of the very stuff of the Revolution which, indeed, is the expression in
terms of urgent human need of just these values. At the heart of
socialism and communism, bequeathed to it direct by romantics like
Rousseau who saved it from the contradictory theological impedimenta of
the church, lies a view of men and of man which the degenerate humanisms
of the eighteenth century and the sectarian Protestant creeds had
abandoned. It is the view of human history as one organic body, growing
by tragic effort toward consciousness and justice; it is the view of the
individual (in so far as he is _real_) as an integer of this body, so
that the health of the whole and the health of every part are one; it is
the view that universal meaning is inherent in material behavior, and
therefore, that society becomes by its actions the immanent presence of
timeless value. This view, which I call the _organic_ view, is implicit
in every major artist, however dissident may be his intellectual
convictions. It runs with infallible continuity from the Egyptian
sculptors and the Hebrew prophets through the patrists, through the
builders of the Gothic, through the great sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century founders of modern science, through the systems of
Spinoza and Hegel—ineluctably leading to the historical-prophetic vision
of Karl Marx.
But in the eighteenth century there had grown strong a countercurrent in
the thought of Europe. So successful was the conquest of facts about
material bodies, the capture of their movements in the laws of
mechanics, that certain men, hungry like all men for simplifications,
cut down the organic humanisms of Erasmus and Rabelais, the organic
rationalisms of Spinoza and Newton, to a dogmatic empiricism of the five
senses. Theirs was a “universe” containing everything that moved by
mechanical law—everything, that is, except life. And the victories of
applied science were so great that these shallow empiricists swelled in
prestige; while the organic view grew enfeebled, being confined to
artists with no “scientific” magic to win them credence, to mystics
overburdened with theologies that contradicted their intuitions, and to
simple men and simple women with no intellectual weapons.
The nineteenth century, of course, brought giants who, in philosophy,
literature and the sciences, revived the organic view. In Marx, who
belongs to his century’s great tradition, the organic view of man is
fundamental, and is complete as in perhaps no other modern thinker
except Spinoza and Goethe. But this shallow empiricism was in the air.
Marx, overanxious to attack theological creeds and theological
metaphysics, at times fell into the use of easy terms borrowed from the
vulgar materialists whom he despised as much as he hated the idealists
against whom he aimed them. There are contradictions in Marx—great
prophet, great historical philosopher, great economist, but too harried
a man to be a complete logician. Often on the same page with an
unsurpassed word about man’s primal unity, in thought and deed, with the
dynamic principle of all life, one will find uncritical outcroppings of
sensationalism, phrases from the eighteenth-century materialists whom he
rejected, implicit denials of the validity and primacy of man’s
intuitive organic sense—all of which betray the premise of the Marxist
dialectic. These flaws in his work have been stressed as virtues in our
Western world by sterile men to whom a dogmatic reduction of life to the
report of the five senses offers comfort; and it has been a blight upon
our revolutionary growth.
I have no time, nor need, to expatiate upon the symptoms of this blight.
The course of socialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany,
France, England, America, is full of them. Witness the degradation, one
might almost say the disappearance, of the _true person_ from
revolutionary letters as the individual is shrunk from an organic
integer of cosmos to a mere quantitative factor of the collective mass,
possessing no inwardness—in consequence of which the human mass likewise
becomes denatured. Witness the simplification of the human being to a
passive product of environment—a fallacy which any man who has ever
planted a carrot seed next to a pea in a garden knows enough to laugh
at. And the failure, in judging the course, both hideous and heroic, of
contemporary events, to allow, in some adequate modern term, for what
our fathers fancifully called the demonic and the angelic aspects of
human nature. Witness the degradation of literature from being an
integral part of life’s creative process to a mere reflection of events
falsely conceived as “objective” or to a mere instrument for some
surface action. Witness, in such poor thought as this, the decay of
logic and the decay of metaphysics. Witness, above all, the dangerous
failure to distinguish between the true essence of religion—its creative
role in human culture—its major role, indeed, in the genesis of
socialism, and religion’s outworn theological and class superstructures.
