  “America First” Publicity Association, 47

  “American ideals,” 104

  American infantry in Paris, 470

  American Legion, 88

  American literature. _See_ Literature, American

  American Philosophical Association, 177

  American Revolution, 300, 399, 417, 515

  Americanism, 133, 519

  Americanization, 337, 344, 346, 347, 442, 528;
    spirit, 88, 89

  Americans, uniformity, 36, 109

  Ames, Winthrop, 245

  Amusements, 8, 13, 440;
    music, 204, 205

  Anæmia, intellectual, 491, 492, 495, 501

  Ancestor worship, 506

  Anderson, Sherwood, 137

  Anglin, Margaret, 251

  Anglo-American relations, 471, 473, 474, 476

  Anglo-Saxonism, 320, 341, 442, 471, 504

  Anthony, Katharine, on the family, 319–336

  Anthropological groups, 353

  Anthropology, 154

  Anti-Saloon League, 29

  Anti-Semitism, 356, 364

  Appleseed, Johnny, 4

  Applied science, 146, 155–156

  Architecture, 238;
    city, debasement, 10;
    industrial city, 11

  Aridity of American life, 480

  Aristocracy, 193

  Aristocrats, 441, 442

  Armageddon, 440

  Armory Show, 239

  Art, 100, 204, 207, 227–241;
    bibliography, 542;
    colonial, 230, 231;
    conditions and opportunities, 228;
    definition, 107;
    feminization, 229;
    morals and, 101;
    poetry, 225;
    tariff on works of art, 230

  Art for art’s sake, 102

  Artists, advertising as a benefit, 391;
    definition, 107;
    respect for, 208

  Asiatics. _See_ Orientals

  Associated Press, 47

  Asylums, 334, 451

  Athletics, 526, 527;
    college, 117

  Atlantic City, 9

  _Atlantic Monthly_, 243

  Attorney-General, 66

  Austin, Mrs. Mary, 144

  Australia, farm policy, 347, 348

  Australian Courts of Conciliation, 73

  Authority, 160;
    educational, 85

  Automobile industry, 400


  Back to the land, 285

  Backgrounds, historical, 308;
    intellectual, 146

  Bacteriologists, 454

  Baking industry, 400

  Ballot, 281

  Bar Associations, 65–66

  Bargaining, collective, 264;
    _see also_ Contract

  Barnum, P. T., 292

  Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” 246

  Barrymore, John, 250

  Baseball, 458

  Baseball fans, 457

  Beard, C. A., 532, 547

  Beard, G. M., 430, 431, 432, 438

  Beautiful necessity, 165, 168

  Beauty, 14, 204, 238, 492, 535

  Beer-garden, 10

  Behaviour, 173;
    crowd, 312

  Behaviourism, 169

  Belief, 171

  Bell, Sanford, 436

  Bergson, Henri, 167, 172

  Bett, Miss Lulu, 320

  Beyer, O. S., Jr., on engineering, 417–425

  “Beyond the Horizon,” 243, 244, 248

  Bibliographical notes, 531

  Big business, 406, 407, 409

  Bigness, contrary effect on English and Americans, 477, 478

  Billboards, 293, 395

  Billiards, 460

  Billings, Frank, 449

  Biochemistry, 456

  Biographical notes on contributors to this volume, 559–564

  Biographies, 96;
    political, 532

  Biology, 456;
    experimental, 153

  Birth control, 320, 321, 322, 323;
    artificial, 321

  Birth-rate, 321, 336

  Black Star Line, 369

  Blackburn, J. B., 231

  Blashfield, E. H., 236

  Blind Tom, 207–208

  Board of Health, 304

  Boas, Franz, 154

  Bodenheim, Maxwell, 218, 221, 222, 223

  “Book of Daniel Drew, The,” 72

  Boosters, 293

  Bosses, political, 24

  Boston, 4, 15;
    dramatic taste, 245;
    marriage age, 328;
    Public Library, 11, 235;
    Trinity Church, 11

  Boxing, 459

  Boyd, Ernest, on American civilization, 489–507

  Brady, W. A., 244

  Brandeis, L. D., brief on Oregon law, 73

  Branford, V. V., 531

  “Brass Check, The,” 41

  Breasted, J. H., 547

  Brewer, Justice P. J., 73–74

  Brill, A. A., 434

  British Institution of Civil Engineers, 418, 419

  Britten, Clarence, on school and college life, 109–133

  Broadway, 8

  Brokers, 405

  Bronson-Howard, George, 249

  Brooke, Rupert, 503

  Brookline, Mass., 15

  Brooks, Van Wyck, iii;
    on the literary life, 179–197

  Brown, H. C., on philosophy, 163–177

  Brown University, 125

  Brunetière, Ferdinand, 498, 503

  Bryan, W. J., 25, 429, 440, 451, 497

  Bryce, James, 196, 490, 532, 536

  Buddhism, 373

  Bundling, 315

  Bush Terminal Tower, 12

  Business, 397–415;
    American conception, 482;
    bibliography, 551;
    blind sequence, 414;
    government and, 48;
    honour, 405, 409, 410, 430;
    individual and corporate, 409, 410;
    revolution of methods, 405;
    State and, 264

  Business education, 80

  Business life, 186

  Business man’s chivalry, 324

  Business world, 143

  Butler, Samuel, 188, 547


  California, early law, 54;
    gold discovery, 403;
    Land Laws, 365;
    race-prejudice, 357, 364

  Calvinism, 164, 168

  Cambridge, Mass., 4, 6

  Canals, 403

  Canning industry, 401

  Capital, 404, 405

  Capital and labour, engineers and, 420

  Capitalism, 544;
    case for, 257, 261

  Captains of industry, 517

  Carnegie, Andrew, 18

  Carnegie Institution, 158

  Case-system, 68, 69

  Castberg, Johan, 332

  Caste system in college, 121

  Catechism, Negro, 370

  Catholic Church, 193

  Cattell, J. Nick, 538

  Cavalier and Puritan, 512, 513, 514

  Celibacy, 321, 328

  Cézanne, Paul, 239, 240

  Chafee, Zechariah, Jr., on the law, 53–75

  City, bibliography, 531

  Chain-store, 407

  Chambers, R. W., 192

  Character in business, 409

  Charm, personal, 112

  Chase, W. M., 234, 235

  Chastity, 454

  Chautauqua, 6, 83, 142

  Chekhov, A. P., 190

  Chemistry of proteins, 456

  Chesterton, G. K., 477;
    on American genius, 183

  Chicago, 8, 10, 403;
    dramatic taste, 245

  Chickens, alcoholic, 452

  Chief Justice, 67

  Child labour, 275, 329

  Childhood, family influence, 335;
    shortness, 185

  Children, fewer and better, 452;
    on farms, 321;
    sexuality, 436;
    spoiling, 334

