IS AMERICA YOUNG?
IS AMERICA YOUNG?
I
In 1719 an anonymous New England author who signed himself, rather
oddly, “your friend among the Oakes and Pines,” gave voice to the
doctrine that America was young. Speaking for his day, he said, “The
Plow-Man that raiseth Grain is more serviceable to Mankind than the
Painter who draws only to please the Eye.... The Carpenter who builds a
good house to defend us from Wind and Weather is more serviceable than
the curious Carver, who employs his Art to please the Fancy.” Only, he
continues, after further praise of labor, “when a People grow numerous,
and part are sufficient to raise necessaries for the whole, then ’tis
allowable and laudable, that some should be imployed in innocent Arts
more for ornament than Necessity; any innocent business that gets an
honest penny, is better than Idleness.”
When this anonymous social critic made his comments on the needs of
America there was but little more than a fringe of settlement along
the Atlantic coast. Boston, with a population of eleven thousand, was
about twice as populous as either of its two rivals, Philadelphia
and New York. The entire white population of North America was
considerably under half a million people. There were scarcely any roads
and no public means of transportation. Beyond the scattered coastal
settlements, the wilderness stretched three thousand miles to the
Pacific. Inhabited by savages and almost interminable in extent, the
work of subduing it to the needs of civilized man seemed to call, not
for centuries, but for millennia of physical effort.
Owing partly to the indomitable courage and partly to the insatiable
greed of the American people, but even more to the inventions of
science, what seemed a task for the ages has been accomplished in six
generations. On the Pacific coast to-day there are cities as populous
as were the greatest in Europe when our New Englander promulgated
his doctrine that America was young. Yet that doctrine is as firmly
embedded in the popular mind as ever. This is so obvious as hardly to
need emphasizing by example, but I may mention what I have noted within
a few three days.
When speaking to an American boy of seventeen in regard to certain
aspects of American life, he countered immediately with: “But America
is young. We are really only about a _hundred and fifty_ years old.”
In the course of conversation only yesterday with an Englishman, the
son of one of the great friends America had in England during our Civil
War, he said: “Of course you are _young_. We must wait.” In a letter
just received from a friend at home I find the same idea reiterated.
“We are _three hundred_ years old,” he writes, “England a thousand
years old. Will you venture the prophecy that in seven hundred more
years, when people have a competency, we shall not educate our sons and
daughters for service that does not have immediate economic returns?”
It is worth while to analyze such a persistent and almost universal
conception. Just what do we mean when we say that America is young?
Has the idea any validity, and what is the effect on the minds of those
who so easily use it?
By America, of course, we must mean the American people or the American
nation. It is obvious, however, that we cannot use the word nation in
this connection in a purely political sense. So rapidly does the loom
of history weave that we can now be ranked as among the older nations
of western civilization. As an independent and unified nation we long
antedate, for example, Italy, which was created only in 1860, or
Germany, which was first welded into a nation in 1870, to say nothing
of many of even later growth.
II
It is possible that in some minds the idea stems from that popular
analogy which would identify a nation or a society with an organism.
This analogy, however, like most analogies, is extremely dangerous.
It may illuminate certain likenesses between society and a physical
organism, but it is not a safe instrument with which to try to discover
new likenesses. Because we may fancy that certain functions of society
resemble those of an organism, it by no means follows that we can
interpret one in terms of the other. In spite of many sociologists
and writers on history, like Spengler, there is nothing to prove that
a society has its birth, growth, and death in the same way as has a
physical organism. Such a metaphor is merely suggestive, and is not
only unscientific but may be disastrously misleading. The individual
appears in his personal development to repeat the broad stages of
our racial development, but I fail to find any law supported by the
facts of history indicating that nations infallibly do the same.
To force the attempt to make any such law is to glide blindly over
such innumerable exceptions as would certainly invalidate any law in
scientific thinking. Not only do certain manifestations of cultural
life—æsthetic, intellectual, and other—appear in some nations and not
in others, but there seems to be no definite sequence in which they
appear when they appear at all. We may speak of a human being as young,
middle-aged, or old, but such terms lose all meaning when applied to a
nation as an organism.
Let us take Greece for example. Was Athens old or young in 450 B.C.?
