Consummate showmen, they arrest the wonder of the mob, and so put
its suspicions to sleep. What they actually believe is of secondary
consequence; the main thing is what they say; even more, the way
they say it. Obviously, their activity does a great deal of damage
to the democratic theory, for they are standing refutations of the
primary doctrine that the common folk choose their leaders wisely.
They damage it again in another and more subtle way. That is to say,
their ineradicable contempt for the minds they must heat up and
bamboozle leads them into a fatalism that shows itself in a cynical
and opportunistic politics, a deliberate avoidance of fundamentals.
The policy of a democracy thus becomes an eternal improvisation,
changing with the private ambitions of its leaders and the transient
and often unintelligible emotions of its rank and file. Roosevelt,
incurably undemocratic in his habits of mind, often found it difficult
to gauge those emotional oscillations. The fact explains his frequent
loss of mob support, his periodical journeys into Coventry. There were
times when his magnificent talents as a public comedian brought the
proletariat to an almost unanimous groveling at his feet, but there
were also times when he puzzled and dismayed it, and so awakened its
hostility. When he assaulted Wilson on the neutrality issue, early
in 1915, he made a quite typical mistake. That mistake consisted in
assuming that public indignation over the wrongs of the Belgians would
maintain itself at a high temperature--that it would develop rapidly
into a demand for intervention. Roosevelt made himself the spokesman
of that demand, and then found to his consternation that it was
waning--that the great masses of the plain people, prospering under
the Wilsonian neutrality, were inclined to preserve it, at no matter
what cost to the Belgians. In 1915, after the _Lusitania_ affair,
things seemed to swing his way again, and he got vigorous support from
the British press bureau. But in a few months he found himself once
more attempting to lead a mob that was fast slipping away. Wilson, a
very much shrewder politician, with little of Roosevelt's weakness for
succumbing to his own rhetoric, discerned the truth much more quickly
and clearly. In 1916 he made his campaign for reëlection on a flatly
anti-Roosevelt peace issue, and not only got himself reëlected, but
also drove Roosevelt out of the ring.
What happened thereafter deserves a great deal more careful study than
it will ever get from the timorous eunuchs who posture as American
historians. At the moment, it is the official doctrine in England,
where the thing is more freely discussed than at home, that Wilson was
forced into the war by an irresistible movement from below--that the
plain people compelled him to abandon neutrality and move reluctantly
upon the Germans. Nothing could be more untrue. The plain people,
at the end of 1916, were in favor of peace, and they believed that
Wilson was in favor of peace. How they were gradually worked up to
complaisance and then to enthusiasm and then to hysteria and then to
acute mania--this is a tale to be told in more leisurely days and by
historians without boards of trustees on their necks. For the present
purpose it is sufficient to note that the whole thing was achieved so
quickly and so neatly that its success left Roosevelt surprised and
helpless. His issue had been stolen from directly under his nose. He
was left standing daunted and alone, a boy upon a burning deck. It took
him months to collect his scattered wits, and even then his attack upon
the administration was feeble and ineffective. To the plain people it
seemed a mere ill-natured snapping at a successful rival, which in fact
it was, and so they paid no heed to it, and Roosevelt found himself
isolated once more. Thus he passed from the scene in the shadows, a
broken politician and a disappointed man.
I have a notion that he died too soon. His best days were probably
not behind him, but ahead of him. Had he lived ten years longer, he
might have enjoyed a great rehabilitation, and exchanged his old
false leadership of the inflammatory and fickle mob for a sound and
true leadership of the civilized minority. For the more one studies
his mountebankeries as mob-master, the more one is convinced that
there was a shrewd man beneath the motley, and that his actual beliefs
were anything but nonsensical. The truth of them, indeed, emerges
more clearly day by day. The old theory of a federation of free and
autonomous states has broken down by its own weight, and we are moved
toward centralization by forces that have long been powerful and are
now quite irresistible. So with the old theory of national isolation:
it, too, has fallen to pieces. The United States can no longer hope
to lead a separate life in the world, undisturbed by the pressure of
foreign aspirations. We came out of the war to find ourselves hemmed in
by hostilities that no longer troubled to conceal themselves, and if
they are not as close and menacing to-day as those that have hemmed in
Germany for centuries they are none the less plainly there and plainly
growing. Roosevelt, by whatever route of reflection or intuition,
arrived at a sense of these facts at a time when it was still somewhat
scandalous to state them, and it was the capital effort of his life
to reconcile them, in some dark way or other, to the prevailing
platitudes, and so get them heeded. To-day no one seriously maintains,
as all Americans once maintained, that the states can go on existing
together as independent commonwealths, each with its own laws, its own
legal theory and its own view of the common constitutional bond. And
to-day no one seriously maintains, as all Americans once maintained,
that the nation may safely potter on without adequate means of defense.