  Children’s Bureau, 320

  Chinese, 373;
    Californians and, 364;
    in America, 357

  Chiropractors, 444

  Chivalry of the business man, 324

  Christian Science, 438, 443

  Christianity, 166, 167

  Church, 35, 77, 85, 146

  Church-college, 163, 168

  Cincinnati, 4, 8

  Circus parade, 292

  Cirrhosis of the liver, 452

  Cities, 3–20;
    architectural debasement, 10;
    civic equipment, 16;
    civic life, 16;
    country versus, 17;
    drama, outside New York, 245;
    future, 19;
    growth and improvement, 15;
    improvements, 14;
    industrial, 9, 10;
    provincial, 3;
    shifts of population and institutions, 7;
    spiritual failure, 9;
    State legislatures and, 24;
    three periods, 3

  Citizenship, good, 175

  City Beautiful movement, 14

  Civil engineers, 417

  Civil War, 139

  Civilization, human, 508;
    Roman, 509

  Civilization, American, as seen by an Englishman, 469–488;
    as seen by an Irishman, 489–507;
    as seen by an Italian, 508–528

  Clark University, 434

  Classics, 79, 81, 94, 146

  Cleanliness, 392

  Clients and lawyers, 59

  Clouston, T. S., 452

  Clubs, college, 121, 128

  Coeducational forms, 129

  Cohan, G. M., 249, 457

  Cohen, M. R., 168

  Colby, F. M., on humour, 463–466

  Cole, R., 444

  Collective bargaining, 264

  College “Bible,” 118

  College life, 109–133;
    athletics, 117;
    avocations, 128;
    bibliography, 536;
    caste system, 121;
    clubs, 121, 128;
    course system, 126;
    democracy, 118;
    examination and passing, 126;
    extra-collegiate social regimen, 129;
    fellowship, 123;
    moral crusades, 124–125;
    political management of affairs, 124;
    recreation, 130;
    sex lines and forms, 129;
    social life, 117–118;
    study, 125;
    traditions, 118

  College professors, 491;
    _see also_ Professors

  College stories, 536

  Colleges, early church-college, 163, 168;
    _see also_ Education

  Colonial culture, 138

  Colonial law, 54

  Colonialism, 97

  Colonies, 301, 493

  Colonists, 398

  Colour of God, 370

  Commercial city, 5

  Commercial God, 480, 481, 483

  Commercialism, 484

  Common Law, American conditions and, 56;
    New England and, 54

  Communist parties, 279, 280

  Community, New England, 5

  Compensation acts, 72

  Competition, 259, 260, 406, 482

  Composers, 199, 208, 210

  Compromise, 284

  Compulsions, 439, 440

  Concord, Mass., 4

  Coney Island, 13

  Conformity, 439, 520;
    college, 118

  Congress, 31

  _Congressional Record_, 27, 532, 544

  Congressmen, character, 22, 27, 33

  Conjugal fidelity, 309

  Connecticut, early land act, 55

  Conservatives, 273

  Constitution, U. S., 140, 506, 515

  Contingent fee, 60

  Contract, 275;
    right of, 259, 262, 264

  Contract labour law, 343

  Contributors to this volume, brief biographies, 559–564

  Control of industry, 257, 263, 419

  Conventions, 291;
    “iron hand of convention,” 182

  Conventionalities, 252, 491;
    college, 129

  Co-operative movement, 284

  Copley, J. S., 231, 232, 233, 237

  Cornell University, tradition, 120

  Corporation lawyers, 59

  Corporations, 406, 411, 412;
    State and, 412

  Corrective Eating Society, 444

  Correspondence schools, 385

  Country, 287, 288;
    envy of the city, 17;
    social life, 294;
    _see also_ Small town

  County fair, 295

  Crisis-emotion, 315

  Courage in journalism, 40

  Courts, diversity, 71

  Craftsmanship, 413

  Crane, Frank, 44

  Cranks, 147

  Craven, Frank, 248

  Credit, 405, 410, 413

  Credulity, 454;
    medical, 444

  Criminal law, 60, 70

  Criminals and lawyers, 60

  Criticism, 497, 503;
    American, 99;
    bibliography, 535;
    definition, 100, 108;
    dogmatic or intellectual, 100, 108;
    music, 209;
    need, 105;
    scholarship and, 93–108;
    scholarship the basis, 99;
    schools of, 100

  Cross of Gold, 440

  Crowd behaviour, 312

  Culture, 93, 106, 175, 508;
    original American, 512

  Curiosity, 130, 131, 175


  Daly, Arnold, 251

  Dancing, 526

  Dante, scholarship, 96

  Darwin, Charles, 163

  Days of grace, 64

  Declaration of independence, 132, 133, 140, 506

  Decorators, 236

  De Leon, Daniel, 545

  Demand and supply, 261

  Dementia præcox, 434

  Democracy, college, 118

  Denmark, farmers, 347

  Department stores, 8;
    advertising in the newspapers, 389;
    newspapers and, 46;
    private tribunals, 70

  Dependence, habits of, 401

  Deportation, 342, 344, 348

  Devil, 439, 440

  Dewey, John, 168, 540;
    on education, 175;
    psychology, 173;
    weakness of his philosophy, 176

  Dickinson, Emily, 218

  Differentiations, regional, 111

  Diphtheria, 450

  Diplomacy, shirt-sleeve, 489

  Discipline, 471, 480, 482, 488

  Disease, 443, 445, 449, 455;
    prevention, 449

  Dishonesty in business, 405, 409, 410, 430

  Divorce, attitude to, 309, 310;
    growing prevalence, 330

  Doctors, 443;
    _see also_ Disease; Physicians

  Dogmatic criticism, 100, 108

  Domestic Relations Courts, 72, 331, 332

  Double personality, 433

  Dowden, Edward, 504

  Drachsler, Julius, 375, 376, 377

  Drama. _See_ Theatre

  Drama League, 247

  Dreadnought Hams, 386

  Dreiser, Theodore, 181, 182, 189, 196, 286


  East, the, 112

  Economic democracy, 339

  Economic liberty, 276

  Economic opinion, 255–270;
    basis and value, 270;
    opportunities, 346;
    bibliography, 543;
    radicalism, 276, 277, 278;
    volume, 269–270

  Economics, classical, 259;
    facts and statistics, 268;
    “fundamental,” 273;
    immigration and, 338;
    newer, 544;
    protest, 263;
    system, 517;
    waste, 284

  Eddy, Mrs. Mary Baker, 443, 498

  Edison, T. A., 436

  Editors, 36

  Education, 77–92, 524, 525;
    bibliography, 534;
    corrupt practices, 90;
    Dewey’s philosophy, 175;
    engineering, 423, 424;
    enthusiasm for, 109;
    feminization, 317;
    general and special, 81;
    medical, 455;
    State and, 89;
    superficial, 82;
    superstitious mood toward, 77, 78

