1
Apparently there are those who begin to find it disagreeable—nay,
impossible. Their anguish fills the Liberal weeklies, and every ship
that puts out from New York carries a groaning cargo of them, bound
for Paris, London, Munich, Rome and way points—anywhere to escape the
great curses and atrocities that make life intolerable for them at
home. Let me say at once that I find little to cavil at in their basic
complaints. In more than one direction, indeed, I probably go a great
deal further than even the Young Intellectuals. It is, for example,
one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs, reached after an inquiry
extending over a score of years and supported by incessant prayer
and meditation, that the government of the United States, in both
its legislative arm and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent,
corrupt, and disgusting—and from this judgment I except no more than
twenty living lawmakers and no more than twenty executioners of their
laws. It is a belief no less piously cherished that the administration
of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all
reason and equity—and from this judgment I except no more than thirty
judges, including two upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United
States. It is another that the foreign policy of the United States—its
habitual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or
foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable—and from
this judgment I consent to no exceptions whatever, either recent or
long past. And it is my fourth (and, to avoid too depressing a bill,
final) conviction that the American people, taking one with another,
constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob
of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom
since the end of the Middle Ages, and that they grow more timorous,
more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.
So far I go with the fugitive Young Intellectuals—and into the
Bad Lands beyond. Such, in brief, are the cardinal articles of my
political faith, held passionately since my admission to citizenship
and now growing stronger and stronger as I gradually disintegrate
into my component carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, calcium,
sodium, nitrogen and iron. This is what I believe and preach, _in
nomine Domini_, Amen. Yet I remain on the dock, wrapped in the flag,
when the Young Intellectuals set sail. Yet here I stand, unshaken and
undespairing, a loyal and devoted Americano, even a chauvinist, paying
taxes without complaint, obeying all laws that are physiologically
obeyable, accepting all the searching duties and responsibilities
of citizenship unprotestingly investing the sparse usufructs of my
miserable toil in the obligations of the nation, avoiding all commerce
with men sworn to overthrow the government, contributing my mite toward
the glory of the national arts and sciences, enriching and embellishing
the native language, spurning all lures (and even all invitations) to
get out and stay out—here am I, a bachelor of easy means, forty-two
years old, unhampered by debts or issue, able to go wherever I please
and to stay as long as I please—here am I, contentedly and even smugly
basking beneath the Stars and Stripes, a better citizen, I daresay,
and certainly a less murmurous and exigent one, than thousands who
put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and
Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the
Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan,
and Anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” and believe with the faith of little children
that one of Our Boys, taken at random, could dispose in a fair fight
of ten Englishmen, twenty Germans, thirty Frogs, forty Wops, fifty
Japs, or a hundred Bolsheviki.
Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even
to the point of offensiveness), so free from bile, so little fretting
and indignant, so curiously happy? Why did I answer only with a few
academic “Hear, Hears” when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and
the _emigrés_ of Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the
corn-fed _intelligentsia_ to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands,
throw off the curse forever? The answer, of course, is to be sought in
the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep
upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose)
happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy
(reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:
_a._ Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.
_b._ Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the
masses of my fellow-men.
_c._ Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.
It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no
country on the face of the earth wherein a man roughly constituted
as I am—a man of my general weaknesses, vanities, appetites,
prejudices, and aversions—can be so happy, or even one-half so happy,
as he can be in these free and independent states. Going further, I
lay down the proposition that it is a sheer physical impossibility
for such a man to live in These States and _not_ be happy—that it
is as impossible to him as it would be to a schoolboy to weep over
the burning down of his school-house. If he says that he isn’t happy
here, then he either lies or is insane. Here the business of getting a
living, particularly since the war brought the loot of all Europe to
the national strong-box, is enormously easier than it is in any other
Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forhanded man
who fails at it must actually make, deliberate efforts to that end.
Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence,
of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who
knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and
practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on
a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive
aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or
have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and
communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions
and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of
theological buffooneries, of æsthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles
and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities,
grotesqueries, and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and
preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable
amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and
originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm
can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every
morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school
superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.
A certain sough rhetoric may be here. Perhaps I yield to words as a
chautauqua lecturer yields to them, belaboring and fermenting the
hinds with his Message from the New Jerusalem. But fundamentally I am
quite as sincere as he is. For example, in the matter of attaining to
ease in Zion, of getting a fair share of the national swag, now piled
so mountainously high. It seems to me, sunk in my Egyptian night,
that the man who fails to do this in the United States to-day is a
man who is somehow stupid—maybe not on the surface, but certainly
deep down. Either he is one who cripples himself unduly, say by
setting up a family before he can care for it, or by making a bad
bargain for the sale of his wares, or by concerning himself too much
about the affairs of other men; or he is one who endeavors fatuously
to sell something that no normal American wants. Whenever I hear a
professor of philosophy complain that his wife has eloped with some
moving-picture actor or bootlegger who can at least feed and clothe
her, my natural sympathy for the man is greatly corrupted by contempt
for his lack of sense. Would it be regarded as sane and laudable for
a man to travel the Soudan trying to sell fountain-pens, or Greenland
offering to teach double-entry bookkeeping or counterpoint Coming
closer, would the judicious pity or laugh at a man who opened a shop
for the sale of incunabula in Little Rock, Ark., or who demanded a
living in McKeesport, Pa., on the ground that he could read Sumerian?
In precisely the same way it seems to me to be nonsensical for a man
to offer generally some commodity that only a few rare and dubious
Americans want, and then weep and beat his breast because he is not
patronized. One seeking to make a living in a country must pay due
regard to the needs and tastes of that country. Here in the United
States we have no jobs for grand dukes, and none for _Wirkliche
Geheimräte_, and none for palace eunuchs, and none for masters of the
buck-hounds, and none (any more) for brewery _Todsaufer_—and very few
for oboe players, metaphysicians, astrophysicists, assyriologists,
water-colorists, stylites and epic poets. There was a time when the
_Todsaufer_ served a public need and got an adequate reward, but it is
no more. There may come a time when the composer of string quartettes
is paid as much as a railway conductor, but it is not yet. Then why
practice such trades—that is, as trades? The man of independent
means may venture into them prudently; when he does so, he is seldom
molested; it may even be argued that he performs a public service by
adopting them. But the man who has a living to make is simply silly
if he goes into them; he is like a soldier going over the top with a
coffin strapped to his back. Let him abandon such puerile vanities, and
take to the uplift instead, as, indeed, thousands of other victims of
the industrial system have already _done._ Let him bear in mind that,
whatever its neglect of the humanities and their monks, the Republic
has never got half enough bond salesmen, quack doctors, ward leaders,
phrenologists, Methodist evangelists, circus clowns, magicians,
soldiers, farmers, popular song writers, moonshine distillers, forgers
of gin labels, mine guard, detectives, spies, snoopers, and _agents
provocateurs._ The rules are set by Omnipotence; the discreet man
observes them. Observing them, he is safe beneath the starry bed-tick,
in fair weather or foul. The _boobus Americanus_ is a bird that knows
no closed season—and if he won’t come down to Texas oil stock, or
one-night cancer cures, or building lots in Swampshurst, he will always
come down to Inspiration and Optimism, whether political, theological,
pedagogical, literary, or economic.
