government and the freedom of private property and the repudiation of
any but voluntary emotional and supererogatory co-operation in the
national purpose to the level of a religion, and the American
Constitution, with but one element of elasticity in the Supreme Court
decisions, established these principles impregnably in the political
structure. It organised disorganisation. Personal freedom, defiance of
authority, and the stars and stripes have always gone together in men’s
minds; and subsequent waves of immigration, the Irish fleeing famine,
for which they held the English responsible, and the Eastern European
Jews escaping relentless persecutions, brought a persuasion of immense
public wrongs, as a necessary concomitant of systematic government, to
refresh without changing this defiant thirst for freedom at any cost.
In my book, _The Future in America_, I have tried to make an estimate of
the working quality of this American tradition of unconditional freedom
for the adult male citizen. I have shown that from the point of view of
anyone who regards civilisation as an organisation of human
interdependence and believes that the stability of society can be
secured only by a conscious and disciplined co-ordination of effort, it
is a tradition extraordinarily and dangerously deficient in what I have
called a “_sense of the State_.” And by a “sense of the State” I mean
not merely a vague and sentimental and showy public-spiritedness—of that
the States have enough and to spare—but a real sustaining conception of
the collective interest embodied in the State as an object of simple
duty and as a determining factor in the life of each individual. It
involves a sense of function and a sense of “place,” a sense of a
general responsibility and of a general well-being overriding the
individual’s well-being, which are exactly the senses the American
tradition attacks and destroys.
For the better part of a century the American tradition, quite as much
by reason of what it disregards as of what it suggests, has meant a
great release of human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidy
exploitation of the vast resources that the European invention of
railways and telegraphic communication put within reach of the American
people. It has stimulated men to a greater individual activity, perhaps,
than the world has ever seen before. Men have been wasted by
misdirection no doubt, but there has been less waste by inaction and
lassitude than was the case in any previous society. Great bulks of
things and great quantities of things have been produced, huge areas
brought under cultivation, vast cities reared in the wilderness.
But this tradition has failed to produce the beginnings or promise of
any new phase of civilised organisation, the growths have remained
largely invertebrate and chaotic, and, concurrently with its gift of
splendid and monstrous growth, it has also developed portentous
political and economic evils. No doubt the increment of human energy has
been considerable, but it has been much less than appears at first
sight. Much of the human energy that America has displayed in the last
century is not a development of new energy but a diversion. It has been
accompanied by a fall in the birth-rate that even the immigration
torrent has not altogether replaced. Its insistence on the individual,
its disregard of the collective organisation, its treatment of women and
children as each man’s private concern, has had its natural outcome.
Men’s imaginations have been turned entirely upon individual and
immediate successes and upon concrete triumphs; they have had no regard
or only an ineffectual sentimental regard for the race. Every man was
looking after himself, and there was no one to look after the future.
Had the promise of 1815 been fulfilled, there would now be in the United
States of America one hundred million descendants of the homogeneous and
free-spirited native population of that time. There is not, as a matter
of fact, more than thirty-five million. There is probably, as I have
pointed out, much less. Against the assets of cities, railways, mines
and industrial wealth won, the American tradition has to set the price
of five-and-sixty million native citizens who have never found time to
get born, and whose place is now more or less filled by alien
substitutes. Biologically speaking, this is not a triumph for the
American tradition. It is, however, very clearly an outcome of the
intense individualism of that tradition. Under the sway of that it has
burnt its future in the furnace to keep up steam.
The next and necessary evil consequent upon this exaltation of the
individual and private property over the State, over the race that is
and over public property, has been a contempt for public service. It has
identified public spirit with spasmodic acts of public beneficence. The
American political ideal became a Cincinnatus whom nobody sent for and
who therefore never left his plough. There has ensued a corrupt and
undignified political life, speaking claptrap, dark with violence,
illiterate and void of statesmanship or science, forbidding any healthy
social development through public organisation at home, and every year
that the increasing facilities of communication draw the alien nations
closer, deepening the risks of needless and disastrous wars abroad.
