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EVERYDAY AMERICANS
by
HENRY SEIDEL CANBY
Author of “College Sons and College Fathers,”
“Our House,” “Education by
Violence,” etc.
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1920
Copyright, 1919, 1920, by
The Century Co.
PREFACE
This is emphatically not a war book; and yet the chapters that follow,
in one sense, are the fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent
reflections upon his own people by one returning to a familiar
environment after active contact with English, Scottish, Irish, and
French in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They are complementary,
in a way, to a volume of essays which sprang from that experience and
was published in 1919 under the title “Education by Violence.” But
though representing in its inception the fresher view of familiar
America of one returning from abroad, this book in its completed form
is tendered as a modest attempt to depict an American type that was
sharpened perhaps, but certainly not created by the war. The “old
Americans” came to racial consciousness many years ago, although their
sense of nationality has been immeasurably strengthened by the events
of the last few years. It is no picture of all America, no survey of
our complete social being that I attempt in the following pages; but
rather a highly personal study of the typical, the everyday American
mind, as it is manifested in the American of the old stock. It is a
study of what that typical American product, the college and high
school graduate, has become in the generation which must carry on after
the war.
New Haven, Connecticut,
June 4, 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE AMERICAN MIND 3
II CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 29
III RADICAL AMERICA 61
IV AMERICAN IDEALISM 91
V RELIGION IN AMERICA 120
VI LITERATURE IN AMERICA 149
VII THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 175
EVERYDAY AMERICANS
EVERYDAY AMERICANS
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICAN MIND
In England there developed long ago, perhaps as far back as the days of
Shakespeare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and democratic in his
sympathies, a curious political animal called the radical-conservative.
The radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once said, is a man who
would have been a radical outright if radicals had not been dissenters;
by which he clearly meant that the species agreed with radical
principles, but objected to radicals because they did not have good
manners, seldom played cricket, and never belonged to the best clubs.
Therefore the radical-conservative stays in his own more congenial
class while working for social justice toward all other classes. He is
willing to vote with the conservative party in return for concessions
in labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguarding of public health.
Thence arises the curious circumstance, most mystifying to foreigners,
that a good share of the really progressive legislation in Great
Britain of the last half-century has been led by young gentlemen from
Oxford and Cambridge who have no more intention of becoming part of the
proletariate than of leaving off their collars and going without baths.
Bismarck was an out-and-out conservative who for his own nefarious
ends furthered what a Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory would
call radical measures. But Lord Robert Cecil in our own day is a
convinced aristocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who is more
sincerely effective than many Liberals in various movements which we
are accustomed to call reform.
The conservative-liberal is quite a different animal and far commoner,
far more familiar to Americans, even if they have never called him
by that name. His habitat is America, and thanks to the populousness
of this country, he is beginning to have a very important influence
outside of his habitat. To define him is difficult, but for purposes of
rough classification he may be said to be the man whose native liberal
instincts have been crystallized by a combination of interesting
circumstances--and sometimes petrified. He is the man who was born a
liberal in a liberal country and intends to remain as he was born. He
is the man who will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the Declaration
of Independence against any later manifestation of the revolutionary
spirit. He believes in conserving in unaltered purity the principles of
life, government, and industry that his forefathers rightly believed
to be liberal. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned policeman, a
progressive who stands pat upon his progress, a conservative-liberal.
I believe that he is our closest approximation to a typical American
mind.
Whether familiar or not, the effects of this political disease--for
it is a disease, a hardening of the arteries of the mind--are easily
observable all about us in the America of to-day. Indeed, we see them
so frequently that they awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in
any intellectual sense of the word. They are like our clear atmosphere,
our mixture of races, our hurried steps--things we scarcely notice
until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an outsider. I am so much a
part of America that I find it difficult to detach myself from a mood
that is mine in common with many other Americans. And yet, once one
sees it plainly, the educated conservatism of liberal America becomes
portentous, a unique political phenomenon.