The doctrine that it is _infra digitatem_ for an educated man to take
a hand in the snaring of this goose is one in which I see nothing
convincing. It is a doctrine chiefly voiced, I believe, by those
who have tried the business and failed. They take refuge behind the
childish notion that there is something honorable about poverty _per
se_—the Greenwich Village complex. This is nonsense. Poverty may be
an unescapable misfortune, but that no more makes it honorable than
a cocked eye is made honorable by the same cause. Do I advocate,
then, the ceaseless, senseless hogging of money? I do not. All I
advocate—and praise as virtuous—is the hogging of enough to provide
security and ease. Despite all the romantic superstitions to the
contrary, the artist cannot do his best work when he is oppressed by
unsatisfied wants. Nor can the philosopher. Nor can the man of science.
The best and clearest thinking of the world is done and the finest art
is produced, not by men who are hungry, ragged and harassed, but by men
who are well-fed, warm and easy in mind. It is the artist’s first duty
to his art to achieve that tranquility for himself. Shakespeare tried
to achieve it; so did Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Ibsen and Balzac.
Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schumann and Mendelssohn were born to it. Joseph
Conrad, Richard Strauss and Anatole France have got it for themselves
in our own day. In the older countries, where competence is far more
general and competition is thus more sharp, the thing is often cruelly
difficult, and sometimes almost impossible. But in the United States
it is absurdly easy, given ordinary luck. Any man with a superior air,
the intelligence of a stockbroker, and the resolution of a hat-check
girl—in brief, any man who believes in himself enough, and with
sufficient cause, to be called a journeyman—can cadge enough money, in
this glorious commonwealth of morons, to make life soft for him.
And if a lining for the purse is thus facilely obtainable, given a
reasonable prudence and resourcefulness, then balm for the ego is just
as unlaboriously got, given ordinary dignity and decency. Simply to
exist, indeed, on the plane of a civilized man is to attain, in the
Republic, to a distinction that should be enough for all save the most
vain; it is even likely to be too much, as the frequent challenges of
the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Anti-Saloon League, and
other such vigilance committees of the majority testify. Here is a
country in which all political thought and activity are concentrated
upon the scramble for jobs—in which the normal politician, whether he
be a President or a village road supervisor, is willing to renounce
any principle, however precious to him, and to adopt any lunacy,
however offensive to him, in order to keep his place at the trough.
Go into politics, then, without seeking or wanting office, and at once
you are as conspicuous as a red-haired blackamoor—in fact, a great
deal more conspicuous, for red-haired blackamoors have been seen, but
who has ever seen or heard of an American politician, Democrat or
Republican, Socialist or Liberal, Whig or Tory, who did not itch for a
job? Again, here is a country in which it is an axiom that a business
man shall be a member of a Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles
M. Schwab, a reader of the _Saturday Evening Post_, a golfer—in
brief, a vegetable. Spend your hours of escape from _Geschäft_ reading
Remy de Gourmont or practicing the violoncello, and the local Sunday
newspaper will infallibly find you out and hymn the marvel—nay, your
banker will summon you to discuss your notes, and your rivals will
spread the report (probably truthful) that you were pro-German during
the war. Yet again, here is a land in which women rule and men are
slaves. Train your women to get your slippers for you, and your ill
fame will match Galileo’s or Darwin’s. Once more, here is the Paradise
of back-slappers, of democrats, of mixers, of go-getters. Maintain
ordinary reserve, and you will arrest instant attention—and have your
hand kissed by multitudes who, despite democracy, have all the inferior
man’s unquenchable desire to grovel and admire.
Nowhere else in the world is superiority more easily attained or more
eagerly admitted. The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is
the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus. It admired the literary style
of the late Woodrow; it respects the theological passion of Bryan; it
venerates J. Pierpont Morgan; it takes Congress seriously; it would be
unutterably shocked by the proposition (with proof) that a majority of
its judges are ignoramuses, and that a respectable minority of them
are scoundrels. The manufacture of artificial _Durchlauchten, k.k.
Hoheiten_ and even gods goes on feverishly and incessantly; the will
to worship never flags. Ten iron-molders meet in the back-room of a
near-beer saloon, organize a lodge of the Noble and Mystic Order of
American Rosicrucians, and elect a wheelwright Supreme Worthy Whimwham;
a month later they send a notice to the local newspaper that they
have been greatly honored by an official visit from that Whimwham,
and that they plan to give him a jeweled fob for his watch chain. The
chief national heroes—Lincoln, Lee, and so on—cannot remain mere
men. The mysticism of the mediæval peasantry gets into the communal
view of them, and they begin to sprout haloes and wings. As I say, no
intrinsic merit—at least, none commensurate with the mob estimate—is
needed to come to such august dignities. Everything American is a bit
amateurish and childish, even the national gods. The most conspicuous
and respected American in nearly every field of endeavor, saving only
the purely commercial (I exclude even the financial) is a man who would
attract little attention in any other country. The leading American
critic of literature, after twenty years of diligent exposition of his
ideas, has yet to make it clear what he is in favor of, and why. The
queen of the _haut monde_, in almost every American city, is a woman
who regards Lord Reading as an aristocrat and her superior, and whose
grandfather slept in his underclothes. The leading American musical
director, if he went to Leipzig, would be put to polishing trombones
and copying drum parts. The chief living American military man—the
national heir to Frederick, Marlborough, Wellington, Washington and
Prince Eugene—is a member of the Elks, and proud of it. The leading
American philosopher (now dead, with no successor known to the average
pedagogue) spent a lifetime erecting an epistemological defense for the
national æsthetic maxim: “I don’t know nothing about music, but I know
what I like.” The most eminent statesman the United States has produced
since Lincoln was fooled by Arthur James Balfour, and miscalculated
his public support by more than 5,000,000 votes. And the current
Chief Magistrate of the nation—its defiant substitute for czar and
kaiser—is a small-town printer who, when he wishes to enjoy himself
in the Executive Mansion, invites in a homeopathic doctor, a Seventh
Day Adventist evangelist, and a couple of moving-picture actresses.
2
All of which may be boiled down to this: that the United States is
essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men—that distinction is easy
here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and
judgment, of ordinary competence is so low. No sane man, employing an
American plumber to repair a leaky drain, would expect him to do it at
the first trial, and in precisely the same way no sane man, observing
an American Secretary of State in negotiation with Englishmen and Japs,
would expect him to come off better than second best. Third-rate men,
of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in
full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.
The land was peopled, not by the hardy adventurers of legend, but
simply by incompetents who could not get on at home, and the lavishness
of nature that they found here, the vast ease with which they could
get livings, confirmed and augmented their native incompetence. No
American colonist, even in the worst days of the Indian wars, ever had
to face such hardships as ground down the peasants of Central Europe
during the Hundred Years War, nor even such hardships as oppressed the
English lower classes during the century before the Reform Bill of
1832. In most of the colonies, indeed, he seldom saw any Indians at
all: the one thing that made life difficult for him was his congenital
dunderheadedness. The winning of the West, so rhetorically celebrated
in American romance, cost the lives of fewer men than the single
battle of Tannenberg, and the victory was much easier and surer. The
immigrants who have come in since those early days have been, if
anything, of even lower grade than their forerunners. The old notion
that the United States is peopled by the offspring of brave, idealistic
and liberty loving minorities, who revolted against injustice, bigotry
and mediævalism at home—this notion is fast succumbing to the alarmed
study that has been given of late to the immigration of recent years.