However unpleasant it may be to contemplate, the fact is plain that
the American people, during the next century, will have to fight to
maintain their place in the sun.
Roosevelt lived just long enough to see his notions in these directions
take on life, but not long enough to see them openly adopted. To the
extent of his prevision he was a genuine leader of the nation, and
perhaps in the years to come, when his actual ideas are disentangled
from the demagogic fustian in which he had to wrap them, his more
honest pronunciamentoes will be given canonical honors, and he will be
ranked among the prophets. He saw clearly more than one other thing
that was by no means obvious to his age--for example, the inevitability
of frequent wars under the new world-system of extreme nationalism;
again, the urgent necessity, for primary police ends, of organizing the
backward nations into groups of vassals, each under the hoof of some
first-rate power; yet again, the probability of the breakdown of the
old system of free competition; once more, the high social utility of
the Spartan virtues and the grave dangers of sloth and ease; finally,
the incompatibility of free speech and democracy. I do not say that
he was always quite honest, even when he was most indubitably right.
But in so far as it was possible for him to be honest and exist at all
politically, he inclined toward the straightforward thought and the
candid word. That is to say, his instinct prompted him to tell the
truth, just as the instinct of Dr. Wilson prompts him to shift and
dissimulate. What ailed him was the fact that his lust for glory, when
it came to a struggle, was always vastly more powerful than his lust
for the eternal verities. Tempted sufficiently, he would sacrifice
anything and everything to get applause. Thus the statesman was
debauched by the politician, and the philosopher was elbowed out of
sight by the popinjay.
Where he failed most miserably was in his remedies. A remarkably
penetrating diagnostician, well-read, unprejudiced and with a touch
of genuine scientific passion, he always stooped to quackery when he
prescribed a course of treatment. For all his sensational attacks upon
the trusts, he never managed to devise a scheme to curb them--and
even when he sought to apply the schemes of other men he invariably
corrupted the business with timorousness and insincerity. So with
his campaign for national preparedness. He displayed the disease
magnificently, but the course of medication that he proposed was
vague and unconvincing; it was not, indeed, without justification
that the plain people mistook his advocacy of an adequate army for
a mere secret yearning to prance upon a charger at the head of huge
hordes. So, again, with his eloquent plea for national solidarity
and an end of hyphenism. The dangers that he pointed out were very
real and very menacing, but his plan for abating them only made them
worse. His objurgations against the Germans surely accomplished
nothing; the hyphenate of 1915 is still a hyphenate in his heart--with
bitter and unforgettable grievances to support him. Roosevelt, very
characteristically, swung too far. In denouncing German hyphenism so
extravagantly he contrived to give an enormous impetus to English
hyphenism, a far older and more perilous malady. It has already gone
so far that a large and influential party endeavors almost openly
to convert the United States into a mere vassal state of England's.
Instead of national solidarity following the war, we have only a
revival of Know-Nothingism; one faction of hyphenates tries to
exterminate another faction. Roosevelt's error here was one that he
was always making. Carried away by the ease with which he could heat
up the mob, he tried to accomplish instantly and by _force majeure_
what could only be accomplished by a long and complex process, with
more good will on both sides than ever so opinionated and melodramatic
a pseudo-Junker was capable of. But though he thus made a mess of the
cure, he was undoubtedly right about the disease.