It is not fair to say that she had just reached full maturity because
within a half century her architecture flowered in the completion of
the Parthenon, her sculpture in the works of Phidias, her poetry in
Æschylus, or her philosophy in Socrates and Plato. That is a mere
begging of the question. It is estimating the age by the achievement,
whereas, when we say that America is young, we are deferring the
possibility of achievement upon the score of age.
How old was England in the age of Elizabeth? How are we to estimate
the answer? Are we to date her birth in the period of the savage
Britons, the Roman conquest, the Saxon or Norman conquests, or when?
Are we to calculate her age by some stage of culture attained, by some
infusion of new racial blood, by the formation of a unified language,
government, or sense of nationality? How old England was in 1558 when
Elizabeth came to the throne is as insoluble as “How old is Ann?” Yet
if certain manifestations of culture go with certain national ages,
it ought to be easy to date a nation in such a marked phase as the
days of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Byrd, and the whole
galaxy of stars of the first magnitude. Nor was the spiritual heaven
of that time dotted only with such. One writer tells us that “the
young gentleman of Sidney’s day was as deft at turning a sonnet as his
present-day successor at stopping an approach to the green.” Another
says that music and song “were not the affair solely of intellectual
circles but the creation and inheritance of the whole people.” Poetry,
music, drama, philosophy, architecture—all the arts, as well as the
energy of practical life—were at full flood.
The very first foundation stones were being laid in the building of the
British Empire which was to continue to rise and grow until it covers a
quarter of the globe. We often hear the period spoken of as gloriously
_young_. Was England young or old? If she was young then, was she a
baby when the work of building cathedrals was in full swing in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries? If she was old and mature in 1600 was
she doddering in old age when another great outburst of art and thought
came in the years of Victoria? In one sense we may date the birth of
England in the age of Elizabeth. It was then that the seed was planted
of the great empire that was to be. Of practical activity there was
enough, it would seem to absorb the whole energies of any people: wars
by sea and land; business being pushed into new quarters of the world
in every direction; new commodities being found, new methods of doing
business being developed, new trade routes being opened up; attempts at
colonizing North and South America; a rebuilding of a large part of the
domestic architecture of the whole nation to meet altered conditions
of life—all these and other aspects of feverish business activity were
evident on every hand. Was it youth, maturity, or old age?
How old, again, is Italy? From one point of view she is to-day a
new nation, throbbing with new life, occupied with the problems of a
“new” country, developing a national consciousness and her national
material resources, as “young” as America. From another, she was old
when Cæsar lay in his blood. I have recently been in Czechoslovakia.
As a political nation she is only ten years old. As I passed through
her villages on the way from Dresden, they looked newer than Kansas,
the whole countryside having been rebuilt while the peasants were
afraid to put their money into anything but building on account of the
steady fall in the currency. In Prague I was told that the nation was
new, that the task of building it would absorb all the energies of its
people, that the work of developing its resources was overwhelming,
that for the present it “did not want learned men, artists, or writers,
but business men, engineers, practical men. Later,” my informant
continued, “the rest may come, but not now.” It was the New England
voice “from the Oakes and Pines” of 1719. Yet here and there one saw
on hilltops castles ten centuries old. In the fields one saw men in
the furrows following yoked white oxen as in the days of Virgil. Is
Czechoslovakia young or, from the standpoint of America, very, very old?
Does age mean the accumulation of resources from the past—old
buildings, cathedrals, picture galleries, and all the valuable
opportunities to see and to study? All these doubtless help, but
how much of all such did the common people of Athens have when they
crowded as multitudinously to hear the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides as the modern _hoi polloi_ of America crowd to see the latest
sex film on the screen? In 1787 we were nearly a century and a half
“younger” than we are now, but if we held a constitutional convention
in 1930 should we be able to send any better thinkers or more broadly
cultured men than those who drew up our first constitution? Would
the discussion and propaganda regarding a political problem to-day
show any advance in maturity and power of thought on the part of both
writers and readers over the papers of the _Federalist_? It may well be
that not only an outburst of art and literature, such as has happened
now and again in the world’s history, but the degree of a cultured
civilization to which a nation as, say the French, comes to attain,
have no ascertainable cause, that they come from combinations deep
in human nature too inscrutable to be observed or predicted. That is
probably the case, but if so why claim that they are the products or
accompaniments of a given age, and that we cannot expect them before a
certain period any more than in the human body we can look for puberty
or the growth of a beard or the coming of the wisdom teeth?
