THE MUCKER POSE
THE MUCKER POSE
I
This borrowed title expresses better than any I have been able to
devise for myself a problem which has recently been put to me by
several of my American friends, men who on account of both their
profession and positions are familiar with the more cultured portion
of the American scene. The question which they put is one that I have
been hesitatingly asking myself as I contrast that scene on successive
returns from abroad with the one very obviously to be observed in
this respect in France or England. “Why,” they ask, “is it that a
gentleman in America nowadays seems afraid to appear as such; that
even university men try to appear uncultured; and that the pose of
a gentleman and a scholar is that of the man in the street?” A few
nights ago another friend of mine, a literary editor of some importance
in New York, complained in the course of the evening’s talk that the
verbal criticism of many of the writers whom he knew had descended to
the moronic classifications of “hot stuff,” “bully,” “rot,” and so on.
These writers, often meticulous in the artistry of their own work and
thoroughly competent to criticize acutely and intelligently that of
others, appeared afraid to do so lest they be considered as literary
poseurs. The real pose in their cases was in talking like news-agents
on a railroad train; but that appeared to them to be safe, whereas
vague danger lurked in conversing as would any intelligent French or
English critic.
The mucker-poseurs do not content themselves with talking like
uneducated half-wits. They also emulate the language and manners of the
bargee and the longshoreman, although where the profanity of the latter
is apt to have at least the virtue of picturesqueness, the swearing
of the mucker-poseur is apt to be merely coarse. A member of a most
distinguished family and a young graduate of one of our best-known
Eastern universities was overheard the other day in his university
club in New York describing his new position in the banking world. The
nearest to analysis or description of his work that this young scion
of American aristocracy with every social and educational advantage
could reach was to tell his friends that it was “the God-damnedest
most interesting job in the world.” Among both men and women of the
supposedly cultivated classes such profanity is much on the increase. I
know of a man who has recently declined to take foreign visitors to his
club for luncheon or dinner any longer on account of the unfortunate
impression which would be made upon them by the hard swearing of the
American gentlemen, mucker-poseurs, at the surrounding tables. One of
the finest scholars in the country, a man who once had distinguished
manners, has become not only extremely profane but exceedingly addicted
to smutty stories, both, apparently, in the effort to make himself
considered a good mixer and as a bid for popularity. If one wishes to
acquire an extensive and varied vocabulary of the most modern sort, one
has merely to watch the young ladies of the mucker-poseur type playing
tennis at Southampton or Newport.
Again, the mucker-poseur aims to act like the lowest of muckers when
he—and frequently she—gets drunk. Drinking in this country has ceased
to add any charm or grace to social life. On a sailing from New York
on the _Aquitania_ at midnight I counted twelve first-cabin women
passengers brought on board, all so drunk that they could not get up
the gangway without help. Many years ago, when I was a small boy of
twelve, I attended “Field Day” at one of the most exclusive private
boarding schools in the East. In the course of the day an address was
made by an old graduate on the subject of alcohol. To the surprise
and horror of the clerical head of the school, the good-natured but
somewhat inebriated speaker said nothing to condemn drinking, but he
threw out the comment, which is all I can now recall of his speech,
that “when you boys do drink, remember always to get drunk like
gentlemen.” That is something which our present generation of drinkers
have completely forgotten. They act in country clubs in a way which
would have been considered a disgrace to the patrons and patronized in
a disorderly house of a generation ago. It is a question not of a mere
decline in manners but of consciously striven-for pose.
In the case of the young this is more understandable, just as it is
more international. I am not here concerned, however, with (or at) the
vagaries of the younger and, in so many respects, admirable generation.
I am concerned with their elders, men who have lived long enough to
have developed personalities of their own, men who appreciate the value
of cultivating both mind and manners. Why should they be afraid to
appear as cultured gentlemen and assume as a protective coloration the
manners and level of thought of those who are beneath them?
The question would be a futile one unless we believed that manners and
culture possess genuine significance, a significance for society as a
whole as well as for the individual. It is all too evident that a large
proportion of the dwellers in our United States do not believe so, but
there is a large minority which does. Not to do so argues a failure to
think things through and ignorance of history and human nature. This
chapter deals with the contemporary attitude of many believers, and we
can but glance briefly, before passing to them, at the non-believers.