The talented Sherman, in the monograph that I have praised, argues
that the chief contribution of the dead gladiator to American life was
the example of his gigantic gusto, his delight in toil and struggle,
his superb aliveness. The fact is plain. What he stood most clearly
in opposition to was the superior pessimism of the three Adams
brothers--the notion that the public problems of a democracy are
unworthy the thought and effort of a civilized and self-respecting
man--the sad error that lies in wait for all of us who hold ourselves
above the general. Against this suicidal aloofness Roosevelt always
hurled himself with brave effect. Enormously sensitive and resilient,
almost pathological in his appetite for activity, he made it plain to
every one that the most stimulating sort of sport imaginable was to
be obtained in fighting, not for mere money, but for ideas. There was
no aristocratic reserve about him. He was not, in fact, an aristocrat
at all, but a quite typical member of the upper _bourgeoisie;_ his
people were not _patroons_ in New Amsterdam, but simple traders; he was
himself a social pusher, and eternally tickled by the thought that he
had had a Bonaparte in his cabinet. The marks of the thoroughbred were
simply not there. The man was blatant, crude, overly confidential,
devious, tyrannical, vainglorious, sometimes quite childish. One often
observed in him a certain pathetic wistfulness, a reaching out for
a grand manner that was utterly beyond him. But the sweet went with
the bitter. He had all the virtues of the fat and complacent burgher.
His disdain of affectation and prudery was magnificent. He hated all
pretension save his own pretension. He had a sound respect for hard
effort, for loyalty, for thrift, for honest achievement.
His worst defects, it seems to me, were the defects of his race and
time. Aspiring to be the leader of a nation of third-rate men, he had
to stoop to the common level. When he struck out for realms above that
level he always came to grief: this was the "unsafe" Roosevelt, the
Roosevelt who was laughed at, the Roosevelt retired suddenly to cold
storage. This was the Roosevelt who, in happier times and a better
place, might have been. Well, one does what one can.
III. THE SAHARA OF THE BOZART
Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer--
She never was much given to literature.
In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegaic lines,
there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie,
at least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is now almost as
rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is,
indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the
interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether.
Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of
fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in
France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles.
And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the "progress"
it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually,
culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that
house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;
there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the
late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave to-morrow, the
effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but
little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would
be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a
civilization.
I say a civilization because that is what, in the old days, the South
had, despite the Baptist and Methodist barbarism that reigns down there
now. More, it was a civilization of manifold excellences--perhaps
the best that the Western Hemisphere has ever seen--undoubtedly the
best that These States have ever seen. Down to the middle of the last
century, and even beyond, the main hatchery of ideas on this side of
the water was across the Potomac bridges. The New England shopkeepers
and theologians never really developed a civilization; all they ever
developed was a government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky
fellows, oafish in manner and devoid of imagination; one searches the
books in vain for mention of a salient Yankee gentleman; as well look
for a Welsh gentleman. But in the south there were men of delicate
fancy, urbane instinct and aristocratic manner--in brief, superior
men--in brief, gentry. To politics, their chief diversion, they brought
active and original minds. It was there that nearly all the political
theories we still cherish and suffer under came to birth. It was there
that the crude dogmatism of New England was refined and humanized. It
was there, above all, that some attention was given to the art of
living--that life got beyond and above the state of a mere infliction
and became an exhilarating experience. A certain noble spaciousness
was in the ancient southern scheme of things. The _Ur-_Confederate had
leisure. He liked to toy with ideas. He was hospitable and tolerant. He
had the vague thing that we call culture.
But consider the condition of his late empire to-day. The picture
gives one the creeps. It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last
bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field. One
thinks of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians, Greeks and wild swine, of
Poland abandoned to the Poles. In all that gargantuan paradise of the
fourth-rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or
a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven,
or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays,
or a single public monument (built since the war) that is worth looking
at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things.
Once you have counted Robert Loveman (an Ohioan by birth) and John
McClure (an Oklahoman) you will not find a single southern poet above
the rank of a neighborhood rhymester. Once you have counted James
Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the _ancien régime:_ a scarlet
dragonfly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single southern
prose writer who can actually write. And once you have--but when you
come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects
and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad
one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf. Nor an historian. Nor
a sociologist. Nor a philosopher. Nor a theologian. Nor a scientist.
In all these fields the south is an awe-inspiring blank--a brother to
Portugal, Serbia and Esthonia.
Consider, for example, the present estate and dignity of Virginia--in
the great days indubitably the premier American state, the mother of
Presidents and statesmen, the home of the first American university
worthy of the name, the _arbiter elegantiarum_ of the western world.
