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EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 
 
 Author of "College Sons and College Fathers," 
 
 *'Our House," "Education by 
 
 Violence," etc. 
 
 y 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1920 
 

 Copyright, 1919, 1920, by 
 The Century Co. 
 
 ©CU57G518 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This IS emphatically not a war book ; and yet 
 the chapters that follow, in one sense, are the 
 fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent 
 reflections upon his own people by one return- 
 ing to a familiar environment after active con- 
 tact with English, Scottish, Irish, and French 
 in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They 
 are complementary, in a way, to a volume of 
 essays which sprang from that experience and 
 was published in 1919 under the title "Edu- 
 cation by Violence/' But though representing 
 in its inception the fresher view of familiar 
 America of one returning from abroad, this 
 book in its completed form is tendered as a 
 modest attempt to depict an American type 
 that was sharpened perhaps, but certainly not 
 created by the war. The ''old Americans'' 
 came to racial consciousness many years ago, 
 
 v 
 
PREFACE 
 
 although their sense of nationality has been im- 
 measurably strengthened by the events of the 
 last few years. It is no picture of all America, 
 no survey of our complete social being that I 
 attempt in the following pages; but rather a 
 highly personal study of the typical, the every- 
 day American mind, as it is manifested in the 
 American of the old stock. It is a study of 
 what that typical American product, the col- 
 lege and high school graduate, has become in 
 the generation which must carry on after the 
 war. 
 
 New Haven, Connecticut, 
 June 4, 1920. 
 
 VI 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I The American Mind . 
 
 II Conservative America 
 
 III Radical America . 
 
 IV American Idealism 
 
 V Religion in America . 
 
 VI Literature in America 
 
 VII The Bourgeois American 
 
 PAGE 
 
 3 
 
 29 
 61 
 
 91 
 120 
 149 
 
 175 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 IN England there developed long ago, per- 
 haps as far back as the days of Shake- 
 speare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and 
 democratic in his sympathies, a curious political 
 animal called the radical-conservative. The 
 radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once 
 said, is a man who would have been a radical 
 outright if radicals had not been dissenters ; by 
 which he clearly meant that the species agreed 
 with radical principles, but objected to radicals 
 because they did not have good manners, sel- 
 dom played cricket, and never belonged to the 
 best clubs. Therefore the radical-conserva- 
 tive stays in his own more congenial class while 
 
 3 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 working for social justice toward all other 
 classes. He is willing to vote with the con- 
 servative party in return for concessions in 
 labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguard- 
 ing of public health. 
 
 Thence arises the curious circumstance, most 
 mystifying to foreigners, that a good share of 
 the really progressive legislation in Great Bri- 
 tain of the last half-century has been led by 
 young gentlemen from Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge who have no more intention of becom- 
 ing part of the proletariate than of leaving off 
 their collars and going without baths. Bis- 
 marck was an out-and-out conservative who 
 for his own nefarious ends furthered what a 
 Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory 
 would call radical measures. But Lord Rob- 
 ert Cecil in our own day is a convinced aris- 
 tocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who 
 is more sincerely effective than many Liberals 
 in various movements which we are accus- 
 tomed to call reform. 
 
 4 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 The conservative-liberal is quite a different 
 animal and far commoner, far more familiar to 
 Americans, even if they have never called him 
 by that name. His habitat is America, and 
 thanks to the populousness of this country, he 
 is beginning to have a very important influence 
 outside of his habitat. To define him is diffi- 
 cult, but for purposes of rough classification he 
 may be said to be the man whose native liberal 
 instincts have been crystallized by a combina- 
 tion of interesting circumstances — and some- 
 times petrified. He is the man who was born 
 a liberal in a liberal country and intends to 
 remain as he was born. He is the man who 
 will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the 
 Declaration of Independence against any later 
 manifestation of the revolutionary spirit. He 
 believes in conserving in unaltered purity the 
 principles of life, government, and industry 
 that his forefathers rightly believed to be lib- 
 eral. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned 
 policeman, a progressive who stands pat upon 
 
 5 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 his progress, a conservative-liberal. I believe 
 that he is our closest approximation to a typi- 
 cal American mind. 
 
