mental attitude, such as the apparently inexhaustible resources of a
newly opened country, the consciousness of youthful energy, the feeling
that any very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day can easily be
rectified when we pitch camp to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration
which was so particularly annoying to English visitors in the middle
of the last century--annoying even to Charles Dickens, who was himself
something of an expert in exuberance--is a physical and moral no less
than a mental quality. That monstrous braggadocio which Dickens
properly satirized in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was partly, of course, the
product of provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, and there are
still, plenty of Pograms who are convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel
Webster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that
youthful bragging, and perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has
its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It springs from group
loyalty, from sectional fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be
precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic mud-hole. Yet we who are
interested in the new town do not intend, as the popular phrase has it,
"to give ourselves away." We back our own "proposition," so that to
this day Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor Harvard to
Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified through its rootage in loyalty;
and likewise extravagance--surely one of the worst of American mental
vices--is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion
or in the righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded
American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right,
and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a
splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent.
Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist
philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the
Lord's side?" i.e., on the side of Wendell Phillips.
Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted combatant in a moral crisis
like the abolition controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual
dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is
commonly called our "Fourth of July" period has indeed passed away. It
has few apologists, perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is
possible to regret the disappearance of that old-fashioned assertion of
patriotism and pride, and to question whether historical pageants and a
"noiseless Fourth" will develop any better citizens than the fathers
were. But on the purely intellectual side, the influence of that
spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. Throughout wide-extended regions
of the country, and particularly in the South and West, the "orator"
grew to be, in the popular mind, the normal representative of
intellectual ability. Words, rather than things, climbed into the
saddle. Popular assemblies were taught the vocabulary and the logic of
passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. The "stump" grew more
potent than school-house and church and bench; and it taught its
reckless and passionate ways to more than one generation. The
intellectual leaders of the newer South have more than once suffered
ostracism for protesting against this glorification of mere oratory.
But it is not the South alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can
gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and
rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable
American temperament.
The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less
in our popular journalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is
extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The
extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news
columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the
circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think
it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely
the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in
cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers. The
journals of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are steadily gaining
in circulation, in resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they are,
for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, sophistical, and passionate.
They outvie the popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play with fire.
The note of exaggeration which is heard in American oratory and
journalism is struck again in the popular magazines. Their campaign of
"exposure," during the last decade, has been careless of individual and
corporate rights and reputations. Even the magazine sketches and short
stories are keyed up to a hysteric pitch. So universally is this
characteristic national tension displayed in our periodical literature
that no one is much surprised to read in his morning paper that some
one has called the President of the United States a liar,--or that some
one has been called a liar by the President of the United States.
For an explanation of these defects, shall we fall back upon a
convenient maxim of De Tocqueville's and admit with him that "a
democracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are forced to do so. But then
comes the inevitable second thought that a democracy must needs have
other things than meditation to attend to. Athenian and Florentine and
Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly
favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who
enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life
was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the
eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish
blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is not quite the American ideal
of existence, and it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits of
meditation in the Indian himself.
One may freely admit the shortcomings of the American intelligence; the
"commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce believes to be
inseparable from the presence of such masses of men associated under
modern democratic government; the frivolity and extravagance which
represent the gasconading of the romantic temper in face of the grey
practicalities of everyday routine; the provincial boastfulness and bad
taste which have resulted from intellectual isolation; the lack, in
short, of a code, whether for thought or speech or behavior. And
nevertheless, one's instinctive Americanism replies, May it not be
better, after all, to have gone without a code for a while, to have
lacked that orderly and methodized and socialized European
intelligence, and to have had the glorious sense of bringing things to
pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that would have been fatal
to our democracy. It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyere's famous
book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written,
everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we
were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our
existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been
the barbarism of life and not of death. A rawboned baby sprawling on
the mud floor of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful spectacle than
a wholly civilized funeral.
"Perhaps it is," rejoins the European critic, somewhat impatiently,
"but you are confusing the issue. We find certain grave defects in the
American mind, defects which, if you had not had what Thomas Carlyle
called 'a great deal of land for a very few people,' would long ago
have involved you in disaster. You admit the mental defects, but you
promptly shift the question to one of moral qualities, of practical
energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so forth. You have too often
absented yourself from the wedding banquet, from the European symposium
of wit and philosophy, from the polished and orderly and delightful
play and interplay of civilized mind,--and your excuse is the old one:
that you are trying your yoke of oxen and cannot come. We charge you
with intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of moral preoccupation.
If you will permit personal examples, you Americans have made ere now
your national heroes out of men whose reasoning powers remained those
of a college sophomore, who were unable to state an opponent's position
with fairness, who lacked wholly the judicial quality, who were
vainglorious and extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an
exuberant barbarian; but you instantly forget their intellectual
defects in the presence of their abounding physical and moral energy,
their freedom from any taint of personal corruption, their whole-souled
desire and effort for the public good. Were not such heroes, impossible
as they would have been in any other civilized country, perfectly
illuminative of your national state of mind?"
For one, I confess that I do not know what reply to make to my
imaginary European critic. I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we
stand here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to linger any
longer over a catalogue of intellectual sins, let us turn frankly to
our moral preoccupations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we
abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry with Europe, in the
reflection that it is the muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is
the dominant force in the modern world.