The truth is that the majority of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants since the
Revolution, like the majority of Anglo-Saxon immigrants before the
Revolution, have been, not the superior men of their native lands,
but the botched and unfit: Irishmen starving to death in Ireland,
Germans unable to weather the _Sturm und Drang_ of the post-Napoleonic
reorganization, Italians weed-grown on exhausted soil, Scandinavians
run to all bone and no brain, Jews too incompetent to swindle even
the barbarous peasants of Russia, Poland and Roumania. Here and
there among the immigrants, of course, there may be a bravo, or even
a superman—e. g., the ancestors of Volstead, Ponzi, Jack Dempsey,
Schwab, Daugherty, Debs, Pershing—but the average newcomer is, and
always has been simply a poor fish.
Nor is there much soundness in the common assumption, so beloved of
professional idealists and wind-machines, that the people of America
constitute “the youngest of the great peoples.” The phrase turns up
endlessly; the average newspaper editorial writer would be hamstrung if
the Postoffice suddenly interdicted it, as it interdicted “the right to
rebel” during the war. What gives it a certain specious plausibility is
the fact that the American Republic, compared to a few other existing
governments, is relatively young. But the American Republic is not
necessarily identical with the American people; they might overturn
it to-morrow and set up a monarchy, and still remain the same people.
The truth is that, as a distinct nation, they go back fully three
hundred years, and that even their government is older than that of
most other nations, e. g., France, Italy, Germany, Russia. Moreover,
it is absurd to say that there is anything properly describable as
youthfulness in the American outlook. It is not that of young men, but
that of old men. All the characteristics of senescence are in it: a
great distrust of ideas, an habitual timorousness, a harsh fidelity
to a few fixed beliefs, a touch of mysticism. The average American is
a prude and a Methodist under his skin, and the fact is never more
evident than when he is trying to disprove it. His vices are not those
of a healthy boy, but those of an ancient paralytic escaped from the
_Greisenheim._ If you would penetrate to the causes thereof, simply
go down to Ellis Island and look at the next shipload of immigrants.
You will not find the spring of youth in their step; you will find the
shuffling of exhausted men. From such exhausted men the American stock
has sprung. It was easier for them to survive here than it was where
they came from, but that ease, though it made them feel stronger, did
not actually strengthen them. It left them what they were when they
came: weary peasants, eager only for the comfortable security of a
pig in a sty. Out of that eagerness has issued many of the noblest
manifestations of American _Kultur:_ the national hatred of war, the
pervasive suspicion of the aims and intents of all other nations, the
short way with heretics and disturbers of the peace, the unshakable
belief in devils, the implacable hostility to every novel idea and
point of view.
All these ways of thinking are the marks of the peasant—more, of the
peasant long ground into the mud of his wallow, and determined at last
to stay there—the peasant who has definitely renounced any lewd
desire he may have ever had to gape at the stars. The habits of mind of
this dull, sempiternal _fellah_—the oldest man in Christendom—are,
with a few modifications, the habits of mind of the American people.
The peasant has a great practical cunning, but he is unable to see
any further than the next farm. He likes money and knows how to amass
property, but his cultural development is but little above that of
the domestic animals. He is intensely and cocksurely moral, but his
morality and his self-interest are crudely identical. He is emotional
and easy to scare, but his imagination cannot grasp an abstraction.
He is a violent nationalist and patriot, but he admires rogues in
office and always beats the tax-collector if he can. He has immovable
opinions about all the great affairs of state, but ninetenths of them
are sheer imbecilities. He is violently jealous of what he conceives
to be his rights, but brutally disregardful of the other fellow’s. He
is religious, but his religion is wholly devoid of beauty and dignity.
This man, whether city or country bred, is the normal Americano—the
100 per cent. Methodist, Odd Fellow, Ku Kluxer, and Know Nothing.
He exists in all countries, but here alone he rules—here alone his
anthropoid fears and rages are accepted gravely as logical ideas, and
dissent from them is punished as a sort of public offense. Around every
one of his principal delusions—of the sacredness of democracy, of the
feasibility of sumptuary law, of the incurable sinfulness of all other
peoples, of the menace of ideas, of the corruption lying in all the
arts—there is thrown a barrier of taboos, and woe to the anarchist who
seeks to break it down!
The multiplication of such taboos is obviously not characteristic of
a culture that is moving from a lower plane to a higher—that is, of
a culture still in the full glow of its youth. It is a sign, rather,
of a culture that is slipping downhill—one that is reverting to the
most primitive standards and ways of thought. The taboo, indeed, is the
trademark of the savage, and wherever it exists it is a relentless
and effective enemy of civilized enlightenment. The savage is the most
meticulously moral of men; there is scarcely an act of his daily life
that is not conditioned by unyielding prohibitions and obligations,
most of them logically unintelligible. The mob-man, a savage set
amid civilization, cherishes a code of the same draconian kind. He
believes firmly that right and wrong are immovable things—that they
have an actual and unchangeable existence, and that any challenge
of them, by word or act, is a crime against society. And with the
concept of wrongness, of course, he always confuses the concept of mere
differentness—to him the two are indistinguishable. Anything strange
is to be combatted; it is of the Devil. The mob-man cannot grasp ideas
in their native nakedness. They must be dramatized and personalized
for him, and provided with either white wings or forked tails. All
discussion of them, to interest him, must take the form of a pursuit
and scotching of demons. He cannot think of a heresy without thinking
of a heretic to be caught, condemned, and burned.
The Fathers of the Republic, I am convinced, had a great deal more
prevision than even their most romantic worshipers give them credit
for. They not only sought to create a governmental machine that would
be safe from attack without; they also sought to create one that would
be safe from attack within. They invented very ingenious devices for
holding the mob in check, for protecting the national polity against
its transient and illogical rages, for securing the determination
of all the larger matters of state to a concealed but none the less
real aristocracy. Nothing could have been further from the intent
of Washington, Hamilton and even Jefferson than that the official
doctrines of the nation, in the year 1922, should be identical with the
nonsense heard in the chautauqua, from the evangelical pulpit, and on
the stump. But Jackson and his merry men broke through the barbed wires
thus so carefully strung, and ever since 1825 _vox populi_ has been
the true voice of the nation. To-day there is no longer any question
of statesmanship, in any real sense, in our politics. The only way to
success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the
mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its
current manias _en bloc_, or convince it hypocritically that he has
done so, while cherishing reservations _in petto._ The result is that
only two sorts of men stand any chance whatever of getting into actual
control of affairs—first, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe
what the mob believes, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing
to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold
their jobs. One finds perfect examples of the first class in Jackson
and Bryan. One finds hundreds of specimens of the second among the
politicians who got themselves so affectingly converted to Prohibition,
and who voted and blubbered for it with flasks in their pockets. Even
on the highest planes our politics seems to be incurable mountebankish.