All such systems indicate the contempt for human life and destiny which
comes when man is cut off from his primitive participation in the cosmos
without finding a conscious synthesis (the task of the writers!) to
replace it: all, regnant in the vulgar revolutionary thought of Western
Europe and America, strike at the very heart of revolutionary meaning.
In agricultural lands, such as Russia, China, great sections of America
Hispana, the folk have not lost that immediate integration with life,
through soil and self, which is the organic sense in its first phase.
The revolutionary doctrines of the West, even with their present
limitations, tend to free these peoples from the imposed dualism of
their priestcraft, to discipline them for technical advance against the
cloudy helplessness in which their misery has mired them, and to release
their instinctive monism so that it should flow with ease into the
organic view and form of a communist order. This procedure is
particularly plain in the Soviet Union where, despite an orthodox
terminology which frequently sounds mechanistic or traditionally
dogmatic, the true foundations of organic Marxism are understood and are
being passionately enacted by the people.
In our industrialized countries, the case is different. Science,
prostituted and misapplied, has for a hundred years plowed down the
primitive monistic intuitions of the masses: the same vulgar empiricism
which attaints our literature flouts its obscene excesses in every penny
paper, every school, every church. The stress on the “environmental,”
the “behavioristic,” the “economic” man, the failure to appeal, in
revolutionary terms, to _the whole man_, stimulates the mechanolatry to
which we are already enslaved; dims further our enfeebled sense of
wholeness from which alone fertility and power issue; and threatens our
whole birth-period with disaster.
I do not deny the economic-political causes of fascism. But only
psychological and cultural factors in all the people can explain its
spread. Among these factors, pre-eminently in Germany, was the failure
of both great revolutionary parties to lead forward into fresh forms of
loyalty and action those primordial intuitive energies of man which,
balked of their future, flow back into the rotted channels of church,
state, race, devotion to a Fuehrer mouthing decayed loyalties—there, of
course, to be exploited by the sinister high priests of Money.
I do not mean that the revolutionary cause in its present form fails to
enlist the heroic loyalties of numbers of men and women. The
concentration camps of Hitler give the lie to such a statement, as does
every industrial struggle of the world from the Saar to California,
where you will find them: the young crusaders for Man, the geniuses of
social vision, clear-eyed, quiet of soul. These are the gifted vanguard
who, of their own lyric health, absorb and express what is deeply
organic in the revolutionary movement. But the world cause cannot rely
exclusively on heroes or on the natural poets of action. Its Word must
be such as to fire also the more cautious, the more conservatively
rooted. And the more subjectively sensitive must also be entrained,
those hosts of men and women (teachers, poets, mothers, subtle and
humble craftsmen) whose religious and esthetic instincts are balked by
the antireligious and antiesthetic conventions of most Marxists. For
each youth who is driven into the fascist ranks because he finds it easy
to adore his own petty ego magnified in a Fuehrer or a Duce, there are a
score of men and women too decent and intelligent to be tempted by these
obscene gestures, who yet remain unmoved while the world cries for them,
because the appeal of Revolution _seems_ to deny those very depths of
man, secret and mysterious, whence the creative will and energy must
issue.
The New World of which the old world is in travail is like an embryon.
Until it be whole, it cannot be born. What intimate _knowing_ moves the
embryon, long after its organs and muscles are complete? This knowing of
completeness is the final phase of completion. When it is there, and not
before, the being issues forth; a new life breathes.... I sometimes feel
that all the organs, the limbs, the brain and nervous system, of the New
World exist. They are the laws of science, the methods of production and
communication, the treasures of literature, art, religious wisdom; and,
embodying these, the mass of workers possessed of the will and the
power, together with their indispensable leaders, drawn from all
classes, the intellectuals, the teachers, and technicians. Why, in this
hour of travail, when death threatens the generations of man, does not
the new life issue? The final integrality is lacking ... the final
completeness which is organic consciousness, the _knowing_ harmony of
all the parts, making them move to life, making them breathe together.
This, within the ready social body, is the function of the writer.
