RADICAL AMERICA
It is with no intention to be paradoxical that I call America a radical
nation. I know well by experience, sometimes galling, what an English
labor leader or a French socialist thinks of America, as he understands
it. A mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground of the bourgeoisie,
the birthplace of trusts, where even the labor-unions are capitalistic.
If the world is to be saved for democracy, he says, it will not be by
America.
I am not so sure. Being one of those who doubted whether the successful
termination of the war would forever make safe democratic ideals, I
feel at liberty to doubt whether the triumph of a European proletariate
will give us what we want. It depends much upon what one means by
democracy. And correspondingly, whether America is fundamentally
radical or conservative depends much upon what one means by radicalism.
If, like Louis XIV or Napoleon, I had a leash of writers and scholars
at my command, I would have them produce nothing but definitions while
these critical years of transition lasted. I would make them into an
academy whose fiat in general definition would be as valid as the
French Academy’s in the meaning of a word. I would make it a legal
offense for two men to quarrel over socialism when one means communism
and the other state control of the post-office. I would, like the
early Quakers, require arbitration for all disputants, especially
in politics, knowing that a clear head would quickly discover that
arguers on democracy conceivably meant anything from a standard collar
for every one to nationalization of women. But the good old days of
literary dictatorship are past. The most a writer upon the mind of
the everyday American can do is to endeavor honestly to make his own
definitions as he goes; and I believe that American radicalism needs a
good deal of defining.
It is not the doctrines of Babeuf or Marx or Lenine that have made
what seems to be the indigenous variety of American radicalism. Their
beliefs, and especially those of Marx, have found acceptance here.
There are moments in intellectual or industrial development when men’s
minds become seeding-grounds for ideas blown from without. There were
centuries when the mystical ideas of the Christian East were sown and
rooted in the barbarian brains of the West. There were the years when
the liberal ideas of the French Revolution were blown across Italy,
Germany, and the Low Countries. And much that we call radical in
America is simply foreign seed, growing vigorously in our soil, but not
yet acclimated, as it is growing also in Russia and New Zealand. And
much is not American in any sense, but rather the purely alien ideas
of immigrants--individual men among us. It is not for nothing that
Trotzky was here, and the Marxists, the syndicalists, the nihilists,
and the communists of half Europe. We have been exposed to every germ
of radicalism ever hatched in the Old World; yet neither the young
professor, lecturing on the redistribution of wealth, nor the Russian
stevedore, who in lower New York awaits the proletariate revolution,
truly represents American radicalism. These are the ideas and these the
men our restless youth are borrowing from, but they are not yet, they
may never be, American.
It is fortunately not yet difficult to separate foreign from indigenous
radicalism. There is that in both our heredity and our environment
which makes the American mind bad soil for the seed of foreign
ideologies. They rain upon us, they germinate; but they do not make
a crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; our New World has
kept us too cheerfully busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned
too low over this blessed America for discontent which leads to
dreaming, oppression which makes revolt, to be common among us. We
“old Americans,” at least of this generation, are poor material for
Bolshevism; even as socialists we are never more than half convinced.
Our radicalism has been of a different breed.
Indeed, radicalism, like religion and sea-water, takes color from the
atmosphere in which it is found. The French radical possesses the
lucidity and the self-regarding spirit of the modern French mind. He
lends ideas, but does not propagate them. The English radical seeks his
ends by direct political action in good English fashion. And the native
American has his own way also. That its essential quality of radicalism
has often been overlooked, while the term has been bandied among
soapbox orators and devotees of the bomb, is natural, but unfortunate
for clear thinking.
Our home-bred radicalism has been physical and moral, not intellectual.
It has been a genuine attempt to tear down and rebuild, but it has not
ordinarily been called radicalism, which term has been usually applied
to radical thinking, to the intellectual radicalism of revolutionary
organizations and protestants against the social order. Our effective
radicals have been the leaders, not the opponents, of American
society. They have been business men, philanthropists, educators, not
strike-leaders, social workers, and philosophers.
I talked recently to the head of a great manufacturing plant where
technical skill both of hand and of brain was exercised upon wood and
brass and steel. The modern world, according to his viewing (which
was very obviously from the angle of business) is divided into two
categories, executives and engineers. Executives are the men who
organize and control. They are the ones chiefly rewarded. Engineers
invent and carry out. They are the experts. It is the executives who
lead; the experts supply ideas, work out methods, but follow.
This statement may be disputable, and it is certainly a painfully
narrow bed in which to tuck American life and American ideals.