The moral temper of the American people has been analyzed no less
frequently than their mental traits. Foreign and native observers are
alike agreed in their recognition of the extraordinary American
energy. The sheer power of the American bodily machine, driven by the
American will, is magnificent. It is often driven too hard, and with
reckless disregard of anything save immediate results. It wears out
more quickly than the bodily machine of the Englishman. It is typical
that the best distance runners of Great Britain usually beat ours,
while we beat them in the sprints. Our public men are frequently--as
the athletes say--"all in" at sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just
the time that many an English statesman begins his best public service.
But after making every allowance for wasteful excess, for the restless
and impatient consumption of nervous forces which nature intended that
we should hold in reserve, the fact remains that American history has
demonstrated the existence of a dynamic national energy, physical and
moral, which is still unabated. Immigration has turned hitherward the
feet of millions upon millions of young men from the hardiest stocks of
Europe. They replenish the slackening streams of vigor. When the
northern New Englander cannot make a living on the old farm, the French
Canadian takes it off his hands, and not only improves the farm, but
raises big crops of boys. So with Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish,
Jews, and Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation of immigrants,
a digging, hewing, building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood
and varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the wages of going on;
a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood
that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplishing its
vital tasks, and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and
material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit.
From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by
idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it
gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants
to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic,
but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or
cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our
characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of
woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for
jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be
not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in
comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State
as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the
Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions.
Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the butt of
such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but
nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which
Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a
Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed
it, but because the phrase "a Christian nation" expresses the
historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made
its own. The Bible is still considered, by the mass of the people, a
sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great
office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all
the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in
religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the
meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to
the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking
instances of idealism in the history of civilization.
The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and
section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a
clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply
embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind.
Charles Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there
was an infallible test of the American authorship of any anonymous
article or essay: "Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not
despair'? If it does, it was written by an American." In spite of all
that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain
and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are
aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of
romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and
calls it "playing the game"; to work as hard as he can is to "get into
the game," and to work as long as he can is to "stay in the game"; he
loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as
much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his
business activity the mood of the idealist.
It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional
effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its
idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man.
No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a
mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals,
have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_,
in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia
was "both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what
benefits or commodities might be had in those parts." How that
"both"--"as also" keeps echoing in American history: "both" to
christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, "both" duty and
advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" international good will
and increased armaments; "both" Sunday morning precepts and Monday
morning practice; "both" horns of a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did
ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method
of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious
hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more
absurd!--than other men.
Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. "To be
an American," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." That
statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined
to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very
far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic
community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he has at bottom
a fund of moral and political conservatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of
the greatest of our radical idealists, had a good deal of the English
squire in him after all. Jeffersonianism endures, not merely because it
is a radical theory of human nature, but because it expresses certain
facts of human nature. The American mind looks forward, not back; but
in practical details of land, taxes, and governmental machinery we are
instinctively cautious of change. The State of Connecticut knows that
her constitution is ill adapted to the present conditions of her
population, but the difficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to
amend it. Yet everybody admits that amendment will come "some day."
This admission is a characteristic note of American feeling; and every
now and then come what we call "uplift" movements, when radicalism is
in the very air, and a thousand good "causes" take fresh vigor.
One such period was in the New England of the eighteen-forties. We are
moving in a similar--only this time a national--current of radicalism,
to-day. But a change in the weather or the crops has before now turned
many of our citizens from radicalism into conservatism. There is, in
fact, conservatism in our blood and radicalism in our brains, and now
one and now the other rules. Very typical of American radicalism is
that story of the old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was supposed, of
the science of navigation, and who cheerfully defended himself by
saying that he could work his vessel down to Boston Light without
knowing any navigation, and after that he could go where he "dum
pleased." I suspect the old fellow pulled his sextant and chronometer
out of his chest as soon as he really needed them. American radicalism
is not always as innocent of the world's experience as it looks. In
fact, one of the most interesting phases of this twentieth century
"uplift" movement is its respect and even glorification of expert
opinion. A German expert in city-planning electrifies an audience of
Chicago club-women by talking to them about drains, ash-carts, and
flower-beds. A hundred other experts, in sanitation, hygiene,
chemistry, conservation of natural resources, government by commission,
tariffs, arbitration treaties, are talking quite as busily; and they
have the attention of a national audience that is listening with
genuine modesty, and with a real desire to refashion American life on
wiser and nobler plans. In this national forward movement in which we
are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive
idealism.
No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of
individualism. We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. Brownell;
we like our institutions because they suit us, and not because we
admire institutions. "Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman,
"the rest follows." Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no
question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress
upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans
were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the
principle of "every man for himself"; solitary confrontation of his
God, solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He that will not work,"
declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown,
"neither let him eat." The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his
own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation
were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the
community; he could at most "change works" in time of harvest, with a
neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance,
from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to
witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its
eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Thoreau, and
Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive
American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few
individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their
defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a
"lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician," before he
became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his
individual character in passing from one occupation or position to
another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling
cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up
cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth
of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by
turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on
Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal
vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never lost his identity.... He
had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience
along with him." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the
voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the
undertone of America.
Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public
spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked
in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often
have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the
superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to
learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to
the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already
pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to
the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the
_Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust
common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The
spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not
merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are
righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied
in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. Nothing finer can be
said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton
said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public soul."
No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have
attempted without realizing how much escapes his classification.
Conscious criticism and assessment of national characteristics is
essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the
net is not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances, as
modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are
we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are
revealed in the Swiss immigrant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz,
the native-born mulatto Booker Washington? The Americanism of
representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be
reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the
process of formal analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial
tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such
American figures as Franklin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee,
Lincoln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the countrymen of those typical
Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness,
genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idealism,
which are indubitably and fundamentally American.