We Americans are a Peculiar People
Even among the various nationalities of the white race there are very
great differences of character and temperament. To try to overlook
these, to declare that they do not exist, is both dishonest and
dangerous. Moved by the inspiration of a common cause in the Great
War, no doubt the American troops and the French people made every
possible effort to be agreeable and companionable. Still their very
real differences caused friction. We recognize all sorts of peculiar
characteristics among individuals. Why this folly of trying to deny
their existence among nations? Sound conclusions in any matter
are reached only by starting with facts. But the humanitarian and
sentimental purposes which some of us have in mind often lead to the
misuse of facts. Self-deception is the very last support upon which to
build a sense of international or interracial friendship and good will.
Democracy, as a working system, as we have said in previous articles,
is peculiar to a few nations of the white race. As such it is perhaps
the greatest social and spiritual adventure in the history of humanity.
Democracy can thrive only where it sinks its roots deep into the
personality of the individual soul. In a successful democracy the
citizen must be free, honest, intelligent, informed, sportsmanlike, and
willing to be always active in the performance of his political duties.
These qualities can not be brought forth by the hocus-pocus of wishing
them upon anybody. They are the result of a long evolution. They
have grown, thus far, only in particular environments and only among
peculiar peoples whose whole history furnishes the essential background.
It is often pointed out as an evidence of the success which follows
the mixing of our various nationalities, that we original Americans
have resulted from the greatest of all mixtures. We began, in Colonial
times, as English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish; as French, Dutch, German
and Swedish elements. The results of this mixture, we conclude, have
been entirely satisfactory. But right here we are apt to come to error.
True, the original American people were formed by the mixture of
these various nationalities. Yet the success of out great experiment
was due to the fact of a much greater social unity than at first
appears on the surface. Our American people were drawn, mostly, from
a single European class. This was the class of small property-holders
and skilled workers. They came from the progressive countries to the
north and west of Europe. What members of the British country gentry
who came to Virginia and South Carolina were quickly unified with
those among whom they settled. Indeed, ever since Magna Charta, the
English country gentry were thrown together, especially in the House of
Commons, with the representatives of the small farmers and the towns
people. To ignore this fact of essential unity is to leave Hamlet out
of the play. The dominant group, the great majority in every colony,
was this mixture of gentry, independent small farmers, shopkeepers and
skilled mechanics. This was then the rising class of Europe, struggling
to find itself; hungering to give expression of its peculiar form of
civilization; ardent in its desire for larger freedom. These facts can
not be over-emphasized.
The original settlers, in large part, came to America to find the
freedom and political opportunity they so richly deserved. If they
did not, at once, always grant freedom to others in their own
settlements, there was plenty of room for the others elsewhere. The
Baptists, driven out of Massachusetts, found refuge in Rhode Island.
The Quakers, whipped out of New England, discovered room and to spare
in Pennsylvania. The Cavaliers, forced into exile during the Puritanic
tyranny of the Commonwealth period, settled in Virginia and South
Carolina. When the French Protestants came, after the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, they were not really foreigners in
America. They possessed the same faith, they were guided by exactly the
same system of morals, they were the same class of people basically, as
those among whom they settled. One of the most liberal and democratic
groups to organize a colony were the English Catholics of Maryland. The
secret of understanding the beginnings of America is to know that there
was room for everybody and for everybody's beliefs. Even the bigot in
Europe eventually became the liberal here. The indentured servant,
of whom there were comparatively few, eventually found freedom and
acquired property in the wilderness.
It was this abundant opportunity to possess free land which finally led
to the complete triumph of our democracy. The real America has always
been country America. The settlers came from Europe ready in mind and
heart for the great adventure. The effort required independence,
self-reliance and high courage. The weaklings failed and died. With
every movement into the wilderness these mightier qualities of body,
mind, and soul were renewed and developed. So our American democracy
came, at last, to its greatest triumph west of the Alleghenies. Here
the limitations upon opportunity which obtained in the coastal colonies
were not to be found. Here was, at last, rich soil in abundance for any
hand that could wield the axe or hold the plow. Under the leadership
of men like Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln there was finally builded
a great nation upon the broad foundation of universal white male
suffrage. Here came, with the nineteenth century, the realization of
the democratic visions of twenty-five hundred years. Here our American
vanguard of democracy, at last, placed the banner of its hope and its
triumph upon the topmost pinnacle.
Sometimes we refer to these pioneer Americans as "common people." In
fact they were most uncommon. The wilderness environment made them
deeply spiritual, even mystical. In men like Andrew Jackson and Abraham
Lincoln their basic qualities, however crude the outward aspect, took
on the forms of genius. The mind and the spirit of this individualistic
American is seen in everything he was and did. He built his solitary
house, hidden among the trees, upon his own land. In physical form
and manner he came to resemble the native Indian quite as much as the
European. He grew to be slender, "rangey," keen of eye, and ready of
hand--a "Jack of all trades." This type to-day can not possibly live in
American cities as it is unless it keeps one foot in the country.