 Whether familiar or not, the effects of this 
 political disease — for it is a disease, a harden- 
 ing of the arteries of the mind — are easily ob- 
 servable all about us in the America of to-day. 
 Indeed, we see them so frequently that they 
 awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in 
 any intellectual sense of the word. They are 
 like our clear atmosphere, our mixture of races, 
 our hurried steps — things we scarcely notice 
 until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an 
 outsider. I am so much a part of America 
 that I find it difficult to detach myself from a 
 mood that is mine in common with many other 
 Americans. And yet, once one sees it plainly, 
 the educated conservatism of liberal America 
 becomes portentous, a unique political pheno- 
 menon. 
 
 I think that this peculiarity of our political 
 thinking first became evident to me on an ocean 
 
 6 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 voyage In war-time. There were a score or so 
 of Americans on board, members, most of 
 them, of various government missions, picked 
 business men, picked professional men, thor- 
 oughly intelligent, intensely practical, and en- 
 tirely American. They were democratic, too, 
 as we use the word in America; that is, good 
 "mixers," free from snobbery, and nothing new 
 in action was alien to their sympathies. They 
 could remold you a business or a legal prac- 
 tice in half an hour's conversation; tear down 
 an organization and build it up again between 
 cigars. Their committee meetings went off 
 like machine-guns, whereas the English offi- 
 cers and trade diplomats, when they got to- 
 gether, snarled themselves in set speeches and 
 motions and took an afternoon to get anywhere. 
 The English, indeed, seemed puzzled and a 
 little dazed by the ease with which the Ameri- 
 cans seized upon and put through reorganiza- 
 tion of any kind. They seemed positively to 
 leap at change, so long as basic ideas were not 
 
 7 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 involved. ''Nothing/' said an Indian colonel, 
 "is sacred to them. They would scrap the em- 
 pire and build a new one — on paper — at sixty 
 miles an hour." 
 
 He was quite wrong. The system my coun- 
 trymen lived by permitted change, urged 
 change, up to a certain point. They would 
 demolish a ten-story building to erect one of 
 twenty or scrap thousands of machines in order 
 to adopt a better process, but when it came to 
 principles and institutions they were conserva- 
 tive. The founders of their social and politi- 
 cal order had been almost a century ahead of 
 the times. The instruments of life and of 
 government they had provided had served with 
 slight modifications for the free-moving 
 America of the nineteenth century. It had 
 been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, 
 to realize the liberality and democracy possible 
 under the Constitution, to work out the inde- 
 pendence available for the common man in a 
 rich and undeveloped country in which his 
 
 8 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 political power guaranteed him every advan- 
 tage that could be gained in a capitalistic sys- 
 tem, including the acquisition of capital. It 
 had been a splendid game, and our wits had 
 been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, 
 our prosperity fortified, our self-confidence 
 enormously increased in playing it. Given our 
 rules, we could play the game more resource- 
 fully than any other people on earth. And 
 they were wise rules, which provided for 
 growth, but not for a dififerent kind of contest. 
 We were so sure that America stood for free- 
 dom, independence, and liberality in general 
 that we could not take seriously people who 
 did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that 
 there might be an idea of democracy dififerent 
 from our own. 
 
 Indeed, on board that ship, a curious ex- 
 perience came to all of us. Englishmen, Ameri- 
 cans, and I, the humble observer, when in the 
 course of argument or conference the theories 
 of life upon which we were variously living 
 
 9 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 came momentarily into view. The Ameri- 
 cans, it was clear, were certain that they were 
 the most progressive people in the world. This 
 certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman 
 Catholic; it gave them elasticity and daring. 
 Being sure of their principles, so sure as to be 
 almost unaware of them, they ignored prece- 
 dents, and solved or dismissed problems with 
 equal ease. They made plans for a league of 
 nations, they approved of a temporary au- 
 tocracy for the President, they put the labor 
 question on a business basis, and so disposed 
 of it ; they were afraid of nothing but a failure 
 to act and act quickly. Nevertheless, as they 
 talked and worked with the English, it became 
 increasingly evident that their road ended in 
 a wall. 
 