This question of national age becomes more puzzling the more we think
about it, but in trying to solve it let us turn to America, the land
that everyone says is young. We may, as we have seen, dismiss at once,
I think, certain interpretations of age. We may discard the thought
of any analogy with an organism. We can date a human being as five,
fourteen, twenty-one, or three score and ten years of age, and have
it mean something. We cannot date a nation as one century, five, or
twenty, and have it mean anything with scientific accuracy. Again, we
may discard the thought of independence or political nationhood. My
young friend, probably taught by his elders, evidently had that point
in mind. Arguing that way, we should be a century older than Italy or
Germany, but those who argue that America is young would not accept
that conclusion.
We have got, again, to dismiss as a criterion the stage of culture
which a people has arrived at—the arts, inventions, knowledge which
they have inherited from the past. Every settler who came to America
had behind him all the past just as much as did his family or neighbors
who remained behind. The seventeenth century English, Scotch, Germans,
Swedes, Dutch, and others who came here in our first century were not
barbarians. They had the entire inheritance from the past. They were
heirs of Greece and Rome, of the Reformation and the Renaissance, as
much as those who continued in the old countries; and every man who has
come here since has been of the same national age as those he has left
behind.
III
In analyzing this idea of our being a young nation, I cannot see that
there is any valid way in which to date ourselves as compared with
others, and I believe that the constant insisting upon this misleading
way of putting the truth (for there _is_ a truth about our case which I
shall elaborate in a moment) is beginning to do us deep hurt. I believe
that it would be far better for the development of our best selves,
individually and nationally, if instead of consistently thinking and
speaking of the American people as “young,” we should think and say
the clear truth, which is that we are an old people, the same age as
our European cousins, who _moved into an unsettled world_. Not only
is the content of these two ideas very different, but so also are the
inferences often very loosely and carelessly drawn from them.
The moving into a new country was bound to have important consequences.
Even the moving of a family into a new house usually marks a change.
The mere move itself is apt to bring about a feeling of excitement and
exhilaration if the move is for the better, or depression and sorrow
if it is for the worse. For a while after the move, also, there is
much to be done of a purely physical sort. One has to rearrange one’s
furniture, get “shaken down,” as we say; perhaps do all sorts of things
to house and garden; get used to a new neighborhood; find new shops;
learn new ways of doing old things; in a word, the whole routine of
daily life is altered for the time being, and our habits and the
enjoyment of our tastes are apt to be broken in upon until we get over
the pressing work of settling into the new place.
In moving into America there was much more involved, mentally and
physically, than in such a move as we have just described. Not only was
the break with the old home and the old associations more complete,
but everything, literally, from the ground up had to be done in the
new. The savages had to be fought; the land had to be cleared; the
houses had to be constructed; a new life, socially and institutionally,
had to be built up. I have pointed out elsewhere the effect of this
on the minds of the settlers. It is also, of course, a fact of great
significance for American cultural life that, speaking comparatively,
almost without exception all the immigrants who have ever come here
have been men of the lower middle and laboring classes. There was
nothing in America to attract any of the wealthy or professional ones.
With the exception of a few religious refugees, virtually all who have
come here have been “practical” men, who have come to better their
economic positions. They did not include in their numbers aristocrats,
scholars, poets, dramatists, artists, any of the classes who were
carrying on and developing the European cultural tradition. But in some
respects the arts were more diffused in their practice and enjoyment
among the lower classes in the Europe from which our earlier settlers
came than they are to-day. Many brought books and many a love and taste
for music and the various handicrafts, such as weaving, woodcarving of
houses and furniture, and other things, no less truly arts because they
were folk-arts.
The effort, however, to establish a European standard of living in the
wilderness was too great. The intellectual and æsthetic enjoyments of
life had to be laid aside until the practical duties of subduing the
wilderness had been fulfilled. All this is well enough understood.
But let us suppose for a moment that the North American continent had
consisted of that strip of land between the ocean and the Appalachian
range of mountains, beyond which we will place the Pacific. By 1776
practically all of this territory was settled as peacefully as was
England itself. In fact, much of it looked like England. Boston was
to all intents and purposes identical with an English provincial
town. Travelers reported that much of the New England countryside was
indistinguishable from that of old England. Wealth had accumulated;
colleges had been erected; the arts were beginning to flourish. In
the 1750’s the theater in New York offered a better repertoire than
could be found in any English provincial city of the time, and I am
not sure but as good as that of London itself, certainly better than
can be heard some years in New York now. Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, actors
of note in London, arrived in the colonies with their company and
remained twenty years. They acted in plays of Shakespeare, Addison,
Rowe, Congreve, Farquhar, Steele, and others; and in 1754 New York had
a season in which twenty-one different plays, the cream of English
dramatic literature up to that time, were heard by the public.