I think that this peculiarity of our political thinking first became
evident to me on an ocean voyage in war-time. There were a score or
so of Americans on board, members, most of them, of various government
missions, picked business men, picked professional men, thoroughly
intelligent, intensely practical, and entirely American. They were
democratic, too, as we use the word in America; that is, good “mixers,”
free from snobbery, and nothing new in action was alien to their
sympathies. They could remold you a business or a legal practice in
half an hour’s conversation; tear down an organization and build
it up again between cigars. Their committee meetings went off like
machine-guns, whereas the English officers and trade diplomats, when
they got together, snarled themselves in set speeches and motions and
took an afternoon to get anywhere. The English, indeed, seemed puzzled
and a little dazed by the ease with which the Americans seized upon and
put through reorganization of any kind. They seemed positively to leap
at change, so long as basic ideas were not involved. “Nothing,” said
an Indian colonel, “is sacred to them. They would scrap the empire and
build a new one--on paper--at sixty miles an hour.”
He was quite wrong. The system my countrymen lived by permitted change,
urged change, up to a certain point. They would demolish a ten-story
building to erect one of twenty or scrap thousands of machines in
order to adopt a better process, but when it came to principles and
institutions they were conservative. The founders of their social and
political order had been almost a century ahead of the times. The
instruments of life and of government they had provided had served with
slight modifications for the free-moving America of the nineteenth
century. It had been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, to
realize the liberality and democracy possible under the Constitution,
to work out the independence available for the common man in a rich and
undeveloped country in which his political power guaranteed him every
advantage that could be gained in a capitalistic system, including the
acquisition of capital. It had been a splendid game, and our wits had
been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, our prosperity fortified,
our self-confidence enormously increased in playing it. Given our
rules, we could play the game more resourcefully than any other people
on earth. And they were wise rules, which provided for growth, but not
for a different kind of contest. We were so sure that America stood for
freedom, independence, and liberality in general that we could not take
seriously people who did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that
there might be an idea of democracy different from our own.
Indeed, on board that ship, a curious experience came to all of us,
Englishmen, Americans, and I, the humble observer, when in the course
of argument or conference the theories of life upon which we were
variously living came momentarily into view. The Americans, it was
clear, were certain that they were the most progressive people in the
world. This certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman Catholic;
it gave them elasticity and daring. Being sure of their principles,
so sure as to be almost unaware of them, they ignored precedents, and
solved or dismissed problems with equal ease. They made plans for a
league of nations, they approved of a temporary autocracy for the
President, they put the labor question on a business basis, and so
disposed of it; they were afraid of nothing but a failure to act and
act quickly. Nevertheless, as they talked and worked with the English,
it became increasingly evident that their road ended in a wall.
There were walls on the English road, too--walls of caste thinking and
social privilege that seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an office
building. Our wall was invisible to most of us, and as a body we never
tried to pass it at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas,
beyond which, if we thought of it at all, presumably lay socialism,
anarchy, chaos.
Just that far the American mind, like some light tank, ran, surmounting
everything, taking to the fields if the road was blocked, turning,
backing, doing everything but stop; only to halt dead at the invisible
barrier, and zigzag away again. By such a free-moving process within
the limits of law we had scrambled across a continent in turbulent,
individualistic exploitation, and yet had built a sound political
system carefully and well. And there we had stopped, convinced that
we had solved the problem of democracy and equal opportunity for all.
This explains why America is twenty years behind the best of Europe in
social and economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed reform more than
we did). This is what it is to be a conservative-liberal.