Nevertheless, it has at least one element of profound truth. In the
world of physical endeavor and physical organization it is executive
business men who have changed, broken up, reorganized, developed the
material world of America. They have fearlessly scrapped the whole
machinery of production, transportation, and trade as it existed in the
last generation, and in many respects improved upon, or destroyed by
competition, the parallel order in the Old World. They have been true
radicals of the physical category, and their achievements have been as
truly radicalism as the experiments of Lenine in government ownership.
That it is a physical radicalism, dealing with material values chiefly
and without reference to some of the greatest needs of the human
spirit, does not mean that intellect of a high, if not the highest,
order may not have been required for its successful accomplishment.
Our other native radicals, the philanthropists and the educators,
have also been chiefly executives. Their work has been inspired by
the stored-up moral force of America, especially puritan America. But
their great achievements, like those of the business men, have been in
organization and development rather than in thought.
In earlier generations our moral radicals were such men as Emerson
and Whitman. To-day they are college presidents, organizers of
junior high-school systems, or heads of the Rockefeller and Carnegie
foundations--prime movers all of them in systems of educational or
philanthropic practice that uplift millions at a turn of a jack-screw.
And these men in any true sense of the word are radicals--so radical in
their thorough-going attempts to transform society by making it more
intelligent, healthier, more productive that all Europe is protesting
or imitating them. Who is exercising a greater pressure for durable
change upon the largest number, who is digging most strenuously about
the roots of the old order, John Rockefeller, Jr. and his co-workers or
Trotzky? It is not easy to say.
This essay is not propaganda, and I am not particularly concerned
as to whether or no the reader accepts my broadening of the term
“radicalism.” Time may force him to do so, for no one can tell in
a given age just what actions and what theories will lead to the
tearing up of old institutions and the planting of a new order. Those
absolutist kings, Philip Augustus and his successors, who crushed
together the provinces of France, were, we see now, radicals, though
power and privilege were their motives. I, however, am interested in
men rather than in categories, and the philanthropist radicals, the
business radicals, and the educational pioneers of America already
interest the world strangely.
What they are in essence is of course more important than the name we
give them. And first of all I believe that in a genuine, if narrow,
sense they have been idealistic; indeed, that their American idealism
has made them radical. If America at present is actively, practically
idealistic (something Europe and the world in general would like to
have determined) it is due to them.
Idealism is not a negative virtue. It is not mysticism. It is not
meditation, though it may be its fruit. Whatever idealism may be in
philosophical definition, in life it is the desire and the attempt
to put into practice conceptions of what ought theoretically to be
accomplished in this imperfect world; and the quality of the idealism
depends upon the quality of the idealist.
In this sense--a true sense for America, however inapplicable to the
Middle Ages--who can doubt that such Americans as I have described are
idealistic? Nowhere in the world are there more visible evidences of
the desires of men wreaking themselves upon earth and stone and metal,
upon customs and government and morals, than in this new continent.
And these desires are predominantly for betterment, for perfection--a
low perfection sometimes, it is true--for the “uplift,” physically,
morally, intellectually of humanity.
Of course the quality of American idealism is mixed. Beside the pure
ambition of a St. Francis to make men brothers, beside the aspiring
hope of the cathedral builders to make faith lovely to the eye, the
ideal of a chain of five-and-ten cent stores, or a railroad system,
or even a democratic method of education, is not a luminous, not a
spiritual, idealism. But a working ideal for the benefit of the race it
may be, and often is.
The truth of this has not seemed obvious to Europeans or to most
Americans. Our individualism has been so intense and often so
self-seeking, our preoccupation since the Civil War so dominantly with
matter rather than with mind or spirit, that it is easy for foreigners
to call us mere money-grubbers. Yet no one who has ever talked with
a “captain of industry” or the director of a great philanthropic
enterprise feels doubt as to the unsoundness of this description.
Unfair, narrow, material-minded we may have been, but our enterprises
have had vision behind them, dreams, perhaps, imposed upon us by the
circumstances of a new, raw, continent, by wealth for the seeking,
by opportunities for the making, by vast battles with nature to be
organized and won.
Furthermore, behind and beneath all our striving, sets of moral ideas
have been active. America has never been blasé or cynical. We have
never relinquished the ethics of puritanism, which are the ethics
of the Bible. Even the greedy capitalist has disgorged at last, and
devoted his winnings to the improvement of the society he preyed upon.
