The Conservation of the American Home
The American home is rapidly becoming a failure. After countless ages
of biological and social evolution, that marvelous process of change
and growth which has produced us, we are committing suicide as a nation
and as a people. A home without children is not, in a social sense, a
home at all. It is only a place in which, and a condition under which,
two persons of opposite sex live together more happily and comfortably,
perhaps less so, than they could do apart.
The American home, the home in which healthy, intelligent and
characterful children are bred and reared, both for their own sakes
and the nation's service--this home is the veritable rockbottom of our
national well-being. Let the home fail, and all our wealth and material
achievement is naught but poverty and trash.
The millions of homes in which there are no children, or only one
child, the birth of which was perhaps wholly unintentional, are so
many millions of tombs in which the nation's hope and future lie
buried. The millions of young unmarried Americans, between the ages of
twenty-one and forty years, whatever be the cause of their unnatural
and unsocial condition, are just so many millions of Americans who have
rejected life. All of the unmarried, all of the married who do not
reproduce themselves, are a crushing accusation against our national
intelligence, our national morals, and our national social policy. What
do these figures not mean in terms of disappointment and despair, of
social purpose unfulfilled, of negative sorrow and anguish in the heart
of the individual, of souls unfed in terms of every higher realization
of life?
A people which can calmly behold a large per cent of its marriageable
young people homeless and childless has confessed itself to be a broken
and dissolving remnant among the nations. We, lords of the richest
land in all the four quarters of the world, voluntarily place our
national head upon the block and beckon to the executioner, axe in
hand, to make haste.
Visualize this old-time American home--on the hillside, among the
trees. For many generations it has stood foursquare against every
blast of winter, every ugly aspect of circumstance. From its wide
portals have gone forth a myriad of the young and gay, the hopeful and
the brave. Its offspring peopled all our West. Its victories in the
wilderness, through a hundred years, have no counterpart in all the
history of humanity. The history of America has been the history of the
American home--of what that home has accomplished for the citizens that
were born and reared under its sheltering roof.
Open the door! Wait! You shall see none enter here. Only a going out--a
funeral procession. A death march sounds forth, a mighty people, the
hope of the world--such a people is borne to the grave. Where there is
no laughter of children, there Death is King. And those that see make
jest and frolic.
In the even scales of biological law and of mathematical calculation,
our people are being weighed in the balance and found wanting. We
Americans, all that we have been, and all that we are, are being borne
to the grave in execution of the law. We have been tried and condemned
by a just Judge.
It is a most dangerous error to undertake to build a national life
on the individual as a unit. "God has set the solitary in families,"
said Moses, as he led his people through the vast wilderness unto the
promised land. We may destroy all else, but leave the home and the
family, and yet all the elements and works that make the nation can be
once again regained and rebuilt. We may possess all else, wealth and
power, all the arts and all the knowing, thriving schools and majestic
temples--but if the home crumbles and decays, we perish with it utterly.
Oh! The deep, deep and terrible tragedy of our Nordic race in America!
We have been decimated by fratricidal war. Our flesh and blood have
been corrupted by industrialism. Now, however, we go to our destruction
simply because we do not care to live. We go as blindly as a species
of animals whose conditions of life have been completely upset by
new forces with which they do not know how to deal. Sheep and swine,
nay, the wild beasts of the field, could not act with such utter
carelessness and immorality as we. All that we have done will perish
with us. Other nations have lived and left record of their labors in
a lofty literature or a resplendent art. The glory of the temples
they have builded keeps their memory green centuries after their very
language is forgotten. The people of the age of Pericles will live on
in their work, to beautify and glorify humanity for twice ten thousand
years. But we Americans are perishing miserably to leave no record of
high value, because our greater work has been bound up in our very
selves. We have all lived and labored together as free men. We have
proven to a faithless world that the humblest toiler could wield the
mightiest and most glittering scepter of power. We have made good the
proud boast of a triumphant democracy. All that we have been, as a
beckoning star among the nations, all that we have meant to the world
of hope in the common man, is doomed to perish with us.
All I seek to do in these chapters is to bring the mind and heart of
my country to this place. Here, in the old-fashioned American home,
we shall do battle. Here we shall fight the last fight, to win or to
lose. If we are to have a greater and better America, we must begin by
breeding better Americans in larger numbers. There is no other way. The
man who says our young men and women, in general, do not desire homes
and children, says a falsehood. We neither desire nor expect fifteen
children in the home. What we do insist upon, in recreating all the
conditions about that home, is two, three, four, and sometimes, in
exceptional cases, five or six children. For our country as a whole,
during this century, we crave but a small increase in native born
population in every decade--perhaps ten or twelve per cent. We would
reject, by taking forethought and preventing marriage, the children
of the criminal, the children of the imbecile and the insane, the
children of those who are accursed with incurable diseases or incurable
indolence. We would remould all that needs remoulding in order to
receive into the hearts and the homes of our country the children
of the healthy and the industrious, the honest and intelligent, the
high-minded and the sensitive.
Give our young people of America but half a chance! Let them have
their own country in which to test out the labor of their hands and
the love of their hearts! Let them again lay upon themselves the first
duty of the supreme law of nature! They can and will preserve to this
continent every higher value, every article of faith left to their
keeping. Remove from their environment a competition that is unfair
and killing. Give them bread and not a stone for their toil. Give them
solid assurance and not a gnawing insecurity of livelihood, and they
will give to their country a future through the sons and daughters of
their love.
