When the history of the late years in America is written, I suspect
that their grandest, gaudiest gifts to _Kultur_ will be found in the
incomparable twins: the right-thinker and the forward-looker. No other
nation can match them, at any weight. The right-thinker is privy to all
God’s wishes, and even whims; the forward-looker is the heir to all
His promises to the righteous. The former is never wrong; the latter
is never despairing. Sometimes the two are amalgamated into one man,
and we have a Bryan, a Wilson, a Dr. Frank Crane. But more often there
is a division: the forward-looker thinks wrong, and the right-thinker
looks backward. I give you Upton Sinclair and Nicholas Murray Butler
as examples. Butler is an absolute masterpiece of correct thought; in
his whole life, so far as human records show, he has not cherished a
single fancy that might not have been voiced by a Fifth Avenue rector
or spread upon the editorial page of the New York _Times._ But he has
no vision, alas, alas! All the revolutionary inventions for lifting up
humanity leave him cold. He is against them all, from the initiative
and referendum to birth control, and from Fletcherism to osteopathy.
Now turn to Sinclair. He believes in every one of them, however daring
and fantoddish; he grasps and gobbles all the new ones the instant they
are announced. But the man simply cannot think right. He is wrong on
politics, on economics, and on theology. He glories in and is intensely
vain of his wrongness. Let but a new article of correct American
thought get itself stated by the constituted ecclesiastical and secular
authorities—by Bishop Manning, or Judge Gary, or Butler, or Adolph
Ochs, or Dr. Fabian Franklin, or Otto Kahn, or Dr. Stephen S. Wise,
or Roger W. Babson, or any other such inspired omphalist—and he is
against it almost before it is stated.
On the whole, as a neutral in such matters, I prefer the forward-looker
to the right-thinker, if only because he shows more courage and
originality. It takes nothing save lack of humor to believe what
Butler, or Ochs, or Bishop Manning believes, but it takes long practice
and a considerable natural gift to get down the beliefs of Sinclair.
I remember with great joy the magazine that he used to issue during
the war. In the very first issue he advocated Socialism, the single
tax, birth control, communism, the League of Nations, the conscription
of wealth, government ownership of coal mines, sex hygiene and free
trade. In the next issue he added the recall of judges, Fletcherism,
the Gary system, the Montessori method, paper-bag cookery, war gardens
and the budget system. In the third he came out for sex hygiene, one
big union, the initiative and referendum, the city manager plan,
chiropractic and Esperanto. In the fourth he went to the direct
primary, fasting, the Third International, a federal divorce law, free
motherhood, hot lunches for school children, Prohibition, the vice
crusade, _Expressionismus_, the government control of newspapers,
deep breathing, international courts, the Fourteen Points, freedom
for the Armenians, the limitation of campaign expenditures, the merit
system, the abolition of the New York Stock Exchange, psychoanalysis,
crystal-gazing, the Little Theater movement, the recognition of Mexico,
_vers libre_, old age pensions, unemployment insurance, cooperative
stores, the endowment of motherhood, the Americanization of the
immigrant, mental telepathy, the abolition of grade crossings, federal
labor exchanges, profit-sharing in industry, a prohibitive tax on Poms,
the clean-up-paint-up campaign, relief for the Jews, osteopathy, mental
mastery, and the twilight sleep. And so on, and so on. Once I had got
into the swing of the Sinclair monthly I found that I could dispense
with at least twenty other journals of the uplift. When he abandoned
it I had to subscribe for them anew, and the gravel has stuck in my
craw ever since.
