Drifting
Our country is not lacking in incurable optimists, more commonly known
as fools. Do we not always hear, they repeat, the cry of "Wolf, wolf"
by night, and do we not always wake up in the morning quite safe and
sound? I maintain that these poor words of mine are no mere warning
of the wolf. Yesterday he was in close pursuit. To-day his jaws are
closing upon our flesh. This outcry wrung from pain and fear is due to
no imaginary ills.
We are drifting on every hand. The stupendous national problems
which beset our country internally can not be counted off on the
fingers of both hands. The exploitation of our farmers is leaving our
countryside, the cradle of our national character and well-being,
depleted of population. The Great War is over, but high prices largely
remain. We have not even approached a solution of the problem of both
safeguarding and properly controlling the nation's greater industries.
Labor strikes take on the nature of social revolutions. The advocacy
of Bolshevism arouses mighty crowds to wild enthusiasm. The children
of the rich and poor alike grow up without proper normal training, not
to speak of spiritual vision. With millions of people lacking houses
to live in, we find ourselves with millions of people unemployed. The
problem of the Negro is no nearer permanent solution than it was forty
years ago. I might go on adding to this list indefinitely.
Throughout the length and breadth of the land our political life
draws ever weaker character and poorer mind to political leadership.
Strength, purposefulness and astuteness, when united together, are
used mostly to win riches. The weaker brethren are more and more being
drawn into the public service, into the pulpit and into the profession
of teaching. If we really wanted, as in the past, our first-class men
to preach to us, to teach us, and to direct our government, we could
easily enough secure their services.
A century ago our national problems were exceedingly simple. Their full
meaning and purport could be quickly explained and grasped. To-day our
economic and social problems are infinitely complex. Keeping the trains
running between New York and San Francisco in the year 1921 is a vastly
different piece of business than keeping the stage coaches running
between New York and Boston in 1787. But the average of intelligence
and character in both our state legislatures and in Congress is far
lower than it was in 1787. If any be disposed to deny this, let him
make a comparison between the debates of the Federal Convention of
1787 and the debates of our Federal Congress or the average state
legislature of to-day. Our political mind, in so far as we have any,
is still living on the contributions of our national past. The last
quarter of the century, especially, has registered failure with
reference to almost every internal national problem presented by our
time.
Reflect, for a moment, upon the present colossal issues of municipal
government. A hundred thousand, a million, or five millions of persons
are forced, for better or for worse, for good or for evil, to live
together. In the recent municipal elections, the great city of New
York continued the domination of Tammany Hall, by a vote of more
than two to one. The people of Buffalo elected a mayor who received
a majority of votes because he promised upon election to throw the
Eighteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution into the waste basket.
Youngstown, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana, elected "freak" mayors,
ignorant and inexperienced, whose campaigns for office both they and
those who heard them treated as huge practical jokes. The great city
of Cleveland, Ohio, containing nearly a million inhabitants, elected
as mayor a man who was expelled from the position of Chief of Police
because of proved irregularities and unfitness to hold office. In
the midst of our war with Germany, Chicago re-elected as mayor a man
who, throughout the war, was an outspoken enemy of his country. In
the outright venality of every sort, the government of the city of
Chicago, I am informed, exceeds any in the country, even New York.
Through the South we have not been able to secure since the War Between
the States, as a general thing, that fine type of political leader
who did such honor to our section in the earlier period. Our country
is not receiving from the South that contribution of leadership which
history might lead us to expect. The industrial North and East should
naturally lead the nation in the solution of the peculiar problems of
industrialism. Its remnant of American population readily admit their
utter failure. We of the South can offer no help.
A full generation of so-called reforms have ended largely in failure.
Even seats in the United States Senate now go to the highest bidder
like old furniture at an auction sale. The minority which is decent,
honest, and informed, is giving up the fight. The ballot in the hands
of ignorant and untrained immigrants, of Negroes, and of illiterate
native whites, has proven to be a terrible flare-back, burning our hope
of progress to ashes. Again force the ballot upon the southern Negro
and we of the South will outdo the North in political failure and decay.
Our greater internal public problems, only a few of which I have
enumerated at the beginning of this article, will ever grow more
complex in character, more threatening in aspect. Who can expect men
with neither work nor property to take an idealistic attitude toward
our government and the public service? Their vote must express their
meanest immediate interests. He who stands in the bread line votes for
sugar in his coffee and a bigger slice of bread. Every unemployed man
is a prospective Bolshevist. Every illiterate man who votes inevitably
supports bossism and graft rule. With such an electorate how can
we move safely and intelligently into the uncharted and terrifying
future? Soon we must rule the great industrial organizations by law,
or they will rule us ignoring the law. Meanwhile the efficiency of
the individual wage-worker is decreasing. His joy in his work becomes
less and less. His loyalty to his task has almost struck the zero
point. Ignore the problem of the white small farming class yet a little
longer, and we shall be driven into farming on a great scale, with
armies of stolid peasants doing the work. We already have agricultural
communities where a score or a hundred small farms have recently been
joined together in one estate. What a sign post of our times to see
the old farm house made to serve as the dwellings for the immigrant
serfs who till the land! So "Wealth accumulates and men decay." It is
with a shudder that any patriot foresees the time when the countryside,
like the city, shall have lost its free, independent population.