 There were walls on the English road, too — 
 walls of caste thinking and social privilege that 
 seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an of- 
 fice building. Our wall was invisible to most 
 of us, and as a body we never tried to pass it 
 
 lO 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas, 
 beyond which, if we thought of it at all, pre- 
 sumably lay socialism, anarchy, chaos. 
 
 Just that far the American mind, like some 
 light tank, ran, surmounting everything, taking 
 to the fields if the road was blocked, turning, 
 backing, doing everything but stop; only to 
 halt dead at the invisible barrier, and zigzag 
 away again. By such a free-moving process 
 within the limits of law we had scrambled 
 across a continent in turbulent, individualistic 
 exploitation, and yet had built a sound politi- 
 cal system carefully and well. And there we 
 had stopped, convinced that we had solved the 
 problem of democracy and equal opportunity 
 for all. This explains why America is twenty 
 years behind the best of Europe in social and 
 economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed 
 reform more than we did). This is what it is 
 to be a conservative-liberal. 
 
 The Englishman is different. He is much 
 more likely to be an obstinate Tory, blocking 
 
 II 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by a 
 system as antiquated as feudalism ; or if not a 
 Tory, then an out-and-out radical eager for a 
 legal revolution. But in either case he knows 
 what different-minded men are thinking; and if 
 there is a wall on his road, he looks over it. If 
 he is a Tory, he understands radicalism and 
 fights it because he prefers an inequality that 
 favors him to a more logical system that might 
 be personally disagreeable. If he is a radical, 
 he understands Toryism. But the American 
 conservative-liberal acknowledges no opinion 
 except his own. He insists, in the words 
 of a contemporary statesman, that the 
 American system, as founded by our fore- 
 fathers, is the best in the world, and he is not 
 interested in others. There are a thousand 
 proofs that it is not the best possible system 
 even for America, and plenty of them are in 
 print — proofs advanced by capitalists as well 
 as labor leaders, by Catholics as well as social- 
 ists; but they do not trouble him, because he 
 
 12 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 neither hears nor reads them. It is easier to 
 call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik. 
 
 This is the liberal-conservative mind that 
 will not look beyond its own fixed principles and 
 refuses to understand those who differ from 
 it; that suffers a kind of paralysis when con- 
 fronted by genuine radicalism. The Ameri- 
 can college undergraduate has it to perfection. 
 Bubbling over with energy, ready for anything 
 in the practical world of struggle or adventure, 
 he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he 
 has inherited as a girl of her reputation. He 
 is armored against new thinking. The Ameri- 
 can business man fairly professes it. He 
 speculates in material things with an abandon 
 that makes a Frenchman pale; but new prin- 
 ciples in the relations of trade to general wel- 
 fare, questions of unearned increment, first 
 bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him. 
 
 And yet the college undergraduates, after 
 hatching, and the American business man have 
 made for us a very comfortable America, just 
 
 13 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 now the safest place in the world to live in, the 
 most prosperous country in the world, the 
 most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way 
 of doing things has its great advantages. 
 America is its product, and the ranter who de- 
 scribes the United States as the home of super- 
 capitalism, a sink of cheaply exploited labor, a 
 dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity, does not 
 seem to be able to persuade even himself that 
 the United States is not the best of all coun- 
 tries for a permanent residence. 
 
 And the great Americans of the past have 
 nearly all been conservative-liberals. Wash- 
 ington was a great republican ; he was also es- 
 sentially an aristocrat in social and economic 
 relations, who kept slaves and did not believe 
 in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically, was 
 the greatest of English-speaking democrats, 
 but he let the privileged classes exploit the 
 working-man and the soldier, partly in order to 
 win the war, chiefly because problems of wages 
 and unearned increments and economic priv- 
 
 14 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 ilege generally did not enter into his scheme of 
 democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for 
 the square deal in public and private life, but 
 hesitated and at last turned back when it be- 
 came evident that a deal that was completely 
 square meant the overturning of social life as 
 he knew and loved it in America. 
 