  Edwards, Jonathan, 164, 165

  Efficiency, 471, 478, 481, 482, 484;
    social, 175

  Egoism, 197

  Eight-hour day, 275

  Elderton-Pearson report, 453

  Election machinery, 281

  Elections, 281

  Elective system in education, 79, 119

  Electric lighting, 14

  Electrical engineers, 417

  Eliot, C. W., 79

  Eliot, T. S., 218, 221, 222, 223, 224

  Elizabethan literature, 220

  Ellis Island, 341

  Emerson, R. W., 138, 164, 165, 184, 195, 494

  Emotion, 203, 209;
    crisis, 315;
    lack, vii;
    mother-love, 437, 438;
    sex, 310, 317

  Emotionality, 176

  “Emperor Jones,” 360

  Empiricism, 172

  Employer and employé, 483

  Employés’ welfare, 484

  Employment, 482

  Engineering, 417–425;
    bibliography, 552;
    bulwark and inspiration, 424;
    new problems, 418

  Engineers, capital and labour, relation to, 420;
    educational background, 423, 424;
    formulating a policy, 420;
    intellectual limitations, 423;
    intelligence, 455;
    larger function, 418;
    original function, 418;
    position, 432;
    symbolic speculations, 423;
    typical, 417

  England, 512;
    bond with America, 473;
    competition with America, and courses open, 474;
    proletariat, 485, 487;
    war and post-war conditions, 487

  English language professors, 96

  Englishman’s view of American civilization, 469–488

  Englishmen, as immigrants, 472;
    character, 476, 477, 478

  Erie Railroad, 72, 409

  Ethics, 174

  Ettinger, W. L., 87, 88

  Eucken, R. C., 167

  Europe, American attitude to, 486;
    attraction, 238, 239;
    civilization and culture, 511;
    history, 510;
    impoverishment, 473;
    problem, 511

  Evangelical literature, 496, 497

  _Evening Sun_, 250

  Exchange, 413

  Exercise, 458, 461


  Factory workers, 9

  Facts, 313

  Faith, 78;
    defending, 163;
    intellectual, 515

  Faithful servant, 320

  Family, 319–336;
    bibliography, 548;
    financial arrangements, 324;
    income, and distribution, 323;
    influence on children 335;
    nomadic habit, 333;
    public opinion, 319;
    reduction in size, 320;
    reunions, 294

  Farmer-Labour Party, 280

  Farming and alien immigrants, 346, 347

  Fear, 340, 341

  Federated Press, The, 50

  Feminization, 135, 143;
    education, 317;
    music, 205

  Ferguson, O. G., 359

  Fiction, American, 495;
    college, 536;
    sporting, 554

  Fish phosphates, 431

  Fiske, John, 185

  Five and ten cent store, 9

  Fletcher, J. G., 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226

  Flexner, Simon, 154

  Focal infection, 448, 449

  Folin, Otto, 456

  Folksong, 211

  Food, children’s, 334

  Food products, 401

  Football, 459

  Ford, Henry, 298, 299

  Foreign relations, 486

  Foreign trade, 414

  Foreign views of American civilization, bibliography, 555;
    Englishman’s, 469–488;
    Irishman’s, 489–507;
    Italian’s, 508–528

  Foreigners, 275, 441;
    musical composers, 199;
    _see also_ Aliens; Immigration

  Fosdick, Raymond, 70

  Foster, W. Z., 282

  France, journalism, 39;
    medicine, 434

  France, Anatole, 142, 180, 494

  Francis Galton Laboratory, 453

  Fraternal orders, 6, 34, 290, 291

  Fraternities, 5, 6

  Freedom, 275, 489, 490, 491, 519;
    in love, 309;
    sexes in youth, 313, 315;
    speech, 74, 75;
    thought, 86, 87;
    _see also_ Liberty

  _Freeman_, 51

  Frémont, J. C., 151

  French, D. C., 236

  Freshmen, 119, 120

  Freud, Sigmund, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437;
    books on, 435

  Friedenwald, Julius, 452

  Front parlour, 297

  Frontier, 301

  Frost, Robert, 184, 218, 221, 222, 226, 503

  Freude, J. A., on Americans, 184

  Fugitive slave law, 58

  “Fundamental economics,” 273

  “Fussing,” 129


  _Ga-Ga_, 449

  Galileo, 152

  Galli-Curci, Amelita, 206

  Galsworthy, John, 243, 244, 250

  Galton (Francis) Laboratory, 453

  Garrett, Garet, on business, 397–415

  Gary, Ind., 12

  Gauguin, Paul, 189

  Geddes, Patrick, 531

  Generosity, 523

  Genius, 183, 188, 190, 194

  Genteel tradition, the, 147, 148, 163, 167

  “Gentleman and scholar,” 94

  Georgia, legislature, 64

  German beer-garden, 10

  German idealism, 164

  German State, 302

  Ghost Dance, 372

  Gibbs, Willard, 152

  Gilbert, G. K., 153

  Gimbel Brothers, 46

  Glad hand, 5

  God, 166, 439;
    colour of, 370

  Gold in California, 403

  Golf, 459

  Gopher Prairie, 19

  Gorgas, W. C., 450

  Gorky, Maxim, 180, 190, 192

  Gould, Jay, 410

  Gourmont, Rémy de, 494

  Government, 275;
    business and, 48

  Grade schools, 84

  Graham, Stephen, 365

  Grandeur, 397

  Grape juice, 451

  “Great American novel,” 93

  Greatness, 190, 191

  Greeley, Horace, 37, 330

  Griffes, Charles, 212

  Group medicine, 446–447

  Group opinions, 161

  Grub Street, 189

  Guinea-pigs, 452

  Gullibility, 443, 449


  Hamilton, W. H., on economic opinion, 255–270

  Hamsun, Knut, 180, 192

  Hancock, John, 399

  Hardy, Thomas, 180, 190

  Harris, William, Jr., 245

  Harvard College, 78, 79;
    democracy, 119

  Harvard Medical School, 443

  Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 185, 195

  “H. D.,” 221, 223

  Health, exercise and, 458;
    politics and, 451

  Health, Board of, 304

  Health crusade, 450

  Hearst newspapers, 43, 139, 501

  Heathen, 450

  Helmholtz, H. L. F. von, 159, 160

  Herbert, Victor, 209

  Herd sense, 311

  Hero-worship, 461

  High schools, 83, 114, 525

  Highbrow, 131, 209

  Higher law, 58

  Hill, G. W., 153

  Historians, 95, 302, 306, 307;
    scientific, 303, 304

  History, 95, 297–38, 509;
    American, 298, 299;
    as an art, 303;
    bibliography, 547;
    early settlers, 300;
    popular estimate, 298, 308

