AMERICAN IDEALISM
Is American idealism a virtue, a disease, or an illusion? The question
cannot be answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry with which
Tennyson threatened the flower in the crannied wall--what man is, and
what God is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can be made ready
for answering. The writer, and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer
to it; and that is better than the inner feeling of many an American
just now, who, weary of five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly
believes that American idealism is first of all a nuisance.
Yet it was never so easy to make a case for the virtue of idealism as
in retrospect of the years 1914-18. What many have never grasped in
the confusion of the times is that exactly the same idealistic prime
motive made us join hearts from the first with Great Britain and
France, kept us out of war for two years and a half, and brought us
in on that April of 1917. There is always a complex of motives behind
every war, but there is also, with few exceptions, a _primum mobile_,
and with us it was the distrust, the fear, the hatred that were the
reactions of our idealism against arbitrary violence. The invasion of
Belgium settled our will for Belgium and her allies. Our distrust of
war, especially European war, as a means by which we could bring about
justice and peace, kept us out of the struggle despite clamorous, and
perhaps far-sighted, minorities. Our final conviction that violence was
a fire loose in the world, which must be stamped out, drove us from
easy neutrality into war. And if in the last of these three stages
dread of the future and the need of immediate self-defense had their
large part, they did no more than sharpen the angle of our resolve.
Idealism kept us out of war, and idealism drove us into it.
The fume and spume of idealism is oratory, sermonizing, talk about
morality, duty, patriotism, rights, and noble purposes. All such
gushing rhetoric is no more the thing itself than foam is the ocean.
But, like smoke, there is seldom much of it without cause. Men and
women who were abroad in 1918 must reflect curiously on the, shall
we say, wearisome prevalence of the moralistic, idealistic note in
American speech and writing in contrast to its restraint and frequent
absence in France and England. When an Englishman orated upon the war
to stop war he was usually talking for American consumption. This does
not mean that Great Britain and France were sordid, we sincere; on the
contrary, it is proof of a tincture of the sentimental in our idealism,
to which I shall later return. But it is additional testimony to the
quantity and the popularity of American idealism in those months. The
tone of the press at that crucial time was evidence of the tone of
the people that read and responded. And while many a sounding speech
and impassioned editorial are now, as one reads them, a little faded,
faintly absurd, like tattered war posters on a rural bill-board, yet no
one can doubt the flood of patriotic idealism that created them, few
will doubt that our war idealism was a virtue in 1914-1918.
It seemed a virtue then, but was it not already diseased? When we
entered the war, the vast majority of Americans publicly and privately
committed themselves to certain general principles, and, whatever
else they fought for, believed that they were fighting for them. A
square deal all around was one, the consent of the governed to their
government was another, a third was the substitution, at all costs, of
justice for violence in the ruling of the world. We all assented to
these principles, most of us assumed them voluntarily as an article
of faith, and the average man took them as seriously as he is able to
take abstractions. Peace came, the armistice, the stages of the treaty.
Nothing could be clearer or more to be expected than that sometimes in
spirit, often in detail, and most seriously in ultimate purpose, the
treaty in scores of instances ran counter to the faiths we had accepted
and made commonplaces of speech and thinking.
I am neither criticizing nor justifying the treaty and its included
covenant. No one, I suppose, but a sentimental optimist could
have expected a work of logical art in exact conformity with the
principles and conditions of a new epoch that has scarcely begun, no
one at least who had ever read history, or studied the politics of
Sonnino, Clemenceau, and the Unionist party. It was bound to have
inconsistencies; to reflect as many views as there were strong minds
in the conference, to be experimental, to be a compromise. This is not
what is astonishing; it is the attitude of the typical American mind
toward the treaty negotiations.
In the winter and spring of 1919, while the world was burning, while
the principles we had shouted for were at last in actual settlement,
this enormous American idealism slept, forgot its fine phrases,
forgot its pledges to see the thing through, was bored because some
Americans felt that it was our duty to see the thing through. We are an
uncritical nation despite our occasional vehemence of criticism, but
we have never been so uncritical of major issues as in 1919, when the
terms of world settlement were of acute interest to all but Americans.
We are an easy-going nation, but we have never been so easy-going as
in 1919, when not one man in a thousand as much as read the abstract
of the treaty to see whether the things he had said he fought for were
safeguarded in it. The only real fire-spitting fervor struck out in
this country since the armistice has been in defense of our right to
let Europe stew in her own juice, and our privilege to tell general
principles to go hang. And this is an emotion almost too narrow to be
attributed, even by the generous minded, to idealism.