But most American capitalists have not been greedy. They themselves
have been devoured by a consuming desire to accomplish, to build up,
to put through. When they have broken laws, it is because the laws
have held them back from what seemed to them necessary, inevitable
development for the greater good of all--because, in a word, they were
radical.
One night in war-time, at a base port in Scotland far from our own
environment and our native prejudices, I heard the self-told tale
of an arch-enemy of American “interests,” a pugnacious man who had
fought and won, with a price on his head, sent millionaires to jail,
been calumniated, been trapped by infamous conspiracies, and escaped
them--a man better hated, better loved than is the fortune of most of
us. My other companion was another American, a young, but celebrated,
preacher, a moralist of the breed of the Beechers and the Spurgeons.
And the same question rose to our lips when the story was finished.
These enemies, these magnates who had been jailed and defeated, and
yet still fought and often successfully, were they mere self-seekers,
rascals, by any fair definition? And neither of us was satisfied with
that answer, nor was the hero of the story. Two of us at least agreed
that it was rather a case of “enterprise” _versus_ “social justice,”
of individualistic effort _versus_ the rights of a community. The zeal
of the capitalists had burned in their hearts until they broke through
morality in an effort to make good.
But of course most of our American radicals have not been even
illegal in their idealism. Their zeal has encountered only obstinacy,
stupidity, and the intractable conservatism of ordinary life. These
men have built up great industries that made life more facile, or
extended great educational and health enterprises over States and
beyond seas, with little harm to any man and much good to most, unless
the source of the wealth expended be questioned, or the effect of a
zealot’s ideas enforced upon millions.
Indeed, if strength of purpose, if energy, if a burning desire to
change, to better the minds, the bodies, or the tools of men, were all
that could be asked of radicalism, then we might well rest content
with the achievements of the American idealist-radical. But more has
been asked of the reformer, even of the reformer of business methods,
than energy and will. The radicalism I have described, based upon
common sense and inspired by restless virility, has not always been
adequate. The pioneering days are ended when a good shot could always
get game, a strong arm always find plowlands. It is time to take
thought. And if one compares the uprooting energy of Americans with
the intellectual radicalism of Europe or with the new radicalism of
the incoming American generation, a curious difference appears. Our
old radicalism was perhaps healthier, certainly more productive of
immediate betterment to those who profited by it; but it is harder to
define, harder to follow into a probable future, because, when all is
said, it is relatively aimless.
Where do our vast business enterprises lead? Toward a greater
production of this world’s goods, toward an accumulation of wealth
in the hands of the sturdy organizers; but equally toward a vast
corporate machine in which the individual man becomes a particle lost
in the mass, toward a society which produces wealth without learning
to distribute or employ it for the purposes of civilization. I do not
say that this latter port is our destination. I say that our business
leaders are steering a course which is just as likely to land us there
as anywhere. Or, rather, they are stoking the engines and letting the
rudder go free.
And is our vast educational enterprise any more definitely aimed?
Perhaps so, for the increase of intelligence is an end in itself.
Nevertheless, for what, let us say, is the American high school
preparing, a new social order, or the stabilization of the old one?
When the aristocrats and the burghers of Europe began to be educated,
they tore themselves apart in furious wars over religion. When the
Western proletariate becomes educated, will it not tear our social
fabric in class wars also? Are we educating for this or against it? For
what kind of society are we educating? The socialist has his answer.
Can American school boards say?
And our organized philanthropists, combating hookworm, tuberculosis,
lynching, child labor, liquor, slums, and preventable crime? The
medieval church, hampered by its lack of science and the waywardness
of its world, engaged in such a struggle, and from a thousand
monasteries, built, like our modern foundations, upon the profits of
exploitation, strove to uplift Europe. Its aim and end were clear: to
practise charity that the souls of workers and donors might be saved;
to clothe the naked and feed the hungry that love might be felt to
govern the world. And the church succeeded in its measure until, on
the somewhat specious plea that not love, but justice, was demanded,
rapacious governments seized the capital of the ecclesiastical
corporations and sold the abbeys for building stone and lead.
Our great organizations are more efficient than the church, because
they are more scientific. Whether they are more successful depends
upon one’s estimate of success. The modern man, for whom they care,
is a cleaner, brighter, more long-lived person than his medieval
ancestor. He is probably better material for civilization, because, if
more vulgarized, he is more intelligent. That he is happier is not
so certain. The church inspired a confidence (not always justified)
in the friendliness of destiny which the Rockefeller Foundation has
so far failed to equal. Nevertheless, scientific philanthropy, though
it promises less, achieves what it does promise more thoroughly
and without those terrible by-products of the ecclesiastical
system--servility, pauperism, bigotry, and superstition. But what is
its aim?