As to unlovely qualities, we Americans have no doubt been richly
endowed. The frontiersman farmer readily enough fights his neighbor
with fists or firearms. The laws we make for ourselves we often find
too irksome to obey. We are careless, often inefficient, and most
wasteful of our national resources. Recently we have been led far
astray by the deceitfulness of riches. Finally we are apt to become
blind to the quieter graces and refinements of life. In certain
sections an original austerity gives way these days to pleasures that
do not really please anybody. Having conquered a continent with such
tumult and shouting, we have not yet learned how to live sanely or even
safely. The finer values of life easily elude us, even when we try to
seek them out. Yet, are we entirely in error when we claim that we,
as a people, have had something valuable placed in our keeping by our
history and evolution? Are we not worth preserving in the world? We
know that we are. Even in the moments marked by failure and humility we
can not lose our national pride and sense of worth.
Assuredly, we Americans are a peculiar people. The conditions of our
European origin gave us a careful selection of personal qualities. Our
remarkable environment has upbuilded us. Infinite possibilities have
been opened up to us through the extent and resources of our country.
We have lacked nothing needful to a great destiny. Our future has
seemed so certain that we have never permitted it to be questioned. So
have we been prepared to become the ancestors of a glorious and ever
unfolding race. And now, within the short span of half a dozen years,
we are given over to every terrible doubt and misgiving. Ours has been,
were we but so minded, the wonderful privilege of continuing to select
the ancestors of America's future. We have shamelessly neglected this
privilege which is, indeed, the most sacred of duties. The ancestors
of America's future sons and daughters have been recently drawn, in
large part, from the most stolid peasantry and denizens of the slums of
Europe and Asia, simply because these sell themselves cheapest in the
labor markets of the world. So we are self-accursed. History may unfold
every page of her story and discover nowhere a profounder reason than
this for damning a great nation to destruction.
Our peculiar Nordic civilization, the creation, par excellence, of the
whitest of the white European races, has found but one primary field
for its larger expansion. That field is North America. Both South
America and Africa lie too much within the tropics to make of them the
home of our race. The Southern extremity of South America, including
Argentina and Chile, possesses a soil and climate comparable to our
own in the Northern and border states. But the incoming Mediterranean
people are giving this temperate area the aspect of a subtropical
civilization.
The larger portions of both tropical South America and all of Africa
will no doubt be kept for or won for the darker peoples. The white
population of South Africa is now less than twenty per cent of the
whole. Australia, too, is largely tropical. Within the greater portion
of her territory the Nordic white man can hardly conserve, through
centuries, his distinctive physical and spiritual qualities. Our North
American continent was destined by history to be the greater Nordic
Europe. Here our stalwart race has been offered a gigantic area for its
expansion--a suitable field upon which to play its mighty part in all
the future. Indeed, this marvelous home is suited by nature to meet our
reasonable needs for many thousands of years. An intelligent population
policy might have permitted us to welcome from Northern Europe a
considerable number of immigrants throughout the twentieth century.
Restricted to Europe and a few outlying insular colonies, our race
will, at an early date, cut but a sorry figure beside the populations
of the colored peoples on the one hand, and the undeveloped white
peoples on the other. The British Empire is to-day more than
three-fourths colored. The World War has only hastened the sinking of
the hopes of the European. The "natural" tendency in racial evolution
is always for the races with the more developed standards of life and
culture to be dragged down and engulfed by the surrounding world of
less developed peoples. A high standard of living with leisure among
the masses must be jealously preserved from competition or it will
become extinct in another generation. The most expensive thing in the
world is a moral ideal. The most wasteful system of government is a
democracy. But these things are worth the cost. We Americans have set
out upon a great adventure in social life. We have made some valuable
discoveries. Our spiritual possessions are numerous and valuable. We
can not successfully give them to all the world by first letting the
world take them away from ourselves. The "rising tide" of the colored
peoples and the backward white peoples, their ultimate domination of
the human process, to-day OVER-TOPS IN IMPORTANCE EVERY OTHER FACT IN
THE WORLD.
We are throwing away North America as the home of our people and our
civilization. Were we to open our gates to hostile armies and welcome
the yoke of servitude to a foreign autocracy, the results, in the end
might be less tragic. In the Hawaii of to-day, with its white American
element a small minority and rapidly becoming a fading remnant, we see
the North America of to-morrow. Across the length and breadth of our
Continent falls the darkening shadow.