In the first volume of his personal philosophy, “The Book of Life:
Mind and Body,” he is stopped from displaying whole categories of his
ideas, for his subject is not man the political and economic machine,
but man and mammal. Nevertheless, his characteristic hospitality to new
revelations is abundantly visible. What does the mind suggest? The mind
suggests its dark and fascinating functions and powers, some of them
very recent. There is, for example, psychoanalysis. There is mental
telepathy. There is crystal-gazing. There is double personality. Out
of each springs a scheme for the uplift of the race—in each there is
something for a forward-looker to get his teeth into. And if mind, then
why not also spirit? Here even a forward-looker may hesitate; here,
in fact, Sinclair himself hesitates. The whole field of spiritism is
barred to him by his theological heterodoxy; if he admits that man has
an immortal soul, he may also have to admit that the soul can suffer in
hell. Thus even forward-looking may turn upon and devour itself. But if
the meadow wherein spooks and poltergeists disport is closed, it is at
least possible to peep over the fence. Sinclair sees materializations
in dark rooms, under red, satanic lights. He is, perhaps, not yet
convinced, but he is looking pretty hard. Let a ghostly hand reach out
and grab him, and he will be over the fence! The body is easier. The
new inventions for dealing with it are innumerable and irresistible; no
forward-looker can fail to succumb to at least some of them. Sinclair
teeters dizzily. On the one hand he stoutly defends surgery—that
is, provided the patient is allowed to make his own diagnosis!—on
the other hand he is hot for fasting, teetotalism, and the avoidance
of drugs, coffee and tobacco, and he begins to flirt with osteopathy
and chiropractic. More, he has discovered a new revelation in San
Francisco—a system of diagnosis and therapeutics, still hooted at
by the Medical Trust, whereby the exact location of a cancer may
be determined by examining a few drops of the patient’s blood, and
syphilis may be cured by vibrations, and whereby, most curious of all,
it can be established that odd numbers, written on a sheet of paper,
are full of negative electricity, and even numbers are full of positive
electricity.
The book is written with great confidence and address, and has a good
deal of shrewdness mixed with its credulities; few licensed medical
practitioners could give you better advice. But it is less interesting
than its author, or, indeed, than forward-lookers in general. Of all
the known orders of men they fascinate me the most. I spend whole
days reading their pronunciamentos, and am an expert in the ebb and
flow of their singularly bizarre ideas. As I have said, I have never
encountered one who believed in but one sure cure for all the sorrows
of the world, and let it go at that. Nay, even the most timorous
of them gives his full faith and credit to at least two. Turn, for
example, to the official list of eminent single taxers issued by the
Joseph Fels Fund. I defy you to find one solitary man on it who stops
with the single tax. There is David Starr Jordan: he is also one of
the great whales of pacifism. There is B. O. Flower: he is the emperor
of anti-vaccinationists. There is Carrie Chapman Catt: she is hot for
every peruna that the suffragettes brew. There is W. S. U’Ren: he is in
general practise as a messiah. There is Hamlin Garland: he also chases
spooks. There is Jane Addams: vice crusader, pacifist, suffragist,
settlement worker. There is Prof. Dr. Scott Nearing: Socialist and
martyr. There is Newt Baker: heir of the Wilsonian idealism. There
is Gifford Pinchot: conservationist, Prohibitionist, Bull Moose,
and professional Good Citizen. There is Judge Ben B. Lindsey:
forward-looking’s Jack Horner, forever sticking his thumb into new
pies. I could run the list to columns, but no need. You know the type
as well as I do. Give the forward-looker the direct primary, and he
demands the short ballot. Give him the initiative and referendum, and
he bawls for the recall of judges. Give him Christian Science, and he
proceeds to the swamis and yogis. Give him the Mann Act, and he wants
laws providing for the castration of fornicators. Give him Prohibition,
and he launches a new crusade against cigarettes, coffee, jazz, and
custard pies.
I have a wide acquaintance among such sad, mad, glad folks, and know
some of them very well. It is my belief that the majority of them are
absolutely honest—that they believe as fully in their baroque gospels
as I believe in the dishonesty of politicians—that their myriad and
amazing faiths sit upon them as heavily as the fear of hell sits upon a
Methodist deacon who has degraded the vestry-room to carnal uses. All
that may be justly said against them is that they are chronically full
of hope, and hence chronically uneasy and indignant—that they belong
to the less sinful and comfortable of the two grand divisions of the
human race. Call them the tender-minded, as the late William James used
to do, and you have pretty well described them. They are, on the one
hand, pathologically sensitive to the sorrows of the world, and, on
the other hand, pathologically susceptible to the eloquence of quacks.
What seems to lie in all of them is the doctrine that evils so vast as
those they see about them _must_ and _will_ be laid—that it would be
an insult to a just God to think of them as permanent and irremediable.
This notion, I believe, is at the bottom of much of the current
pathetic faith in Prohibition. The thing itself is obviously a colossal
failure—that is, when viewed calmly and realistically. It has not only
not cured the rum evil in the United States; it has plainly made that
evil five times as bad as it ever was before. But to confess that bald
fact would be to break the forward-looking heart: it simply refuses
to harbor the concept of the incurable. And so, being debarred by the
legal machinery that supports Prohibition from going back to any more
feasible scheme of relief, it cherishes the sorry faith that somehow,
in some vague and incomprehensible way, Prohibition will yet work.
