No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or
Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghanies without feeling
that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing
in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the
Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and
communal. There may be no less litter and scrubbiness; the clustered
houses of the towns may look even more flimsy, undistinguished,
well-worn; but it is a litter of aspiring order, a chaos which the
people are insensitive to because they are living in the light of a
hopeful future. The East has pretty much abandoned itself to the tides
of immigration and industrial change which have overwhelmed it: no one
really believes that anything startling will be done to bring about a
new heaven and a new earth. But the intelligence of the West seems to
live in apocalyptic sociological--not socialistic, however--dreams.
Architects and business men combine half-heartedly to “save New York”
from the horrors of the Jewish clothing-trade invasion, but Chicago
draws great maps and sketches of a city-planning that shall make it not
only habitable but radiant and palatial.
Hope has not vanished from the East, but it has long since ceased
to be our daily diet. Europe has infected us perhaps with some of
its world-weariness. The East produces more skeptics and spiritual
malcontents than the West. For the Middle West seems to have
accomplished most of the things, industrial and political, that the
East has been trying to do, and it has done them better. The Middle
West is the apotheosis of American civilization, and like all successes
it is in no mood to be very critical of itself or very examinatory
as to the anatomy and physiology of its social being. No Easterner
with Meredith Nicholson’s human and literary experience would write
so complacently and cheerfully about his part of the country as Mr.
Nicholson writes about “The Valley of Democracy.” His self-confidence
is the very voice of the Middle West, telling us what it thinks of
itself. This, we say as we read, must be the inner candor which goes
with the West that we see with our eyes. So we like Mr. Nicholson’s
articles not so much for the information they give us as for the
attitudes they let slip, the unconscious revelations of what the people
he is talking for think important.
It is not a book of justification, although he would rather anxiously
have us take not too seriously the political vagaries like Bryanism and
Progressivism. And he wishes us to miss none of the symphony orchestras
and art institutes that evidently now begin to grow like grasshoppers
on the prairies. He treats himself rather as an expositor, and he
is explicitly informational, almost as if for a foreign country. He
sometimes has an amusing air of having hastily read up and investigated
Western wonders and significances that have been not only common
material in the Eastern magazines, but matter of despairing admiration
on the part of those of us who are general improvers of mankind. He
is naïve about the greatness of Chicago, the vastness of agricultural
production, the ravages of culture among the middle classes. He is
almost the professional Westerner showing off his prize human stock.
Mr. Nicholson does well to begin with the folksiness of the West. No
one who has experienced that fine open friendliness of the prosperous
Middle Westerner, that pleasant awareness of the alert and beneficent
world we live in, can deny that the Middle West is quite justified in
thinking of itself as the real heart of the nation. That belief in the
ultimate good sense, breadth of vision, and devotion to the common
good, of the “folks back home,” is in itself a guaranty of social
stability and of a prosperity which implies that things will never be
any different except as they slowly improve. Who can say that we have
no Gemüthlichkeit in America, when he runs up against this warm social
mixability which goes so far to compensate for the lack of intellectual
_nuances_ and spontaneous artistic sensibilities?
Of course the Middle West has to pay for its social responsiveness
in a failure to create, at least in this day and generation, very
vigorous and diverse spiritual types. An excessive amiability, a genius
for adaptability will, in the end, put a premium on conformity. The
Westerner sincerely believes that he is more averse to conventionality
than the Easterner, but the latter does not find him so. The heretic
seems to have a much harder time of it in the West. Classes and
attitudes that have offended against the “folks’” codes may be actually
outlawed. When there are acute differences of opinion, as in the war,
society splits into bitter and irreconcilable camps, whereas in the
East the undesirables have been allowed to shade off towards limbo
in gradual degrees. When hatred and malice, too long starved by too
much “niceness,” do break out from the natural man, they may produce
those waves of persecution and vindictiveness which, coming from a so
recently pacifist West, astonished an East that was no less densely
saturated with aliens but was more conversant with the feeling that it
takes all kinds of people to make a world. Folksiness evidently has its
dark underlining in a tendency to be stampeded by herd-emotion. “Social
conscience” may become the duty to follow what the mob demands, and
democracy may come to mean that the individual feels himself somehow
expressed--his private tastes and intelligence--in whatever the crowd
chooses to do.