 And these men we feel were right. Their 
 duty was to make possible a good government 
 and a stable society, and they worked not with 
 theories only, but also with facts as they were. 
 The Germans have argued that the first duty 
 of the state is self-preservation, and that rights 
 of individual men and other states may properly 
 be crushed in order to preserve it. We have 
 crushed the Germans and, one hopes, their phil- 
 osophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of 
 society to preserve itself. No one believes that 
 universal sufifrage for all, negroes included, 
 would have been advisable in Washington's 
 day, when republicanism was still an experi- 
 ment. No one believes, I fancy, that the mini- 
 
 15 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 mum wage, the inheritance tax, and coopera- 
 tive management should have had first place, or 
 indeed any place, in the mind of the Lincoln of 
 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a social- 
 ist would have been as useful to the United 
 States as Roosevelt the Progressive with a 
 back-throw toward the ideals of the aristo- 
 cratic state; as Roosevelt the conservative- 
 liberal. 
 
 But too great reliance on even a great tra- 
 dition has its disadvantages. I know an 
 American preparatory school that for many 
 college generations has entered its students at 
 a famous university with the highest of ex- 
 amination records, and a reputation for cour- 
 tesy and cleanness of mind and soundness of 
 body scarcely paralleled elsewhere. I have 
 watched these boys with much interest, and I 
 have seen them in surprising numbers gradually 
 decline from their position of superiority as 
 they faced the rapid changes of college life, as 
 they settled into a new environment with differ- 
 
 16 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 ent demands and more complex standards. 
 They leaned too heavily upon their admirable 
 schooling; they were too confident of the 
 strength and worth of their tradition; they 
 looked backward instead of forward, and stood 
 still while less favored men went on. Their 
 fault was the fault of American liberalism, 
 which stands pat with Washington and Roose- 
 velt and Lincoln. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest teacher in nineteenth- 
 century American universities was William 
 Graham Sumner. In his day he was called a 
 radical, and unsuccessful efforts were made to 
 oust him from his professorship because of his 
 advocacy of free trade. Now I hear him cited 
 as a conservative by those who quote his sup- 
 port of individualism against socialism, his 
 distrust of cooperation against the league of 
 nations. His friends forget that an honest 
 radical in one age would be an honest radical 
 in another; and that the facts available hav- 
 ing changed, it is certain that his opinions 
 
 17 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 would change also, although just what he would 
 advocate, just how decide, we cannot certainly 
 know. Is it probable that Dante, the great ad- 
 vocate of imperial control in a particularistic 
 medieval world, would have been a pro-German 
 in 1 914? The American liberal who proclaims 
 himself of the party of Lincoln, and is content 
 with that definition, might have an unpleasant 
 shock if that great reader of the heart of the 
 common man could resume his short-cut life. 
 Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same 
 disadvantages as inherited money: all the 
 owner has to do is to learn how to keep it ; in 
 other words, to become a conservative. That 
 is what is going on in America. While we 
 were pioneers in liberty and individualism, 
 wealth and opportunity and independence were 
 showered upon us, and although wealth for the 
 average man is harder to come by, and oppor- 
 tunity is more and more limited to the for- 
 tunate, and independence belongs only to good 
 incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal 
 
 18 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 keeps the pioneer's optimism, and is satisfied to 
 take ready-made a system that his ancestors 
 wrought by painful and open-minded experi- 
 ment. In practice he is still full of initiative 
 and invention; in principle he can conceive of 
 only one dispensation, the ideas of political 
 democracy which were the radicalism of 1861 
 and 1840 and 1789 and 1776. 
 