When the truth becomes so horribly evident that even forward-lookers
are daunted, then some new quack will arise to fool them again, with
some new and worse scheme of super-Prohibition. It is their destiny
to wobble thus endlessly between quack and quack. One pulls them by
the right arm and one by the left arm. A third is at their coat-tail
pockets, and a fourth beckons them over the hill.
The rest of us are less tender-minded, and, in consequence, much
happier. We observe quite clearly that the world, as it stands, is
anything but perfect—that injustice exists, and turmoil, and tragedy,
and bitter suffering of ten thousand kinds—that human life at its
best, is anything but a grand, sweet song. But instead of ranting
absurdly against the fact, or weeping over it maudlinly, or trying
to remedy it with inadequate means, we simply put the thought of
it out of our minds, just as a wise man puts away the thought that
alcohol is probably bad for his liver, or that his wife is a shade
too fat. Instead of mulling over it and suffering from it, we seek
contentment by pursuing the delights that are so strangely mixed with
the horrors—by seeking out the soft spots and endeavoring to avoid
the hard spots. Such is the intelligent habit of practical and sinful
men, and under it lies a sound philosophy. After all, the world is
not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it,
save within very narrow limits. Going outside them with our protests
and advice tends to become contumacy to the celestial hierarchy. Do
the poor suffer in the midst of plenty? Then let us thank God politely
that we are not that poor. Are rogues in offices? Well, go call a
policeman, thus setting rogue upon rogue. Are taxes onerous, wasteful,
unjust? Then let us dodge as large a part of them as we can. Are whole
regiments and army corps of our fellow creatures doomed to hell? Then
let them complain to the archangels, and, if the archangels are too
busy to hear them, to the nearest archbishop.
Unluckily for the man of tender mind, he is quite incapable of any
such easy dismissal of the great plagues and conundrums of existence.
It is of the essence of his character that he is too sensitive and
sentimental to put them ruthlessly out of his mind: he cannot view
even the crunching of a cockroach without feeling the snapping of
his own ribs. And it is of the essence of his character that he is
unable to escape the delusion of duty—that he can’t rid himself of
the notion that, whenever he observes anything in the world that
might conceivably be improved, he is commanded by God to make every
effort to improve it. In brief, he is a public-spirited man, and the
ideal citizen of democratic states. But Nature, it must be obvious,
is opposed to democracy—and whoso goes counter to nature must expect
to pay the penalty. The tender-minded man pays it by hanging forever
upon the cruel hooks of hope, and by fermenting inwardly in incessant
indignation. All this, perhaps, explains the notorious ill-humor of
uplifters—the wowser touch that is in even the best of them. They
dwell so much upon the imperfections of the universe and the weaknesses
of man that they end by believing that the universe is altogether out
of joint and that every man is a scoundrel and every woman a vampire.
Years ago I had a combat with certain eminent reformers of the sex
hygiene and vice crusading species, and got out of it a memorable
illumination of their private minds. The reform these strange creatures
were then advocating was directed against sins of the seventh category,
and they proposed to put them down by forcing through legislation of a
very harsh and fantastic kind—statutes forbidding any woman, however
forbidding, to entertain a man in her apartment without the presence of
a third party, statutes providing for the garish lighting of all dark
places in the public parks, and so on. In the course of my debates with
them I gradually jockeyed them into abandoning all of the arguments
they started with, and so brought them down to their fundamental
doctrine, to wit, that no woman, without the aid of the police, could
be trusted to protect her virtue. I pass as a cynic in Christian
circles, but this notion certainly gave me pause. And it was voiced by
men who were the fathers of grown and unmarried daughters!