The Englishman is different. He is much more likely to be an obstinate
Tory, blocking all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by
a system as antiquated as feudalism; or if not a Tory, then an
out-and-out radical eager for a legal revolution. But in either case he
knows what different-minded men are thinking; and if there is a wall on
his road, he looks over it. If he is a Tory, he understands radicalism
and fights it because he prefers an inequality that favors him to a
more logical system that might be personally disagreeable. If he is a
radical, he understands Toryism. But the American conservative-liberal
acknowledges no opinion except his own. He insists, in the words of a
contemporary statesman, that the American system, as founded by our
forefathers, is the best in the world, and he is not interested in
others. There are a thousand proofs that it is not the best possible
system even for America, and plenty of them are in print--proofs
advanced by capitalists as well as labor leaders, by Catholics as well
as socialists; but they do not trouble him, because he neither hears
nor reads them. It is easier to call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik.
This is the liberal-conservative mind that will not look beyond its own
fixed principles and refuses to understand those who differ from it;
that suffers a kind of paralysis when confronted by genuine radicalism.
The American college undergraduate has it to perfection. Bubbling over
with energy, ready for anything in the practical world of struggle
or adventure, he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he has
inherited as a girl of her reputation. He is armored against new
thinking. The American business man fairly professes it. He speculates
in material things with an abandon that makes a Frenchman pale; but new
principles in the relations of trade to general welfare, questions of
unearned increment, first bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him.
And yet the college undergraduates, after hatching, and the American
business man have made for us a very comfortable America, just now
the safest place in the world to live in, the most prosperous country
in the world, the most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way of doing
things has its great advantages. America is its product, and the ranter
who describes the United States as the home of super-capitalism, a sink
of cheaply exploited labor, a dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity,
does not seem to be able to persuade even himself that the United
States is not the best of all countries for a permanent residence.
And the great Americans of the past have nearly all been
conservative-liberals. Washington was a great republican; he was also
essentially an aristocrat in social and economic relations, who kept
slaves and did not believe in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically,
was the greatest of English-speaking democrats, but he let the
privileged classes exploit the working-man and the soldier, partly in
order to win the war, chiefly because problems of wages and unearned
increments and economic privilege generally did not enter into his
scheme of democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for the square deal
in public and private life, but hesitated and at last turned back when
it became evident that a deal that was completely square meant the
overturning of social life as he knew and loved it in America.
And these men we feel were right. Their duty was to make possible
a good government and a stable society, and they worked not with
theories only, but also with facts as they were. The Germans have
argued that the first duty of the state is self-preservation, and that
rights of individual men and other states may properly be crushed in
order to preserve it. We have crushed the Germans and, one hopes,
their philosophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of society to
preserve itself. No one believes that universal suffrage for all,
negroes included, would have been advisable in Washington’s day, when
republicanism was still an experiment. No one believes, I fancy, that
the minimum wage, the inheritance tax, and coöperative management
should have had first place, or indeed any place, in the mind of the
Lincoln of 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a socialist would have
been as useful to the United States as Roosevelt the Progressive with
a back-throw toward the ideals of the aristocratic state; as Roosevelt
the conservative-liberal.
But too great reliance on even a great tradition has its disadvantages.
I know an American preparatory school that for many college generations
has entered its students at a famous university with the highest of
examination records, and a reputation for courtesy and cleanness of
mind and soundness of body scarcely paralleled elsewhere. I have
watched these boys with much interest, and I have seen them in
surprising numbers gradually decline from their position of superiority
as they faced the rapid changes of college life, as they settled into
a new environment with different demands and more complex standards.
They leaned too heavily upon their admirable schooling; they were too
confident of the strength and worth of their tradition; they looked
backward instead of forward, and stood still while less favored men
went on. Their fault was the fault of American liberalism, which stands
pat with Washington and Roosevelt and Lincoln.
Perhaps the greatest teacher in nineteenth-century American
universities was William Graham Sumner. In his day he was called a
radical, and unsuccessful efforts were made to oust him from his
professorship because of his advocacy of free trade. Now I hear him
cited as a conservative by those who quote his support of individualism
against socialism, his distrust of coöperation against the league of
nations. His friends forget that an honest radical in one age would
be an honest radical in another; and that the facts available having
changed, it is certain that his opinions would change also, although
just what he would advocate, just how decide, we cannot certainly know.
