Definition of America
We have two prodigious victories to gain--the war and the world after
the war. The chatter about not "defining war aims" because specific
aims are bound to disturb us, is dangerously beside the point, because
the kind of world we will create depends largely on the kind of war we
wage. If we nazify ourselves to win, we will win a nazified world; if
we communize ourselves, we will probably share a modified Marxian
world with the Soviets; and if we win by intensification of our
democracy, we will create the only kind of world in which we can live.
And, as noted in discussing the strategy of the war, the chances are
that we can only win if we divine the essential nature of our people
and create a corresponding strategy.
In addition to the direct military need for knowing what kind of
people we are, there is the propaganda need, so that we can create a
national unity and put aside the constant irritation of partisanship,
the fear of "incidents", the wastage of emotional energy in quarrels
among ourselves. And there is a third reason for an exact and candid
review of what we are: it is our future.
When this war ends we will make, in one form or another, solemn
agreements with the nations of the world, our allies and what is left
of our enemies. We know almost nothing about any of them--we, the
American people. Our State Department knows little enough; what it
knows, it has not communicated to us; and we have never been
interested enough to make discoveries of our own. We are about to
commit a huge international polygamy, with forty picture brides, each
one in a different national costume.
Some conditions of this mass marriage are the subject of the next
section of this book. Here I am concerned with the one thing we can do
to make the preliminary steps intelligent. We cannot learn all we need
to know about all the other nations of the world; but we can reflect
on some things within ourselves, we can know ourselves better; and on
this knowledge we can erect the framework into which the other nations
will fit; or out of which they will remain if they choose not to fit.
We can, by knowing a few vital things about ourselves, learn a lot
about South America and Europe and Asia and Australia; what _we_ are
will determine whom we will marry, whom reject, and whom we will set
up, if agreeable, in an unsanctified situation. The laws of man, in
many states, require certificates of eligibility to marry, the
services of the church inquire if an obstacle exists. Before we enter
into compacts full of tragic and noble possibilities, we might also
make inquiries. Something in us shies away from the pomp of the old
diplomacy--what is that something? We used to like revolutionaries and
never understood colonial exploitation--how do these things affect us
now? Are we prepared to deal with a government in one country and a
people in another? Is it possible for us to ally ourselves to
Communists, reformed fascists, variously incomplete democracies,
cooperative democratic monarchies, and centralized empires, all at the
same time? Is there anything in us which requires us to make terms
with Britain about India, with Russia about propaganda, with Sweden
about exports, before we make a new world with all of them? Can we,
honorably, enter any agreement, with any state or with all states,
while they are ignorant of our character--as ignorant, possibly, as we
are of theirs?
The difficulty we are in is nicely doubled, because introspection is
no happy habit and we say that we _know_ all about America, or we say
that America cannot be known--it is too big, too varied, too
complicated. And these two opposite statements are in themselves a
beginning of a definition. America, by this testimony, is a country,
large, varied, complex, inhabited by people who either understand
their country perfectly or will not make an effort to understand it. I
would not care to rest on this definition--but it shows the need of
definition.
_Mathematics of Character_
By "definition of America" I mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we
are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from
others. We are, for instance, the only country lying between the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 25 deg. 35' and 49 deg. north latitude. This
definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a
criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact,
the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied
climate, our resources, our bigness with _its_ consequences in the
temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical _fact_.)
Not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in
mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of
jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a
superiority. Moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put
on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other
what is exclusively ours--and make a comparison, a guide to
international conduct "on scientific principles". We would know how
far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm
basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or
made compromise impossible.
We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social
boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we
can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a
diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics
can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the
hope of a better life--the number who came can be written down, the
intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination
can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by
those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of
men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far
as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the
great complex of our national character.
We are defined by events--immigration was an event. But immigrants
came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England.
When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us.
It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both
absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries
or has all our habits, because none has had our history--that is the
base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with
us, but we differ from each relatively--in some degree. This would not
be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and
were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted
that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The
corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.