It is no wonder that men who cherish such ideas are so ready to accept
any remedy for the underlying evils, no matter how grotesque. A man
suffering from hay-fever, as every one knows, will take any medicine
that is offered to him, even though he knows the compounder to be a
quack; the infinitesimal chance that the quack may have the impossible
cure gives him a certain hope, and so makes the disease itself
more bearable. In precisely the same way a man suffering from the
conviction that the whole universe is hell-bent for destruction—that
the government he lives under is intolerably evil, that the rich are
growing richer and the poor poorer, that no man’s word can be trusted
and no woman’s chastity, that another and worse war is hatching,
that the very regulation of the weather has fallen into the hands
of rogues—such a man will grab at anything, even birth control,
osteopathy or the Fourteen Points, rather than let the foul villainy go
on. The apparent necessity of finding a remedy without delay transforms
itself, by an easy psychological process, into a belief that the remedy
has been found; it is almost impossible for most men, and particularly
for tender-minded men, to take in the concept of the insoluble. Every
problem that remains unsolved, including even the problem of evil,
is in that state simply because men of strict virtue and passionate
altruism have not combined to solve it—because the business has been
neglected by human laziness and rascality. All that is needed to
dispatch it is the united effort of enough pure hearts: the accursed
nature of things will yield inevitably to a sufficiently desperate
battle; mind (usually written Mind) will triumph over matter (usually
written Matter—or maybe Money Power, or Land Monopoly, or Beef Trust,
or Conspiracy of Silence, or Commercialized Vice, or Wall Street, or
the Dukes, or the Kaiser), and the Kingdom of God will be at hand. So,
with the will to believe in full function, the rest is easy. The eager
forward-looker is exactly like the man with hay-fever, or arthritis, or
nervous dyspepsia, or diabetes. It takes time to try each successive
remedy—to search it out, to take it, to observe its effects, to hope,
to doubt, to shelve it. Before the process is completed another is
offered; new ones are always waiting before their predecessors have
been discarded. Here, perhaps, we get a glimpse of the causes behind
the protean appetite of the true forward-looker—his virtuosity in
credulity. He is in all stages simultaneously—just getting over the
initiative and referendum, beginning to have doubts about the short
ballot, making ready for a horse doctor’s dose of the single tax, and
contemplating an experimental draught of Socialism to-morrow.
What is to be done for him? How is he to be cured of his great thirst
for sure cures that do not cure, and converted into a contented and
careless backward-looker, peacefully snoozing beneath his fig tree
while the oppressed bawl for succor in forty abandoned lands, and
injustice stalks the world, and taxes mount higher and higher, and
poor working-girls are sold into white slavery, and Prohibition fails
to prohibit, and cocaine is hawked openly, and jazz drags millions
down the primrose way, and the trusts own the legislatures of all
Christendom, and judges go to dinner with millionaires, and Europe
prepares for another war, and children of four and five years work
as stevedores and locomotive firemen, and guinea pigs and dogs are
vivisected, and Polish immigrant women have more children every year,
and divorces multiply, and materialism rages, and the devil runs
the cosmos? What is to be done to save the forward-looker from his
torturing indignations, and set him in paths of happy dalliance?
Answer: nothing. He was born that way, as men are born with hare lips
or bad livers, and he will remain that way until the angels summon
him to eternal rest. Destiny has laid upon him the burden of seeing
unescapably what had better not be looked at, of believing what isn’t
so. There is no way to help him. He must suffer vicariously for the
carnal ease of the rest of us. He must die daily that we may live in
peace, corrupt and contented.
As I have said, I believe fully that this child of sorrow is
honest—that his twinges and malaises are just as real to him as those
that rack the man with arthritis, and that his trusting faith in quacks
is just as natural. But this, of course, is not saying that the quacks
themselves are honest. On the contrary, their utter dishonesty must be
quite as obvious as the simplicity of their dupes. Trade is good for
them in the United States, where hope is a sort of national vice, and
so they flourish here more luxuriously than anywhere else on earth.
Some one told me lately that there are now no less than 25,000 national
organizations in the United States for the uplift of the plain people
and the snaring and shaking down of forward-lookers—societies for
the Americanization of immigrants, for protecting poor working-girls
against Jews and Italians, for putting Bibles into the bedrooms of
week-end hotels, for teaching Polish women how to wash their babies,
for instructing school children in ring-around-a-rosy, for crusading
against the cigarette, for preventing accidents in rolling-mills, for
making street-car conductors more polite, for testing the mentality
of Czecho-Slovaks, for teaching folk-songs, for restoring the United
States to Great Britain, for building day-nurseries in the devastated
regions of France, for training deaconesses, for fighting the
house-fly, for preventing cruelty to mules and Tom-cats, for forcing
householders to clean their backyards, for planting trees, for saving
the Indian, for sending colored boys to Harvard, for opposing Sunday
movies, for censoring magazines, for God knows what else. In every
large American city such organizations swarm, and every one of them
has an executive secretary who tries incessantly to cadge space in the
newspapers. Their agents penetrate to the remotest hamlets in the land,
and their circulars, pamphlets and other fulminations swamp the mails.