Is it probable that Dante, the great advocate of imperial control in a
particularistic medieval world, would have been a pro-German in 1914?
The American liberal who proclaims himself of the party of Lincoln, and
is content with that definition, might have an unpleasant shock if that
great reader of the heart of the common man could resume his short-cut
life.
Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same disadvantages as inherited
money: all the owner has to do is to learn how to keep it; in other
words, to become a conservative. That is what is going on in America.
While we were pioneers in liberty and individualism, wealth and
opportunity and independence were showered upon us, and although wealth
for the average man is harder to come by, and opportunity is more and
more limited to the fortunate, and independence belongs only to good
incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal keeps the pioneer’s
optimism, and is satisfied to take ready-made a system that his
ancestors wrought by painful and open-minded experiment. In practice he
is still full of initiative and invention; in principle he can conceive
of only one dispensation, the ideas of political democracy which were
the radicalism of 1861 and 1840 and 1789 and 1776.
Suppose that he could conceive of industrial democracy, of a system
where every man began with an equal share of worldly privilege as he
begins now with an equal share of worldly rights. Would he not work it
out, with his still keen practicality, and test its value precisely as
he tests a new factory method or an advertising scheme? But he cannot
conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispensation. His liberalism turns
conservative at the thought. It was different with political democracy
and With religious toleration. The first cannot even now be said to be
precisely a perfect system, and the second has left us perilously near
to having no religion at all. Nevertheless, the liberal ancestor of our
American never doubted that they were _his_ problems, to be worked out
to some solution. He followed boldly where they led.
What has happened to the political and economic thinking of many an
American much resembles what has happened to his religion. He learns
at church a number of ethical principles which would make him very
uneasy if put into practice. He learns the virtue of poverty, the duty
of self-sacrifice, the necessity of love for his fellow-man. Now,
saintly poverty has not become an ideal in America--certainly not in
New York or Iowa or Atlantic City--nor is self-sacrifice common among
corporations, or love a familiar attribute of the practice of law.
Does the American therefore eschew the ethics of Christianity? On the
contrary. Religion is accepted at its traditional value. The church
grows richer and more influential--within limits. The plain man keeps
all his respects for religion as an ideal; but he regards it precisely
as an ideal, a formula beautiful in its perfection, not to be sullied
by too close an application, not to be worked out into new terms to fit
a new life.
And that is just what the conservative-liberal does with the vigorous
liberalism of his forefathers. He buries it in his garden, and expects
to dig it up after many days, a bond with coupons attached. He has
accepted it as the irrevocable word of Jehovah establishing the metes
and bounds wherein he shall think. It is his creed; and like the creeds
of the church, the further one gets from its origins, the greater the
repugnance to change. He stands by the declaration of his forefathers;
stands pat, and begs to be relieved of further abstract discussion.
Business is pressing; controversy is bad for business; ideas are bad
for business; change is bad for business: let well enough alone.
But by all odds the most important fact as regards this
conservative-liberal mind of which I have been writing remains to be
stated, and that is its success, for it is now the prevailing mind
in America. As our soldiers in France, though bearing Italian names,
Irish names, Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet and uniform
looked all, or nearly all, like the physical type we call American,
so in this confusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, polylingual,
built upon fragments of the empires of England and Spain and Russia
and France, there is indubitably a mental type which we may call with
some confidence American, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its
instincts conservative.
Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demonstrable that this American
mental type is the most definite national entity to be found anywhere
in the Western world. I know that this sounds paradoxical. We have
heard much for several years now of the lack of homogeneity in America.