_The Revolution in Property_
When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most
important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The
ruling class in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become
poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as
in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the
thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of
land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable
area was only the fringe, the shore line, of Continental America; the
Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the
French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which
unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.
Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution
in the deepest instincts of man had taken place--land became a
commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe,
land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal
Houses were founded on land); land was _real_ estate, everything else
was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws,
laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and
foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law
governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to
property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and
marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the
Prince (or _Princeps_) was often the first man in the land because he
was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent
thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur;
in it they were buried.
The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the
clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and
complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond
the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a
House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia
tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to
buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed
(often legally, often by squatters' right--which is the right of work,
not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and
went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.
There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move
which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal
instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock,
reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European
cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in
themselves--or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied
so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has
beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his
"rape of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's
positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's
advice to seek Nature "in a wise passiveness"--advice based on the
poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then
as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped
his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". Our more
familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for
wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who
wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what
he was doing.
He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did.
The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and
position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine--which is
wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the _industry_ of
one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not
by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to
alter--for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a
criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became
respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was
divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few
generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable--but
not responsible.
_The Consequences of Free Land_
This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had
astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the
land--in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The
European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn,
nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the
soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a
younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate
unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. This may be
morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result:
the American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil
exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but
escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant
class. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite
forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant
virtues, the peasant sturdiness and all the rest of the good qualities
which go with slavery to the soil.
So the physical definition of America leads to these opening social
definitions:
we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and
power;
we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil;
we were supremely the great wasters of the world;
we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant class.
From this beginning we can go on to other effects:
our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war
against neighboring states;
we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger
could find more and better land);
the national center of gravity was constantly changing as
population moved to take up new land;
we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were
constantly opening new frontiers;
our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;
we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and
education, for instance) at the same time;
we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning
and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of
political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.
The effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant
psychological factor in America; the obvious effects are that the land
invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer--who between them
created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of
character. In addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at
home and peaceful abroad. Once we felt secure within our territorial
limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of
the Spaniards in Cuba to bring us into our first war against a
European nation since 1814. This pacifism was more intense in the more
agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific
Scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than
ours. Pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from Germany
and Russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service
(for their children, if not for themselves). In revenge for this
un-European pacifism we created a purely American lawlessness--and a
toleration of it which is the amazement of Nazi Germany, where the
leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized
Europe, having lived through duels and massacres, is still shocked by
our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in
pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new
citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs.
_America on the Move_
One more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and
all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers
struck inland from Plymouth and upland from Jamestown) have not
altered us. The voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a
generation; but the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon was moving into the
Northwest Territory as soon as the Revolution was over; then New
England began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails
broken by outriders to the western ocean; the Gold Rush pulled men
through the wintry passes or around the Horn, and by then our passion
for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the Clipper ship;
after the Civil War the Homestead Act started a new move to the West,
and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular
and abundant. If the 1870's were not marked by great migrations of
men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of
cattle, north from Texas in the summer, south from Wyoming as winter
threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines
and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to
the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City. We were moving a bit more
slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest
was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no
more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in Europe,
developed as a common tool for the average family, and America was
mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a
satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of
activity which has not been sufficiently studied--the tin can tourist,
the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. This search for the
sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established
habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new
ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required
initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was
only a new beginning.
The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World
War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost
tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost
entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that
one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quantity-production
of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor
mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities,
small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks,
busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away
from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the
conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country
known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a
small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million
Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road.
Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy
came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside
cabin.
"Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car";
that was left for dictators to promise--without fulfilment. The cars
made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new
models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a
more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors,
widely remarked. That the motor car could be used--was being used--as
a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war
threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which
had rested there for thirty years--but might still be good for
transport.
In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near
frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European
_governments_ subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were
not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two
things--making planes in mass production, and getting millions of
people to use them. The present war has anticipated normal progress in
methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a
downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train;
but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic
American pattern of machines for mobility.
"_The Richest Nation on Earth_"
From free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast
amount of wealth in America. Because land could not be the exclusive
base of riches, wealth in America began to take on many meanings and,
for the first time in history, a wealthy people began to emerge,
instead of a wealthy nation.