 Suppose that he could conceive of industrial 
 democracy, of a system where every man be- 
 gan with an equal share of worldly privilege 
 as he begins now with an equal share of 
 worldly rights. Would he not work it out, 
 with his still keen practicality, and test its 
 value precisely as he tests a new factory method 
 or an advertising scheme? But he can- 
 not conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispen- 
 sation. His liberalism turns conservative at 
 the thought. It was different with political 
 democracy and with religious toleration. The 
 first cannot even now be said to be precisely a 
 perfect system, and the second has left us per- 
 
 19 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 ilously near to having no religion at all. Nev- 
 ertheless, the liberal ancestor of our American 
 never doubted that they were his problems, to 
 be worked out to some solution. He followed 
 boldly where they led. 
 
 What has happened to the political and eco- 
 nomic thinking of many an American much 
 resembles what has happened to his religion. 
 He learns at church a number of ethical prin- 
 ciples which would make him very uneasy if 
 put into practice. He learns the virtue of 
 poverty, the duty of self-sacrifice, the necessity 
 of love for his fellow-man. Now, saintly 
 poverty has not become an ideal in America — 
 certainly not in New York or Iowa or Atlantic 
 City — nor is self-sacrifice common among cor- 
 porations, or love a familiar attribute of the 
 practice of law. Does the American therefore 
 eschew the ethics of Christianity? On the 
 contrary. Religion is accepted at its tradi- 
 tional value. The church grows richer and 
 more influential — within limits. The plain 
 
 20 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 man keeps all his respects for religion as an 
 ideal; but he regards it precisely as an ideal, a 
 formula beautiful in its perfection, not to be 
 sullied by too close an application, not to be 
 worked out into new terms to fit a new life. 
 
 And that is just what the conservative-lib- 
 eral does with the vigorous liberalism of his 
 forefathers. He buries it in his garden, and 
 expects to dig it up after many days, a bond 
 with coupons attached. He has accepted it as 
 the irrevocable word of Jehovah establishing 
 the metes and bounds wherein he shall think. 
 It is his creed; and like the creeds of the 
 church, the further one gets from its origins, 
 the greater the repugnance to change. He 
 stands by the declaration of his forefathers; 
 stands pat, and begs to be relieved of further 
 abstract discussion. Business is pressing; con- 
 troversy is bad for business ; ideas are bad for 
 business; change is bad for business: let well 
 enough alone. 
 
 But by all odds the most important fact as 
 
 21 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 regards this conservative-liberal mind of which 
 I have been writing remains to be stated, and 
 that is its success, for it is now the prevailing 
 mind in America. As our soldiers in France, 
 though bearing Italian names, Irish names, 
 Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet 
 and uniform looked all, or nearly all, like the 
 physical type we call American, so in this con- 
 fusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, 
 polylingual, built upon fragments of the em- 
 pires of England and Spain and Russia and 
 France, there is indubitably a mental type 
 which we may call with some confidence Ameri- 
 can, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its 
 instincts conservative. 
 
 Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demon- 
 strable that this American mental type is the 
 most definite national entity to be found any- 
 where in the Western world. I know that 
 this sounds paradoxical. We have heard 
 much for several years now of the lack of 
 homogeneity in America. We felt in 1914 our 
 
 22 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 German- Americans cleave away from us (to 
 be sure, they came back) ; we saw in 1918 and 
 19 1 9 the radical socialist and the I. W. W. and 
 the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms 
 that were certainly not American as the 'nine- 
 ties knew America. We began to realize that 
 the immigrant changes his language more 
 quickly than his mores, and frequently changes 
 neither. All this is true. And yet, in spite of 
 it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at 
 things which we know so well in America 
 comes nearer to being a definite national 
 psychology that acts in expected fashions, has 
 qualities that you can describe as I have been 
 describing them, and characteristics common 
 to all varieties of it, than either the ''British 
 mind" or the "French mind" of which we write 
 glibly. 
 