  Hoar, E. R., quoted on law and private judgment, 58

  Hocking, W. E., 167, 168, 172

  Holmes, Justice O. W., quoted on criminal law, 70;
    quoted on the law, 75

  Holt, E. B., 435

  Home, 332

  Homer, Winslow, 233, 234, 236, 237

  Honesty in business, 405, 409, 410

  Honourables, 295

  Hopkins, Arthur, 245, 251, 253

  Hopkins, E. M., quoted on propaganda, 86

  Hopwood, Avery, 249

  Horse racing, 459

  Hotels, 293

  Hours of work for women, 73

  Housewife, 325

  Howe, F. C., on the alien, 337–350

  Howells, W. D., 184, 191, 192, 194

  Hubbard, Elbert, 42

  Hughes, C. E., 50, 63

  Human civilization, 508

  Humanism, 509;
    Italy, 510

  Humboldt, Alexander von, 151

  Humour, viii, 463–466

  Husbands, 316;
    as providers, 324, 325

  Hypnotism, 433

  Hypocrisy, 252, 338

  Hysteria, 433, 438


  Ibsen, Henrik, 197, 503

  Idealism, advertising, 385, 394;
    American, 164;
    German, 164;
    peculiar American, 515;
    reaction to, 167

  Ideas, 501;
    political, 28;
    real test, 144

  Ignorance, 113

  Illusion, 295

  Imagination, 102, 103, 461

  Immigrants, 440;
    English, 472;
    law and, 57;
    neurosis, 441;
    protection, 349;
    rapid rise and progress, 345;
    savings, 348

  Immigration, 301, 404;
    cause, 338;
    constructive policy, 347;
    economic cause, 338;
    hostility, 340;
    old and new, 338;
    percentage law, 344;
    problem, 337

  Immortality, 171, 436

  Impressionism, 105

  Impressionist criticism, 108

  Impressionists, 235

  Inalienable rights, 274

  Incest-complex, 438

  Independence Hall, 11

  Indian reservations, 363

  Indians, American, 351, 356;
    Americanization, 363;
    art influence, 227–228;
    bibliography, 550;
    culture and education, 371;
    marriage with whites, 376;
    religious movement, 372;
    treatment, 362

  Individual, 258

  Individualism, 287, 311, 439, 506

  Individuality, lack, 36

  Industrial accidents, 72, 73

  Industrial management, 419, 421

  Industrial revolution, 266, 516

  I. W. W., 276, 282

  Industrialism, birth, 9–10;
    city life, 9, 10, 11;
    culture and, 12;
    disputes, 72;
    system, 260;
    _see also_ Labour movement

  Industry, control, 257, 263, 419;
    secrets, 421

  Inhibitions, 478

  Injustice, 341

  Inness, George, 233

  Insanity, 452

  Instrumentalism, 145, 168, 521

  Intellect, 521;
    distrust of, 519, 520;
    needs, 527

  Intellectual anæmia, 491, 492, 495, 501

  Intellectual faith, 515

  Intellectual life, 135–150, 523;
    backgrounds, 146;
    bibliography, 537;
    contempt for real values, 145;
    cranks and mountebanks, 147;
    pioneer point of view and, 136

  Intellectualist, 100

  Intellectualist criticism, 108

  Intelligence, 174

  International Exhibition of 1913, 239

  Interstate Commerce Commission, 68

  Intolerance, 430

  Investigators, 156

  Ireland, 493

  Irish, 338

  Irishman’s view of American civilization, 489–507

  Irving, Washington, 186

  Isolation, 188, 287

  Italian’s view of American civilization, 508–528

  Italy, humanism, 510


  James, Henry, 183, 190, 503

  James, William, 82, 540;
    eminence, 152, 154, 155;
    on genius, 194;
    pragmatism, 171;
    psychology, 170

  Janet, Pierre, 433

  Japanese, 373;
    Californians and, 364;
    dislike and fear of, 357

  Jefferson, Thomas, 274, 275, 276

  Jensen, J. V., 180

  Jews, 351;
    bibliography, 551;
    jealousy and fear of, 356;
    manifestations of prejudice against, 363;
    mixed marriages, 376;
    place, 372;
    religion, 373

  Jim Crow regulations, 358, 360

  Joan of Arc, canonization, 428

  Johnson, Lionel, 499

  Jokes, 463

  Journalism, 35–51, 180, 501;
    bibliography, 533;
    England, 38;
    European continent, 39;
    musical, 209

  Journalists, 36;
    courage and integrity, 40;
    “training and outlook,” 41

  Judges, 65;
    selection and training, 66;
    unfair treatment, 67

  Judiciary, 66

  Jumel Mansion, 231

  Jung, C. G., 436

  Justice, Minister of, 66


  Kallen, H. M., quoted on control of education, 91

  Kansas, 429;
    industrial court, 73

  Kempf, E. J., 435

  Kent, James, 56, 62

  Keynes, J. M., 506

  King, Willford, 324, 326

  Knowledge, 131

  Kodak, 18

  Korsakow’s disease, 451

  Kraepelin, Emil, 433

  Kreymborg, Alfred, 221, 223, 224

  Ku Klux Klan, 290, 359

  Kuttner, A. B., on nerves, 427–442


  Labour, American and English, 485, 486

  Labour movement, 193, 277, 278, 281, 282;
    engineers and, 420

  Labour organization, 72

  Labour-saving devices, 402

  La Forge, John, 235

  _Laissez-faire_ economics, 256, 257, 543

  Land, colonies and settlement, 347, 348;
    free, 339, 343;
    immigration and, 339;
    speculation, 7, 8, 347

  Landscape painters, 232

  Langdell, C. C., 69

  Language of American leaders, 478, 479

  Lanier, Sidney, 187

  Lardner, R. W., on sport and play, 457–461

  Law, 53–75;
    bibliography, 533;
    delays, expenses, etc., 71;
    disrespect for, 57, 58;
    early hostility to English, 54, 56;
    flings at, 53;
    lack of progress, 63;
    newspaper discussion needed, 63;
    obligation, 57, 58;
    private judgment and, 58;
    real defect, 62

  Law schools, 68

  Lawyers, 53;
    changing function, 58–59;
    laymen and, 60, 61

  Laziness, 366

  Leadership, industrial, 425

  League of nations, 53

  Learning, 96, 108

  Legal aid societies, 72, 331

  Legal education, 68

  Legal systems, various, 65

  Legislation and lawyers, 60

  Legislatures and law reforms, 64

  Leisure, 139, 141

  Leisure class, 491, 505

  Lenin, Nicolai, lying about, 49

  Lewis, Sinclair, 192

  Liberals, 273

  Liberty, 485;
    economic, 276;
    _see also_ Freedom

  Libido theory, 436

  Lick Observatory, 158

  Lindsay, Vachel, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222

  Lippmann, Walter, quoted on journalism, 40, 43

  Literary test, 344

  Literary theory, 108

  Literature, morals and, 101;
    three conceptions, 101

  Literature, American, 93, 492–493;
    absence, and reasons therefor, 504;
    bibliography, 540;
    colonial, 195;
    impotence of creative spirit, 179;
    lack of leadership, 189;
    namby-pamby books, 495–496;
    radical, 501, 502;
    school, 196;
    variety, 216

