THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY
France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than one
sense, be called the heart of America. Her coureurs de bois opened its
paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the shod feet of Europe. Her
explorers planted the watershed with slender, silent portage traces that
have multiplied into thousands of noisy streets and tied indissolubly the
lakes of the north to the rivers of the south from which they were long
ago severed by nature. Her one white sail above Niagara marked the way of
a mighty commerce. Her soldiers sowed the molten seeds of tumultuous
cities on the sites of their forts, and her priests and friars consecrated
with their faith and prayers forest trail, portage path, ship's sail, and
leaden plate.
But that is not all--a valley of new cities like the old, of new paths for
greater commerce, of more altars to the same God! The chief significance
and import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the world, all
indeed that makes it significant, is that here was given (though not of
deliberate intent) a rich, wide, untouched field, distant, accessible only
to the hardiest, without a shadowing tradition or a restraining fence, in
which men of all races were to make attempt to live together under rules
of their own devising and enforcing. And as here the government of the
people by the people was to have even more literal interpretation than in
that Atlantic strip which had traditions of property suffrage and church
privilege and class distinctions, I have called it the "Valley of the New
Democracy."
When the French explorers entered it, it was a valley of aboriginal,
anarchic individualism, with little movable spots of barbaric communistic
timocracy, as Plato would doubtless have classified those migratory,
predatory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, contemporary with King
Donnacona, whom Cartier found on the St. Lawrence--communities governed by
the warlike, restless spirit.
The French communities that grew in the midst of those naked timocrats,
whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the
plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree. One cannot
easily imagine a socialism that would go further in its prescriptions than
did this affectionate, capricious, generous, if unwise, as it now seems,
government of a village along the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi, from a
palace by the Seine where a hard-working monarch issued edicts "in the
fulness of our power and of our certain knowledge."
The ordinances preserved in the colonial records furnish abundant proof of
that parental concern and restraint. They relate to the regulation of inns
and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews,
stray hogs, mad dogs, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and
guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, observance of Sunday,
preservation of timber, and many other matters.
Parkman cites these interesting ordinances, which illustrate to what
absurd lengths this jealous, paternalistic care extended:
"Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands
all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the
same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another order
forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order of
precedence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.]
One intendant issued a "mandate to the effect that, whereas the people of
Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle
and sheep, 'being therein ignorant of their true interest, ... now,
therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the cotes of this government
shall hereafter own no more than two horses or mares and one foal--the
same to take effect after the sowing season of the ensuing year (1710),
giving them time to rid themselves of their horses in excess of said
number, after which they will be required to kill any of such excess that
may remain in their possession." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in
Canada," p. 341.]
And, apropos of the trend toward cities, there is the ordinance of Bigot,
issued with a view, we are told, of "promoting agriculture and protecting
the morals of farmers" by saving them from the temptations of the cities:
"We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (Quebec) under any
pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of being
expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods
confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of the
hospitals." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 342.] There is
even a royal edict designed to prevent the undue subdivision of farms
which "forbade the country people, except such as were authorized to live
in villages, to build a house or barn on any piece of land less than one
and a half arpents wide and thirty arpents long." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old
Regime in Canada," p. 342.]
And this word should be added in intimation of the generosity of the
paternalism:
"One of the faults of his [Louis XIV's] rule is the excess of his
benevolence, for not only did he give money to support parish priests,
build churches, and aid the seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the
hospitals, but he established a fund destined, among other objects, to
relieve indigent persons, subsidized nearly every branch of trade and
industry, and in other instances did for the colonists what they would far
better have learned to do for themselves." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime
in Canada," p. 347.]
Like Aeneas, therefore, these filial emigrants, seeking new homes, not
only carried their _lares et penates_ in their arms but bore upon their
shoulders their father Anchises.
Succeeding savage individualism, this benevolent despotism gave the valley
into the keeping of an individualism even purer and less restrained than
that which it succeeded, for the sparse pioneer transmontane settlements
were practically governed at first by only the consciences or whims of the
inhabitants, instructed of parental commandments learned the other side of
the mountains, and by their love of forest and of their prairie neighbors.