Such plays were also given in such a surprising list of places as
Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Hobb’s Hole, Port Tobacco, Upper
Marlborough, Petersburg, and Fredericksburg. The theatrical and musical
life of Charleston could hardly have been excelled, if it was, in any
provincial town in England.
In 1757 the first exhibition of paintings by colonial artists was held
in New York. Before long, Copley, Peale, Benjamin West, who later
became president of the Royal Academy, and Stuart were painting and,
with lesser figures, were in the way of establishing an American school
of art. Colonial architecture, domestic and public, was so good that
we do our best to reproduce it to-day, as was likewise the furniture.
Merchants in the North, country gentlemen in the South, lived much the
same lives as did their contemporaries of similar standing in the old
country. The ablest men of the colonies in innumerable instances held
legislative and judicial offices. There was no titled aristocracy,
there were no cathedrals or ruined castles from the past, life was
a little freer, less formal, considerably more open to economic
opportunity than in England; but so far from excusing themselves on the
ground of being a new people the colonials rather prided themselves on
living the same life and indulging the same tastes as their cousins
overseas. America was indeed provincial, but then, so also was all
England outside the one center of London. Much not only of the
talent but the genius of England had always been recruited from the
provinces, and America had made a good beginning two centuries ago in
contributing, among other types, men whose paintings hang to-day on the
walls of London galleries. Franklin’s fame was European. When Berkeley,
the English philosopher, was temporarily living in Rhode Island he
found no lack of agreeable society and intelligent conversation in the
circle in which he moved. The lower grades had permanently lost their
folk-arts and had taken on some frontier characteristics, but there was
every indication that a new civilization, following the main cultural
interests, values, and trends of the old, was arising rapidly after the
break due to the task of subduing the wilderness. Had the continent
been limited, as I suggested, to the seaboard strip, or had the people
chosen to expand gradually, there is no reason to suppose that the
cultural tendencies noted above as on the upward trend through the
eighteenth century would not have continued.
The continent, however, was not so limited. It stretched nearly
three thousand miles further. It was incredibly rich. Following the
Revolution, piece after piece of it, at intervals, came into the hands
of the descendants of those eighteenth century colonials, men quite
as much as women, who had begun to interest themselves in painting,
literature, drama, and music. The wealth to be made out of the West, a
constantly retreating West for more than a century, began to act as a
magnet on men’s minds and ambitions. Following the poorer classes who
went as hunters and settlers, there appear the agents of merchants,
bankers, and speculators. Astor made a fortune in furs. Others in
lands. Others in yet more ways. The craze for getting fabulously rich
quickly spread. The perpetual boom, broken only by sharp crises, in
which America has since lived, began. The nascent civilization on
the seaboard became violently deflected from its course. Scientific
inventions succeeded one another, and with every new method of
transportation—canal, good roads, steamboat, railroad—every new method
of mining, every new product to be utilized, every new foreign market
opened, the rush to win riches by raping a continent became madder and
madder.
It was not a question of preparing a continent for habitation. It
was one of money-maddened men furiously wrenching wealth from it in
every way their ingenuity and greed could devise—from the land, from
the forests above it, from the mines below it. Like hogs at a trough,
each man guzzled as hard as he could, regardless of all else, lest
some other hog should get ahead of him. In Germany they have been
rafting logs for a thousand years. The carefully tended and replanted
forests may well last for a thousand more. Rafting on the Mississippi
began, flourished, and was finished in seventy years. About 1840 the
American people as a nation owned forty billion feet of standing lumber
contiguous to the river and its tributaries. In seventy years private
individuals and companies had stripped the land of this magnificent
heritage without replacing a single tree. This was not “the task of
subduing a wilderness to make it habitable.” It was the madness of
lust—the meanest of all lusts, the lust for money.