One answers, of course, that such a decline from overheated virtue
into indifferentism is only human nature at its old tricks, the
collapse after the New Year’s resolution, the weariness of being too
good, symptoms, in short, of content with having “licked the Hun,”
and a desire to get back to work. And the reply is, of course this is
true. But Europe is not thus functioning. There has been a striking
contrast in the years since the war between British and American
attitudes toward treaty negotiations. In England, exhausted by war as
we never were, deep in the lassitude of rest after struggle, men and
women have leaped into criticism and defense of the ideals embodied
in the settlement. Peace has seemed to them as vital a battle-ground
of ideas as war. By and large, the plodding mass of us who make money
and public opinion have been cold to the contest, uninterested. The
press of Great Britain has fiercely attacked and fiercely defended
the morale of the treaty; ours has reported it with little real
criticism and little interest except where the league was concerned.
Their universities have supplied men and parties to fight through the
principles for which we fought; ours have been intent upon how much
scholastic credit should be given returned soldiers and who should
get an honorary degree. They forced an easy-going premier to stand
for a victory that was more than conquest; we grudged our President
the attempt to carry through in Paris what in 1917 we were all agreed
upon; let our dislike of his methods outweigh our deep interest in his
ends. If it had not been for the great issue of the League of Nations,
which, forcing Americans to act, forced them to remember (some with
difficulty) what they had believed in and what they had learned in
1917 of the dangers of selfish aloofness from world problems, if it
had not been for the fight over the league, the politics of 1919 would
have been as local, as trivial, as wearisome, as in the year after a
Presidential election. Some scholar in the next decade will place side
by side the files of a New York daily in its moral-idealistic stage
of 1917 and its cynical back-to-business mood of 1919; will compare
the fantastic pledges never again to trade with Germany, which were
circulating in 1918, with the export statistics of 1919; will marvel,
and perhaps draw conclusions.
And one wonders, meeting everywhere an interest in world affairs that
seems dying, a national morale that is forgetting its moral impulses, a
hatred of the professional idealist, a weariness of general principles,
and a cynical distrust of ideas--one wonders whether this flaming
American idealism so-called was not even in 1918 flushed with disease,
a virtue already dying.
Were we indeed ever really idealistic? Consider the case of the
ablest of our manufacturers, who, when the emotional fit was on him,
proposed to increase the production of idealism until every American
home should own an ideal of the latest model. He gives the order, draws
the checks, and, naïvely surprised at the discovery that you cannot
make ideals without understanding them, hangs up philosophy, and goes
back to the motor business. Consider the case of our radical papers who
fought our entrance into a war where American ideals were not properly
safeguarded, and then preferred to risk a treaty without the League
of Nations, to a league which, though it expressed American idealism,
was not perfect by their judging. Consider the flaming desire to make
the universe and one’s home safe for democracy, in contrast with the
current contempt for the ideals of industrial democracy. Perforce one
wonders whether American idealism, healthy or diseased, is not a mere
emotion, easily roused, never lasting; whether, as a valuable part of
our national character, it is not an illusion.
So much needs to be said by way of charge and speculation in order
to clear the air. If I write with some excitement, it is no more
than the sight of the tumble from great-worded, great deeded 1918
to the indifferent, self-regarding, and a little cynical present
may account for. Certainly in our national past idealism has not
been an illusion, although it was often emotional. Nor, in sober
fact, do I doubt the essential idealism of the normal American mind,
especially that American mind which inherits the optimism and the
liberal instincts of our forefathers. I am merely curious as to the
exact nature of that idealism as it exists, and plays strange tricks,
to-day. It seems to be a quality more resembling energy than a moral
characteristic like virtue or vice. It seems, as one thinks over these
recent manifestations, to be a blend of physical virility and nervous
sensitiveness, good or bad, active or inactive, according to the
condition and environment of the patient. Stir him, and it becomes
active, beneficent, altruistic. Stir him further, and it may become
sentimental, with symptoms of hysteria. Relax the pressure, and it
drops into desuetude. These are the habits of American idealism, and
I doubt whether more can be said of them except by way of further
description. But there must be some thoughts, some ideas behind to
account for these vagaries. There must be reasons why Americans
idealize more readily than other nations, and why, just now at least,
they so easily tire of their idealizing.