And when formal government came a pure democracy, social and political--it
came of individual interest and neighborly love and of no abstract
philosophical theory or of protest against oligarchy; it came from the
application, voluntary for the most part, of "older institutions and ideas
to the transforming influence of land," free land; and such has been the
result, says Professor Turner, [Footnote: See his "Significance of the
Frontier in American History," in "Fifth Yearbook of the National Herbart
Society, 1899," also his "Significance of the Mississippi Valley in
American History," in "Mississippi Valley Historical Association
Proceedings, 1909-10."] that fundamentally "American democracy is the
outcome of the American people in dealing with the West," that is, the
people of this valley of the French pioneers.
The democratical man, as Socrates is made to define him in Plato's
"Republic," was one in whom the licentious and extravagant desires have
expelled the moderate appetites and love of decorum, which he inherited
from his oligarchical father. "Such a man," he adds, "lives a life of
enjoyment from day to day, guided by no regulating principle, but turning
from one pleasure to another, just as fancy takes him. All pleasures are
in his eyes equally good and equally deserving of cultivation. In short,
his motto is 'Liberty and Equality.'"
But the early "democratical man" of that valley, even if he came remotely
from such oligarchical sires as Socrates gives immediately to all
democratical men, reached his motto of "Liberty and Equality" through no
such sensual definition of life.
It is true that many of those first settlers migrated from places where
the opportunities seemed restricted or conventions irksome or privileges
unequal, but it was no "licentious or extravagant desire" or flitting from
pleasure to pleasure that filled that valley with sober, pale-faced, lean-
featured men and tired, gentle women who enjoyed the "liberty" not of a
choice of pleasurable indulgences but of interminable struggles, the
"equality" of being each on the same social, economic, and political
footing as his neighbor. The sequent democracy was derived of
neighborliness and good fellowship, the "natural issue of their interests,
their occupations, and their manner of life," and was not constructed of
any theory of an ideal state. Nor were they frightened by the arguments of
Socrates, who found in the "extravagant love of liberty" the preface to
tyranny. And they would not have been frightened even if they had been
familiar with his doctrine of democracy. They little dreamed that they
were exemplifying the doctrines of a French philosopher or refuting those
of a Greek thinker.
Those primitive democratic and individualistic conditions had not yet been
seriously changed when, in that bit of the valley which lies in the dim
background of my own memory, there had developed a form of government more
stern and uncaressing. But there was not a pauper in all the township for
its stigmatizing care. There was not an orphan who did not have a home;
there was not a person in prison; there was only one insane person, so far
as the public knew, and she was cared for in her own home. The National
Government was represented by the postmaster miles away; the State
government by the tax assessor, a neighbor who came only once a year, if
he came at all, to inquire about one's earthly belongings, which could not
then be concealed in any way; and the local government by the school-
teacher, who was usually a man incapacitated for able-bodied labor or an
unmarried woman.
The citizens made and mended the public roads, looked after the sick in a
neighborly way, bought their children's schoolbooks, and buried their own
dead. I can remember distinctly wondering what a "poor officer" was, for
there were no poor in that society where none was rich.
It was a community of high social consistency, promoted not by a
conscious, disinterested devotion to the common welfare but by the common,
eagerly interested pursuit of the same individual welfares, where there
was room enough for all.
It is well contended in a recent and most profound discussion of this
subject by Professor Turner (of whom I spoke as born on a portage) that
this homogeneity of feeling was the most promising and valuable
characteristic of that American democracy. [Footnote: See his
"Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History."]
And it was, indeed, prolific of mighty consequences:
First of all, it made it possible for the United States to accept
Napoleon's proffer of Louisiana.
Second, it compelled the War of 1812 and so confirmed to the United States
the fruits of the purchase, demonstrating at the same time that the
"abiding-place" of the national spirit was in the west.
And, third, that spirit of nationalism took into its hands the reins of
action in the time when nationality was in peril. Before the end of the
Civil War the west was represented in the National Government by the
President, the Vice-President, the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the
House, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Postmaster-General, the
Attorney-General, the General of the Army, and the Admiral of the Navy.
And it furnished, as Turner adds in summary, the "national hero, the
flower of frontier training and ideals."