In Washington and at every state capital they have their lobbyists, and
every American legislator is driven half frantic by their innumerable
and preposterous demands. Each of them wants a law passed to make
its crusade official and compulsory; each is forever hunting for
forward-lookers with money.
One of the latest of these uplifting vereins to score a ten-strike
is the one that sponsored the so-called Maternity Bill. That measure
is now a law, and the over-burdened American taxpayer, at a cost of
$3,000,000 a year, is supporting yet one more posse of perambulating
gabblers and snouters. The influences behind the bill were exposed in
the Senate by Senator Reed, of Missouri, but to no effect: a majority
of the other Senators, in order to get rid of the propagandists in
charge of it, had already promised to vote for it. Its one intelligible
aim, as Senator Reed showed, is to give government jobs at good
salaries to a gang of nosey old maids. These virgins now traverse the
country teaching married women how to have babies in a ship-shape and
graceful manner, and how to keep them alive after having them. Only
one member of the corps has ever been married herself; nevertheless,
the old gals are authorized to go out among the Italian and Yiddish
women, each with ten or twelve head of kids to her credit, and tell
them all about it. According to Senator Reed, the ultimate aim of the
forward-lookers who sponsored the scheme is to provide for the official
registration of expectant mothers, that they may be warned what to eat,
what movies to see, and what midwives to send for when the time comes.
Imagine a young bride going down to the County Clerk’s office to report
herself! And imagine an elderly and anthropophagous spinster coming
around next day to advise her! Or a boozy political doctor!
All these crazes, of course, are primarily artificial. They are
set going, not by the plain people spontaneously, nor even by the
forward-lookers who eventually support them, but by professionals. The
Anti-Saloon League is their archetype. It is owned and operated by
gentlemen who make excellent livings stirring up the tender-minded;
if their salaries were cut off to-morrow, all their moral passion
would ooze out, and Prohibition would be dead in two weeks. So with
the rest of the uplifting camorras. Their present enormous prosperity,
I believe, is due in large part to a fact that is never thought
of, to wit, the fact that the women’s colleges of the country, for
a dozen years past, have been turning out far more graduates than
could be utilized as teachers. These supernumerary lady Ph.D’s almost
unanimously turn to the uplift—and the uplift saves them. In the early
days of higher education for women in the United States, practically
all the graduates thrown upon the world got jobs as teachers, but now
a good many are left over. Moreover, it has been discovered that the
uplift is easier than teaching, and that it pays a great deal better.
It is a rare woman professor who gets more than $5,000 a year, but
there are plenty of uplifting jobs at $8,000 and $10,000 a year, and in
the future there will be some prizes at twice as much. No wonder the
learned girls fall upon them so eagerly!
The annual production of male Ph.D’s is also far beyond the legitimate
needs of the nation, but here the congestion is relieved by the greater
and more varied demand for masculine labor. If a young man emerging
from Columbia or Ohio Wesleyan as _Philosophiez Doctor_ finds it
impossible to get a job teaching he can always go on the road as a
salesman of dental supplies, or enlist in the marines, or study law, or
enter the ministry, or go to work in a coal-mine, or a slaughter-house,
or a bucket-shop, or begin selling Oklahoma mine-stock to widows and
retired clergy-men. The women graduate faces far fewer opportunities.
She is commonly too old and too worn by meditation to go upon the stage
in anything above the grade of a patent-medicine show, she has been so
poisoned by instruction in sex hygiene that she shies at marriage, and
most of the standard professions and grafts of the world are closed to
her. The invention of the uplift came as a godsend to her. Had not some
mute, inglorious Edison devised it at the right time, humanity would
be disgraced to-day by the spectacle of hordes of Lady Ph.D’s going
to work in steam-laundries, hooch shows and chewing-gum factories. As
it is, they are all taken care of by the innumerable societies for
making the whole world virtuous and happy. One may laugh at the aims
and methods of many such societies—for example, at the absurd vereins
for Americanizing immigrants, _i. e._, degrading them to the level of
the native peasantry. But one thing, at least, they accomplish: they
provide comfortable and permanent jobs for hundreds and thousands of
deserving women, most of whom are far more profitably employed trying
to make Methodists out of Sicilians than they would be if they were
trying to make husbands out of bachelors. It is for this high purpose
also that the forward-looker suffers.