The same Senators who raised such raucous alarms against the League of
Nations voted for the Disarmament Treaty—a far more obvious surrender
to English hegemony. And the same Senators who pleaded for the League
on the ground that its failure would break the heart of the world were
eloquently against the treaty. The few men who maintained a consistent
course in both cases, voting either for or against both League and
treaty, were denounced by the newspapers as deliberate marplots,
and found their constituents rising against them. To such an extent
had the public become accustomed to buncombe that simple honesty was
incomprehensible to it, and hence abhorrent!
As I have pointed out in a previous work, this dominance of mob ways
of thinking, this pollution of the whole intellectual life of the
country by the prejudices and emotions of the rabble, goes unchallenged
because the old landed aristocracy of the colonial era has been
engulfed and almost obliterated by the rise of the industrial system,
and no new aristocracy has arisen to take its place, and discharge its
highly necessary functions. An upper class, of course, exists, and of
late it has tended to increase in power, but it is culturally almost
indistinguishable from the mob: it lacks absolutely anything even
remotely resembling an aristocratic point of view. One searches in vain
for any sign of the true _Junker_ spirit in the Vanderbilts, Astors,
Morgans, Garys, and other such earls and dukes of the plutocracy; their
culture, like their aspiration, remains that of the pawnshop. One
searches in vain, too for the aloof air of the don, in the official
_intelligentsia_ of the American universities; they are timorous and
orthodox, and constitute a reptile Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to
match Bismarck’s _Reptilienpresse._ Everywhere else on earth, despite
the rise of democracy, an organized minority of aristocrats survives
from a more spacious day, and if its personnel has degenerated and its
legal powers have decayed it has at least maintained some vestige of
its old independence of spirit, and jealously guarded its old right to
be heard without risk of penalty. Even in England, where the peerage
has been debauched to the level of a political baptismal fount for
Jewish money-lenders and Wesleyan soap-boilers, there is sanctuary for
the old order in the two ancient universities, and a lingering respect
for it in the peasantry. But in the United States it was paralyzed by
Jackson and got its death blow from Grant, and since then no successor
to it has been evolved. Thus there is no organized force to oppose the
irrational vagaries of the mob. The legislative and executive arms of
the government yield to them without resistance; the judicial arm has
begun to yield almost as supinely, particularly when they take the form
of witch-hunts; outside the official circle there is no opposition
that is even dependably articulate. The worst excesses go almost
without challenge. Discussion, when it is heard at all, is feeble and
superficial, and girt about by the taboos that I have mentioned. The
clatter about the so-called Ku Klux Klan, two or three years ago, was
typical. The astounding program of this organization was discussed
in the newspapers for months on end, and a committee of Congress sat
in solemn state to investigate it, and yet not a single newspaper
or Congressman, so far as I am aware, so much as mentioned the most
patent and important fact about it, to wit, that the Ku Klux was, to
all intents and purposes, simply the secular arm of the Methodist
Church, and that its methods were no more than physical projections
of the familiar extravagances of the Anti-Saloon League. The intimate
relations between church and Klan, amounting almost to identity, must
have been plain to every intelligent American, and yet the taboo upon
the realistic consideration of ecclesiastical matters was sufficient to
make every public soothsayer disregard it completely.
I often wonder, indeed, if there would be any intellectual life at
all in the United States if it were not for the steady importation
in bulk of ideas from abroad, and particularly, in late years, from
England. What would become of the average American scholar if he could
not borrow wholesale from English scholars? How could an inquisitive
youth get beneath the surface of our politics if it were not for such
anatomists as Bryce? Who would show our statesmen the dotted lines
for their signatures if there were no Balfours and Lloyd-Georges? How
could our young professors formulate æsthetic judgments, especially
in the field of letters, if it were not for such gifted English
mentors as Robertson Nicoll, Squire and Clutton-Brock? By what process,
finally, would the true style of a visiting card be determined, and
the _höflich_ manner of eating artichokes, if there were no reports
from Mayfair? On certain levels this naïve subservience must needs
irritate every self-respecting American, and even dismay him. When he
recalls the amazing feats of the English war propagandists between
1914 and 1917—and their even more amazing confessions of method
since—he is apt to ask himself quite gravely if he belongs to a free
nation or to a crown colony. The thing was done openly, shamelessly,
contemptuously, cynically, and yet it was a gigantic success. The
office of the American Secretary of State, from the end of Bryan’s
grotesque incumbency to the end of the Wilson administration, was
little more than an antechamber of the British Foreign Office. Dr.
Wilson himself, in the conduct of his policy, differed only legally
from such colonial premiers as Hughes and Smuts. Even after the United
States got into the war it was more swagger for a Young American blood
to wear the British uniform than the American uniform. No American
ever seriously questions an Englishman or Englishwoman of official or
even merely fashionable position at home. Lord Birkenhead was accepted
as a gentleman everywhere in the United States; Mrs. Asquith’s almost
unbelievable imbecilities were heard with hushed fascination; even
Lady Astor, an American married to an expatriate German-American
turned English viscount, was greeted with solemn effusiveness. During
the latter part of 1917, when New York swarmed with British military
missions, I observed in _Town Topics_ a polite protest against a very
significant habit of certain of their gallant members: that of going
to dances wearing spurs, and so macerating the frocks and heels of the
fawning fair. The protest, it appears, was not voiced by the hosts and
hostesses of these singular officers: they would have welcomed their
guests in trench boots. It was left to a dubious weekly, and it was
made very gingerly.
The spectacle, as I say, has a way of irking the American touched by
nationalistic weakness. Ever since the day of Lowell—even since the
day of Cooper and Irving—there have been denunciations of it. But
however unpleasant it may be, there is no denying that a chain of
logical causes lies behind it, and that they are not to be disposed of
by objecting to them. The average American of the Anglo-Saxon majority,
in truth, is simply a second-rate Englishman, and so it is no wonder
that he is spontaneously servile, despite all his democratic denial of
superiorities, to what he conceives to be first-rate Englishmen. He
corresponds, roughly, to an English Nonconformist of the better-fed
variety, and he shows all the familiar characters of the breed. He is
truculent and cocksure, and yet he knows how to take off his hat when
a bishop of the Establishment passes. He is hot against the dukes, and
yet the notice of a concrete duke is a singing in his heart. It seems
to me that this inferior Anglo-Saxon is losing his old dominance in
the United States—that is, biologically But he will keep his cultural
primacy for a long, long while, in spite of the overwhelming inrush
of men of other races, if only because those newcomers are even more
clearly inferior than he is. Nine-tenths of the Italians, for example,
who have come to these shores in late years have brought no more of the
essential culture of Italy with them than so many horned cattle would
have brought. If they become civilized at all, settling here, it is
the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon majority that they acquire, which
is to say, the civilization of the English second table. So with the
Germans, the Scandinavians, and even the Jews and Irish. The Germans,
taking one with another, are on the cultural level of green-grocers. I
have come into contact with a great many of them since 1914, some of
them of considerable wealth and even of fashionable pretensions. In the
whole lot I can think of but a score or two who could name offhand the
principal works of Thomas Mann, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Ludwig Thoma or
Hugo von Hofmannsthal. They know much more about Mutt and Jeff than
they know about Goethe. The Scandinavians are even worse. The majority
of them are mere clods, and they are sucked into the Knights of
Pythias, the chautauqua and the Methodist Church almost as soon as they
land; it is by no means a mere accident that the national Prohibition
Enforcement Act bears the name of a man theoretically of the blood of
Gustavus Vasa, Svend of the Forked Beard, and Eric the Red. The Irish
in the United States are scarcely touched by the revival of Irish
culture, despite their melodramatic concern with Irish politics. During
the war they supplied diligent and dependable agents to the Anglo-Saxon
White Terror, and at all times they are very susceptible to political
and social bribery. As for the Jews, they change their names to Burton,
Thompson and Cecil in order to qualify as true Americans, and when they
are accepted and rewarded in the national coin they renounce Moses
altogether and get themselves baptized in St. Bartholomew’s Church.