  Little red school-house, 302

  Lloyd George, David, 50

  Lodge, G. C., 183, 184

  Loeb, Jacques, 456

  London, Jack, 182, 183, 192

  London _Labour Herald_, 50

  London _Times_, 38, 63

  Long haul, 408

  Longevity, 328

  Louisiana, early law, 56

  Love, as an art, 318;
    freedom in, 309

  Lovett, R. M., on education as degradation of energy, 77–92

  Low-browism, 526

  Lowell, Amy, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226;
    on our poetry, 215

  Lowie, R. H., on science--lack of fruitful background, 151–161

  Lusk Committee, 546

  Lusk law, 88, 90

  Lyceum, 6

  Lynching, 359, 360


  Mabie, H. W., 496

  McCormick reaper, 402

  MacDowell, E. A., 210

  Mach, Ernst, 155, 156, 161, 539

  Machine politics, 24, 26

  Machinery, 402, 404

  McKim, C. F., 11

  Macy, John, on journalism, 35–51

  Madison Square Garden, 11

  Magazines, 189;
    radical, 272, 273

  Maiden aunt, 320

  Main Street, 14, 204, 248, 287, 307

  Malnutrition, 334

  Manchester _Guardian_, 38

  Mandarins, 493, 494, 500

  Manet, Edouard, 240

  Mania a potu, 451

  Mann, Horace, 84

  Marden, O. S., 496, 497

  Marriage, 314, 315, 316;
    ages for, 327, 328;
    Indians and whites, 376;
    mixed, 374, 375, 376;
    Negroes and whites, 374, 375;
    protection, 310;
    war and, 331

  Married persons, 316

  Mars, visitor from, and his thoughts, 109

  Martians, 110

  Martin, E. D., 312

  Martin, Homer, 233

  Masculine and feminine, 143

  Masefield, John, 503

  Mass fatalism, 196

  Mass production, 408

  Masters, E. L., 184, 218, 221, 222

  Masturbation, 311, 454

  Materialism, 97, 354, 481, 494, 516

  Mather, F. J., 188

  Mating, 310

  Maury, M. F., 151

  _Mayflower_, 350

  Mazzini, Giuseppe, 511

  Meat-packing, 401;
    idealism, 385

  Mechanical engineers, 417

  Mechanics’ Hall, 10

  Medical education, 455

  Medicine, 443–456;
    art of healing in America, 446;
    bibliography, 553;
    French, 434;
    preventive, 449;
    preventive, contamination by religion, 454;
    preventive, retrogression, 450;
    science and, 444;
    specialization, and “group medicine,” 446

  Melville, Herman, 188

  Men and women, dichotomy, 142

  Mencken, H. L., on aristocracy, 193;
    on politics, 21–34

  Mental hygiene, 334

  Metaphysics, 176, 433

  Metropolitan Opera House, 199

  Metropolitanism, 16, 17, 19

  Michelson, A. A., 152

  Microbes, 448

  Middle classes, 326

  Middle West, towns, 5

  Migration, 301

  Miller, C. G., 46

  Milling industry, 401

  Milton, John, and Satan, 103

  Minister of Justice, 66

  Minorities, racial, 351–379

  Mitchell, S. Weir, 432

  Mob tyranny, 441

  Money, 112, 140;
    in college, 118

  Morality, vi, 526;
    alien population, 346;
    art and literature and, 101;
    business, 405, 409, 410;
    realistic, 170

  More, P. E., 493, 498, 499, 500, 503, 544

  Morellet, Abbe, 103

  Morgan, L. H., 154

  Morgan, T. H., 154

  Mormon Church, 430

  Morrill Act, 417

  Morse telegraph code, 403

  Moses, M. J., 180

  Mosquitoes and yellow fever, 450

  Mother-love, 437, 438

  Motion pictures, 13;
    music accompaniment, 212

  Motley, J. L., 195, 303

  Mulattoes, 374

  Mumford, Lewis, on the city, 3–20

  Municipal Art societies, 14

  _Munsey’s Magazine_, 243

  Murry, J. M., on our poetry, 215

  Music, 199–214;
    American spirit, 214;
    bibliography, 541;
    classical and popular, 209;
    composers, 210;
    criticism, 209;
    exotic, 211;
    feminization, 205;
    German, 210;
    journalism, 209;
    motion pictures and, 212;
    Negro, 211;
    technique, 159

  Musical comedy, 208

  Musical festivals, 207

  _Musical Quarterly_, 209

  Mysticism, 172, 519

  Mythology, 514, 515


  Napoleonic code, 56

  Nathan, G. J., on the theatre, 243–253

  National Education Association, 78, 88

  National Federation of Musical Clubs, 205

  National Research Council, report on intelligence, 454

  Nationality, 511

  Natural resources, 257, 260

  Natural science, 80

  Nature, 164, 168

  Necessity, 165, 168

  Negro Catechism, 370

  Negro Declaration of Independence, 370

  Negroes, 351;
    bibliography, 549;
    culture, 371;
    decreasing proportion, 355;
    economic progress, 368;
    education, 361;
    exodus organization, 369;
    exodus to the North, 360;
    in literature, 360;
    international convention, 370;
    marriage with whites, 374, 375;
    music and religion, 211, 368;
    new defiance of whites, 367;
    Northern prejudice against, 355, 359;
    repression in the South, 358;
    Southern feeling about, 354;
    white friends, 361

  Nerve tonics, 431

  Nerves, 335, 427–442;
    bibliography, 553

  Neurasthenia, 430, 432, 433

  Neuroses, 437

  Neurotics, 427

  New England, 179, 216, 301, 494, 502, 514;
    common law, 54;
    culture, 138;
    early trade, 398;
    surplus women, 327;
    town, 3

  New Jersey, 400

  New Realism, 168

  New Realists, 168, 169

  _New Republic_, 51, 544;
    exposure of false nature of Russian news, 49

  New York (City), 16, 17;
    dominance, 18;
    plan, 7;
    School Board and trial of a teacher, 86;
    theatre, 243, 246

  New York (State), early law, 55

  New York Board of Health, 450

  New York _Call_, 44

  New York Code of Civil Procedure, 64

  New York _Globe_, 44

  New York _Herald_, 27

  New York _Nation_, 46, 51, 544;
    exposure of false nature of Russian news, 49

  New York _Sun_, 250

  New York _Times_, 27, 43, 46, 251;
    on parenthood, 321;
    Russian news, character, 49