I have followed Mr. Nicholson in his speaking of the Middle West as
if he thought of the region as a unit. He does speak as if he did,
but he does not really mean it. Much as he would like to believe in
the substantial equality of the people in the Valley of Democracy, he
cannot help letting us see that it is but one class that he has in
mind--his own, the prosperous people of the towns. He protests against
their being scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie. “They constitute
the most interesting and admirable of our social strata.” And he is
quite right. Certainly this stratum is by far the most admirable of all
the middle classes of the world. It is true that “nowhere else have
comfort, opportunity, and aspiration produced the same combination.” He
marvels at the numbers of homes in the cities that cannot imaginably
be supported on less than five thousand a year. And it is these homes,
and their slightly more impoverished neighbors, who are for him the
“folks,” the incarnate Middle West. The proletarian does not exist for
him. The working-classes are merely so much cement, filling in the
bricks of the temple--or, better, folks in embryo, potential owners of
bungalows on pleasant suburban streets. Mr. Nicholson’s enthusiasm is
for the college-girl wife, who raises babies, attends women’s clubs,
and is not afraid to dispense with the unattainable servant. It is
for the good-natured and public-spirited business man, who goes into
politics because politics in the Middle West has always been concerned
with the prosperity of the business community. But about the economic
foundation of this class Mr. Nicholson sounds as innocent as a babe.
Take his attitude towards the farmer. You gather from these pages
that in the Middle West the farmer is a somewhat unfortunate anomaly,
a shadow on the bright scene. Farming is scarcely even a respectable
profession: “the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers
are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling”! He
hints darkly at a decay in fiber. Only one chapter out of six is given
to the farmer, and that is largely occupied with the exertions of
state agencies, universities, to lift him out of his ignorance and
selfishness. The average farmer has few of the admirable qualities
of the Valley of Democracy. He is not “folksy”; he is suspicious,
conservative, somewhat embittered, little given to coöperation;
he even needed prodding with his Liberty bonds. In Mr. Nicholson’s
pages the farmer becomes a huge problem which lies on the brain and
conscience of a Middle West that can only act towards him in its best
moments like a sort of benevolent Charity Organization Society. “To
the average urban citizen,” says Mr. Nicholson, “farming is something
remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions
that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window
of a limited train.”
It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that
sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle
West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population.
Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an
urban minority--a small but significant class which has in its hands
all the non-productive business and political power--towards the great
productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in
plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself
as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and
social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this
light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an
analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country
town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to
say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising
sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public
or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local
interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local
businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business
community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the
part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country
town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its
beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation
in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get
something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment
of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement
and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto)
loses this character of real-estate speculation. This affords a common
bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly
masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic
pride, and the like.”
In other words, Town, in the traditional American scheme of things,
is shown charging Country all the traffic will bear. It would be hard
to find a member of Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West--that minority urban
class--who was not owing his prosperity to some form of industrial
or real-estate speculation, of brokerage business enterprise, or
landlordism. This class likes to say sometimes that it is “carrying
the farmer.” It would be more like the truth to say that the farmer is
carrying this class. Country ultimately has to support Town; and Town,
by holding control of the channels of credit and market, can make the
farmer pay up to the hilt for the privilege of selling it his product.
And does. When the farmers, getting a sense of the true workings of the
society they live in, combine in a Non-Partisan League to control the
organism of market and credit, they find they have a bitter class war
on their hands. And the authentic voice of Mr. Nicholson here scolds
them roundly for their restlessness and sedition. In this ferocious
reaction of Town against Country’s socialistic efforts to give itself
economic autonomy, we get the betrayal of the social malaise of the
Middle West, a confession of the cleavage of latent class conflict in
a society as exploitative, as steeply tilted, as tragically extreme
in its poles of well-being, as any other modern society based on the
economic absolutism of property.
A large part of the hopefulness, the spiritual comfort of the Middle
West, of its sturdy belief in itself, must be based on the inflexible
reluctance of its intelligentsia to any such set of ideas. However
thoroughly Marxian ideas may have saturated the thought of Europe
and become the intellectual explosive of social change, the Middle
West, as in this book, persists in its robust resistance to any such
analysis or self-knowledge. It is not that Mr. Nicholson’s attitudes
are not true. It is that they are so very much less than the whole
truth. They need to be supplemented by analysis set in the terms in
which the progressive minds of the rest of the world are thinking.
The intelligent Middle West needs to sacrifice a certain amount of
complacency in exchange for an understanding of the structure of
its own society. It would then realize that to read “The Valley of
Democracy” in conjunction with pages 315-323 of Veblen’s “Imperial
Germany and the Industrial Revolution” is to experience one of the most
piquant intellectual adventures granted to the current mind.