4. TERRE HAUTE HOTEL
Outside the nine cells[16] of our ward runs a corridor which is left
open part of the day, and through its barred windows I can see the
country. Right under my eye is the mellow muddy river that Theodore
Dreiser’s brother sang, long ago. On the banks of the Wabash I see a
huge pile of discarded cars, rust-rotted fragments of machines, shanties
paintless and broken-roofed, the homes of human discards among the
industrial refuse. This view outside the jail makes me feel at home in
the jail. The bars shut me into, rather than out of, a familiar world.
The men in the ward enhance my feeling of having come more close to the
America that put me here. There are details, of course, inanimate or
crawling, to which I am not used; but like the iron-barred windows, the
grated doors, these separating elements are superficial; they do not
avail against the growing knowledge that to be in this jail, among these
men, and with the police and the chamber of commerce outside, is to be
at the heart of a common experience and (given the society we live in)
to be in the right place.
The men of our ward have set up a “kangaroo court” to deal with their
day-by-day needs, problems primarily of supplementing the vile, scant
prison food, of bringing in tobacco, of keeping the ward comparatively
clean. The chief of the court is a big fellow whom I’ll call Jack, a
natural leader. Jack’s boyhood was rooted in the shanties along the
banks of the Wabash; joy for him, from the earliest days, meant escape
from everything familiar—and the best means to it, whisky. Jack found a
good job in a local gymnasium. One night of payday, he left a bootleg
dive and was attacked by a gang who knew that he had dollars in his
pocket. There was a fight; a policeman butted in, and a chance blow of
Jack’s great fist sent him to the pavement, fracturing his skull. The
cop died, and when Jack got out of jail, the police hounded him and no
more jobs were open. Jack had to eat, he had to drink, he had to have a
girl; so he became a bootlegger. From then on, he has spent half his
time in jail. When he’s out, he falls inevitably back into the one way
he can think of to make a living: a way of disorder, of course.
But here in jail (where he has more essential freedom than outside),
Jack is an orderly man. His cell is clean, his clothes, his toilet
articles, his library of magazines, are arranged in shipshape fashion.
With a Flit can, he holds the bugs in abeyance. And with his authority
as chief of the kangaroo court, he keeps order in the ward, teaching the
newcomers and the vags who are let in for the night their duties and
their places. Jack is a great reader, and if what he reads is trash, the
reason is that trash is all he knows—a point in common with the
vigilantes. He is the kind of taciturn man who, when he talks, talks
well. I note, in his description of his friendship with the little
children of his brother, the tenderness that is in him, the kind of
tenderness that I have often felt in preadolescent boys for very little
children. Utterly wanting in Jack is a critical sense of the society he
lives in, is a concept for understanding and bettering his place.
Mentally, spiritually, he is a child, because he has been stopped from
growing; but in his fixedness of immaturity certain virtues of the boy
remain untarnished. I observe this, when he comes into my cell, of his
own accord, and shows me the trick of driving the bedbugs to cover. And
I shall not forget his bringing out to me, as a spread for my bread, his
jar of peach preserve, a homemade gift from his mother; and his
sensitive lie, when he feels my hesitation (I know already what good
food means in jail): “Go ahead, eat all you want—I don’t eat that stuff
much.”
Jack’s right-hand man is Pop, who supervises the ward’s housework,
cooking, cleaning, laundry; an old man of sixty doing time for perjury.
Pop’s grey face has a beauty difficult to decipher, until one catches
its two main elements: a childlike, animal gaiety impervious to
experience and an old man’s pain, the two transfused into a mask, sly,
ironic, covering them both. Pop also is a child; he’d play treacherous
tricks on you if he chose; that is clear. But it is also clear that if
you touch his emotions decently, he may not choose. He’s a child brought
up among hostile and undiscerning masters. He does not question their
authority, nor does he conform. He escapes by remaining in the limbo of
his boyhood, a psychological place beyond good and evil but saturated
with feeling and humor.
Tony is the kind of chap who affects white buck shoes, and even in stir
tries to keep them polished if not clean. He wears a saffron necktie and
his blond hair is pushed up from his vague blue eyes in a pompadour.
Tony is being held for manslaughter—killing a truckman while driving his
car in a state of intoxication. He used to be an iron molder; but
molding jobs have run thin in the mills since the production of capital
machines has dwindled; and bad times have reduced him to the status of a
common laborer. He likes the boys in jail; he’s having a good time doing
nothing.