And in the third place it is to be remarked that the American tradition
has defeated its dearest aims of a universal freedom and a practical
equality. The economic process of the last half-century, so far as
America is concerned, has completely justified the generalisations of
Marx. There has been a steady concentration of wealth and of the reality
as distinguished from the forms of power in the hands of a small
energetic minority, and a steady approximation of the condition of the
mass of the citizens to that of the so-called proletariat of the
European communities. The tradition of individual freedom and equality
is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom and
equality out of which it rose. Instead of the six hundred thousand
families of the year 1790, all at about the same level of property and,
excepting the peculiar condition of seven hundred thousand blacks, with
scarcely anyone in the position of a hireling, we have now as the most
striking, though by no means the most important, fact in American social
life a frothy confusion of millionaires’ families, just as wasteful,
foolish and vicious as irresponsible human beings with unlimited
resources have always shown themselves to be. And, concurrently with the
appearance of these concentrations of great wealth, we have appearing
also poverty, poverty of a degree that was quite unknown in the United
States for the first century of their career as an independent nation.
In the last few decades slums as frightful as any in Europe have
appeared with terrible rapidity, and there has been a development of the
viler side of industrialism, of sweating and base employment of the most
ominous kind.
In Mr. Robert Hunter’s _Poverty_ one reads of “not less than eighty
thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present employed in
the textile mills of this country. In the South there are now six times
as many children at work as there were twenty years ago. Child labour is
increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each year more little
ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live in the degrading
and demoralising atmosphere of the mill towns....”
Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from
Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little
nephews and nieces, friends’ sons and so forth brought in by them is
peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It was
a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little boy
of no ascertainable relationship....
In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were
hardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the tiniest
and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning and,
like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day’s labour; and,
when they return home, “wearily fling themselves on their beds, too
tired to take off their clothes.” Many children work all night—“in the
maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and
clouded with humidity and lint.”
“It will be long,” adds Mr. Hunter in his description, “before I forget
the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched forward
to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form already
showing the physical effects of labour. This child, six years of age,
was working twelve hours a day.”
From Mr. Spargo’s _Bitter Cry of the Children_ I learn this much of the
joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:
“For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over the
chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as it
moves past them. The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of the
crushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening. Sometimes
one of the children falls into the machinery and is terribly mangled, or
slips into the chute and is smothered to death. Many children are killed
in this way. Many others, after a time, contract coal-miners’ asthma and
consumption, which gradually undermine their health. Breathing
continually day after day the clouds of coal dust, their lungs become
black and choked with small particles of anthracite....”
In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J. F. Carey tells how little
naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York
millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals
that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....
Altogether it would seem that at least one million and a half children
are growing up in the United States of America stunted and practically
uneducated because of unregulated industrialism. These children,
ill-fed, ill-trained, mentally benighted, since they are alive and
active, since they are an active and positive and not a negative evil,
are even more ominous in the American outlook than those five-and-sixty
million of good race and sound upbringing who will now never be born.
§ 5
It must be repeated that the American tradition is really the tradition
of one particular ingredient in this great admixture and stirring up of
peoples. This ingredient is the Colonial British, whose
seventeenth-century Puritanism and eighteenth-century mercantile
radicalism and rationalism manifestly furnished all the stuff out of
which the American tradition is made. It is this stuff planted in virgin
soil and inflated to an immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and
unanticipated material prosperity and success. From that British
middle-class tradition comes the individualist protestant spirit, the
keen self-reliance and personal responsibility, the irresponsible
expenditure, the indiscipline and mystical faith in things being managed
properly if they are only let alone. “State blindness” is the natural
and almost inevitable quality of a middle-class tradition, a class that
has been forced neither to rule nor obey, which has been concentrated
and successfully concentrated on private gain.