While the mere fact of office-holding does not indicate the place or
source of power, it is noteworthy that the Presidents since the war--to
the election of Wilson--Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Harrison, and
Taft all came from this valley. Cleveland went over the edge of it, when a
young man, to Buffalo and left it only to become governor and President;
Arthur, who succeeded to the presidency through the death of President
Garfield, and President Roosevelt, who also came first to the presidency
through the death of a President and was afterward elected, were both
residents of New York, though the latter had a ranch in the far west and
seems rather to belong to that region than the place of his birth. Thus of
the elected Presidents there was not one who had not a middle-western
origin, experience, or association. The Chief Justices since the war have
been without exception western men, and so with few exceptions have been
the Speakers of the House. And practically all these Presidents, Chief
Justices, Speakers, were pioneers or sons of pioneers in that "Valley of
the New Democracy" or, at any rate, were nurtured of its natural
fellowships, its one-man-as-good-as-another institutions, and its
unhampered ambitions.
It is not mere geographical and numerical majorities that are connoted. It
is the dominancy of the social, democratic, national spirit of the valley
--the supremacy of the average, the useful man, his power and self-
sufficiency when standing squarely, firmly upon the earth. It was the
secret of the great wrestler Antaeus, the son of Terra, that he could not
be thrown even by Hercules so long as his feet touched the earth. How
intimately filial to the earth and neighborly the middle-west pioneers
were has been suggested. And it was the secret of their success that they
stood, every man in his own field, on his own feet, and wrestled with his
own arms in primitive strength and virtue and self-reliant ingenuity.
Democracy did not theorize much, and when it did it stumbled. If it had
indulged freely in the abstractions of its practices, it would doubtless
have suffered the fate of Antaeus, who was finally strangled in mid-air by
a giant who came over the mountains.
As it was, this valley civilization apotheosized the average man. Mr.
Herbert Croly, in his "Promise of American Life," makes this picture of
him: "In that country [the very valley of which I am writing] it was sheer
waste to spend much energy upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged
experience, high technical standards, or exclusive devotion. The cheaply
and easily made instrument was the efficient instrument, because it was
adapted to a year or two of use, and then for supersession by a better
instrument; and for the service of such tools one man was as likely to be
good as another. No special equipment was required. The farmer was
required to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was
merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of
a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time
was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge,
planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most
of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who
persisted in one job and who applied the most rigorous and exacting
standards to his work was out of place and was really inefficient. His
finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did
the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and
peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of
his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which
naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and
uncritically to current standards." [Footnote: Herbert Croly, "Promise of
American Life," pp. 63, 64.]
Is this what democracy, undefiled of aristocratic conditions and
traditions, has produced? it will be asked. Has pure individualism in a
virgin field wrought of its opportunity only this mediocre, all-round,
good-natured, profane, rough, energetic, ingenious efficiency? Is this
colorless, insipid "social consistency" the best wine that the valley can
offer of its early vintages?
I know those frontier Antaei, who, with their feet on the prairie ground,
faced every emergency with a piece of fence wire. They differed from their
European brothers in being more resourceful, more energetic, and more
hopeful. If it be true that "out of a million well-established Americans
taken indiscriminately from all occupations and conditions," when compared
to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, "a larger proportion of the
former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives," though they may
not be wiser or better men; that there will be a "smaller amount of social
wreckage" and a "larger amount of wholesome and profitable achievement,"
it may be safely said that, if the middle-west frontier Americans had been
under consideration, the proportion of alert achievement would have been
higher and the social wreckage smaller--partly because of the
encouragement of the economic opportunity, and partly because of the
encouragement of a casteless society.
I cannot lead away from those familiar days without speaking of other
companionships which that valley furnished beyond those intimated--
companionships which did not interfere with the rough frontier fellowships
that made democracy possible. For it was in these same fields that Horace
literally sat by the plough and sang of farm and city. It was there that
Livy told his old-world stories by lamplight or at the noon-hour. It was
there that Pythagoras explained his ancient theorem.
I cannot insist that these companionships and intimacies were typical, but
they were sufficiently numerous to disturb any generalizations as to the
sacrifices which that democracy demanded for the sake of "social
conditions" and economic regularity.
The advancing frontier soon spent itself in the arid desert. The pioneer
came to ride in an automobile. The people began to jostle one another in
following their common aspirations, where once there was freedom for the
energy, even the unscrupulous energy, of all. Time accentuated differences
till those who started together were millions of dollars apart. Failures
had no kinder fields for new trials. Democracy had now to govern not a
puritanical, industrious, sparsely settled Arcady but communities of
conflicting dynamic successes, static envies, and complaining despairs.