In this, he is like the farm boy from the Kentucky border—Willie—who
denies the grand larceny charge that has put him here, but visibly
enjoys his moratorium from cribbing corn and milking. Willie, with
brand-new blue overalls, curled-up amber hair, baby blue eyes, could
take the part of the farmer’s son in the melodrama, the youth smelling
of clover who comes to the big city to reclaim his girl lured by the
wicked traveling salesman. Willie is handsome, nonchalant, illiterate,
with many a childish virtue. Back on the farm he has a wife and two
kids. He is glad to be free of them for a while, and time for him does
not go beyond the vague measure of a season.
When night falls, the lock on the door frequently grinds and the
homeless men are turned in for a night’s lodging. Not to dull my story
(which has a point, if you’ll be patient), I’ll describe but two of
these night-guests. One is an old man, dweller in the filthiest shanties
of the Wabash, an aged human body clad in squalor. Sam has been south,
picking cotton, and he tells us it doesn’t pay. That’s why he’s back
home. He hails the tin dish of malodorous slop called supper with
delight; although he has no teeth, the pork chop gets gnawed to the
bone.
Beside Sam is a riveter, a young South Indianan who has helped build
bridges from Bayonne to St. Louis. He’s broke, but he expects a job
tomorrow. Meantime, he shows us where a molten rivet missed his pail and
caught him in the belly; his clothes ablaze, he jumped to the elevator,
dropped to a tank of water and then spent three months in a hospital
bed. But he’s all right now: to prove it he takes hold of a steel butt
on the ceiling with the forward half of his fingers and chins himself
six times. Old Sam jumps up, and chins himself twice, giggling with
pride. Sam’s body is still gamy and beneath his dirty unshaved beard is
the bland face of a boy, a face essentially sweet....
Do not judge that I am sentimentalizing this common, typical group of
failures. There are, of course, vicious men in jails, just as there are
vicious men out of jail. They are the exception in both categories, and
I’m sure I do not know in which one will find relatively more. Perhaps
the vicious among convicts are as rare as the Mellons, Rockefellers,
duPonts, among businessmen; as the Hearsts among journalists; as the
Hitlers and Huey Longs and Coughlins among politicians. Every broad
social group has certain basic traits; in the criminal group not
viciousness is such a trait, but _childishness_. Without a doubt, the
percentage of rotten men among criminals is so small it is no wonder
that every single man in my ward of the jail happens to be a decent
person.
That they were all childish was not accidental. It may help to explain
why I liked these men. I have always felt at ease among children. And
perhaps this means that I am something of a child myself. And this draws
me closer to the point of my story.
Two inmates of our ward, mugged and fingerprinted like the rest of us, I
have not yet named. They are the communist organizers, Andrew Remes and
Charles Stadtfelt. Stadtfelt is a young man with a playboy’s smile and a
body pitifully invaded by tuberculosis. So slight is Stadtfelt’s
resistance that every hour or so he must dive into his lousy bunk, under
mine, for a rest. When he emerges, there is a cigarette in his mouth, a
laugh in his eyes and a jest on his tongue. Stadtfelt’s way of curing
his consumption is to forget it, and devote his life to bringing on the
Revolution. There is no feverish strain in his good humor; it comes from
a harmony of the whole man which tubercular bacilli have not yet broken.
The second communist, Remes, is studious and unsmiling. Brought in later
than I, the first thing he does is to ask me for an explanation of why
the Soviet Union does not officially help the Spaniards. Back and forth
in the corridor we walked, while he put his questions. But the sobriety
of Comrade Remes is not objectionable to the camaraderie of the others.
His intellectual preoccupations trouble them no more than his working
out the crossword puzzles in the old papers (while they hunt tales of
daring gunmen and passionate lovers). Instinctively, they are aware that
Remes looks at the bosses with eyes parallel to theirs.
These bosses are the symbolic “fathers” who keep the boys behind bars.