Whenever ideas enter the United States from without they come by way of
England. What the London _Times_ says to-day, about Ukranian politics,
the revolt in India, a change of ministry in Italy, the character of
the King of Norway, the oil situation in Mesopotamia, will be said
week after next by the _Times_ of New York, and a month or two later
by all the other American newspapers. The extent of this control of
American opinion by English news mongers is but little appreciated in
the United States, even by professional journalists. Fully four-fifths
of all the foreign news that comes to the American newspapers comes
through London, and most of the rest is supplied either by Englishmen
or by Jews (often American-born) who maintain close relations with
the English. During the years 1914–1917 so many English agents got
into Germany in the guise of American correspondents—sometimes with
the full knowledge of their Anglomaniac American employers—that
the Germans, just before the United States entered the war, were
considering barring American correspondents from their country
altogether. I was in Copenhagen and Basel in 1917, and found both
towns—each an important source of war news—full of Jews representing
American journals as a side-line to more delicate and confidential work
for the English department of press propaganda. Even to-day a very
considerable proportion of the American correspondents in Europe are
strongly under English influences, and in the Far East the proportion
is probably still larger. But these men seldom handle really important
news. All that is handled from London, and by trustworthy Britons. Such
of it as is not cabled directly to the American newspapers and press
associations is later clipped from English newspapers, and printed as
bogus letters or cablegrams.
The American papers accept such very dubious stuff, not chiefly because
they are hopelessly stupid or Anglomaniac, but because they find it
impossible to engage competent American correspondents. If the native
journalists who discuss our domestic politics avoid the fundamentals
timorously, then those who venture to discuss foreign politics are
scarcely aware of the fundamentals at all. We have simply developed no
class of experts in such matters. No man comparable, say to Dr. Dillon,
Wickham Steed, Count zu Reventlow or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt exists in
the United States. When, in the Summer of 1920, the editors of the
Baltimore _Sun_ undertook plans to cover the approaching Disarmament
Conference at Washington in a comprehensive and intelligent manner,
they were forced, willy-nilly, into employing Englishmen to do the
work. Such men as Brailsford and Bywater, writing from London, three
thousand miles away, were actually better able to interpret the work
of the conference than American correspondents on the spot, few of
whom were capable of anything beyond the most trivial gossip. During
the whole period of the conference not a professional Washington
correspondent—the flower of American political journalism—wrote
a single article upon the proceedings that got further than their
surface aspects. Before the end of the sessions this enforced
dependence upon English opinion had an unexpected and significant
result. Facing the English and the Japs in an unyielding alliance,
the French turned to the American delegation for assistance. The
issue specifically before the conference was one on which American
self-interest was obviously identical with French self-interest.
Nevertheless, the English had such firm grip upon the machinery of news
distribution that they were able, in less than a week, to turn American
public opinion against the French, and even to set up an active
Francophobia. No American, not even any of the American delegates,
was able to cope with their propaganda. They not only dominated the
conference and pushed through a set of treaties that were extravagantly
favorable to England; they even established the doctrine that all
opposition to those treaties was immoral!
When Continental ideas, whether in politics, in metaphysics or in the
fine arts, penetrate to the United States they nearly always travel
by way of England. Emerson did not read Goethe; he read Carlyle. The
American people, from the end of 1914 to the end of 1918, did not
read first-handed statements of the German case; they read English
interpretations of those statements. In London is the clearing house
and transformer station. There the latest notions from the mainland are
sifted out, carefully diluted with English water, and put into neat
packages for the Yankee trade. The English not only get a chance to
ameliorate or embellish; they also determine very largely what ideas
Americans are to hear of at all. Whatever fails to interest them, or
is in any way obnoxious to them, is not likely to cross the ocean.
This explains why it is that most literate Americans are so densely
ignorant of many Continentals who have been celebrated at home for
years, for example, Huysmans, Hartleben, Vaibinger, Merezhkovsky,
Keyserling, Snoilsky, Mauthner, Altenberg, Heidenstam, Alfred Kerr. It
also explains why they so grossly overestimate various third-raters,
laughed at at home, for example, Brieux. These fellows simply happen to
interest the English _intelligentsia_, and are thus palmed off upon the
gaping colonists of Yankeedom. In the case of Brieux the hocus-pocus
was achieved by one man, George Bernard Shaw, a Scotch blue-nose
disguised as an Irish patriot and English soothsayer. Shaw, at bottom,
has the ideas of a Presbyterian elder, and so the moral frenzy of
Brieux enchanted him. Whereupon he retired to his chamber, wrote a
flaming Brieuxiad for the American trade, and founded the late vogue of
the French Dr. Sylvanus Stall on this side of the ocean.
This wholesale import and export business in Continental fancies is of
no little benefit, of course, to the generality of Americans. If it
did not exist they would probably never hear of many of the salient
Continentals at all, for the obvious incompetence of most of the
native and resident introducers of intellectual ambassadors makes them
suspicious even of those who, like Boyd and Nathan, are thoroughly
competent. To this day there is no American translation of the plays of
Ibsen; we use the William Archer Scotch-English translations, most of
them atrociously bad, but still better than nothing. So with the works
of Nietzsche, Anatole France, Georg Brandes, Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoi, and other moderns after their kind. I can think of but one
important exception: the work of Gerhart Hauptmann, done into English
by and under the supervision of Ludwig Lewisohn. But even here Lewisohn
used a number of English translations of single plays: the English were
still ahead of him, though they stopped half way. He is, in any case, a
very extraordinary American, and the Department of Justice kept an eye
on him during the war. The average American professor is far too dull
a fellow to undertake so difficult an enterprise. Even when he sports
a German Ph.D. one usually finds on examination that all he knows
about modern German literature is that a _Mass_ of Hofbräu in Munich
used to cost 27 _Pfennig_ downstairs and 32 _Pfennig_ upstairs. The
German universities were formerly very tolerant of foreigners. Many an
American, in preparation for professing at Harvard, spent a couple of
years roaming from one to the other of them without picking up enough
German to read the _Berliner Tageblatt._ Such frauds swarm in all our
lesser universities, and many of them, during the war, became eminent
authorities upon the crimes of Nietzsche and the errors of Treitschke.