With little more regard to the source of their wealth than the church,
the philanthropies of to-day have far less regard for the final results
of their benefactions. As with the educators, it is enough for them, so
to speak, to improve the breed. The apparent philosophy behind their
program is that when the proletariate is bathed, educated, and made
healthy, it will be civilized, and therefore competent to take over the
world (including universities and steel mills, railroads and hospitals)
and run it. But the executives of these great organizations would
probably protest against this reading of their expectations almost as
quickly as the donors of the funds; certainly they show no readiness to
meet the proletariate half-way on its upward path. Clearly, you cannot
wash, teach, and invigorate society without powerfully affecting the
whole social fabric. The feeble experiments of the nineteenth century
in universal education have already proved that. Some transformation
the great endowments of our age are laboring to bring about. For the
creating of a new race they have a plan, but not for its salvation,
even on this side of heaven. Indeed, as the German experience shows,
they may even become instruments by which the common man is made
a mere tool firmly grasped by the hand of authority. Common sense
alone governs them. Their vision is bent upon the immediate, not the
ultimate, future.
A little vague these criticisms may seem to the practical mind; and
vague, when philosophically considered, are the aims of American
radicalism. Very different, indeed, they are from the clean-cut
programs of the European radical. There is little vagueness in
socialism, little vagueness in syndicalism, the very opposite of
vagueness, despite the efforts of the American press, in Bolshevism.
In all these systems the past is condemned, the present reconstructed,
and the future made visible with a lucidity that betrays their origin
in efforts of the pure reason. That, of course, is the difficulty--at
least to American and most British intelligences. The aim of Bolshevism
is so definite as to be almost mathematical. Society as a whole is
considered economically, and a program deduced that will fill the most
mouths with the least labor. To be sure, stomach-filling is not the
sole purpose of Lenine and his followers. They argue, and with more
right than our easy-going bourgeois civilization is willing to concede,
that idleness, unrest, and crime are more often the result than the
cause of poverty. Nevertheless, the type radical of the European
variety does unquestionably rest his case upon the premise that man
is merely a tool-using animal. Ask a Bolshevik where civilization is
going, and he will answer you with ease and explicitness. Ask the
average American, and he will either reply in vague platitudes or deny
both knowledge and responsibility. Of the two men he is less likely to
be wrong.
And note well that our domesticated socialists and intelligentzia,
though far more inclined to consider the human factor than the
Bolsheviki, have the same advantage of clarity of aim, and the same
tendency to confuse ideas with facts. Common sense--not the highest
virtue, not the virtue which will save our souls, or even our bodies,
in a crisis like war or a turmoil of the spirit--is often lacking in
the socialist. Good humor--again not a quality that wins heaven’s
gates, but a saving grace, nevertheless--is noticeably absent from
the columns of our radical weeklies. An admirable service they are
rendering in clarifying the American mind, in forcing it, or some of
it, to face issues, to think things through, to be intelligent as
well as sensible; but the logical rigidity of their program inhibits
that sense of proportion which recognizes the _Falstaffs_ and the
_Micawbers_ of this world, smiles sometimes over miscarriages of
idealism, sympathizes with feeble, humorous man, does not always scold.
And yet the American who dislikes scolding should beware of
superciliousness. It is much easier for genial folks to chide the
critics with programs than to be critical of themselves. The normal
American is a product of American education, with its insistence upon
liberal progress, upon acceleration toward the vaguest of goals. It has
not taught him to be critical of others in any thorough-going fashion,
it has not taught him to be critical of himself. The confidence that
has carried our business to a maximum, that has flung our schools
broadcast, and swept our philanthropies over the world, spelled
differently is self-assurance. Nothing disturbs us so much as to be
told to stop and think. Nothing angers the business world so much as
legislation that “halts business.” Nothing infuriates an educational
organizer more than to question the quality, not the quantity, of his
product. We have seen clearly what we wished to do with iron and coal
and food. We have felt, in education and philanthropy, sure of our
moral bases. Our energy has been concentrated on going ahead. To be
radical intellectually, to think it all out in terms of a possible
relation of labor and capital, of a possible education, of a possible
society for the future--that has not appealed to us. We have shunned
philosophical programs by instinct, and wilfully built for to-day
instead of tomorrow. The American radical has done too little thinking;
the European, perhaps too much.