It met the new emergencies at first, one by one, with no other programme
than the most necessary restraints, encouragement of tariffs for the
dynamic, improved transportation for the static, and charity for the
despairful; but all with an optimism born of a belief in destined success.
To this has succeeded gradually a more or less clearly defined policy of
constructive individualism, under an increasingly democratic and less
representative control. The paternal absolutism of Louis XIV has evolved
into the paternal individualism of a people who are constantly struggling
in imperfect speech to make their will understood and by imperfect
machinery to get it done--and, as I believe, with increasingly
disinterested purpose. It is, however, I emphasize, the paternalism of a
highly individualized society.
I described in an earlier chapter a frontier community in that valley. See
what has come in its stead, in the city into which it has grown. The child
coming from the unknown, trailing clouds of glory, creeps into the
community as a vital statistic and becomes of immediate concern. From
obliging the nurse to take certain precautions at its birth, the State
follows the newcomer through life, sees that he is vaccinated, removes his
tonsils and adenoids, furnishes him with glasses if he has bad vision,
compels him to school, prepares him not only for citizenship but for a
trade or profession, prevents the adulteration of his food, inspects his
milk, filters his water, stands by grocer and butcher and weighs his bread
and meat for him, cleans the street for him, stations a policeman at his
door, transports his letters of business or affection, furnishes him with
seeds, gives augur of the weather, wind, and temperature, cares for him if
he is helpless, feeds him if he is starving, shelters him if he is
homeless, nurses him in sickness, says a word over him if he dies
friendless, buries him in its potter's field, and closes his account as a
vital statistic in the mortality column.
And there are many agencies of restraint or anxious care that stand in a
remoter circle, ready to come in when emergencies require. I have before
me a report of legislation in the States alone (that is, exclusive of
national and municipal legislation) for two years. I note here a few
characteristic and illustrative measures out of the thousands that have
been adopted. They relate to the following subjects:
Health of women and children at work; employer's liability; care of
epileptics, idiots, and insane; regulation of dentistry and chiropody;
control of crickets, grasshoppers, and rodents; exclusion of the boll-
weevil; the introduction of parasites; the quenching of fires; the burning
of debris in gardens; the destruction of predatory fish; the prohibition
of automatic guns for hunting game; against hazing in schools; instruction
as to tuberculosis and its prevention; the demonstration of the best
methods of producing plants, cut flowers, and vegetables under glass; the
establishment of trade-schools; the practice of embalming.
I introduce this brief but suggestive list as intimating how far a
democratic people have gone in doing for themselves what Louis XIV at
Versailles in the "fulness of power" and out of "certain knowledge" did
for the trustful habitants of Montreal, who were "ignorant of their true
interest."
And, of course, with that increased paternalism has come of necessity an
army of public servants--governors and policemen, street cleaners and
judges, teachers and factory inspectors, till, as I have estimated, in
some communities one adult in every thirty is a paid servant of the
public.
Such paternalism is not peculiar to that valley. I remember, years ago,
when I was following the legislation of an eastern State, that a bill was
introduced fixing the depth of a strawberry box, and another obliging the
vender of huckleberries to put on the boxes a label in letters of certain
height indicating that they were picked in a certain way. And this
paternalism is even more marked in the old-age pension provision in
England, where the "mother of parliaments," as one has expressed it, has
been put on the level of the newest western State in its parental
solicitude.
But nowhere else than in this valley, doubtless, is that paternalism so
thoroughly informed of the individualistic spirit. Chesterton said of
democracy that it "is not founded on pity for the common man.... It does
not champion man because man is miserable, but because man is so sublime."
It "does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his
not being a king." Indeed, democracy is ever dreaming of "a nation of
kings." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics," p. 268.] And that
characteristic is truer of the democracy that came stark out of the
forests and out of the furrows than of the democracy which sprang from
protest against and fear of single kings.
The constitution east of the mountains was made in fear of a system which
permitted an immediate and complete expression of the will of the people.
