SOME PLAIN WORDS TO AMERICANS. ARE THE AMERICANS A SACRED PEOPLE?
IS INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM RESTRICTED TO THE EASTWARD POSITION?
This paper is addressed primarily to certain American correspondents,
but it discusses a matter of considerable interest to all
English-speaking readers--namely, the right of British and European
people generally to have and to express opinions about American
affairs. The converse right has never been questioned, and is exercised
freely by Americans throughout the world.
In this article I maintain my right as a free-born Englishman to think
freely about the affairs of the United States, and to say what I think
to be true and right and proper about all or any of these affairs. I
refuse to regard the people of the United States as in any way a Holy
People. It is not blasphemous to deny them perfection. It may even
be wholesome that their present great exaltation of spirit should be
tempered by criticism. And if I have anything upon my conscience with
regard to the United States in the past, it is that my disposition
has been more consistently favourable and flattering to the American
tone, the American quality, and the American future than the present
ungraciousness of these correspondents of mine justifies.
True that when first I crossed the Atlantic some artless comments
of mine offended Boston. There has always been something a little
difficult between myself and Massachusetts, some incompatibility. New
York I loved frankly, and Chicago amazed me. I left verbal instructions
that the ashes of my heart were to be thrown into the Potomac where
Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia meet; but Boston I
found refined and genteel and sensitive beyond my capacity. Everybody
admired the Winged Victory and had a replica of it somewhere. I had
never encountered such a serried unanimity of culture before. I made
remarks about it, and about Longfellow’s house. I began wrong perhaps
by going to Boston in a Fall River boat with my cabin near the syren,
and spending the next day sceptically in an open automobile exploring
the wildernesses into which Boston was proposing to expand. I doubt it
ever will. And now again my trouble is with the super-civilization of
Massachusetts. All the haughtier letters I get in this correspondence
come from that State.
My gravest offence, I gathered, lies in this, that together with two
other miscreants, to wit, one Arnold Bennett and one John Galsworthy,
I did wantonly issue a manifesto or appeal upon the issue of the
Sacco and Vanzetti trial while it was still in suspense. For myself
and my associates I object to every word in that indictment. We were
approached severally by an American gentleman, bearing one of the
greatest names in the history of American science, and himself of
respectable academic standing, and asked to sign an appeal to Governor
Fuller which he put before us, and I, at least, was given to understand
that this was to be an extensively signed document not confined to
English or American opinion. We were not so pontifical, therefore,
as we seemed to be. In fact, we were not pontifical at all. We
responded to an American invitation and did not expect to be treated as
principals but as chorus in the matter.
Still, that is a minor point. I signed that appeal very readily, and,
later on, when the execution occurred, I expressed an opinion about
it, an indignant opinion, for which I had ample justification in the
facts as they had been put before me from American sources. From the
examination actually quoted to me, I was impressed by the extravagant
unfairness of the questions put to the accused, and by the way in
which, being charged with ordinary murder and robbery, their political
opinions were dragged into court to create a prejudice against them.
I was concerned about the moral quality of the court far more than
about the moral quality of the accused. I wrote an article upon this,
which did not get all the publicity I had hoped for in America. The
question of whether these two Italians were guilty or innocent I made
a secondary matter. The thing that scandalized me was that they should
have been tried in such a fashion.
Now for six years before that, although I was frequently hearing
about it vaguely, I had left the Sacco and Vanzetti affair alone as
no concern of mine. It is only recently that I have been roused to
the realization that it is a case like the Dreyfus case, by which the
soul of a people is tested and displayed. I had supposed it to be a
row between the “Reds” and the authorities, and I had assumed that the
accused were involved in some political or semi-political crime. I am
not a “Red,” though a number of people I have stung by criticisms they
could not answer in any other fashion have sought comfort in calling me
that. I have criticized Communism with a passionless destructiveness
far more deadly than the mere brawling abuse of Moscow habitual to
these people who denounce me. And it was only when I found that two
men, who might or might not be murderers and robbers, were being tried
as though anarchist opinions and murder were interchangeable things
that my sense of intellectual decency was aroused.
It was my friend H. W. Nevinson who induced me to look into this
case more closely, by a review of a book by Mr. Felix Frankfurter.