II
One of the most suggestive methods of modern study has been the
comparative. By the use of none other, however, are the unwary and the
untrained so likely to come to logical grief over a _non sequitur_.
The comparative study of habits and customs has revealed that both
moral and social conventions have varied from age to age, from place
to place, and from race to race. Immediately the unwary and untrained
jump to the conclusion that because there appear to be no eternal or
universal standards of morals and manners there is, therefore, no value
in a local, temporary, and but slowly changing one—a conclusion by no
logical possibility to be drawn from the premises. The result of this
particular and, at the moment, very popular _non sequitur_ has been to
cause in many persons a headlong jettisoning of their whole cargo of
morals, manners, and conventions, and the bringing about of a muckerly
chaos which arouses mirth or terror according to the temperament of
the social observer.
It would seem as though no sane person with a knowledge of the past of
his own species and any adequate insight into human nature could fail
to believe in the absolute need of _some_ standards, _some_ established
values, to save us from a derelict wallowing about in the welter of
sensations, impulses, attractions, and repulsions which form so much
of this strange dream we call life. The standards, the values, will
undoubtedly alter from time to time and from place to place; but that
does not invalidate the need of having some of them at any one given
time and place. Even the now much scorned minor conventions have
their effective influence upon conduct, remote or proximate. A story
is told of an English gentleman who was sent out as governor of an
island where the entire population save for his sole self was black and
savage. He dressed for his solitary dinner every night as carefully as
though he were about to take a taxi to the smartest residence in Park
Lane. He did so not from habit but from a knowledge of human nature.
“If,” he said, “I should drop this convention of civilized society, I
should find myself some day having dropped one and another of the more
important conventions, social and moral, and lower myself to the level
of the blacks whom I govern. Evening clothes are far more important
here than they ever were in London.”
As for the second point, lack of culture, it is most evident in the
extreme slovenliness in America in the use of the English language.
There is, of course, some slang which is not slovenly but which has
been born in a flash of genuine insight; and the language is always
being enriched by absorbing many such words from below, much as the
English aristocracy is by marrying or admitting commoners. But this is
not true of the vast mass of slang words and cheap and easy expressions
which are intellectually slovenly and nothing else; and anyone
habitually using them impairs the keenness of his mind as much as he
would the strength of his body by lolling in a hammock all his life.
There is no question but that slang, hackneyed phrases, and clichés
worn smooth make for intellectual laziness, and if constantly used blur
the sense of discrimination. The very first step toward a cultivated
mind is the development of the ability rationally to discriminate,
to distinguish between varying values and qualities. It is not easy,
and most of us Americans rarely achieve it in the cultural field. I
have often been struck by the different replies one receives from an
American and a Frenchman if you ask them what sort of person so-and-so
is. The American will usually find himself helpless and toss off a
mere “good scout,” “a great guy,” “a good egg,” whereas the Frenchman,
with a moment’s reflection, will give you in half a dozen sentences
a sharply etched sketch of the man’s distinctive characteristics, or
what he believes to be such, and classify him accurately as to type. To
describe anything accurately—book, picture, man or woman—so as to bring
out its unique individual qualities, calls for mental exercise of no
mean order. One has to train one’s self to do it and keep in training;
yet the ability to distinguish, if one of the first steps toward
culture, is also, in its higher forms, one of its most perfect fruits.
If one dodges every call for discrimination, if one gets no farther in
describing a book than “hot stuff,” one loses the power after a while
even if one ever possessed it. Slovenly language corrodes the mind.
These few observations as to manners and culture are well enough
understood by any cultivated person who has had social and intellectual
training and who has thought things through. He knows that there
are both values and dangers in life, that some things are more
valuable than others, and that if he has achieved any such social and
intellectual training he cannot lower himself to the general level
again without risk. If manners and culture have no value, there is
no question involved, but if they have—and we shall now assume that
they have—the man who possesses them is above, in those respects at
least, the vast mass of men who do not possess them. Why then should he
pretend not to, and assume the manners and mental lazzaronism of the
crowd? It may be that there is no answer to the question, but as I find
those better qualified than myself asking it, it is worth pondering
over, and I have come to think that there may be three fundamental
influences at work in America which will help us to solve it. One is
democracy as we have it, another is business, and the third is the
extreme mobility of American life.