Well, observe Virginia to-day. It is years since a first-rate man,
save only Cabell, has come out of it; it is years since an idea has
come out of it. The old aristocracy went down the red gullet of war;
the poor white trash are now in the saddle. Politics in Virginia are
cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic; there is scarcely a man in office
above the rank of a professional job-seeker; the political doctrine
that prevails is made up of hand-me-downs from the bumpkinry of the
Middle West--Bryanism, Prohibition, vice crusading, all that sort
of filthy claptrap; the administration of the law is turned over to
professors of Puritanism and espionage; a Washington or a Jefferson,
dumped there by some act of God, would be denounced as a scoundrel
and jailed overnight. Elegance, _esprit,_ culture? Virginia has no
art, no literature, no philosophy, no mind or aspiration of her own.
Her education has sunk to the Baptist seminary level; not a single
contribution to human knowledge has come out of her colleges in
twenty-five years; she spends less than half upon her common schools,
_per capita,_ than any northern state spends. In brief, an intellectual
Gobi or Lapland. Urbanity, _politesse,_ chivalry? Co to! It was in
Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband
whisky in women's underwear.... There remains, at the top, a ghost of
the old aristocracy, a bit wistful and infinitely charming. But it has
lost all its old leadership to fabulous monsters from the lower depths;
it is submerged in an industrial plutocracy that is ignorant and
ignominious. The mind of the state, as it is revealed to the nation,
is pathetically naïve and inconsequential. It no longer reacts with
energy and elasticity to great problems. It has fallen to the bombastic
trivialities of the camp-meeting and the chautauqua. Its foremost
exponent--if so flabby a thing may be said to have an exponent--is a
stateman whose name is synonymous with empty words, broken pledges and
false pretenses. One could no more imagine a Lee or a Washington in the
Virginia of to-day than one could imagine a Huxley in Nicaragua.
I choose the Old Dominion, not because I disdain it, but precisely
because I esteem it. It is, by long odds, the most civilized of the
southern states, now as always. It has sent a host of creditable sons
northward; the stream kept running into our own time. Virginians, even
the worst of them, show the effects of a great tradition. They hold
themselves above other southerners, and with sound pretension. If
one turns to such a commonwealth as Georgia the picture becomes far
darker. There the liberated lower orders of whites have borrowed the
worst commercial bounderism of the Yankee and superimposed it upon a
culture that, at bottom, is but little removed from savagery. Georgia
is at once the home of the cotton-mill sweater and of the most noisy
and vapid sort of chamber of commerce, of the Methodist parson turned
Savonarola and of the lynching bee. A self-respecting European, going
there to live, would not only find intellectual stimulation utterly
lacking; he would actually feel a certain insecurity, as if the scene
were the Balkans or the China Coast. The Leo Frank affair was no
isolated phenomenon. It fitted into its frame very snugly. It was a
natural expression of Georgian notions of truth and justice. There is
a state with more than half the area of Italy and more population than
either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced
a single idea. Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books
that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was
little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works
were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia.
Writing afterward _as_ a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth
rank. And he is not only the glory of the literature of Georgia; he is,
almost literally, the whole of the literature of Georgia--nay, of the
entire art of Georgia.
Virginia is the best of the south to-day, and Georgia is perhaps the
worst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass, gross, vulgar
and obnoxious. Between lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity,
lethargy, almost of dead silence. In the north, of course, there
is also grossness, crassness, vulgarity. The north, in its way, is
also stupid and obnoxious. But nowhere in the north is there such
complete sterility, so depressing a lack of all civilized gesture
and aspiration. One would find it difficult to unearth a second-rate
city between the Ohio and the Pacific that isn't struggling to
establish an orchestra, or setting up a little theater, or going in
for an art gallery, or making some other effort to get into touch
with civilization. These efforts often fail, and sometimes they
succeed rather absurdly, but under them there is at least an impulse
that deserves respect, and that is the impulse to seek beauty and to
experiment with ideas, and so to give the life of every day a certain
dignity and purpose. You will find no such impulse in the south.
There are no committees down there cadging subscriptions for
orchestras; if a string quartet is ever heard there, the news of it
has never come out; an opera troupe, when it roves the land, is a nine
days' wonder. The little theater movement has swept the whole country,
enormously augmenting the public interest in sound plays, giving new
dramatists their chance, forcing reforms upon the commercial theater.
Everywhere else the wave rolls high--but along the line of the Potomac
it breaks upon a rock-bound shore. There is no little theater beyond.
There is no gallery of pictures. No artist ever gives exhibitions. No
one talks of such things. No one seems to be interested in such things.