His précis was so startling that I got the book itself forthwith and
read it. It was manifestly a very honest and competent book, and its
exposure of the prejudice imported into the case by the prosecution
amazed and shocked me profoundly. I inquired further who this Mr. Felix
Frankfurter might be. He was, I discovered, a member of President
Wilson’s government, and he is now Professor of Administrative Law at
Harvard. This seems good enough to go upon. The Communist movement
had seized upon this trial and made it an occasion for demonstrations
and outrages throughout the world. The favourite rôle of the extreme
Red seems always to be that of agent provocateur for reaction. The
extreme Red is the curse of creative liberalism. But the misbehaviour
of excited crowds here and there has nothing to do with the essential
offence of this case, which has been stated for history and all time by
Frankfurter. Frankfurter is no more a Red than I am, and had as little
to gain by taking up this unpopular case. He took it up because it
shocked him, and he imparted his shock to me. The trial and the manner
of the trial are the facts that most concerned him. There they are.
Now the curious thing is that a great number of Americans do not seem
to see in the least what is the point at issue. They do not get, many
of them do not seem able to get, what it is that has roused the liberal
opinion of all Europe against the courts of Massachusetts. There is a
profound psychological difference laid bare in this case.
The guilt or innocence of these two Italians was not the issue that
had excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were the actual
murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit
about the crime. Seven years after the crime the Massachusetts police
(who have certainly been as much on trial as the actual murderers)
produced new and very impressive evidence against Sacco and his
associate. They exhibited a bullet which they depose was the bullet
found in the body of the victim, and a pistol, which they testify was
found upon Sacco at the time of his arrest. The particular bullet is
shown conclusively, by a quite beautiful piece of scientific analysis,
to have been fired from that particular pistol. This must have been
very decisive with Governor Fuller’s committee of inquiry. But these
facts were not before the court in the original trial, and, anyhow,
they have nothing to do with the monstrous way in which the politics of
the accused were dragged into the case. That, I urge upon the American
reader, is what perplexes Europe. Europe is not “re-trying” Sacco and
Vanzetti, or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge
Thayer. Executing political opponents, as political opponents, after
the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as
bandits, but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds,
or Reds as murderers, seems to us a new and very frightening line for
the courts of a state in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth
to pursue.
So much for the Sacco and Vanzetti case. I realize the electric
storminess that broods over it. Wrathful Massachusetts citizens write
to me that they have “consigned” various of my unimportant writings to
“the garbage can,” and have otherwise treated them with contumely. I am
to be barred and suppressed by a hundred million true Americans. This
is melancholy news for me, but of no great importance to the world. The
fact remains that these indignant letter-writers are still in the same
world with Frankfurter’s book and that if they do not read it in this
world, its careful perusal will almost certainly be one of the first
purifying tasks set them in the next.
Well, life must go on, and the Braintree case must be left now on
the receding beaches of history. After this article I shall write no
more about it. And here, indeed, it is not about this case that I am
writing, but about the extraordinarily bad temper certain types of
Americans display at the mere shadow of its discussion--and, indeed,
of any discussion of things American. One can scarcely let a sentence
that is not highly flattering glance across the Atlantic without some
American blowing up. No other people have so acute a sensibility. This
Sacco and Vanzetti business has merely brought this testy impatience
to a head. I have spent only a few months of my life in America, and I
am always careful to base such comments as I make upon America, upon
American authorities. Upon prohibition my silence has been monumental;
it is an affair for Americans only. But many other matters are not
entirely their affair. For example, it is a matter of concern to the
whole world that the general level of education in America should
be high. That is another matter on which I have offended, and shall
continue to offend. Drawing my instances from American writers, I have
pointed out on diverse occasions that the level of elementary education
in America is not high enough for her immense possibilities and her
limitless aspirations. It is no answer to say that it is as high as it
is in most European countries. My answer is that it ought to be much
higher because of the immense wealth, power, and opportunity of the
United States. I regret I have not saved the whole mass of ill-written,
abusive retorts this friendly and helpful reflection has provoked.
The other day, again, I lectured at the Sorbonne on the necessity
of democracy entering upon a new phase. I was considering European
conditions, and I do not think I even mentioned America, but apparently
the word “democracy” infringed the sacredness of the American
tradition, and Senator Borah went up with a loud report. I was reminded
as a Briton of many humiliating things, and particularly of my
financial mismanagement of the war situation, which left Senator Borah
so much up on me. Yet I am doing my best to pay off Senator Borah, and
I have never complained. And the insufficiency of the American common
school is a danger to the peace of the world.
This disposition to answer back hotly and irrelevantly is not
confined to Senator Borah and my mail. Several newspaper articles
to my address have instituted painful general comparisons between
English and American ways. One writer lays much stress on the alleged
British habit of playing tennis, taking a bath, and putting on the same
underclothing again. This may be all right; I have never searched my
fellow countrymen, but personally I don’t play tennis in underclothing.