III
In civilization no man can live wholly to or for himself, and whoever
would achieve power, influence, or success must cater to the tastes and
whims of those who have the granting of these things in their hands.
In a democracy, speaking broadly, those who have the power to grant
are the whole people; and the minds and manners of the people as a
whole are of necessity below those of the chosen few who have risen
above the average level by gifts of nature or happy opportunity. Every
social class everywhere has always had its own standards of morals,
manners, and culture. When such classes are separated by wide social
or economic chasms, the only influences they exert upon one another
are apt to be negative. Each lives in a world of its own, supported
by the only public opinion for which it cares, that of its own class.
Each also tends to react against the manners or morals of the other.
The aristocrats of an earlier day looked down upon the common people
and were more than ever satisfied with their own codes. The common
people, in turn, feeling themselves despised, bolstered up their egos
by despising the manners and morals of the class which looked down
upon them. Much of the Puritan movement in England and elsewhere has
here its roots. By no possibility could an ordinary laborer attain to
the manners, social ease, or knowledge of the world of a duke. Ergo,
the laborer, by unconscious mental processes well understood by modern
psychology, asserted his own worth by denying worth to the qualities
of the classes above him. He could not have the manners of a duke;
therefore, those manners were undesirable anyway. He could not travel
and he could not gain the most valuable sort of education, that of
association with great or cultivated men; therefore, such things were
of no importance. So long as the classes remain separated, as I said
above, their influence upon one another is largely negative, but when
class distinctions disappear in a democracy the mutual influences of
members of those former classes or their vestiges in later generations
become as complex in their action as the currents where tide and river
meet.
The effects of democracy in America have been emphasized by three
factors not present in any of the great democracies of Europe. In the
first place, the Americans started almost wholly fresh. Here were no
thousand-year-old institutions and forms of government and society
to be reckoned with as impediments. America was a clean slate. The
settlers did indeed bring with them habits, information, and memories
gained in the Old World, but they brought them to a wilderness.
In the second place, America has been built up exclusively by the
middle and lower classes, from which practically all of us have
descended. Scarcely a man has ever come and settled here who did
not belong to one or the other; and the most distinguished American
families form no exceptions. Every class in history has had its good
and bad attributes which have varied with class, country, and period.
The English middle class, upper and lower, from which the character
of America, with some modifications, has essentially been built
up, had admirable qualities, but it lacked some of those enjoyed
by the aristocracy. For our purpose here we need mention only one.
The genuine aristocrat insists upon being himself and is disdainful
of public opinion. The middle class, on the other hand, has always
been notoriously timid socially. It rests in terror not only of
public but even of village opinion. If the religious refugees of
New England be held an exception, it may be noted that the genuine
ones were far fewer than used to be supposed, and that as a whole
the New England immigration may be considered as part of the great
economic exodus from England which took thirty thousand Englishmen to
Barbados and little St. Kitts while only twelve thousand were settling
Massachusetts. Religious refugees have formed an infinitesimal part of
American immigration as compared with the economic ones.
The third great influence upon American democracy has been the
frontier, whose line was lapped by the waves of the Atlantic in 1640
and after retreating three thousand miles to the Pacific was declared
officially closed only in 1890. In the hard, rough life of the frontier
manners and culture find no home. As Pastorius, the most learned man
who came to America before 1700, said, “never have metaphysics or
Aristotelian logic earned a loaf of bread.” When one is busy killing
Indians, clearing the forest, and trekking farther westward every
decade, a strong arm, an axe, and a rifle are worth more than all the
culture of all the ages. Not only has the frontiersman no leisure
or opportunity to acquire manners and culture but, because of their
apparent uselessness, and in true class spirit, he comes to despise
them. They are effete, effeminate, whereas he and his fellows are the
“real men.” The well-dressed, cultivated gentleman becomes the “dude,”
object of derision, who, so far from exerting any ameliorating social
or intellectual influence, is heartily looked down upon; and culture
itself is relegated to idle women as something with which no real man
would concern himself.