  New York _Tribune_, 36, 43

  New York _World_, 36

  New Yorkers, 285

  Newcomb, Simon, 153, 155, 552

  News, rough recipe, 38;
    sensational, 45;
    world, 48

  News services, 47

  Newspaper writers’ organization, 41

  Newspapers, 483, 532;
    advertising and corruption, 389;
    advertisements, 44;
    advertising, control by, 46, 47;
    attitude toward the theatre, 249;
    circulation, 35, 43;
    Congressional reports, 27;
    correspondents, 37;
    counting-room control, 45;
    influence, 35;
    legal questions, 63;
    readers uncritical, 43, 44;
    stories, 45;
    _see also_ Journalism

  Nietzsche, F. W., 187, 190

  Nomadism, 333

  Non-conformism, reasoned, 160

  Non-conformists, 149

  Nonpartisan League, 281

  Novelists, 495, 496, 524


  Ochs, Adolph, 49

  Offences, minor legal, 70

  Office-holders, 24

  Oil industry, 400

  Old Guard, 252

  Omnistic philosophy, 433

  On the make, 430, 440

  One Big Union, 282

  O’Neill, Eugene, 243, 244, 245, 248, 251, 360

  Open shop, 346

  Opera, 199

  Ophthalmoscope, 159

  Opinion, 148, 255;
    _see also_ Economic opinion

  Opportunity, 522

  Optimism, 517, 518

  Orchestras, 199, 202

  Orchestration, 201

  Orders, fraternal, 6, 34, 290, 291

  Orientals, 351, 357, 450;
    bibliography, 551;
    culture, 373;
    mixed marriages, 376

  “Origin of Species,” 163

  Over-production, 413, 414;
    advertising and, 390


  Pach, Walter, on art, 227–241

  Panama Canal, 450

  Panics, 413

  Parades, 291, 292

  Paranoia, 434

  Parenthood, 310, 321

  Paresis, 453

  Paris, entry of Allied troops on July 14, 1919, 469

  Parsons, E. C., on sex, 309–318

  Party system, 30

  Parvenus, 106, 139

  Pasteur, Louis, 446, 449, 539

  Pattee, F. L., 498, 500

  Patterson, J. M., 249

  Paul, the Apostle, 314

  Pavements, 14

  Payne, S. H., 533

  Pearl, Raymond, 452, 453

  Pearson, Karl, 453

  Pedants, 94, 97, 104, 108, 492

  Peirce, Charles, 173

  Pensions, widows’, 329

  Perfectibility, 515

  Periodicals, 50, 51

  Perry, R. B., 170

  Personal charm, 112

  Personality, 106, 175;
    double, 433;
    home and, 335;
    lack, 97;
    university life and, 95;
    women, 317, 318

  Petting, 315

  Phase rule, 152

  Philadelphia, dramatic taste, 246

  Philadelphia _Press_, 46

  Philosophers, American, 522

  Philosophy, 163–177, 517;
    American, 521;
    bibliography, 539

  Phosphates of fish, 431

  Physicians, importance, 443;
    intelligence, rank, 454;
    modern kind, 445–446;
    quasi-religious rôle, 445;
    testimony, 65

  Piccoli, Raffaello, on American civilization, 508–528

  Picnics, pioneer, 294

  Pictures, 204, 236, 237

  Pioneers, 97, 136, 137, 185, 193, 203, 294, 429, 441, 515, 516;
    hostility to law, 57

  Pittsburgh, 4, 10;
    newspapers and the steel strike, 46

  Pittsburgh Survey of 1908, 14, 531

  Platitude, 497

  Play, 457–461

  Playwrights, 247, 248;
    foreign and American, 249

  Plough, 402

  Plumbing, 14

  Poe, E. A., 187, 194, 217

  Poetry, 102, 215–226, 524;
    bibliography, 541;
    definition, 107;
    modern vigorousness, 217;
    the “nonsense” of, 103, 104;
    poetic consciousness, 224, 225

  _Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_, 217

  Poets, 100, 102, 208;
    definition, 108

  Police and law enforcement, 70

  Political biography, 532

  Political economy, bibliography, 552

  Political ideas, 28

  Political machinery, 281

  Politicians, 29;
    local, 22, 23

  Politics, 21–34;
    bibliography, 532;
    health movements and, 451

  Pool, 460

  Poor. _See_ Poverty

  Poor whites, 355

  Population policies, 322

  Pound, Ezra, 217, 221, 223

  Poverty, 187, 188, 277, 346;
    college life, 118;
    injustice, 71, 72;
    our forebears, 337

  Power, 397

  Practical, the, 186

  Pragmatism, 145, 170, 171, 173, 192, 521

  Preaching and practice, vi

  Prendergast, M. B., 240

  Preparatory school, 116

  Presidency, 31

  Presidential campaigns, 25

  Press. _See_ Journalism; newspapers

  Prevention of disease, 449;
    _see also_ Disease; Medicine

  Prices, open, 409

  Primitiveness, 479

  Primogeniture, 55

  Prince, Morton, 433

  Private property, 259, 262

  Production, engineers and, 421;
    mass, 408

  Professionalism, 554

  Professors, 96, 97, 193, 491, 527

  Profit, private, 412, 413

  Profit-making, 265

  Progress, legal lack of, 63

  Prohibition, 24, 29, 440, 451, 495, 505;
    consequences, 71;
    origin of movement, 287

  Promenade, 8

  Promiscuity, 438, 502

  Promised Land, 515

  Propaganda, 85, 86, 312, 440

  Property, governmental power over, 74;
    private, 259, 262;
    rights, 259, 262, 412

  Protection, beginnings, 399;
    _see also_ Tariff

  Protest, economic, 263

  Provincial city, 3

  Provincialism, 286, 287, 366

  Prostitution, 316, 317

  Prussia, educational system, 84;
    family income, 323

  Psychoanalysis, 434, 435, 437

  Psychoanalysts, 435, 437

  Psychology, James’, 170

  Psychotherapy, 433

  Public Health Service, 450

  Public opinion. _See_ Economic opinion; Opinion

  Public service commissions, 72

  Publicists, writings, 496, 501

  Publicity pamphlets, 483

  Publishing, 112, 188; music, 210

  “Punch,” American, 482

  Pure-food acts, 406

  Puritan and Cavalier, 512, 513, 514

  Puritanism, 54, 57, 101, 104, 130, 203, 209, 212, 238, 252, 314, 439,
        494, 504;
    culture, 513;
    morbidity, 502;
    original spirit, 519;
    remnants, 520