But the infection of thought is spreading. I do not believe that the
youths who will make the coming generation--the youths that fought the
war--are going to be radicals in the sense that I have called European.
If the ideas of Marx and Lenine ever take root in America, it will be
because social injustice such as we have not yet been cursed with makes
a soil for them. If they take root, they transform in the growing, like
foreign plants in California weather. But the new generation is not
like the old. It is more sensitive to the winds of doctrine. It is less
empirical, less optimistic, less self-assured.
Already one can divide into two classes the undergraduates as one
finds them in American colleges. The smaller group their elders would
call radical. But they are not socialists, not anarchists, not even
consistently liberal. More truly, they are critics of things as they
are. Their minds are restless; they are ever seeking for definitions,
for solutions, for a cause to enroll under. They are restless under
the push of common sense America that drives them into activity without
explanation. They are painfully aware of the difference between their
ideas and the conditions of life in modern society, and are determined
to test one by the other. Their native idealism has become intellectual.
The other group is far larger, but, if less restless, is no more
static. Most of its members are indifferent to the new ideas
scintillating all over the world, if indeed they are not ignorant of
them. Nevertheless, their faith in society as it was is curiously
weak. If few of them are likely to become socialists, few also will be
inspired by the physical and moral idealism of their fathers. The naïve
enthusiasm of those fathers for “movements,” “ideals,” “progress” is
not (unless I miss my guess) common among them. They are not likely
to overturn America a second time in order to make great fortunes;
philanthropy does not interest them; education as a missionary
endeavor does not seem to attract them. Their moral foundations are
less solid than in old days; their energies less boundless; aimless
endeavor for the sake of doing something is no longer a lure. Either
they will find a program of their own to excite them, or stand pat upon
the fortune they expect to inherit. If their future is to be narrowed
to a choice between pleasure and mere productivity, why, then these
men would rather run motor-cars than make them. There is a very real
danger that rather than hustle for the sake of hustling, they will
prefer to “lie down” on their job. And thanks to the homogeneity of the
current American mind, this analysis, if it is true at all, is true of
thousands.
The American radical in the future, I take it, will still be idealist,
but not Bolshevik. That generalization from the needs of poverty is
at the same time too material to suit his temper, which is still
fundamentally moral, and too rash economically to sit with his
practical common sense. He will remain an idealist; but a sharpening
of his intellect will give teeth to his idealism, and the practical
common sense he will carry over from the days when his kind were
pioneers in a new world will steady him. What he will want is not yet
clear, except that it will certainly not be the world of Marx or the
kaiser (himself in many respects a radical). What he will do I cannot
venture to guess. But if one dare not prophesy, one may at least hope.
And my hope is that a principle now visibly at work among many
Americans may guide him also. Principles, if they are sound, have a
way of making themselves felt through the padding of mental habit and
convention, like knobs in a chair-seat.
The principle I have in mind is merely this: that a man’s character
and the ideas upon which, so to speak, he operates must be appraised
separately. Tenacity of will, honesty of spirit, tenderness of
heart--such elements of character make a man neither conservative nor
radical, but they cannot be left out of political accounting.
And my hope is that the new generation is going to be forced toward
such a weighing and discrimination of character and policies. Their
mental padding has worn thin in war-time. The moral conventions that we
have accepted almost unhesitatingly here in America no longer protect
the youth with certainty from the shrewd blows of rationalism or
superstition.
Therefore ideas and character are both likely to be more closely
inspected in the days that are coming. The conservative minded, as
in the past, will emphasize character; and as that is a much better
platform to stand on than mere obstinacy or self-interest, they will
presumably be better conservatives, provided that the intellectual
unrest of the times forces them to think. The radicals will search for
ideas that may transform the future, and if the abundance of ideas in
relation to the paucity of accomplishment causes them to put a higher
value upon character, why, so much for the better radicalism.
No future in the history of the world has been so interesting as is the
immediate future of America. Our next great political leader, who may
be conservative, but is probably radical, is now in college or has but
lately been graduated--unless, indeed, he has just been admitted to
a labor-union. And he is studying, one hopes, the men who dealt most
heavily in character, the amiable McKinley, the fiercely instinctive
Roosevelt; he is studying the careers of the men who have been
dominated chiefly by ideas, the moral idealist Wilson, the ruthless
thinker Lenine. He is learning, one hopes, when and why each and all
failed, each and all in their measure succeeded. Whether he profits,
and we profit, from their experience, time alone will discover.