These are some of the special attributes of American democracy, and of
any democracy in a new land, which it shows in addition to those it
would show in any case merely as a democracy. In America it was slow
in gathering into its hands the reins of power. For many generations
the English aristocratic tradition in part survived, and it may be
recalled that we were a part of the British Empire for a longer period
than we have been independent. In general, the “appeal to the people”
throughout the colonial period and the years of the early republic
was an appeal to “the best people” only. The first two presidents,
Washington and Adams, were as little democratic in doctrine as they
were by nature. Jefferson’s doctrinal democracy was largely offset in
practice by his being an aristocrat to his finger tips by nature, and
it was not until Andrew Jackson that “the people” in the democratic
sense came into their own. At his inaugural reception in the White
House his followers climbed upon the silken chairs in their muddy
boots to get a look at him, rushed the waiters to grab champagne,
broke the glasses, and in the joy of victory gave a number of ladies
bloody noses, and even the President himself had to be rescued from his
admirers and hurried out through a back door. This historic episode may
be taken to mark the turning-point in American manners. These people
had made a President. Thereafter their tastes would form one of the
national influences.
IV
It is this new democracy, a hundred times richer and a shade less
raw, which is in the saddle to-day. What has it done in the way of
influencing manners and thought? Leaving all else aside, even at the
risk of drawing a false picture, we shall consider only those points
which may help to answer our first question. For one thing, then, it
has knocked the dignity of its elected officials into a cocked hat.
Leaving out of the scene many of its chosen, such as the mayor of
Chicago or its favorite, Bryan, it forces a man to play the mountebank
and, whatever the character of the man himself, to appear as one of
“the people.” Washington was a very human man but he never forgot that
he was a gentleman. He was adored by his soldiers, but he won their
deep affection without ever for a moment losing the dignity of his
character and manner. One has only to imagine what would have happened
had a group of his men shouted “Atta Boy, Georgie!” to realize the
gulf between his day and ours. When John Quincy Adams was President,
he declined to attend a county fair in Maryland, remarking privately
that he did not intend that the President of the United States should
be made a sideshow at a cattle fair. To-day, the people insist that the
President be a sideshow; and Roosevelt, with amused understanding, in
his cowboy suit and his Rough rider uniform, used his “properties” as
does an actor. Even the supremely conventional Coolidge had to dress
up in a ten-gallon hat and chaps, although utterly out of character,
and looking so. Just as I write these lines, my attention is called to
an announcement in large type in this morning’s _New York Times_ that
it will publish next Sunday “photographs of Herbert Hoover in workaday
clothes and a panorama of his ranch.” So he, too, is cast for the
comedy. Democracy cracks the whip, and even the most conservative of
candidates and officials must dance. In the campaign of 1916 it is said
that Hughes was politely asked to shave his beard to suit the people.
He balked and consented only so far as to trim it. But then he lost the
election.
The people want officials in their own image. Such men as Elihu Root,
Joseph Choate, or John Hay are rarely elected, only appointed. To get
anywhere in elective politics one must be a “good mixer,” and to be a
good mixer one must shed a good part of one’s culture and a good part
of one’s manners. Dignity to a considerable degree must be discarded.
One must conceal one’s knowledge of English and learn the vernacular,
except for “orations.” Henry Adams, when he became a newspaper
correspondent in Washington, said that he had to “learn to talk to
Western congressmen and to hide his own antecedents.” It is what every
gentleman who desires to take part in elective public life on a large
or small stage in the country to-day has to do to some extent except
for happy accidents.
Our democracy has fostered education, at least to the extent of almost
fabulously increasing the numbers of the reading public. What has been,
for the purpose of the present argument, the effect of that? There has
been one effect, at least, germane to this discussion. It has greatly
lowered the tone of our public press. Such newspaper men as I know
agree with me that there has been a most marked decline even in the
last twenty years, and they agree with me as to the cause. In the old
days a newspaper was largely a personal organ, and what appeared in it
reflected for good or ill upon the editor, who was known by name to all
its readers. In New York the _Sun_ was Charles A. Dana. The _Tribune_
was Horace Greeley. To-day we know no editors, only owners. The
newspaper of to-day aims only at circulation, and with every increase
in circulation the quality has to be lowered. The case is well known
of the purchaser a few years ago of what had been one of the country’s
most distinguished journals, who told his staff that thereafter they
would have to “cut the highbrow” and write down to the level of the
increased public he intended to go after. First the “yellow press,”
then the tabloids, taught the older newspapers what fortunes awaited
those who would stoop to pick them up by catering to the masses. A
newspaper depends on its advertising for its profits. Advertising
quantity and rates depend on circulation. Increased circulation spells
decreased quality. There is the vicious circle which has been drawn for
us by the huge mob which has become literate but not educated.