3
In rainy weather, when my old wounds ache and the four humors do battle
in my spleen, I often find myself speculating sourly as to the future
of the Republic. Native opinion, of course, is to the effect that
it will be secure and glorious; the superstition that progress must
always be upward and onward will not down; in virulence and popularity
it matches the superstition that money can accomplish anything. But
this view is not shared by most reflective foreigners, as any one may
find out by looking into such a book as Ferdinand Kürnberger’s “Der
Amerikamüde,” Sholom Asch’s “America,” Ernest von Wolzogen’s “Ein
Dichter in Dollarica,” W. L. George’s “Hail, Columbia!”, Annalise
Schmidt’s “Der Amerikanische Mensch” or Sienkiewicz’s “After Bread,”
or by hearkening unto the confidences, if obtainable, of such returned
immigrants as Georges Clemenceau, Knut Hamsun, George Santayana,
Clemens von Pirquet, John Masefield and Maxim Gorky, and, via the ouija
board, Antonin Dvorak, Frank Wedekind and Edwin Klebs. The American
Republic, as nations go, has led a safe and easy life, with no serious
enemies to menace it, either within or without, and no grim struggle
with want. Getting a living here has always been easier than anywhere
else in Christendom; getting a secure foothold has been possible to
whole classes of men who would have remained submerged in Europe, as
the character of our plutocracy, and no less of our _intelligentsia_
so brilliantly shows. The American people have never had to face such
titanic assaults as those suffered by the people of Holland, Poland
and half a dozen other little countries; they have not lived with a
ring of powerful and unconscionable enemies about them, as the Germans
have lived since the Middle Ages; they have not been torn by class
wars, as the French, the Spaniards and the Russians have been torn;
they have not thrown their strength into far-flung and exhausting
colonial enterprises, like the English. All their foreign wars have
been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily
engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats
with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings. Even
the Civil War, compared to the larger European conflicts since the
invention of gunpowder, was trivial in its character and transient in
its effects. The population of the United States, when it began, was
about 31,500,000—say 10 per cent. under the population of France in
1914. But after four years of struggle, the number of men killed in
action or dead of wounds, in the two armies, came but 200,000—probably
little more than a sixth of the total losses of France between 1914
and 1918. Nor was there any very extensive destruction of property.
In all save a small area in the North there was none at all, and even
in the South only a few towns of any importance were destroyed. The
average Northerner passed through the four years scarcely aware, save
by report, that a war was going on. In the South the breath of Mars
blew more hotly, but even there large numbers of men escaped service,
and the general hardship everywhere fell a great deal short of the
hardships suffered by the Belgians, the French of the North, the
Germans of East Prussia, and the Serbians and Rumanians in the World
War. The agonies of the South have been much exaggerated in popular
romance; they were probably more severe during Reconstruction, when
they were chiefly psychical, than they were during the actual war.
Certainly General Robert E. Lee was in a favorable position to estimate
the military achievement of the Confederacy. Well, Lee was of the
opinion that his army was very badly supported by the civil population,
and that its final disaster was largely due to that ineffective support.
Coming down to the time of the World War, one finds precious few signs
that the American people, facing an antagonist of equal strength
and with both hands free, could be relied upon to give a creditable
account of themselves. The American share in that great struggle, in
fact, was marked by poltroonery almost as conspicuously as it was
marked by knavery. Let us consider briefly what the nation did. For
a few months it viewed the struggle idly and unintelligently, as a
yokel might stare at a sword-swallower at a county fair. Then, seeing
a chance to profit, it undertook with sudden alacrity the ghoulish
office of _Kriegslieferant._ One of the contestants being debarred, by
the chances of war, from buying, it devoted its whole energies, for
two years, to purveying to the other. Meanwhile, it made every effort
to aid its customer by lending him the cloak of its neutrality—that
is, by demanding all the privileges of a neutral and yet carrying on a
stupendous wholesale effort to promote the war. On the official side,
this neutrality was fraudulent from the start, as the revelations of
Mr. Tumulty have since demonstrated; popularly it became more and
more fraudulent as the debts of the customer contestant piled up,
and it became more and more apparent—a fact diligently made known
by his partisans—that they would be worthless if he failed to win.
Then, in the end, covert aid was transformed into overt aid. And under
what gallant conditions! In brief, there stood a nation of 65,000,000
people, which, without effective allies, had just closed two and a
half years of homeric conflict by completely defeating an enemy state
of 135,000,000 and two lesser ones of more than 10,000,000 together,
and now stood at bay before a combination of at least 140,000,000.
Upon this battle-scarred and war-weary foe the Republic of 100,000,000
freemen now flung itself, so lifting the odds to 4 to 1. And after a
year and a half more of struggle it emerged triumphant—a knightly
victor surely!
There is no need to rehearse the astounding and unprecedented
swinishness that accompanied this glorious business—the colossal
waste of public money, the savage persecution of all opponents and
critics of the war, the open bribery of labor, the half-insane reviling
of the enemy, the manufacture of false news, the knavish robbery of
enemy civilians, the incessant spy hunts, the floating of public
loans by a process of blackmail, the degradation of the Red Cross
to partisan uses, the complete abandonment of all decency, decorum
and self-respect. The facts must be remembered with shame by every
civilized American; lest they be forgotten by the generations of the
future I am even now engaged with collaborators upon an exhaustive
record of them, in twenty volumes folio. More important to the present
purpose are two things that are apt to be overlooked, the first of
which is the capital fact that the war was “sold” to the American
people, as the phrase has it, not by appealing to their courage, but
by appealing to their cowardice—in brief, by adopting the assumption
that they were not warlike at all, and certainly not gallant and
chivalrous, but merely craven and fearful. The first selling point of
the proponents of American participation was the contention that the
Germans, with gigantic wars still raging on both fronts, were preparing
to invade the United States, burn down all the towns, murder all the
men, and carry off all the women—that their victory would bring
staggering and irresistible reprisals for the American violation of the
duties of a neutral. The second selling point was that the entrance
of the United States would end the war almost instantly—that the
Germans would be so overwhelmingly out-numbered, in men and guns, that
it would be impossible for them to make any effective defense—above
all, that it would be impossible for them to inflict any serious damage
upon their new foes. Neither argument, it must be plain, showed the
slightest belief in the warlike skill and courage of the American
people. Both were grounded upon the frank theory that the only way to
make the mob fight was to scare it half to death, and then show it a
way to fight without risk, to stab a helpless antagonist in the back.
And both were mellowed and reënforced by the hint that such a noble
assault, beside being safe, would also be extremely profitable—that
it would convert very dubious debts into very good debts, and dispose
forever of a diligent and dangerous competitor for trade, especially
in Latin America. All the idealist nonsense emitted by Dr. Wilson and
company was simply icing on the cake. Most of it was abandoned as
soon as the bullets began to fly, and the rest consisted simply of
meaningless words—the idiotic babbling of a Presbyterian evangelist
turned prophet and seer.
The other thing that needs to be remembered is the permanent effect
of so dishonest and cowardly a business upon the national character,
already far too much inclined toward easy ventures and long odds.