We felt in 1914 our German-Americans cleave away from us (to be sure,
they came back); we saw in 1918 and 1919 the radical socialist and the
I. W. W. and the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms that were
certainly not American as the ’nineties knew America. We began to
realize that the immigrant changes his language more quickly than his
_mores_, and frequently changes neither. All this is true. And yet, in
spite of it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at things which
we know so well in America comes nearer to being a definite national
psychology that acts in expected fashions, has qualities that you can
describe as I have been describing them, and characteristics common
to all varieties of it, than either the “British mind” or the “French
mind” of which we write glibly.
For the British mind includes the Irish, which is as different from the
English as a broncho from a dray-horse. It includes the Tory mind and
the Liberal mind, which in England are as dissimilar as were Jefferson
Davis and Abraham Lincoln. It includes, if we use it loosely, Sir
Edward Carson and Mr. Asquith and H. G. Wells, each of whom represents
a considerable British constituency. And they could no more think alike
on any topic on the earth below or the heavens above than a Turk, a
Greek, and a Jew. Certain fundamental attitudes would unite all three
of these latter if they were civilized: they would all eat with knives
and forks. And in the same fashion certain definite racial traits unite
the Britons aforementioned. But the differences imposed by social caste
or diverging political and social philosophies are far greater than
anything to be found in everyday America, which latter I define as
lying between the fringe of recent immigrants on the one hand and the
excrescences of Boston intellectual aristocrats or New York radical
intellectuals on the other.
Is there a “French mind”? Intellectually and esthetically, perhaps
yes. Politically and socially, to a less degree of uniformity than
can be found in America. From the simple homogeneity of France, as
we casuals see it, has crystallized out the aristocracy and much of
the church, whose respective parties differ not merely as regards the
policy of the Government, but are still opposed to that Government
itself.
The United States, far more heterogeneous in race, far less fixed
in national character, threatened by its masses of aliens, who are
in every sense unabsorbed, is yet much more homogeneous in its
thinking. In America weekly magazines for men and women spread
everywhere and through every class but the lowest, and so does this
conservative-liberalism in politics and social life which I have tried
to define. In Connecticut and Kansas and Arizona it is displayed
in every conversation, as our best known national weekly (itself
conservative-liberal) is displayed on every news-stand. Irrespective
of racial or financial differences, everywhere in America, between
the boundaries I have already indicated--the alien immigrant on one
hand, the advanced intellectual on the other--nine out of ten of us
are conservative-liberals; everywhere, indeed, throughout the American
bourgeoisie, which with us includes skilled laborer and farmer,
professional man and millionaire.
And the mental habits of this contemporary American are of more than
local importance. We who are just now so afraid of internationalism
are more likely than any other single agency to bring it about. Our
habits of travel, our traverse of class lines, our American way of
doing things, are perhaps the nearest approximation of what the world
seems likely to adopt as a modern habit if the old aristocracies break
down everywhere, if easy transportation becomes general, if there is
wide-spread education, if Bolshevism does not first turn our whole
Western system upside down. Already in newspapers and books, in
theaters and politics, in social intercourse and in forms of music and
language, one sees all through Western Europe (and, they say, also
in the East) the American mode creeping in, to be welcomed or cursed
according to circumstances. And those great international levelers, the
movies, are American in plot and scene and idea and manners from one
end to the other of a film that stretches round the world.
Thus the American mind is worth troubling about; and if politically,
socially, economically the spirit that we and the foreigners call
American has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is time to awake.
In liberalism inheres our vitality, our initiative, our strength. Its
stagnation, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves of freedom
sweeping upward from the masses and on in broken and muddy torrents
through the world are poignant dangers. We must open eyes; we must
change our ground; we must fight the evil in the new revolution, but
welcome the good. Our own revolution lies before the deluge; it is
no longer enough to go on; it is not now the sufficing document of a
political philosophy. We must not stop with Washington and Lincoln. We
must go on where the conservative Washington and the radical Lincoln
would lead if they were our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism
is good, and Toryism or radicalism have their uses; but
conservative-liberalism, preserved, desiccated, museum liberalism, long
continued in, is death to the minds that maintain it.