  Pushkin, A. S., 190


  Quackery, 431, 433, 443, 444

  Quality of commodities, 406


  Race-prejudice, 352, 353, 355, 377;
    manifestations, 358;
    questions, 378–379

  Race suicide, 322

  Races, a quality or inequality, 352, 353

  Rachmaninoff, S. V., 206

  Racial minorities, 351–379;
    attitude, in face of race-prejudice, 367;
    bibliography, 549;
    biological results, 374;
    four most important, 351;
    questions, 378–379

  Radicalism, 131, 174, 271–284, 505, 519;
    associations of the word, 271;
    bibliography, 545;
    definition, 274;
    economic, 276, 277, 278;
    historic American, 274, 275;
    reality and, 283;
    tendency, 283

  Radicals, 272

  Railroad stations, 293

  Railroads, 265, 401, 402, 403, 407, 411;
    rates and hauls, 407, 408;
    rebates, 408

  Rank, Otto, 437

  Rates, railroad, 407, 408

  Raw materials, 257

  Reactionaries, 273

  Realism, 169, 204;
    new, 168;
    small town, 286

  Realistic morality, 170

  Realists, 168, 169

  Reaper, 402

  Rebates, 408

  Reconstruction, 307

  Recreation, 457;
    college, 130

  Reform, 174

  Reformation, Protestant, 510

  Reformers, 439–440

  Regional differentiations, 111

  Registration areas, 320

  Registration of deeds, 55

  Reid, L. R., on the small town, 285–296

  Relativity, 152

  Religion, v, 78, 167, 176, 427, 439, 508;
    founders, 428;
    Puritan, 513

  Religious movements, 518

  Renaissance, 94, 509;
    England, 512

  Representatives, 21

  Research, 156, 157

  Resources, natural, 257, 260

  Responsibility in business, 410

  Results, 174

  Revolution, 280;
    England, prospect, 474;
    Russian, 278

  Revolutionary War, 300, 399, 417, 515

  Rhode Island, Colonial legal training, 55

  Richardson, H. H., 11

  Riesenfeld, Hugo, 213

  Rights and duties, 72, 274

  Robinson, E. A., 184, 217, 221, 222, 226

  Robinson, G. T., on racial minorities, 351–379

  Robinson, J. H., vi, 547

  Rockefeller Institute, 158

  Rome, civilization, 509

  Roosevelt, Theodore, 26, 440;
    on race suicide, 322

  Rosenau’s “Preventive Medicine and Hygiene,” 453

  Rothafel, S. L., 212

  Rowland, H. A., 153, 158

  Royce, Josiah, 165;
    ethics, 166;
    philosophy of religion, 167

  Russia, false news, 49

  Russian Revolution, 278

  Ryder, A. P., 187, 233, 234, 237, 542

  Rymer, Thomas, 103


  St. Louis, Mo., 8, 10

  Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 498

  Salesmanship, 405

  Sandburg, Carl, 103, 220, 221, 222

  Sanitariums, 431

  Sanitary engineers, 454

  Sankey, Justice, 68

  Santayana, George, 539, 540

  Sargent, J. S., 234, 235

  Satire, 247

  _Saturday Evening Post_, 248, 286, 507

  Savings of aliens, 348

  Scholarship, definition, 94, 105, 108

  Scholarship and criticism, 93–108;
    bibliography, 535

  School and college life, 109–133;
    bibliography, 536

  School of literature, 196

  Schoolmaster, 301

  Schools, function, 113;
    suppression of freedom of mind, 86, 87

  Science, 80, 436, 519, 522;
    American contributions, 151–152;
    applied, 146;
    applied and pure, 155–156;
    bibliography, 538;
    hothouse growth in America, 155;
    individual and organized, 156–157;
    lack of fruitful background, 151–161;
    medicine and, 444;
    results and self-doubt, 169;
    theology versus, 163

  Scientific schools, first, 417

  Scientists, equipment, 158;
    spirit, 160

  Scope of the present volume, iv

  Scotch, 338

  Scott, C. P., 38

  Secondary schools, 83, 114, 115;
    private, 115–116

  Secret societies, 290, 291

  Sects, 518, 519

  Sensational news, 45

  Sense and poetry, 104

  Sentimentality, 247, 252

  Servants, 320

  Service, 523

  Settlers, early, 300;
    immigrant, 343

  Sewers, 14

  Sex, 247, 309–318, 501;
    attitudes, 314;
    bibliography, 548;
    college relations, 129;
    concept of sexuality, 437;
    emotion, 310, 317, 437;
    in children, 436;
    morality, 322;
    problem, 436;
    relations, 316;
    relations classified, 313, 314;
    sublimation, 312;
    suppression of instinct, 311;
    youth and, 526

  Shakespeare, William, 220, 250

  Shaw, G. B., 179, 192, 243, 244;
    on America, 285

  “Shelburne Essays,” 498, 500

  Sherman, Stuart, 493, 500, 503

  Shirt-sleeve diplomacy, 489

  Simplification of American life, 479, 480

  Sinclair, Upton, and “The Brass Check,” 41

  Single Tax, 273

  Sissies, 142

  Slang, 112

  Slavery, 354, 365

  Slopping over, 471, 488

  Small Claims Courts, 71

  Small town, 285–296;
    bibliography, 546;
    character, 288;
    life, 289

  Smith, J. Thorne, on advertising, 381–395

  Smith, Reginald H., 71

  Smith, Theobald, 449

  Smoking, 440

  Smuggling, 399

  Soap, 392

  Social hygiene, 453

  Social life, 526, 527;
    freedom of youth, 313, 315

  Socialist Party, 278, 279

  Society, 516

  Society column, 333

  Solicitor, advertising, 388

  Soul and scholarship, 98

  Soule, George, on radicalism, 271–284

  Southern States, 139;
    Negro repression, 358;
    society, 354, 365;
    white superiority, 366

  Specialists, 80

  Specialization, 79, 80, 158;
    surgical, 446

  Speculation in city land, 7, 8

  Spingarn, J. E., 535;
    on scholarship and criticism, 93–108

  Spirit, 518

  Spiritual activity, 93, 98

  Spiritual needs, 527

  Spiritual values, 520

  Spoiled child, 334

  “Spoon River Anthology,” 221, 222, 226, 503

  Sport and play, 457–461;
    bibliography, 554

  Springfield _Republican_, 38

  Standard Oil Co., 409, 412

  Standardization, 149, 150, 335;
    American, 111;
    newspapers and readers, 36

  Standards, economic, 268

  State, business and, 264;
    corporations and, 412;
    diversity of legal systems, 65;
    education and, 89;
    German, 302;
    legislatures, 24, 31