This middle-class British section of the American population was, and is
to this day, the only really articulate ingredient in its mental
composition. And so it has had a monopoly in providing the American
forms of thought. The other sections of peoples that have been annexed
by or have come into this national synthesis are _silent_ so far as any
contribution to the national stock of ideas and ideals is concerned.
There are, for example, those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, the
French Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, the
French-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New-Englander from New
England, the Germans, the Italians, the Hungarians. Comparatively they
say nothing. From all the ten million of coloured people come just two
or three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. Church
Terrell, mere protests at specific wrongs. The clever, restless Eastern
European Jews, too, have still to find a voice. Professor Münsterberg
has written with a certain bitterness of the inaudibility of the German
element in the American population. They allow themselves, he
remonstrates, to count for nothing. They did not seem to exist, he
points out, even in politics until prohibitionist fury threatened their
beer. Then, indeed, the American German emerged from silence and
obscurity, but only to rescue his mug and retire again with it into
enigmatical silence.
If there is any exception to this predominance of the tradition of the
English-speaking, originally middle-class, English-thinking northerner
in the American mind, it is to be found in the spread of social
democracy outward from the festering tenement houses of Chicago into the
mining and agrarian regions of the middle west. It is a fierce form of
socialist teaching that speaks throughout these regions, far more
closely akin to the revolutionary Socialism of the continent of Europe
than to the constructive and evolutionary Socialism of Great Britain.
Its typical organ is _The Appeal to Reason_, which circulates more than
a quarter of a million copies weekly from Kansas City. It is a Socialism
reeking with class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic
in spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American
moral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the one
shrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance.
Now it is impossible to believe that this vast silence of these imported
and ingested factors that the American nation has taken to itself is as
acquiescent as it seems. No doubt they are largely taking over the
traditional forms of American thought and expression quietly and without
protest, and wearing them; but they will wear them as a man wears a
misfit, shaping and adapting it every day more and more to his natural
form, here straining a seam and there taking in a looseness. A force of
modification must be at work. It must be at work in spite of the fact
that, with the exception of social democracy, it does not anywhere show
as a protest or a fresh beginning or a challenge to the prevailing
forms.
How far it has actually been at work is, perhaps, to be judged best by
an observant stroller, surveying the crowds of a Sunday evening in New
York, or read in the sheets of such a mirror of popular taste as the
Sunday edition of the _New York American_ or the _New York Herald_. In
the former just what I mean by the silent modification of the old
tradition is quite typically shown. Its leading articles are written by
Mr. Arthur Brisbane, the son of one of the Brook Farm Utopians, that
gathering in which Hawthorne and Henry James senior, and Margaret Fuller
participated, and in which the whole brilliant world of Boston’s past,
the world of Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, was interested. Mr. Brisbane
is a very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he is
paid the greatest salary of any journalist in the world. He writes with
a wit and directness that no other living man can rival, and he holds up
constantly what is substantially the American ideal of the past century
to readers who evidently need strengthening in it. It is, of course, the
figure of a man and not of a State; it is a man, clean, clean-shaved and
almost obtrusively strong-jawed, honest, muscular, alert, pushful,
chivalrous, self-reliant, non-political except when he breaks into
shrewd and penetrating voting—“you can fool all the people some of the
time,” etc.—and independent—independent—in a world which is therefore
certain to give way to him.
His doubts, his questionings, his aspirations, are dealt with by Mr.
Brisbane with a simple direct fatherliness, with all the beneficent
persuasiveness of a revivalist preacher. Millions read these leaders and
feel a momentary benefit, en route for the more actual portions of the
paper. He asks: “Why are all men gamblers?” He discusses our Longing for
Immortal Imperfection, and “Did we once live on the moon?” He recommends
the substitution of whisky and soda for neat whisky, drawing an
illustration from the comparative effect of the diluted and of the
undiluted liquid as an eye-wash (“Try whisky on your friend’s eyeball!”
is the heading), sleep (“The man who loses sleep will make a failure of
his life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of success”), and the
education of the feminine intelligence (“The cow that kicks her weaned
calf is all heart”). He makes identically the same confident appeal to
the moral motive which was for so long the salvation of the Puritan
individualism from which the American tradition derives. “That hand,” he
writes, “which supports the head of the new-born baby, the mother’s
hand, supports the civilisation of the world.”
