If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give
up the search for our native “American” culture. With the exception of
the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to
be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American
culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of
cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made
it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This
will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous
genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry,
philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough,
American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are
least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness,
action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where
is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction,
the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity,
are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and
mediocre. American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting
into impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor
is it any better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective
of all the arts. We are inarticulate of the very values which we
profess to idealize. But in the finer forms--music, verse, the essay,
philosophy--the American genius puts forth work equal to any of its
contemporaries. Just in so far as our American genius has expressed
the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a
colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many
races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm.
And only as that pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the
American culture. As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the
“melting-pot,” our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was
something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light
of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox
that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be
what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of
attacking the future with a new key.
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become
something utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth-century
Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox
nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital
enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national
self-feeling. We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content
to avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has brought in
Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self-consciousness.
Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend
this scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to
fight if our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization which
armed contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of
honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded
by his jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and
not the mere jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical
violations of our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that
in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country’s sacred
honor, freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the
signal for turning our whole nation into that clan-feud of horror
and reprisal which would be war, then we find ourselves back among
the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and
realistic America of the twentieth century.
We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what mediæval
codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted
European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames it
and turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign
peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. An America,
“hyphenated” to bitterness, is somehow non-explosive. For, even if
we all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war
has set every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the
other side of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic
harmlessness.
What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in
this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In
that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic--between the
hyphenated German-American and the hyphenated English-American--there
have emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional
attitudes, points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues
of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious
struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind. We have seen
the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history
on which Victorian England throve and made itself great in its own
esteem. The clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a
contest between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies
as the incarnation of virtue-on-a-rampage; the fierce envisaging of
their selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and
democracy--all this has been thrown with intensest force against the
German realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and
the virility of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual
battleground of the nations.