  Stearns, H. E., on the intellectual life, 135–150

  Sterility, 148

  Stevens, Wallace, 218, 221, 223, 224

  Stewart, A. T., 405

  Stock Exchange, 410

  Stockard, C. R., 452

  Stories, newspaper, 45

  Story, Joseph, 54, 56, 62

  Strikes and the newspapers, 46

  Stuart, H. L., on American civilization, 469–488

  Student Councils, college, 124

  Sturgis, Russell, quoted on art, 237

  Style, 106

  Sublimation of sex, 312

  Suburbia, 15, 19

  Success, 517, 518

  Suffrage, 143

  Sumner, W. G., 543

  “Super-docs,” 447

  Superstition, 78

  Supply and demand, 261

  Suppression of sex impulse, 311

  Surgeons, 446

  Swift, M. I., 172

  Sydenstricker, Edgar, 325

  Symbolists, 503

  Symons, Arthur, 499

  Sympathy, 175;
    professional physician, 445

  Symphony orchestras, 199, 202

  Syphilis, 453


  Taboos, 315, 441, 494

  Talk, college, 130

  Tariff, 399, 414;
    works of art, 230

  Tarkington, Booth, 243, 248

  Taste, 106;
    definition, 100, 107–108;
    musical, 200;
    theatrical, improvement, 243

  Taylor, Deems, on music, 199–214

  Teachers, control of teaching, 90;
    status, 90;
    suppression of freedom of mind, 86, 87;
    unions, 91

  Teasdale, Sara, 221, 222

  Teeth, infected, 448, 449

  Telegraph, Morse code, 403

  Ten Commandments, 307

  Tennis, 460

  Teutonic school, 303

  Texas fever, 449

  Textile industry, 402

  Theatre, 243–253;
    bibliography, 543;
    New York City, 243, 246;
    newspapers and, 249

  Theology versus science, 163

  Things, 397

  Thomas, Augustus, 249

  Thomas, Theodore, 213

  Thoreau, H. D., 184, 194, 494

  Thorndike’s tests, 154

  Thought, 105, 148, 479;
    uniformity, 439

  Threshing-machines, 402

  Thrift, family, 325

  Thucydides, 307

  Ticknor, George, 95, 96

  Tildsley, John, 87

  Tolstoy, Leo, 190, 499, 503

  Tom, Blind, 207–208

  Tonsils, 448, 449

  Towns, New England, 3;
   _see also_ Small town

  Trade-mark, 409

  Trade secrets, 421

  Trade-union movement, 283

  Traditions, 528;
    college, 118;
    college and life at large, 131–132

  Transportation, 401, 402, 408

  Trinity Church, Boston, 11

  Truth, 86, 92;
    love of, 144

  Tschaikovsky, P. I., 200, 213

  Tuberculosis, bovine and human, 449

  Turgeniev, I. S., 190

  Twachtman, J. H., 235

  Twain, Mark, 182, 187, 191, 194, 464

  Typhoid, 450

  Typography, 391


  Unconscious, the, 435, 436

  Undergraduate, 116

  Unemployment, 414

  Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law, 64

  Uniformity, colleges and life, 131–132

  Unions, 283

  U. S. Geological Survey, 158

  Universal Negro Improvement Assn., 369

  Universities, 524, 526;
    materialism, 97;
    mediocity of life and scholarship, 95, 96, 97;
    professors, 96, 97, 193, 491, 527;
    _see also_ College life; Colleges

  Untermeyer, Louis, on our poetry, 215

  Uplifters, 450, 497


  Vaccination for typhoid, 450

  Valparaiso University, 119, 124

  Van Dyke, Henry, 496

  Van Loon, H. W., on history, 297–308

  Van Slyke, D. D., 456

  Vanderlyn, John, 232

  Vaughan, V. C., 444

  Veblen, T. B., 544, 545

  Venereal peril, 453

  Venereal prophylaxis, 454

  Verihood, 86

  Versailles, 305

  Victrolas, 212

  Villagers, 285

  Villages, atmosphere, 290

  Virginia schools, white and Negro, 359

  Vision, 177, 480, 481

  Vital statistics, 319, 320

  Volstead Act, debate on, 28

  Volunteer firemen’s organizations, 292


  Wanamaker, John, 46

  War. _See_ World War

  Washington, D. C., dramatic taste, 246

  Washington Square Players, 252

  Waste, business, 413;
    economic, 284;
    industrial, 419

  Water, danger of excessive use, 451

  Wealth, 413

  Weir, J. A., 235

  Welfare of employés, 483

  Wellman, Rita, 248

  Wells, H. G., 457

  _Weltanschauung_, 101, 102

  Wendell, Barrett, quoted on education, 77

  Werner, Judge, W. E., 73

  West, the, 112

  Wharton, Mrs. Edith, 179

  Whistler, J. A. M., 234, 237

  White, Stanford, 11

  White City, 13

  White Ways, 13

  Whitman, Walt, 149, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 194, 215, 217, 504, 523

  Who’s who in this volume, 559–564

  Widowhood, prevention, 329

  Widows, 328, 329

  Wigmore, J. H., 69, 75

  Wild oats, 316

  Wilson, Woodrow, 25, 450

  “Winesburg, Ohio,” 137

  Winsett, Ned, 179

  _Wissenschaftlichkeit_, 303, 304

  Witchcraft, 429

  Wives, thrifty, 324, 325

  Women, beauty, 431, 438;
    dominance in art, 229;
    dominance in intellectual life, 135;
    dominance in music, 205;
    hours of work, 73;
    in industry, 326;
    interests, 142;
    longevity, 328;
    maintenance at leisure, 139, 141;
    men and, dichotomy, 142;
    men’s circumspection as to, 316;
    nervous, 432;
    personality, 317, 318;
    psychology, 317;
    surplus, 326, 327

  Women’s clubs, 142

  Woodberry, G. E., 101

  Woods, A. H., 245, 251

  Work for work’s sake, 491

  Workmen’s compensation, 72

  Workmen’s families, 325, 326

  World news, 48

  World War, business and, 413;
    historians and, 304

  World’s Fair, Chicago, 13

  Wyant, A. H., 233


  Yeast, 444

  Yeats, W. B., 499

  Yellow fever, 450

  Y.M.C.A., 144;
    instruction, 83

  Youth, sex life, 526


  Zenger, Peter, 55




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent within
each article when a predominant preference was found in that article;
otherwise, they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Duplicate hemi-titles were removed.

Table of Contents: replaced ditto marks with the actual words above
them.

The index was not systematically checked for proper alphabetization or
correct page references.

Page 352: “singled out” was printed as “signalled out”; changed here.

Page 388: “full-fledged” was printed as “full-edged”; changed here.

Page 573: “New York _Herald_” was misprinted as “New York _World_”;
changed here.

Page 576: “mediocity” was printed that way; may be a misprint for
either “mediocrity” “meritocracy.”

Page 576, under “State, business and”: “corporations” was misprinted as
“co-operations”; changed here.



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