The discovery of the possibilities of mass circulation has caused the
advertisers to raise their demands. Some will not advertise at all in
journals with a circulation of less than half a million. Advertising
is withdrawn from those journals which heroically venture to maintain
their quality at the expense of not increasing their circulation.
Financial ruin usually results. The people are evidently getting the
kind of papers they want, but in doing so they are depriving the
cultured class of the sort _they_ want, and used to get before America
became so “educated.” We get foreign cables about the Prince of Wales
dancing with Judy O’Grady, or the doings of sex perverts in Berlin,
and the treatment of our domestic news is beneath contempt. The other
night I examined what used to be one of the leading papers not only
in New York but in the whole country and I found no headline on three
consecutive pages which did not refer to scandal or to crime. It has
been said that the new reading public has not interfered with the old,
that there are simply vast numbers of new readers of a different type
who are being supplied with what they want. That is not wholly true,
and the competition of the new market has had a heavily detrimental
influence on the older journals. To-day if a man wishes to succeed in a
journalistic career on the daily press he has to scrap even more of his
qualities as a gentleman and a scholar than he has to in a career of
politics.
The democratic spread of education has also had detrimental effects
in other ways. The necessity of finding instruction for the enormous
numbers who now go to school, high school, and college has caused a
demand for teachers which has far outrun the supply of those qualified
to teach. Great numbers of these teachers have even less social and
cultural background than have their students. Under them the students
may learn the facts of some given subject, but they gain nothing in
breadth of culture or even in manners. It is an old story that Charles
Eliot Norton once began a lecture at Harvard by saying, “I suppose
that none of you young men has ever seen a gentleman.” The remark was
hyperbolic, as was intended, but it is only too likely to-day that many
young men can go through some of our newer “institutions of learning”
without seeing at least what used to be called a gentleman. In the
professions, more particularly medicine and law, complaint is rampant
that they are being swamped by young men who know only the facts of
the profession (when they know those) and have no cultural, ethical,
or professional standards. A few such could be ignored. When they
come, as they are coming now, in shoals, they lower the tone of the
whole profession and, without standards themselves, force an unfair
competition upon those who try to maintain them.
V
Perhaps the greatest pressure on the individual to force him to be
wary of how he appears to others is in business, for the overwhelming
mass of Americans are in the varied ranks of business of some sort or
another. One who has reached the top and “made his pile” may, perhaps,
do more or less as he pleases, subject only to milder forms of social
pressure; but for those on the way the road is beset with pitfalls.
Nearly every man wants to make himself popular with his employers, his
fellow-workers, his office superiors, or his customers. These are made
up of all sorts of men, but the sprinkling of gentlemen and scholars
among them is so slight as to be almost negligible for the purpose of
helping one’s advancement. In America, to an extent known nowhere else,
organization is used for every purpose. It is hardly too much to say
that there can hardly be an American who is not a member of from one to
a dozen organizations, ranging from Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Red Men,
Masons, Mechanics, the Grange, and dozens more, to Bar Associations,
Bankers’ Clubs, and social and country clubs innumerable. Some of the
larger corporations, notably the banks and trust companies in New York,
now have clubs made up entirely of members of their own staffs, with
obvious intent. In many lines of business the effect produced by one’s
personality at the annual “convention” is of prime importance. For
business reasons it is essential that men should be at least moderately
popular at all such organizations or meetings. On an unprecedented
scale, tacitly understood but not openly acknowledged, there is
competition for personal popularity. In many lines, such as stock
brokerage where the service is almost wholly personal, it is needful to
“play with your customers,” the necessity varying not with their social
congeniality but with the size of their account. In salesmanship of all
sorts the results of the “personal approach” are, of course, of the
first importance.