 For the British mind includes the Irish, 
 which is as different from the English as a 
 broncho from a dray-horse. It includes the 
 Tory mind and the Liberal mind, which in 
 
 23 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 England are as dissimilar as were Jefferson 
 Davis and Abraham Lincoln. It includes, if 
 we use it loosely, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. 
 Asquith and H. G. Wells, each of whom repre- 
 sents a considerable British constituency. 
 And they could no more think alike on any 
 topic on the earth below or the heavens above 
 than a Turk, a Greek, and a Jew. Certain 
 fundamental attitudes would unite all three of 
 these latter if they were civilized: they would 
 all eat with knives and forks. And in the same 
 fashion certain definite racial traits unite the 
 Britons aforementioned. But the differences 
 imposed by social caste or diverging political 
 and social philosophies are far greater than 
 anything to be found in everyday America, 
 which latter I define as lying between the 
 fringe of recent immigrants on the one hand 
 and the excrescences of Boston intellectual 
 aristocrats or New York radical intellectuals 
 on the other. 
 
 Is there a 'Trench mind"? Intellectually 
 24 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 and esthetically, perhaps yes. Politically and 
 socially, to a less degree of uniformity than can 
 be found in America. From the simple homo- 
 geneity of France, as we casuals see it, has 
 crystallized out the aristocracy and much of the 
 church, whose respective parties differ not 
 merely as regards the policy of the Govern- 
 ment, but are still opposed to that Government 
 itself. 
 
 The United States, far more heterogeneous 
 in race, far less fixed in national character, 
 threatened by its masses of aliens, who are in 
 every sense unabsorbed, is yet much more 
 homogeneous in its thinking. In America 
 weekly magazines for men and women spread 
 everywhere and through every class but the 
 lowest, and so does this conservative-liberalism 
 in politics and social life which I have tried to 
 define. In Connecticut and Kansas and Ari- 
 zona it is displayed in every conversation, as 
 our best known national weekly (itself con- 
 servative-liberal) is displayed on every news- 
 
 25 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 stand. Irrespective of racial or financial dif- 
 ferences, everywhere in America, between the 
 boundaries I have already indicated — the alien 
 immigrant on one hand, the advanced intellect- 
 ual on the other — nine out of ten of us are 
 conservative-liberals ; everywhere, indeed, 
 throughout the American bourgeoisie, which 
 with us includes skilled laborer and farmer, 
 professional man and millionaire. 
 
 And the mental habits of this contemporary 
 American are of more than local importance. 
 We who are just now so afraid of internation- 
 alism are more likely than any other single 
 agency to bring it about. Our habits of travel, 
 our traverse of class lines, our American way 
 of doing things, are perhaps the nearest ap- 
 proximation of what the world seems likely to 
 adopt as a modern habit if the old aristocracies 
 break down everywhere, if easy transportation 
 becomes general, if there is widespread educa- 
 tion, if Bolshevism does not first turn our 
 whole Western system upside down. Already 
 
 26 
 
THE AMERICAN MIND 
 
 in newspapers and books, in theaters and poli- 
 tics, in social intercourse and in forms of music 
 and language, one sees all through Western 
 Europe (and, they say, also in the East) the 
 American mode creeping in, to be welcomed or 
 cursed according to circumstances. And those 
 great interna'tional levelers, the movies, are 
 American in plot and scene and idea and man- 
 ners from one end to the other of a film that 
 stretches round the world. 
 
 Thus the American mind is worth troubling 
 about; and if politically, socially, economically 
 the spirit that we and the foreigners call Amer- 
 ican has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is 
 time to awake. In liberalism inheres our vital- 
 ity, our initiative, our strength. Its stagna- 
 tion, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves 
 of freedom sweeping upward from the masses 
 and on in broken and muddy torrents through 
 the world are poignant dangers. We must 
 open eyes; we must change our ground; we 
 must fight the evil in the new revolution, but 
 
 27 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 welcome the good. Our own revolution lies 
 before the deluge ; it is no longer enough to go 
 on ; it is not now the sufficing document of a po- 
 litical philosophy. We must not stop with 
 Washington and Lincoln. We must go on 
 where the conservative Washington and the 
 ra'di'cal Lincoln would lead if they were 
 our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism is 
 good, and Toryism or radicalism have their 
 uses; but conservative-liberalism, preserved, 
 desiccated, museum liberalism, long continued 
 in, is death to the minds that maintain it. 
 