Somewhere in his diaries Wilfrid Scawen Blunt speaks of the marked
debasement that showed itself in the English spirit after the brutal
robbery and assassination of the South African Republics. The heroes
that the mob followed after Mafeking Day were far inferior to the
heroes that it had followed in the days before the war. The English
gentleman began to disappear from public life, and in his place
appeared a rabble-rousing bounder obviously almost identical with
the American professional politician—the Lloyd-George, Chamberlain,
F. E. Smith, Isaacs-Reading, Churchill, Bottomley, Northcliffe type.
Worse, old ideals went with old heroes. Personal freedom and strict
legality, says Blunt, vanished from the English tables of the law,
and there was a shift of the social and political center of gravity
to a lower plane. Precisely the same effect is now visible in the
United States. The overwhelming majority of conscripts went into the
army unwillingly, and once there they were debauched by the twin
forces of the official propaganda that I have mentioned and a harsh,
unintelligent discipline. The first made them almost incapable of
soldierly thought and conduct; the second converted them into cringing
goose-steppers. The consequences display themselves in the amazing
activities of the American Legion, and in the rise of such correlative
organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. It is impossible to fit any
reasonable concept of the soldierly into the familiar proceedings of
the Legion. Its members conduct themselves like a gang of Methodist
vice-crusaders on the loose, or a Southern lynching party. They are
forever discovering preposterous burglars under the national bed,
and they advance to the attack, not gallantly and at fair odds, but
cravenly and in overwhelming force. Some of their enterprises, to be
set forth at length in the record I have mentioned, have been of
almost unbelievable baseness—the mobbing of harmless Socialists,
the prohibition of concerts by musicians of enemy nationality, the
mutilation of cows designed for shipment abroad to feed starving
children, the roughing of women, service as strike-breakers, the
persecution of helpless foreigners, regardless of nationality.
During the last few months of the war, when stories of the tyrannical
ill-usage of conscripts began to filter back to the United States, it
was predicted that they would demand the punishment of the guilty when
they got home, and that if it was not promptly forthcoming they would
take it into their own hands. It was predicted, too, that they would
array themselves against the excesses of Palmer, Burleson and company,
and insist upon a restoration of that democratic freedom for which they
had theoretically fought. But they actually did none of these things.
So far as I know, not a single martinet of a lieutenant or captain has
been manhandled by his late victims; the most they have done has been
to appeal to Congress for revenge and damages. Nor have they thrown
their influence against the mediæval despotism which grew up at home
during the war; on the contrary, they have supported it actively, and
if it has lessened since 1919 the change has been wrought without
their aid and in spite of their opposition. In sum, they show all the
stigmata of inferior men whose natural inferiority has been made
worse by oppression. Their chief organization is dominated by shrewd
ex-officers who operate it to their own ends—politicians in search
of jobs, Chamber of Commerce witch-hunters, and other such vermin. It
seems to be wholly devoid of patriotism, courage, or sense. Nothing
quite resembling it existed in the country before the war, not even in
the South. There is nothing like it anywhere else on earth. It is a
typical product of two years of heroic effort to arouse and capitalize
the worst instincts of the mob, and it symbolizes very dramatically the
ill effects of that effort upon the general American character.
Would men so degraded in gallantry and honor, so completely purged of
all the military virtues, so submerged in baseness of spirit—would
such pitiful caricatures of soldiers offer the necessary resistance to
a public enemy who was equal, or perhaps superior in men and resources,
and who came on with confidence, daring and resolution—say England
supported by Germany as _Kriegslieferant_ and with her inevitable
swarms of Continental allies, or Japan with the Asiatic hordes behind
her? Against the best opinion of the chautauquas, of Congress and of the
patriotic press I presume to doubt it. It seems to me quite certain,
indeed, that an American army fairly representing the American people,
if it ever meets another army of anything remotely resembling like
strength, will be defeated, and that defeat will be indistinguishable
from rout. I believe that, at any odds less than two to one, even the
exhausted German army of 1918 would have defeated it, and in this view,
I think, I am joined by many men whose military judgment is far better
than mine—particularly by many French officers. The changes in the
American character since the Civil War, due partly to the wearing out
of the old Anglo-Saxon stock, inferior to begin with, and partly to
the infusion of the worst elements of other stocks, have surely not
made for the fostering of the military virtues. The old cool head is
gone, and the old dogged way with difficulties. The typical American of
to-day has lost all the love of liberty that his forefathers had, and
all their distrust of emotion, and pride in self-reliance. He is led
no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents,
word-mongers, uplifters. I do not believe that such a faint-hearted
and inflammatory fellow, shoved into a war demanding every resource
of courage, ingenuity and pertinacity, would give a good account of
himself. He is fit for lynching-bees and heretic-hunts, but he is not
fit for tight corners and desperate odds.
Nevertheless, his docility and pusillanimity may be overestimated, and
sometimes I think that they _are_ overestimated by his present masters.
They assume that there is absolutely no limit to his capacity for
being put on and knocked about—that he will submit to any invasion of
his freedom and dignity, however outrageous, so long as it is depicted
in melodious terms. He permitted the late war to be “sold” to him by
the methods of the grind-shop auctioneer. He submitted to conscription
without any of the resistance shown by his brother democrats of Canada
and Australia. He got no further than academic protests against the
brutal usage he had to face in the army. He came home and found
Prohibition foisted on him, and contented himself with a few feeble
objurgations. He is a pliant slave of capitalism, and ever ready to
help it put down fellow-slaves who venture to revolt. But this very
weakness, this very credulity and poverty of spirit, on some easily
conceivable to-morrow, may convert him into a rebel of a peculiarly
insane kind, and so beset the Republic from within with difficulties
quite as formidable as those which threaten to afflict it from without.
What Mr. James N. Wood calls the corsair of democracy—that is, the
professional mob-master, the merchant of delusions, the pumper-up of
popular fears and rages—is still content to work for capitalism, and
capitalism knows how to reward him to his taste. He is the eloquent
statesman, the patriotic editor, the fount of inspiration, the prancing
milch-cow of optimism. He becomes public leader, Governor, Senator,
President. He is Billy Sunday, Cyrus K. Curtis, Dr. Frank Crane,
Charles E. Hughes, Taft, Wilson, Cal Coolidge, General Wood, Harding.
His, perhaps, is the best of trades under democracy—but it has its
temptations! Let us try to picture a master corsair, thoroughly adept
at pulling the mob nose, who suddenly bethought himself of that Pepin
the Short who found himself mayor of the palace and made himself King
of the Franks. There were lightnings along that horizon in the days
of Roosevelt; there were thunder growls when Bryan emerged from the
Nebraska steppes. On some great day of fate, as yet unrevealed by the
gods, such a professor of the central democratic science may throw off
his employers and set up a business for himself. When that day comes
there will be plenty of excuse for black type on the front pages of the
newspapers.