Neither the scope of these pages nor my knowledge permits me to trace
the history of American thinking and feeling, to say, as the historians
some day must, what elements came from Europe, what modifications are
due to pioneer environment, racial mixture, and centuries of unchecked
material development. But tentatively, and with all modesty, one may
at least seek for light. I find that two great figures of our national
youth and the ways of thinking they represented most help me to
understand the strengths and the weaknesses of American idealism, help
to an understanding of the phenomena of 1917-20.
The first is Jonathan Edwards, theologian of international importance,
leader of the great spiritual revival of mid-eighteenth century New
England, missionary to the Indians, president of Princeton, author of
works so widely read that even now no farm-house garret in New England
but will yield a sermon or two, a treatise on original sin, or his
epochal essay on the freedom of the will.
Alas for human reputation! This tireless thinker, whose logic built
up in entirety an impregnable argument worthy of Aquinas, is now
chiefly remembered as a preacher of infant damnation and a thunderer of
hell-fire over frightened Northampton congregations. But, as all wiser
critics know, the influence of a great mind is distinct and often
different from its reputation. What it does, works on and on after
death, transmuting, transforming; what it was in popular repute, soon
becomes legend and supposed historical fact. Compare the reputation
of Machiavelli with his achievements and influence as described in
Macaulay’s famous essay.
In actual achievement Edwards, whose mind was of unusual lucidity and
endurance, crystallized for Americans the Calvinistic ethics of life
which were the backbone of Puritan civilization. Man, by the unarguable
might of God, is born with a will whose nature may be either bad or
good. Henceforth his reason is free, his choice is free, within the
limits that his character permits. It becomes therefore supremely
important that he shall choose and reason virtuously, for there is no
way to be sure that he has a good will, that he is among the “elect”
except by virtuous action leading to a sense of salvation. Thus in
every condition of life, without excuse or palliation, the Christian
must daily, hourly strive to _prove_ that he is one of the elect of
God, saved from hell-fire by the character God has given him. Good
intentions count for nothing. Good works, if unaccompanied by the sense
of spiritual salvation, count for nothing. God, Himself blameless, has
willed sin and sinful men. It is for us to prove that we are not among
the damned.
That the system is incredible most moderns now believe; that it is
logical, more logical perhaps than any later attempt to justify the
ways of God to man, the student must admit. My desire is naturally not
to argue, but to emphasize, what can never be too much emphasized, the
effect of such thinking upon the intellectual life of America. It was
believed in powerfully and well understood by perhaps a majority of one
formative generation. Later it was not believed in so powerfully, and
it was but little understood, especially outside of New England. But
a conviction of the infinite necessity of willing the right became a
mental habit in American morality that persists and becomes a trait and
a chief factor, as any reader may see, in so-called American idealism.
Benjamin Franklin was almost the exact contemporary of Jonathan
Edwards, but he had the inestimable advantage of living longer and
seeing more; two continents and two ages, in fact, were his familiars,
and learned from him as well as taught him. Franklin, it is clear, was
strongly influenced by that French eighteenth century which he loved,
with its praise of reason and its trust in common sense. But he was
even more a product of the new America. America, as Edwards and Cotton
Mather saw it, was an experiment in godliness. When the Puritan scheme
should have proved its efficacy by an abnormal increase in the number
of earthly saints, the colonies would have served their chief end, and
would, so Mather thought, decline. The hell-breathing vehemence of
Edwards was chiefly due to his fear that the scheme was failing. He
was fighting a spiritual decline.
But Franklin was a member of the worldly, not the spiritual, body of
America; he was a citizen of a country visibly growing in wealth and
population. He looked outward, not inward; forward, not backward.
Like Edwards, he hated sin; but sin for him was not sin because it
was forbidden, but forbidden because it was sin. Franklin’s was a
practical morality, which was cut to fit life, not to compress it. His
firm character and the clarity of his reason kept his morals high.
His ethics were admirable, but they were based upon the principle
that honesty is the best policy, not upon the fear of God. To be
“reasonable” was his highest good. “So convenient it is to be a
reasonable creature,” he remarks whimsically, “since it enables one to
find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” As long
as one is a Franklin, with the will to virtue, honesty, industry, and
thrift that is bred from a good inheritance, in a new and developing
country, such ethics make for idealism. No one was more idealistic in
his day than the practical Franklin, who wished to form a league of
virtue of all nations to be governed by rules, and supported by the
reason of virtuous mankind.