To-day America is fairly glutted with wealth. It is useless to
enumerate the statistics—an advertising expenditure of a billion
dollars a year, savings deposits of twenty-eight billions, two hundred
and twenty-eight individuals reporting incomes of over a million a year
each, a national income of ninety billions.
IV
Is America still young? Is it not rather, perhaps, if we _must_ use
such figures of speech, that she was born at Jamestown in 1607, grew
to promising maturity by the second half of the eighteenth century,
and then, abandoning herself to the desire for expansion and sudden
wealth, deliberately turned her back on the way in which she had been
going? Those who say that America is young, still point to the future
as the time when we may be expected to begin to devote ourselves to
other things than “subduing a continent and accumulating the necessary
material resources on which to build a civilization.” In the name of
every high ideal that man has ever cherished, _when_ are we going to be
rich enough to begin as a nation, if we are not now, now that we have
gutted our heritage, piled up the greatest accumulation of wealth in
the world, accumulated the most stupendous material basis for living
that man has ever known?
I think it is at this point that the dangerous evil of our being
forever told by friendly or hostile critics that we are young comes
in. A boy who is really young realizes that there are some things he
cannot do until he is a man. He waits, but at the same time he prepares
himself. If we tell a child he is too young to do this or that, the
child is justified in believing it and in refraining from trying to
do it. Is there not danger in telling our people, young and old, that
America is young? Will it not merely serve to make them contented to
go on piling up wealth, to do what they have been doing for a hundred
years, and to keep them from playing the part of men as they should?
Many critics have pointed to the immaturity of the American mind.
There is a time to stop telling a boy he is young. There comes a time
when we must tell him to be a man, to do a man’s work and try to think
a man’s thoughts. If we keep on coddling him and telling him he is a
child of whom nothing is expected, we are not likely ever to make a man
of him.
Why should we be content to wait a hundred, two hundred, or seven
hundred years more before we think we shall be old enough to do
something besides provide the material foundation for a civilization
which we are told will somehow come of itself when we are grown up? If
we are told and come to believe that no matter what we do we cannot
lead a more spiritual life or have the culture of an “old” country in
less than so many centuries, any more than a boy of fourteen can make
himself twenty by trying, are we not giving ourselves an excuse to go
on piling up riches and exploiting the world without making an effort
to attain to a spiritual instead of a material plane of civilization?
On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as an old race, heirs of
all the ages, which was temporarily set back by having to move into a
new home, and that now we have not only got that home in order but have
added to it and become incredibly rich, and that therefore it is high
time we turned to something else, I believe it would be far better for
our self-respect and for our spiritual growth. To say that we are too
young is to put off the time of manhood beyond our power to attain, and
to stultify any hopes of our own day and generation. To say, on the
other hand, that we have made our move, got settled, and become rich
is to stir us to something better than spending our days devising more
means to get richer yet.
I do not believe we _are_ young. We are a century and a half older than
when a political gathering could include such minds as John Adams,
Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Marshall, and others. We are nearly
a century older than when in one corner of our land alone we could
have a group like Holmes, Whittier, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Emerson. I
believe in many ways we have already added much to the spiritual wealth
of the world. In our library systems, in our scientific foundations for
research, in a number of other ways, we have led the modern nations.
Why, then, still preach this debilitating doctrine that we are young
and nothing must be expected of us? Is it not time that we stopped
using that as an excuse to cover all our shortcomings, the desire not
to stop hunting after material gain, the refusal to stir our minds and
play a man’s part in the new world? Is it not time to proclaim that
we are not children but men who must put away childish things; that
we have overlooked that fact too long; that we have busied ourselves
overmuch with fixing up the new place we moved into three hundred years
ago, with making money in the new neighborhood; and that we should
begin to live a sane, maturely civilized life? To keep on telling our
children that they cannot expect this and that of America because she
is too young is to make self-indulgent, self-excusing mollycoddles of
them and of her. To say that we cannot yet turn to the spiritual things
of life because we still have material work to do, when we contrast our
own gorged state of material well-being with that of any other nation,
is sheer hypocrisy. If we merely want to continue to grow richer and
richer, and softer and softer, let us say so straight out and not
hide the truth under the plea of having to “develop the continent,”
that continent which Jefferson fondly hoped would leave us room for
expansion for a thousand years. Everything may be hoped from the child
who tries to be a man. Nothing can be hoped from the man who cloaks his
shortcomings or material selfishness or spiritual indolence under the
pretense of being a child.