They have tools. Lowest are the turnkeys, for the most part men
brutalized by long practice of mechanical repression without
understanding; men dehumanized to the bare repressive function. A little
less low are the police, dull incarnations of conformity to the rules
the criminals break; professional opponents, players of the same game as
the lawless but on the other side of the line and held in contempt by
the crooks, who instinctively sense that to obey the rules of our
society means less fantasy, less generosity, less feeling, than to break
them. The true fathers are rarely seen by their unfortunate children:
they are the respectable citizens, the taxpayers, the makers of the
rules, the builders of the courts and jails, the dealers of prison
terms. Implicitly, men like Jack, Pop, old Sam and Tony regard them as
children regard grownups.
These pillars of society are less childlike than the jailbirds. But they
are not the mature men fathers should be. If they were mature (and the
crooks instinctively know this), there would be less filth in jail,
there would be no need of jail at all, there would be less misery,
corruption, injustice, in the chaotic outer world which the jail’s false
order impotently strives to correct. The lawbreakers are children; the
sustainers of the legalized anarchy called the capitalist system are
neither children nor grown men. Call them men in a transition between
infancy and adulthood: that will explain their natural selection for
eminence by a society that is itself an epoch of transition. Capitalism
is a transition age between the naïve childhood of the race and that
mastering maturity in which alone the dreams, values, inventions of
childhood, transfigured, may flower.
This explains why the “children” are in jail; why the men who have not
grown up build the jail and place the “children” in it: it explains also
why the communists, who are creating a form for maturity, are in jail
with the “children.” The two communists in our ward (not to mention the
leading communist in a ward belowstairs) legitimately stand for a will,
a discipline, a method, whereby men may outgrow the irrational chaos of
capitalism, may mature to a society for both grown men and children. By
this truth, symbolically, the communists belong in jail. For the values
which they strive, through changing the laws, to bring to normal life
are kin to the values which the criminals, by breaking the laws,
impotently struggle to retain. The mature man rounds the cycle, giving
organic form to the lyric impulses of childhood—the need for joy, for
play, for freedom, which man outgrows at his peril.
But this natural conjunction of child and mature man in a jail, as
against the halfmen who put them in jail, may be still further
broadened. After we had been released, Chief of Police Yates came up to
us. Yates is a jaunty young man, smooth and hard-eyed, half a machine, a
type too common in this world, without whom fascism could not function.
He is simply the shallow young man, wanting to get along in a hurry, who
sells out to the forces in immediate power—the owners of the Machine;
and who wants for his reward, not so much a fat pay envelope as freedom
to give play to his desires, less destroyed than repressed into sadism
by the dull business world of which he also is a victim.
Yates saunters up to us, and tells us with pride of the congratulatory
cable he has received from Berlin. Capitalist society has already driven
back into infantilism the weakest members of the working class; and you
will find some of them in jail. Fascism is a method for finishing the
process! Fascism would _infantilize_ all the workers; not in order to
put them into jail if they are good boys, but to put them into a brown,
black or silver shirt, and stick a slogan in their mouths and call them
the fatherland’s army. Fascism is the program for the forced regimented
infantilization of the people; implicit or explicit, it must be the
program of all rulers under capitalism, since these rulers, by the
nature of their transitional order, are themselves caught in a
transition before maturity, are not men enough to lead men or to work
with men, and are compelled, before the threatening maturity of the
masses, to drive them all—through force, falsehood, ill nurture—down to
a morbid, regressive, infantile level.
Either down to infantilism or forward to the revolutionary beginning of
a human order in which normal men may normally mature: that was the
choice, palpable as human bodies, within our ward’s barred windows. In
the Terre Haute jail I had our world with me: the atavistic, careless
and abnormal; the future, striving to be; the dolorous, dangerous
present. I felt at home there....
_1936_
INDEX
Abélard, Peter, 134
Absolutists, 88
Adams, John, 96
Aeschylus, 137
Agnosticism, 216 _et seq._
Agrarian class culture, 96 _et seq._
Akiba, Rabbi, 197
Alcott, Louisa May, 167
Alexander, S., 84
“Alice in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll, 169
Allan, John, 162, 164
Anarchism, 181 _et seq._
Anarchists, 179 _et seq._
Anderson, Margaret, 99
Anderson, Sherwood, 93–96, 99, 214
Andrewes, Lancelot, 221, 223