In order to gain popularity with a very large proportion of business
men, many of whom have to-day risen from nothing to riches since the
War, one thing is fundamentally necessary. You must never appear to
be superior even if you are. Not long ago one of the New York banks
added a new vice-president. He was chosen not for his ability but for
his hearty vulgarity, so that he could “make contacts” with the bank’s
new sort of customers! Too perfect an accent in English may be almost
as dangerous in business as a false one in Latin used to be in the
House of Lords. To display a knowledge or taste in art or literature
not possessed by your “prospect” may be fatal. On the whole, it is
safest to plump yourself down to his level at once whatever that may
be, to talk his talk, and only about what he talks. This pressure of
the majority on one’s personal tastes was amusingly exemplified to me
one day when I was looking for a house to rent in a pleasant Jersey
suburb. In the house shown me—as is the case in all the suburbs of
New York I know—there was nothing to mark where my lawn might end and
my neighbor’s begin. All was as open to the public gaze as the street
itself. I thought of delightful English or French gardens, surrounded
by hedge or wall, screened from the public, where one could putter
absurdly over one’s plants, read one’s book, or have one’s supper as
much to one’s self as in the house. In fact they are outdoor rooms,
infinitely more attractive than the American “sun parlor.” I knew well
that no such attempt could be made here, but, nevertheless, I remarked
to the “realtor” that it would be pleasant to have a hedge and privacy
but I supposed it could not be done on account of the neighbors. “I
say No,” he answered with pained surprise, “if you are going to be
‘high hat’ you won’t last long here.” Just so, and so many things in
this country are “high hat” which in other lands simply make for sane
and cultivated living that it is no wonder that the business man whose
car and cellarette, if not bread and butter, depend so often on his
popularity, has to walk warily.
Just why having a garden-wall, speaking one’s native tongue correctly,
or being able to discriminate in matters of art or literature should be
the Gallic equivalent of “high hat” would puzzle a Frenchman, but so it
often is in the land of the free. And no one knows his way about the
land of the free better than the business man. The pressure may vary
with his position and the kind of business he is in, but in general he
will soon discover that in any business where personal contact is a
factor, the people with whom he deals and upon whose good will he has
to lean will insist upon his not being too different from themselves.
In Greenwich Village a man may wear a flowing tie and a Spanish hat,
but it would be suicidal for a bond broker. One has to conform or
one is lost. Our two most successful business men are perhaps John
D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Rockefeller says it is a “religious
duty” to make as much money as you can, and Ford has informed us
that “history is bunk.” The one standard of success in business—and
perhaps its stark and easily grasped simplicity is what attracts
many Americans—is the amount of money you make from it. There are
no foolish nuances. Most Americans are business men. Whatever ideals
they may have had in college, and to a considerable extent whatever
manners they may have inherited or acquired, they begin to shed, unless
their niche is an unusually sheltered one, when the real nature of
the excoriating modern business competition dawns upon them. Little
by little as they “learn the game” they conform to their customers or
associates.
VI
Another characteristic of American life is its extreme mobility. People
move up and down in the social scale and round about the country
like bubbles in a boiling kettle. Social life everywhere here is in
a constant flux. I left Wall Street, where I was in business, and
a certain suburb where I then lived, fifteen years ago. To-day the
personnel of “the Street” as I remember it is almost as completely
changed as are the symbols on the ticker. In the suburb where I
once knew everyone, at least by name, I know scarcely half a dozen
households. People are forever making or losing money, arriving in new
social sets, living in Pittsburgh or a mining camp one year and in
Los Angeles or St. Paul the next. This has a marked effect on social
independence. When a family has lived for many generations in the same
place, or, as have many county families in England, for centuries,
they acquire a social position almost wholly independent of their
individual members at a given time. Indeed, a member is almost an
accident and may be as erratic and independent as he pleases. He still
remains a so-and-so of so-and-so, known to all the countryside. An old
hereditary title accomplishes the same result. Here and there in New
England villages or in the South there are families who approximate
this happy condition, but in the constant movement of the life of most
Americans it is necessary for them to depend wholly upon the effect of
their personalities and bank accounts. A man whose family has lived
in the “big house” in a small Massachusetts town for a century or
two is sufficiently “somebody” there almost to be independent; but
should business require him to move to Kalamazoo he is nobody until
he “shows them.” The social reputation, immunity, and freedom which
long residence in one place gives without effort or thought has to be
built again from the ground up, and warily, when one moves to another
town where they know not Joseph. One joins the organizations in the
new town, and, again, one conforms. To begin in a new place by being
“different” is dangerous; to begin by being too superior, even if
actually, unconsciously, and with no wish to appear so, may be fatal.