In our South this small, free, white farming class requires special
consideration. The danger of its submergence and total loss here is
greater than in any other part of the country.
As an American, ardent alike for Americanism and the Americanization of
our foreign born, I have often enough been accused of narrowness. I saw
others burning with enthusiasm over the hope of the League of Nations,
but I felt my own heart chilled by the sense of the shortcomings of my
own country. With the majority I was hesitant. The map of the world
to-day, in all its parts, strikes suffering into the heart that feels.
The blood lines in every direction indicate that the world as a whole
is drifting from failure unto failure. Europe is struggling helplessly
in the midst of storm and crying piteously for help which never comes.
With the German financial system broken down, France, denied the
reparation she expected, is immersed in gloomy despair. The smaller
nations East and Southeast of Germany are collapsing, if not already
fallen down, starving and diseased; their peoples are becoming every
day more helpless and hopeless. Italy, wasted by the war, is now in the
throes of civil strife and revolution. Russia, the first white nation
of the world, continues to rot in her insane orgies. With the passing
months and years hope for the early salvation of Russia no longer
deceives us. The battle lines of the Greek army, facing the Turks in
Asia Minor, are awaiting reinforcements and supplies in order to resume
the offensive. The four hundred millions of China, torn from without
for a generation, lacerated by revolution and civil wars for ten years,
have merely proven to us their incapacity for self-help. India is in
revolution and Egypt cut adrift. All the world is more decadent to-day
than when America entered the war. Again and again the nations come
to us begging for the strong arm of leadership. Again and again they
go from us, broken hearted and bowed down by the weak words of our
indecision and failure. Yet again they come because elsewhere there is
no help to ask.
[Illustration: The Imperial Wizard Kneeling and Kissing the Flag, the
only Flag to which a Klansman Kneels.]
Such is the world which our times have given so largely into our
keeping. This world demands a leadership such as gave our country unity
under the Constitution of 1787. The giants of those days--a full dozen
strong, loom large over the succeeding generations, and like Titans of
old, their deeds illuminate our whole history. Much accursed as we are
to-day by petty minds and selfish hearts in high places, we read the
history of our heroic period with deepest yearning that the mighty dead
might rise up and speak to us the living words we need to hear. We feel
so helpless, so lost, and gone astray. What mind and character we may
still have has ceased to function normally. From now on we may expect
a steady drift toward monarchy. In a decadent republic monarchicalism
is a natural growth. First comes a great class of the rich on the one
hand and a great class of poor on the other. Both tend, because of
their conditions, toward corruption. Both corrupt the state. The one
will barter the ten commandments to keep what it has; the other to get
what it wants. For a time the proletariat is oppressed with free corn
and the circus, with organized charities, baseball and the movies. No
republic can long endure on that regimen. Gold has already paved the
way that leads to the United States Senate. All that is needed is more
gold and the way will be smoothly paved to the throne of Caesar or
Belshazzar.
It has always seemed to me that our stupendous national sacrifices
during the War Between the States have never been recovered. We lost
a million of the sturdiest and best men who ever grew to manhood
in the world. So did that generation lose a million homes. We have
to-day, instead of the ten millions of their descendants, equally
divided between the city and country, some twenty millions of unskilled
foreign workers crowded into the cities alone. With the close of the
War Between the States we ceased, in every section, to produce first
class national leaders. To-day Charles Murphy has replaced Alexander
Hamilton. In Illinois, Lincoln the Great gives way to William Hale
Thompson the Little. The passing of Woodrow Wilson from the public life
leaves the South searching, perhaps in vain, for a leader to present to
the service of the republic. Into our Southern political life, as into
that of the North a generation ago, there is creeping the hireling of
special interests. Only the ignorant can say that we have not fallen on
times that are weak and evil and failing at every point.
So we drift--on and on; when to drift at all is to drift toward the
abyss. With each setting sun we become less capable of doing well the
great task assigned to us. We are deceived by the superficial results
of mechanical progress. Hence we do not care to know that each waning
summer marks a loss for us in all the fundamental determinants of
blood, of character, of all the elemental forces. These basic elements
of our peculiar civilization can be maintained only through the most
watchful care. A single careless deed done to-day by the nation and
countless ages must pay an ever increasing price of failure and misery.
Our English-speaking peoples are as a ship of democracy struggling in
the sea of unfaith,--an ocean of the world's failure and despair. We
are driven before a furious gale; great waves wash over our decks. We
drug ourselves into believing the theory that somehow Divine Providence
always has cared for, and always will care for, the children, the
lunatics and the United States. Of course this theory is trash. The
Almighty helps only those that help themselves.
You millions of the middle classes of America, living in comfortable
ease--upon your conscience is the greater burden placed! Will you
continue to fiddle while the common weal is in flames? The future
throughout your country and the world will hold you responsible! "BE
NOT DECEIVED, GOD IS NOT MOCKED. WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH, THAT ALSO
SHALL HE REAP."