And here is another palpable strain of Americanism, differing from
that necessity which Edwards trumpeted, but, like it, a stiffener
of idealistic impulses. Here one places the love of a square deal,
the desire to do what is right because it is “fair,” the sense of
the reasonableness of justice that freed the slaves, gave Cuba
self-government, determined our policy toward the Philippines, and was
horror-struck by the invasion of Belgium. It is the idealism of good
common sense, and together with the mental habit of willing the right
has been a main cause of American idealism.
Both of these American characteristics are operative to-day. Both are
now factors and dangerous factors in our idealism, for the strong will
of the Calvinists to do right has become erratic and perverted, and the
common sense of Franklin’s school has degenerated. Here, as I shall
endeavor to show, are two chief causes for the vagaries of the American
mind in the years that ended the war.
The mental discipline which the Puritans learned from the fear of
a wrathful God remained a discipline long after it had lost its
theological basis, and is responsible in no small measure for the
disciplined will of nineteenth-century America to succeed in material
endeavors as well as in philanthropic or moral purpose. But, divorced
from the belief in a speedy damnation which had given it cause, it
was bound to become, and it did become, a mere mental habit, a kind
of aimless necessity of being virtuous. Bolted no longer to a belief
in a revengeful God who demanded virtue, loosed, like an engine from
its flywheel, this ancestral sense of necessity whirled on by its
own momentum. It became will without thinking behind it, which was
driven by material circumstance instead of religious belief. It became
a restless energy whose aim, as a foreign observer has said, seemed
to be “mere acceleration.” It became unreasonable, often absurd,
sometimes hysterical. I find its manifestations in the insistence that
America must always be described as sweet, lovely, and virtuous in
disregard of the facts, in our “boosting” of prosperity and success
by proclaiming them. I find them in the determination to be good and
happy and prosperous immediately and without regard to circumstance
which has created the American magazine story and brought about
national prohibition by constitutional amendment. This hand-me-down
will is responsible for much progress, good and bad, in America; it is
also responsible for American sentimentalism. It has been a driving
force in our idealism; but because it is not so much reasoned purpose
as a mental habit inherited, it has run wild, become hysterical and
erratic. It led us to propose to reform the world and to advertise
our intention before our brains were ready for the task. It makes our
idealism feverish and uncertain.
As for Franklin’s rule of common sense, it has become a positive
deterrent to idealism. His idea of conduct reasonably shaped according
to the needs of environment was, and is to-day, the most solid trait
of Americans. It is the ethics of modern business, and American
business has become, and for a little while yet will remain, the
fundamental America. Nevertheless, every candid observer will admit,
no matter how great his faith in the future of his country, that the
reasonable good sense of the Franklin tradition suffered a progressive
dilution or degeneration throughout the nineteenth century. Rational
ethics became for the most of us materialistic rationalism, still
reasonable, still ethical in its way, still backed and restrained
by common sense (our profiteers have also been philanthropists),
but an enemy, nevertheless, to all idealism that could not be made
from steel, brick, rubber, or oil. We have been too reasonable to be
sordid; too materialistic to remain in the best sense reasonable. Far
from advocating a league of the virtues, our business common sense
has been fighting a League of Nations. The contrast between our moral
code and our business code has already been overwritten in muck-raking
literature. Nevertheless, despite exaggeration, it exists. Our national
life is dual. We can stand on our moral foot and our business foot, but
usually we alternate. In 1918 we rested entirely on one; in 1919 we
swung with relief to the other. Franklin’s rule of common sense as a
stimulus to idealism has broken down.
What reasonable sense of proportion I myself possess as a descendant
of the compatriots of Franklin urges me to protest instantly that all
this is not to be taken as a picture of contemporary America. Rather
it is a plucking out merely of two strains of experience that all
must recognize. But these are perilously interwoven in our national
character. They affect the validity of our idealism.
The hysterical will drives us into professions of virtue we cannot make
good. It drove us to “boost” the war; and then, being a restless energy
sprung from habit rather than from conviction, left us exhausted in
spirit and cynical in mind when the moral profits were ready for the
gathering. It stirred a passion for the League of Nations, rights of
small countries, democracy, justice, and the rest, and then collapsed
like the second day of “clean-up” week. It set the will going and left
the brain unmoved.