 28 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 THERE is one experience that conserva- 
 tive-liberal America — bourgeois Amer- 
 ica, the pushing America that gets what it 
 wants on this side of the ocean — possesses in 
 common, and that is its education. We of the 
 vast American middle class have all been to 
 high school, or we have lived with high school 
 graduates; we have all been to college, or we 
 have worked with college graduates. Our 
 education, when viewed with any detachment, 
 is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given 
 generation most of us have studied the same 
 textbooks in mathematics and geography and 
 history, read the same selections in literature, 
 been inoculated with the same ethical principles 
 from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a 
 
 29 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 question as to what makes right or wrong, as 
 the President did in his war messages, and we 
 will respond with a universal roar, like factory 
 whistles when a button is punched on some cele- 
 bratio'n day. 
 
 This general American experience is largely 
 responsible for the tenacity with which we of 
 this generation blindly conserve the liberal 
 principles of our ancestors, even while we keep 
 them, like the tables of the ten commandments, 
 safe from the rude touch of practical exper- 
 ience. Education such as ours seldom fails to 
 influence men's ways of thinking even when 
 their actions pass beyond its control. The in- 
 fluence, however, is too often ineffectual, blood- 
 less. That is a lesson we need to ponder in 
 America. 
 
 Education in these colonies in the eighteenth 
 century was bent toward theology. All but 
 the lower schools, if, indeed, they could be ex- 
 cepted, were contrived to find and to train the 
 pastor, the minister to the people. For him 
 
 30 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 those studies that influence opinion — history, 
 ethics — were chiefly taught. For his purposes, 
 the languages of the classics were chiefly 
 studied. It was the pastor that emerged as 
 prime product of academies and colleges. And 
 therefore theology, that arduous intellectual 
 exercise for which he prepared, set its mark up- 
 on all intellects down to the humblest. We 
 wonder at the obsession with religious thinking 
 that the letters and diaries of farmers, mer- 
 chants, and lawyers of our eighteenth century 
 display to the amazement of their very untheo- 
 logical descendants. We should rather won- 
 der at the intellectual energy expended in 
 wrestling with a difficult and abstract subject. 
 They entered, as we of the twentieth-century 
 bourgeois do not, into the field of scholarship; 
 they partook of disputes that were as interna- 
 tional as Christendom; and shared with the 
 chosen ones for whom all this education was 
 made, Jonathan Edwards and his co-profes- 
 sionals, an interest in problems far broader 
 
 31 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 than their strip of Atlantic clearings. That 
 the experience, whatever we may think of the 
 value of the theology, was good for them does 
 not, I think, permit of argument. There have 
 never been abler Americans than at the end of 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 But nineteenth-century America was a dif- 
 ferent world. Interest in theology abated for 
 reasons that need not here be discussed. More 
 and more the United States diverged intellect- 
 ually from our colonial unity with Europe ; our 
 own problems engrossed us; and these were 
 problems of material development, of local 
 statecraft, of that elementary education which 
 a democracy must necessarily take as its chief 
 concern. What had been a professional train- 
 ing by which God's ministers were to be se- 
 lected became relatively unprofessional, a so- 
 called ''liberal education," the object of which 
 was to illumine and make pliable and broad the 
 minds of laymen. The high purpose of the 
 teacher was not now to choose the leaders of 
 
 32 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 the spirit. It was rather to preserve in a new 
 world of crude physical endeavor the arts and 
 sciences that civilize the mind. 
 
 American life in the nineteenth century had 
 many of the characteristics that we are accus- 
 tomed to associate with heroic barbarism. It 
 had the same insecurity — insecurity of life on 
 the border, insecurity of fortune where life was 
 safe. It had the same frequency of hazardous 
 toil against wild nature; the same accompani- 
 ments of cold and privation ; the same vast and 
 shadowy enterprises, usually collapsing; the 
 same intensity of physical sensation; the same 
 ardor of emotional experience in the spiritual 
 realm. And always education mitigated ex- 
 travagance, restrained excess, directed effort. 
 Through education our ancestral Europe re- 
 strained and guided us. Education kept us 
 white. 
 