To admit that there is a growing number of our young women who reject
child-bearing as a burden is merely to re-emphasize the crying need
of a socializing education. It is the work of those who know and who
care, to teach those who are ignorant and careless of duty. We teach
our young people that they must help prepare themselves for citizenship
and self-support. Citizenship for our American young women includes
the essential duty of motherhood, and for our young men the duty of the
creation and support of a family. A cornerstone of our ethical teaching
should be the preparation of the minds of the young for home-building
and parenthood. Every able-bodied man, or woman, who deigns to eat,
should perform some sort of useful work. Similarly every normal young
man and woman who accepts life should be gladly willing to create life.
Around and above these homes and these children we must place the
protection of every means furnished by applied science. To educate them
and to fit them for useful work and public service, we must apply the
first fruits of our nation's wealth. To offer to these young citizens,
upon maturity, full opportunity for fruitful labor and self expression,
we must be ready to reject much error that is ancient, and accept much
truth that is new and sometimes startling.
America consists of and exists in the home. The home is America. To
lose the fight here is to lose all. To win at this point is to win
for ourselves national salvation, and for the world our share in its
ultimate redemption.
A FINAL WORD
Let me confess that I alone am responsible for the reorganization of
the Ku Klux Klan. No one suggested it to me. No one helped me in the
formulation of its new task, nor in the working out of any of its basic
principles or methods. So it may not be entirely uninteresting to the
reader for me to close this statement with a brief narrative of the
first growth of this concept in my own mind.
To begin with, my childhood fancies were much laid hold of by the
stories I heard of the original Ku Klux Klan. These stories were
told me in my own home. Sometimes in Negro cabins the old darkies
would play upon my boyish mind with marvelous tales of the hosts of
white-robed horsemen--the souls of the departed soldiers of the great
war--who were used to ride up and down the countryside. Sometimes I
would imagine these cavalcades passing swiftly and silently, like a
white cloud, across the starry heavens. Later, when a more accurate
book of knowledge of this strange epoch of American history was opened
up to me, I eagerly devoured all the reading I could find pertaining
to the subject. Yet the impressions made upon me by the legendary
account never entirely lost their force. So, as I grew to manhood,
my mind, perhaps overburdened while yet too young, with a sense of
the responsibilities of citizenship, made the service of my country
a deeply set conviction. I never went very joyously either to my
studies or to my active duties. To my generation, as it grew up in
the defeated, broken and impoverished South, the problems of life
presented heavy tasks rather than stirring issues. We had to make all
our beginnings as a people over again. Our mood was much like that
of the Puritan founders of New England when they set themselves to
struggle against the stern climate and the thin and unfruitful soil of
their section. A statement of Robert E. Lee to a member of his staff
the day before he surrendered at Appomattox has been more than once
my sheet-anchor. "Captain," said our great leader, "I should gladly
lay down my life, but it is now my duty to live. The way for me has
been hard, very hard--no pathway of duty is easy--only those who
have encountered obstacles, faced difficulties, and endured extreme
hardships, know how much easier it would be for me to die, than to live
in response to the call of duty."
We people of the South lived on. We have tried to do our duty. We have
even tried to forget the past, though often it may not seem so to our
fellow citizens.
In 1898 it was my privilege to enlist in the glorious service of our
reunited country. Of course every youth who then donned the uniform
imagined that he would proceed at once to Cuba and do battle for the
liberation of that country from the tyranny of the Spanish monarchy.
My first evening in camp, under the old flag of the Union, was an
experience never to be forgotten. I believe that all of the thousand
young men in the Alabama regiment with which I served felt their hearts
moved by something of the same great emotion. We were to be under the
command of Nelson Miles and Fitzhugh Lee, of Wesley Merritt and Joe
Wheeler.
The heat and noise of the day gave way to the soft, warm flush of the
evening. Such an evening! Under the clearest of skies and the brightest
of stars I stood on guard at midnight. My mind seemed to be so passive,
so sensitive, so subjected to the thoughts that rushed out of the
universe, from the past and the mysterious present and the unknowable
future, to take possession of my soul. I saw my country ennobled by
the great task of liberty and of love to which she had set herself on
that occasion. United at last! United in a common cause! Reforming a
Union which had always existed in the hearts of all, underneath those
superficial forces which so long troubled us and kept us apart.
And now a great fountain of joy and of pride, pressing from the
heart, filled every artery almost to bursting. On that night I first
understood my country and saw, emblazoned in the sky, the part to which
the Lord of Hosts had called her.
To a young man whose heart is truly enlisted in the issue of a great
war, the mighty thrill of the soul is the ultimate experience of
life. So is the banner of his country raised aloft. So are his arms
consecrated by the deepest impulses of the spirit. Lyric poetry has
often exhausted its meters and its music at the altar of the lesser
loves. On that strangest of nights I knew that here was a love that
makes the heart of youth deny all that comes from self and lift burning
eyes to the stars.
Oh my people--soldiers--workers--pioneers--adventurers--saviors--in
the four quarters of the earth! Be you--your deeds--your vision,--all
in all--imperishable! The world listens to hear the sound of the
song you sing upon the march. Somehow I feel and know that you shall
live--gloriously--throughout the ages.