And our common sense, diluted through millions, obsessed by the
problems of manufacture and construction, is in ever greater danger
of losing that basis of character and enlightened reason that alone
can make common sense anything but common. It dreads ideas, distrusts
theories, is made uncomfortable by altruism that extends beyond the
home. As a nation, we have not degenerated, for our virile energy, our
will, our adaptiveness are all as strong as ever, stronger perhaps
than elsewhere in the world. But, as compared with Franklin’s, our
common sense has lost character. It pulled back in the great moral
and intellectual problems of the war; it did not lead. As manifested
in the present struggle over international policies, it falls below
the ethical standards of the nation, whether you tap it in clubs and
offices or in Congress. In a time of crisis it rallies to encounter
material problems and is invaluable; but morally and intellectually its
vision is short, its endurance weak.
The trouble with the American reformer, as has often been said, is that
he has more energy than reason; and this is because he incarnates the
instinctive, irrational will of which I have been writing. The trouble
with the American materialist is that he has kept his common sense
while losing his vision.
Both, in short, lack an adequate spiritual and moral basis; and so does
the American idealism that is functioning nobly, but so irregularly,
to-day. With an irresponsible will driving it forward and a
matter-of-fact common sense holding it back, it suffers too frequently
from the weakness of all qualities that spring from custom rather than
from conviction. Its leafage has spread; its roots have contracted.
I am not so unhumorous as to propose that the remedy is once again to
believe in Jonathan Edwards’s God and infant damnation; but we must
go deeper than habit and tradition for the springs of our action. Not
since the Civil War have we as a nation explored our souls, sought the
channels of our being, tested our ultimate faith. This war has been no
test. Its issues were clear. They appealed to principles that we held
firmly because we had inherited them. It was easier to go in than to
stay out. Even our material prosperity, apparently, stood to gain, not
to lose, by entering the conflict. We made the right choice, but it
was not hard to make it. To be idealistic was easy.
I do not believe that our inheritance either of virtuous will or of
practical common sense will serve us long without renewal. The first
is vehement in propaganda, prohibition, and hysteric excess, but
flags when a load of stern duty, national or international, is put
upon it. The second has no end and aim but the making of a prosperous
America where the grubber and the grabber have much and others
little. It is useful, nay, indispensable, to the economic state, but
beyond economics--and so much is beyond economics!--there is little
health in it. If our idealism is to remain as robust as our material
prosperity, it must gain what Franklin would have described as a basis
of enlightened reason, or suffer what Edwards would have called a
conversion--and, preferably, both.
Samuel’s mother was a fine, but somewhat rigorous, woman who brought
him up in the conviction that he had to do right (by which she meant
being honest and moral, and going to church on Sundays) or shame
would come upon him. His father was a man whose “word was as good as
his bond.” He taught his boy that working hard and saving money were
probably the most important things in life, and that if you paid your
bills, were true to your word, and kept an eye upon shifty neighbors,
you were sure to be happy and successful.
At the age of fifty the father died from hardening of the arteries,
the result of too few vacations, and the mother became a rather morose
member of the W. C. T. U. Samuel found himself now possessed of half a
million dollars and a prosperous shoe factory.
As for the factory, he discovered within a year that since the death
of his father its success had been due to a new system of piece work,
which “speeded up” the worker and gave the profits to the proprietor.
But there seemed no way of changing the system without ruining
the business. As for his wealth, it brought him new and pleasing
associates who were more polished and intelligent than he, and whose
life was so much more cheerful, instructive, and interesting than his
early experience that he could only wish to be like them; especially
when he saw that they were far better citizens than his father, who,
to tell the truth, lived very much for his own narrow interests. And
yet their ideas of pleasure and even of morality were quite different
from what he had been led to suppose were the only proper principles on
which to conduct one’s life, and they never went to church. He wanted
to be honest, he wanted to be good; but neither how to be honest in his
factory nor how to be good and yet a “good fellow” were explained by
the teachings of his youth.
For an unhappy year or two he tried to act like his father, believe
as his mother, and be like his neighbors. In addition, in order to
satisfy a somewhat uneasy conscience, he prepared to enter politics on
a platform of straight Americanism and the full dinner-pail. Then in
one eventful week his workmen struck for an eight-hour day and shop
committees, his mother announced her intention of bequeathing her share
of the estate to the Anti-tobacco League, his best girl refused to
marry him unless he should become an Episcopalian, and he was invited
by the local boss to subscribe to a “slush” fund or give up politics.
Samuel went to the Maine woods to catch trout and think over the
situation. What he did finally is not told in the story. What he
decided is, however, of some significance. For, brooding over a dark
pool in the spruces, he concluded that each generation must search
out the foundations for its own morality, and determine for itself
the worth and power of the ideals it proclaims. And so perhaps will
America.