We were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. The
overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities
are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the gods;
of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we
have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and
clothing, we can always have enough; from South America, we can get
foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few
strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing;
except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be
poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw
materials serviceable to all of us. So that our power to work, our way
of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on
the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth.
We have a tradition about wealth, too. The Government, to some degree,
has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the
people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any
artificial bar to enterprise.
"_Rugged Individuals_"
Government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million
Americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the
Hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first New
Deal. Perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real Americans"
would reject Federal aid--a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks
about Valley Forge. It was forgotten that the men who froze and swore
at Valley Forge demanded direct Government aid the moment the Republic
was established; and that the Cumberland Road, the artery from
Fredericksburg, Maryland to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was built by the
Government of the United States for its citizens. Government gave
bounties and free land; Government gave enormous sums of money to
industry by way of tariff, and gave 200 million acres of land to
railroads. There was never a time when the Federal Government was not
giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. The
outcry when Government attempted to save _all_ the citizens indicated
an incomplete knowledge of our history. In particular, the steady
reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for
them to start again. The country, for all its obedience to financial
power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. After the era
of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was
ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished--and not
pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty--the almost
universal condition of man throughout the world--was not enough for
America.
It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the
stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark
in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large
nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing
wealth. The Axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is
possible that Hitler has already succeeded, for like the
Administration in 1931, Hitler can say that no one dies of starvation.
Our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure
that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived,
and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. This
may betray a low liking for riches--but it has its good points also.
It has helped to keep us free, which is something.
"_Ye Shall Live in Plenty_"
Wealth--and the prospect of wealth--are positive elements in the
American makeup. We differ from large sections of Europe because we
take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we
spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that
for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed
in business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and
spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness.
The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to
do with forming the American character, because no one took it too
seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they
could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium--they were
disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed
the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to
some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the
facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the
frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the
facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve
equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon
domestic reform to concentrate on the war.
Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of
sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we
accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living
and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of
America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert
Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to
renounce, but to enjoy".
Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been
people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material
goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have
their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations,
most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to
get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the
world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America
it is assumed that all will get a great deal.
The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought
of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are
intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.
_America Invented Prosperity_
In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device
of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can
now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment;
without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to
become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still
is--and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For
it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money
is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as
if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our
invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.
For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity
is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.
The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a
prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have
often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to
run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create
either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with
one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten
times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it.
As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it
would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the
country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The
people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government;
they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing
economic controls--a highly concentrated government over a single, not
a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did
not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act
while Congress was not in session; they erected no system of national
courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy,
could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When
this system of Confederation broke down, the Constitution was
carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of
the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make
their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did
not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.
The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Constitution to their own
advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances
of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of
property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of
the Constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time
... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly
fulfilled."
The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time;
poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually
also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States
was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the
reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and
Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle
down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of
intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the
expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a
_constant_ in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in
1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things
in the mind of the lower classes. The idea of class and the idea of a
"station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted
after _all_ the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in
America the Revolution set out to--and did--destroy the principle of
natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty,
and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been
publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and
what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we
failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which
did not accept poverty as inevitable.
This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world.
We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became
optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We
enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us
preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that,
for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold,
and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or
Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.
_Our Fifty Years of Class War_
From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of
government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the
children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy--the
system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to
displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on
prosperity.
The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent
movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for
generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich
and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our
political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the
combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of
extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under
Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried
to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself.
Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had
begun to _limit_ enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a
peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not
repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal
Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the
safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.
We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not
become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are
a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more
important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money
counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way
back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal
principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and
concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we
are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is
required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our
purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our
capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.
_Labor Troubles_
The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that
we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are
hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we
were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of
life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had
exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests
were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed
revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through
the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of
organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.
The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all
concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of
labor too often unfit. Like other organized groups, labor unions did
not always consult the public good and criminals were found among
them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production
or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long
traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their
ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic
self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing
from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing
legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the
labor unions.