Like myself, had I gone to that Jersey suburb and made a little privacy
round my garden, the newcomer might be voted “high hat” and not “last
long.”
In assuming the “mucker pose” the gentleman and scholar does not, of
course, descend as low as the “mucker”; but he does, in self-defense,
for the sake of peace and quiet, for business success, and for the
sake of not offending the motley crowd of all sorts whom his neighbors
are apt to be in the seething, changing society everywhere today, shed
enough of his own personality not to offend the average. He avoids
whatever others may think “high hat” in manners or culture as he
would the plague. Like Henry Adams he will find himself hiding his
antecedents if they happen to be better than the neighbors’.
This possible answer to my friends’ question does not necessarily
indict democracy and American life. Both have brought new values into
the world of other sorts. I am merely pointing to one of the possible
losses. For it _is_ a loss when a man deliberately uses worse manners
than he knows how to use, when he tries to cover up his intellectual
abilities, or when he tries to be average when he is above it. A
business-democracy has accomplished a great task in levelling up the
material condition of its people. It may be asked, however, whether
there is no danger of a levelling down of manners and culture. Perhaps
the new values gained offset the old ones in some danger of being lost,
but it may, even in America, be left to one to question, to ponder, and
to doubt. Is the mucker pose really forced on one? People adopt it,
evidently, because they think it is the thing to do and essential to
make them quickly popular. It does not always work, even in business.
A dignified man of science was recently explaining to an applicant for
a position some new research work he had been doing. The young Ph.D.
was intensely interested. When the scientist concluded, he asked the
flower of our highest university training what he thought of it. “Hot
Dog!” was the immediate and enthusiastic answer, which, in this case,
promptly blasted the young man’s career in _that_ laboratory. It would
not have done so generally, however, and we come back to business as
conducted to-day, and the character and background of our business
leaders as, perhaps, the main contributing cause of forcing the mucker
pose.
We can prate as we like about the idealism of America, but it is
only money success which really counts. What are ideals or culture
or charming manners as compared with business? What in the last
presidential campaign did two leaders of opinion tell us, one from
the Pacific and the other from the Atlantic coast? Mr. Hoover, in
his address replying to the welcome given him by the people of San
Francisco, told them that the most precious possession of their great
city was—what?—_their foreign trade_! In New York, the _Sun_ in its
editorial explaining its intention to support the Republican party,
admitted that the Prohibition question was “a live campaign topic,”
and that present conditions might be “intolerable” and “a morass of
lawbreaking,” but asked whether it was well to risk loss of prosperity
for the possible reform of those conditions. In America to-day business
life is not the basis for a rational social life, but social life is
manipulated as the basis for an irrational business one. One makes
acquaintances and tries for popularity in order to get ahead downtown.
To an unprecedented extent the people who have money in all lines of
business are newcomers from far down in the social scale, men with no
culture and no background, and often no manners. We may note our new
class of multi-millionaire landlords who have built fortunes out of
shoe-strings since the War. Two of our now greatest industries have
been wholly evolved in the last two decades, and one certainly does
not look for culture among the kings in the motor and moving-picture
trades. The “people” who came into political power under Jackson made a
huge grab at economic power under Grant, but it has been reserved for
the present to “make the world safe for democracy.” The old class which
had inherited manners and culture as essential to an ordered life
has abdicated mainly for mere lack of funds. In business for the last
decade it has been for the most part the conservatives, who had much to
lose, who have lost, and the reckless who have won.
Business may explain the mucker pose, but it may be asked whether those
who adopt it are not traitors to all that is best in the world and
which has been so hardly built up. An impoverished aristocrat may sell
his title in marriage for one generation to rehabilitate his house, but
Americans who sell their culture and their breeding to truckle to the
unbred in business, who shed these things of the spirit for motor cars
and all the rest of the things of the body, are taking refuge in a yet
more ignominious surrender. They may thus pick up some of the golden
drippings from the muckers’ tables, but they do not gain the respect of
the muckers whom they imitate, and may yet awake to the fact that they
have properly forfeited even their own.