The movement in American democracy which is most conspicuous is the effort
to get that will accurately and immediately expressed--that is, a movement
toward what might be called more democracy--toward a direct control of
"politics" by the people--and that movement has had its rise and strength
in the Mississippi Valley and beyond.
But who are the people who are to control? Only those who are living and
of electoral age and other qualification? I recall again Bismarck's
definition: "They are the invisible multitude of spirits--the nation of
yesterday and to-morrow." And that invisible multitude of yesterday and
to-morrow, whose mouths are stopped with dust or who have not yet found
human embodiment, must find voice in the multitude of to-day--the
multitude that inherits the yesterdays and has in it the only promise of
to-morrow.
There may be some question there as to its being always the voice of God,
but no one thinks of any other (except to add to it that of the woman).
The "certain knowledge" and the "fulness of power" of Louis XIV have
become the endowments of the average man--and the average man is one-half
or two-thirds of all the voting men of the community or nation, plus one.
But that average man, forgetful of the multitude of yesterday and
ungrateful, has none the less wrought into his very fibre and spirit the
uncompromising individualism, the unconventional neighborliness, and the
frontier fellowships of yesterday. It is of that that he is consciously or
unconsciously instructed at every turn. And he is now beginning to think
more and more of the invisible multitude, the nation of tomorrow.
It is deplored that the so-called individuality developed in that valley
is "simply an unusual amount of individual energy, successfully spent in
popular and remunerative occupations," that there is "not the remotest
conception of the individuality which may reside in the gallant and
exclusive devotion to some disinterested and perhaps unpopular moral,
intellectual, or technical purpose," as has such illustrious exhibition in
France, for example. This is, we are told, one of the sacrifices to social
consistency which menaces the fulness and intensity of American national
life. And the most serious problem is to make a nation of independent
kings who shall not exercise their independencies "perversely or
irresponsibly."
Men have been always prone to make vocational pursuits the basis of social
classification. In the Scripture record of man he had not been seven
generations in the first inhabited valley of earth before his descendants
were divided into cattlemen, musicians, and mechanics. For the record runs
that Lamech had three sons, Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal--Jabal who became the
father of those who live in tents and have cattle, Jubal the father of
those that handle the harp and the organ, and Tubal the father of those
who work in brass and iron. And we do not have to turn many pages to
discover the social distinctions that grew out of the vocational. The
first question of that western valley is, "Who is he?" and the answer is
one which will tell you his occupation. No one who has not an occupation
of some regularity and recognized practical usefulness is, as Mr. Croly
intimates, likely to have much recognition.
On the other hand, within the limits of approved occupations, there is,
except in great centres, no marked social stratification based on
vocation, as in old-world life and that of the new world more intimately
touched by the old. The man is recognized for his worth.
In the midst of that valley is a college town, [Footnote: Galesburg, Ill.]
planted by a company of migrants from an older State seventy-five years
ago who bought a township of land, founded a college, [Footnote: Knox
College.] and built their homes about on the wild prairie. It has now
twenty thousand inhabitants and is an important railroad as well as
educational centre. It was nearly fifty years old when I entered it as a
student. That I studied Greek did not keep me from knowing well a
carpenter; that in spare hours I learned a manual trade and put into type
my translation of "Prometheus Bound" did not bar me from the homes of the
richest or the most cultured. Once, when a student, because of some little
victory, I was received by the mayor and a committee of citizens, but the
men at the engines in the shops and on the engines in the yards blew their
whistles. When I went back to that college as its president it was not
remembered against me that I had sawed wood or driven a plough. I knew all
the conductors and most of the engineers on the railroads. I knew every
merchant and nearly every mechanic, as well as every lawyer, judge, and
doctor. Men had, to be sure, their preferential associations, but these
were personal and not determined of vocation or class. A recent mayor of
this city of two colleges was a cigar maker and, I was assured by a
professor of theology in a local university, the best mayor it has had in
years, and he died driving a smallpox patient to a pest-house. I received
when in Paris, by the same mail as I recall, a resolution of felicitation
from a Protestant body of which I was a member in that town, and a letter
of like felicitation from the Catholic parish priest of that same city. I
do not know how better to illustrate, to those who are working at the
problem of democracy in other valleys, how democracy has wrought for
itself in that valley of neighborliness and resourcefulness and plenty, in
the wake of the monarchical, paternalistic affection of France.