The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass,
the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country
backward in the _habits_ of organized dealing between management and
labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic
hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of
becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new
wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled
principles--to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.
Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain
his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the
basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not
represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient
wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in
Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we
create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans
have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of
labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border
clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces
capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send
the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal
mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide
them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as
that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became
bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost
when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as
the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty
years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the
Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the
settlement of all disputes.
Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor
disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly
because we shall remain for some time behind the other great
industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a
British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did;
and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the
future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false
unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes,
no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations
Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and
worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we
have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without
self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for
statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor
situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities,
and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we
could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy
could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the
Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.
_The Danger of Godlessness_
I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their
sources, as a guide to conduct--particularly the conduct of the war
(which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian
propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our
habits. I have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook
which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and
from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor
and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I
come now to items which are no less potent because they are
impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of
America into play must count also on these.
We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we
are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from
our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not
constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to
Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a
connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or
see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and
disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our
fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.
The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of
material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a
functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man
from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any
sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private
purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the
mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic"
itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is
now associated with flummery and hoax.
We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical
world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good
intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in
our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of
cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek
his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.
This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a
practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves linked through
God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any
job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic
countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to
the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to
universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a
deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to
abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in
war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep
universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute
for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious
actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already
have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are
enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear
and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of
religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether
the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling"
which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past
was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as
vain as our hope for better.
_The Alger Factor_
The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the
departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against
wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our
Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic
appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of
the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference
of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in
America by an intense and confident appeal to _action_, in the faith
that action will bring far better things than have been known. The
vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a
childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger
or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this
because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of
poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern
history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the
minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have
rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other
peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the
wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints--but we have also
rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to
which they tend.
The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it
must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What
aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands
reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the
scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine
covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona
Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but
the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music
popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty
years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the
greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible
that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic
standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire
year. And both of these instances have another special point of
interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that
pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and
music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.
I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a
"lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American
expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by
twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably,
without servants hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three
flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes
to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't
think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy
themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and
it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget
about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.
_The Morals of Plenty_
We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that
nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is
based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than
his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those
who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for
a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry
and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry
clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation;
Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were
preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we
never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and
living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are
usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what
is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money
beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient
and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most
moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it
adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality
denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be
made by mass production). Mass production put an end to the old
complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub--mass
production of tubs and central heating in apartments. The morality of
scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be
considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the
chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men
born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create
equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this
was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the
practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of mass
production; it was a working morality.
_Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime_
We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of
spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse;
cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the
five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate
time. We may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time
when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully
as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the
process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that
substituted the _goods_ of the many for the good of the few.
The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it
remains a distinguishing mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist
us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to
a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened
to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have
never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the
five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive
presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds
cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the
five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.
In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon;
characteristic of the twentieth century as the crossroads general
store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone
and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is
impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods
and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally
held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French
bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the
five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.
_Prosperity and Politics_
Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of
Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in
conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free
land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to
emancipate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in
the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because
in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of
watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers;
sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that
we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political
party, or a generation--but America did not forget. Each time we
forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic
means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time
we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come
back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years
when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the
redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing;
and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that
America could create the materials for a high standard of life,
although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified
supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society
wealthy"; and we did it so handsomely as to leave questionable his
further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it
can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than
the capitalist system can."
We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives
comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and
immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quantity system
into action; and all of them required the same thing--equality of
political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of
education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free
speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people,
aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future,
capable of earning and not afraid to spend--these are the customers
required by mass production. And the same freedom, the same intention
to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the
future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its
iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men
from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that
individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for
Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in
politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to
our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their
prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely
a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest
spenders.
The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be
understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it
failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them
move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our
own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national
well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen,
our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our
fulfilment of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements
in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical
life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts
with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at
least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out
of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we
breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.