I incline to think that military disaster will give him his inspiration
and his opportunity—that he will take the form, so dear to
democracies, of a man on horseback. The chances are bad to-day simply
because the mob is relatively comfortable—because capitalism has been
able to give it relative ease and plenty of food in return for its
docility. Genuine poverty is very rare in the United States, and actual
hardship is almost unknown. There are times when the proletariat is
short of phonograph records, silk shirts and movie tickets, but there
are very few times when it is short of nourishment. Even during the
most severe business depression, with hundreds of thousands out of
work, most of these apparent sufferers, if they are willing, are able
to get livings outside their trades. The cities may be choked with idle
men, but the country is nearly always short of labor. And if all other
resources fail, there are always public agencies to feed the hungry:
capitalism is careful to keep them from despair. No American knows what
it means to live as millions of Europeans lived during the war and have
lived, in some places, since: with the loaves of the baker reduced to
half size and no meat at all in the meat-shop. But the time may come and
it may not be far off. A national military disaster would disorganize
all industry in the United States, already sufficiently wasteful and
chaotic, and introduce the American people, for the first time in
their history, to genuine want—and capital would be unable to relieve
them. The day of such disaster will bring the savior foreordained. The
slaves will follow him, their eyes fixed ecstatically upon the newest
New Jerusalem. Men bred to respond automatically to shibboleths will
respond to this worst and most insane one. Bolshevism, said General
Foch, is a disease of defeated nations.
But do not misunderstand me: I predict no revolution in the grand
manner, no melodramatic collapse of capitalism, no repetition of what
has gone on in Russia. The American proletarian is not brave and
romantic enough for that; to do him simple justice, he is not silly
enough. Capitalism, in the long run, will win in the United States,
if only for the reason that every American hopes to be a capitalist
before he dies. Its roots go down to the deepest, darkest levels of the
national soil; in all its characters, and particularly in its antipathy
to the dreams of man, it is thoroughly American. To-day it seems to be
immovably secure, given continued peace and plenty, and not all the
demagogues in the land, consecrating themselves desperately to the one
holy purpose, could shake it. Only a cataclysm will ever do that. But
is a cataclysm conceivable? Isn’t the United States the richest nation
ever heard of in history, and isn’t it a fact that modern wars are won
by money? It is not a fact. Wars are won to-day, as in Napoleon’s day,
by the largest battalions, and the largest battalions, in the next
great struggle, may not be on the side of the Republic. The usurious
profits it wrung from the last war are as tempting as negotiable
securities hung on the wash-line, as pre-Prohibition Scotch stored in
open cellars. Its knavish ways with friends and foes alike have left
it only foes. It is plunging ill-equipped into a competition for a
living in the world that will be to the death. And the late Disarmament
Conference left it almost hamstrung. Before the conference it had the
Pacific in its grip, and with the Pacific in its grip it might have
parleyed for a fair half of the Atlantic. But when the Japs and the
English had finished their operations upon the Feather Duster, Popinjay
Lodge, Master-Mind Root, Vacuum Underwood, young Teddy Roosevelt and
the rest of their so-willing dupes there was apparent a baleful change.
The Republic is extremely insecure to-day on both fronts, and it will
be more insecure to-morrow. And it has no friends.
However, as I say, I do not fear for capitalism. It will weather the
storm, and no doubt it will be the stronger for it afterward. The
inferior man hates it, but there is too much envy mixed with his
hatred, in the land of the theoretically free, for him to want to
destroy it utterly, or even to wound it incurably. He struggles against
it now, but always wistfully, always with a sneaking respect. On the
day of Armageddon he may attempt a more violent onslaught. But in the
long run he will be beaten. In the long run the corsairs will sell him
out, and hand him over to his enemy. Perhaps—who knows?—the combat
may raise that enemy to genuine strength and dignity. Out of it may
come the superman.
4
All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for
remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the
lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the
seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb.
It is the reason which grows out of my mediæval but unashamed taste
for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of
the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably
the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all
the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly—for example, royal
ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of _haut politique_, the taking
of politics seriously—and lays chief stress upon the kinds which
delight me unceasingly—for example, the ribald combats of demagogues,
the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit
of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men
to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice
among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as
a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic—and not a few dozen or score of
them, but whole droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all
other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable
dullness—things that seem devoid of exhilarating amusement by their
very nature—are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that
contemplating them strains the mid-riff almost to breaking. I cite an
example: the worship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is carried
on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the
bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to
laugh at them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have
bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of
the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in
ecclesiastical mountebankery—tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers
of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full
of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality. Every American town,
however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent
for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that
his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and
the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night
is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack
his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are
traveling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the
Matterhorn—stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers
of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother
Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition—Bryan, Sunday, and their like.
These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in
them. Their proceedings make me a happier American.
Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the
Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously
idiotic—a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr.
Cook—the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the
inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth.
In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues,
coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and
somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox
reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected
democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism,
to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank
cartridges charged with talcum powder, and so let fly. Here one may
howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and
that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to
the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that nowhere else
on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed
to such fineness. Two experiences are in point. During the Harding-Cox
combat of bladders an article of mine, dealing with some of its more
melodramatic phases, was translated into German and reprinted by a
Berlin paper. At the head of it the editor was careful to insert a
preface explaining to his readers, but recently delivered to democracy,
that such contests were not taken seriously by intelligent Americans,
and warning them solemnly against getting into sweats over politics.
At about the same time I had dinner with an Englishman. From cocktails
to bromo seltzer he bewailed the political lassitude of the English
populace—its growing indifference to the whole partisan harlequinade.
Here were two typical foreign attitudes: the Germans were in danger
of making politics too harsh and implacable, and the English were in
danger of forgetting politics altogether. Both attitudes, it must
be plain, make for bad shows. Observing a German campaign, one is
uncomfortably harassed and stirred up; observing an English campaign
(at least in times of peace), one falls asleep. In the United States
the thing is done better. Here politics is purged of all menace, all
sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such
gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of
a campaign with one’s ribs loose, and ready for “King Lear,” or a
hanging, or a course of medical journals.
But feeling better for the laugh. _Ridi si sapis_, said Martial. Mirth
is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all, to happiness. Well,
here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and
France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops.
What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan
to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort
is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines that any or
all of the carnal joys that it combats. Always, when I contemplate an
uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old-time
burlesque show, witnessed for hire, in my days as a dramatic critic. A
chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer,
the Swiss comedian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to
succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a
fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter,
the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit
for Y. M. C. A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by
the best of intentions, ever running _à la_ Krausemeyer to the rescue
of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am
naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were
a sash-weight the show would be cruel, and I’d probably complain to
the _Polizei._ As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt,
but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps to
get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: _Heureux
serez-vous, lorsqu’on vous outragera, qu’on vous persécutera_, and so
on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better
citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages
than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his
daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than
the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read
the New York _Evening Journal._ Another because there is a warrant out
for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste.
I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United
States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private
share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White
House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of
better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that
it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to
pinch a girl’s arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11
for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price
of the _Congressional Record_, about $15, which, as a journalist, I
receive for nothing. For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as
Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col. George Brinton McClellan
Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler
free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert.
Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less
than a cent a month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money,
first as naval expert, and secondly as a walking _attentat_ upon
democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in
that superstition. We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human
equality—and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly
as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in
this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically
open to every poor boy—here in the very citadel of democracy we found
and cherish a clown _dynasty!_