But that sort of thing is not saving the old native strain in the
population—it moves people, no doubt, but inadequately. And here is a
passage that is quite the quintessence of Americanism, of all its deep
moral feeling and sentimental untruthfulness. I wonder if any man but an
American or a British nonconformist in a state of rhetorical excitement
ever believed that Shakespeare wrote his plays or Michael Angelo painted
in a mood of humanitarian exultation, “_for the good of all men_.”
“What _shall_ we strive for? _Money?_
“Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and in due course the
graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at your bump of acquisitiveness as
at the mean coat of the pauper.
“Then shall we strive for _power_?
“The names of the first great kings of the world are forgotten, and
the names of all those whose power we envy will drift to
forgetfulness soon. What does the most powerful man in the world
amount to standing at the brink of Niagara, with his solar plexus
trembling? What is his power compared with the force of the wind or
the energy of one small wave sweeping along the shore?
“The power which man can build up within himself, for himself, is
nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified egotism can make it
seem worth while.
“Then what is worth while? Let us look at some of the men who have
come and gone, and whose lives inspire us. Take a few at random:
“Columbus, Michael Angelo, Wilberforce, Shakespeare, Galileo,
Fulton, Watt, Hargreaves—these will do.
“Let us ask ourselves this question: ‘Was there any _one thing_ that
distinguished _all_ their lives, that united all these men, active
in fields so different?’
“Yes. Every man among them, and every man whose life history is
worth the telling, did something for _the_ good of _other men_....
“Get money if you can. Get power if you can. Then, if you want to be
more than the ten thousand million unknown mingled in the dust
beneath you, see what good you can do with your money and your
power.
“If you are one of the many millions who have not and can’t get
money or power, see what good you can do without either.
“You can help carry a load for an old man. You can encourage and
help a poor devil trying to reform. You can set a good example to
children. You can stick to the men with whom you work, fighting
honestly for their welfare.
“Time was when the ablest man would rather kill ten men than feed a
thousand children. That time has gone. We do not care much about
feeding the children, but we care less about killing the men. To
that extent we have improved already.
“The day will come when we shall prefer helping our neighbour to
robbing him—legally—of a million dollars.
“Do what good you can _now_, while it is unusual, and have the
satisfaction of being a pioneer and an eccentric.”
It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make
itself audible to the new world, and crackling into italics and breaking
into capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper
is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of
comprehensive things, dead to ideas, impervious to generalisations, a
public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical
extreme of entire individual detachment. These telltale columns deal all
with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no
interest but the interest in intense individual experiences. The
engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are
given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and
sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this
stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits
frown beside the initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to the
keenest pitch of realisation, and any new indelicacy in fashionable
costume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism,
any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea bathing or the
woman’s seat on horseback, or the like, is given copious and moving
illustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a
coloured supplement of knockabout fun, written chiefly in the quaint
dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which “th” has
vanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of an
endless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old.
“Dat ole Maud!” There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the
advertisement columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but
great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics,
clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities....
Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say,
taken off its frills. All but one; Mr. Arthur Brisbane’s eloquence one
may consider as the last stitch of the old costume,—mere decoration.
Excitement remains the residual object in life. The _New York American_
represents a clientèle to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly
with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.
§ 6
The modifications of the American tradition that will occur through its
adoption by these silent foreign ingredients in the racial synthesis are
not likely to add to it or elaborate it in any way. They tend merely to
simplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism. It is with
the detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of a
language; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear.
But there are other forces of modification at work upon the American
tradition of an altogether more hopeful kind. It has entered upon a
constructive phase. Were it not so, then the American social outlook
would, indeed, be hopeless.