Anyhow it doesn’t matter very much. I admit the immense superiority
of Americans in most things; to mention only a few, they win hands
down on films and flivvers, steel construction and advertisement, debt
collecting and floral offerings, Bunker Hill and bathrooms. American
architecture is superb. Their novels are becoming more interesting
than British novels, and London, I understand, is full of their plays.
If no American alive can write anything to compare with the storm in
Tomlinson’s “Gallion’s Reach,” yet Stephen Crane came nearest to it
in his “Open Boat.” The variety of type in the American population,
as compared with the British, is as fifty to one. America invented
flying. Oxford trousers, again, were a plagiarism from America. I
could go on for quite a long time jotting down similar glorious points
for Old Glory. But I do not see what such things have to do with my
articles. I was not at Bunker Hill when Senator Borah, I gather,
stormed that position and licked chaps like me to hell. The question
of the conduct of a public trial or the value of an educational
organization or the imperfection of an electoral method of government
is not settled by vehement reminders of a critic’s nationality and its
associated disadvantages--especially when he happens to be the most
cosmopolitan-spirited of critics.
The friendly European critics of the United States are impressed
by the facts, first, that the elementary education of the American
citizen is cheap and poor and does not fit him for his proper rôle in
the world; next, that the methods of democracy used by the States are
crude and ineffective, and that they hamper the moral and intellectual
development of what is still the greatest, most promising of human
communities; and thirdly and finally, that the American sense of
justice is clumsy and confused. It does not dispose of such criticisms
to say that they come from a poor boob, or that all the world outside
the States is just a wilderness of poor boobs. True, no doubt, as that
is, and salutary as it is to repeat it, nevertheless it leaves the
American defects untouched.
The people of the United States has become very rapidly in the last
fifty years the most secure, wealthy, and powerful nation of the world.
It is high time its citizens displayed a self-complacency commensurate
with this achievement. It is all very well for a touchy little people
on the defence to fly up at the mere hint of criticism, but not for
the proud citizens of a great empire. Far be it from me to institute
vexatious comparisons between Europe and America, but there does
seem to be a clearer sense of the freedoms and frankness permitted
in discussion on this side of the Atlantic. It has been possible in
the past for Americans to discuss the rights and wrongs of British
justice in Ireland, India, and Egypt without provoking vehement denials
of their liberty to do so. The late President Roosevelt offered the
most striking and uninvited advice to English liberal thinkers upon
the subject of the Empire. When the British liner, the _Titanic_,
went down, the Americans, I recall, held officers and crew for a
perfectly gratuitous inquiry before releasing them for the proper legal
investigation by the British Board of Trade. There was no fuss on these
occasions about “alien intervention” in England, we appreciated the
advantage of having our concerns viewed from a fresh angle, and unless
we have touched sore consciences, I do not see why the simple response
of Bennett, Galsworthy, and myself to an American question should evoke
these present transports.
It was precisely because we were not American that we were invited to
give an opinion on the Braintree case.
Whatever may be the outcome of this present little affair, I am afraid
the Americans, like the rest of the world, must be prepared for an
increasing amount of criticism and intellectual and moral intervention
from foreigners. The world becomes more and more one community, and
the state of mind of each nation has practical reactions upon all the
rest that were undreamt of half a century ago. The administration of
justice in Massachusetts or Italy concerns me almost as much as the
administration of justice in London or Glasgow. Particularly when the
lives of aliens are involved. Belligerent teaching in the schoolbooks
of France or Germany or America, or a failure of China to unify and
protect itself against military adventurers, may lead to the deaths
of my sons and the destruction of nearly everything I hold dear about
me. The world becomes my village, and whether Senator Borah likes it
or not, part of me walks down Main Street and defies all America to
expel it. Conversely the voice of Senator Borah reverberates in Dunmow,
and is heard along the Maritime Alps. America is part of my spiritual
home and Old Glory one of my quarterings. I have a loyal feeling for
the American eagle. It is so loyal a feeling that I cannot bear to
think of that bird as anything but aquiline. I want to think of it as
that aspiring eagle with the open wings one encounters first on the
caps of the officials as one steams up the exhilarating approach to
New York. An eagle like a victorious invitation. I do not want to have
that vision replaced by the butt view of a proud but isolated ostrich,
invincibly immense, which has swallowed all the gold in the world and
is now keeping its head resolutely buried in the sand.
_16 October, 1927._