 But never, perhaps, has the divergence be- 
 tween life as it had to be lived and the civilities 
 taught us in school been greater. Never has 
 
 33 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 the ideal world, which, after all, it is the chief 
 business of education to mirror, been more dif- 
 ferent from the facts of experience than in 
 America. The ridiculous scientist of Cooper's 
 'Trairie" who mistakes his donkey for a new 
 monster and thinks it more important to call 
 the buffalo the bison than to eat when hungry 
 of its hump, is a symbol of the contrast between 
 what we learned and what we did in America. 
 In the eighteenth century, education for most 
 Americans was practical preparation for a 
 knowledge of God's ways with man. In the 
 nineteenth it had become not a preparation for 
 life so much as an antiseptic against the de- 
 moralizations of a purely material struggle to 
 open up a continent. The results have been of 
 grave political importance. 
 
 For the divergence between theory and prac- 
 tice explains the curiously traditional character 
 of our schooling as we knew it in youth, as our 
 grandfathers knew it in youth. I am not now 
 speaking of the wearisome controversies over 
 
 34 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 Latin and Greek and classic English literature, 
 the so-called traditional subjects which make 
 up a large part of education. It is not the let- 
 ter, but the spirit, that makes the thing taught 
 traditional. And ever since democracy began, 
 the teacher has had to be the priest and guard- 
 ian of tradition in America. He has been an 
 anxious parent stretching the coverlet of racial 
 culture over the restless limbs of little immi- 
 grants. He has taught reading, writing, and 
 arithmetic as a means of holding fast to our 
 tradition. He has taught literature and his- 
 tory and ''moral ethics" and ''natural science" 
 as the containers of that tradition. We have 
 almost forgotten that for a time in the early 
 nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that 
 the frontier would become Indian rather than 
 European in its culture. We see clearly now 
 how possible it would have been for whole 
 regions of the South to relapse into negro semi- 
 barbarism. We may guess that save for the 
 teacher and his grinding in of tradition the 
 
 35 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 white races of North America might have 
 slipped backward, as too clearly have the white 
 races in many parts of Latin America. 
 
 One element in this education by tradition 
 was specially important. Liberalism, the prin- 
 ciple upon which this republic was founded, 
 education took up as soon as it dropped 
 theology, if not earlier. American education 
 became impregnated with liberalism, made lib- 
 eralism its chief tradition. What we study in 
 school and college stays by us, overlaid perhaps, 
 scarcely vital any more, yet packed close to the 
 roots of our conscious being. And the com- 
 post they gave us in America was liberalism. 
 History enshrined the republican ideals of our 
 founders and the democratic ideals of our nine- 
 teenth-century development. Sometimes it 
 was taught in college classes with ''sources'' 
 duly ticketed. Sometimes it trickled through 
 commencement speeches or primers thumbed 
 on back-row benches. The results were the 
 same. In literature, whether English or 
 
 . 36 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 American, the same ideas were predominant, 
 or at least were made to seem so by careful se- 
 lection. Democracy and the rights of man 
 blow through the reading of the American 
 school-boy, somewhat aridly it must be admit- 
 ted; but still they blow. Civics and govern- 
 ment and the social sciences in these latter 
 days, as they are taught in America, advance 
 the same standard. 
 
 Not less definite and persuasive was the in- 
 fluence of the men who taught us. Many of 
 them have been aristocratic in taste and in their 
 misprision of the stupidities of the common 
 man, but their text also was of liberalism and 
 democracy whenever the subject or the occasion 
 permitted. Even geography and spelling were 
 presented as the means whereby the child of the 
 laboring man had been given his chance to rise 
 in the world and perhaps become President. 
 Properly considered, the things we have been 
 taught, the men who taught us, the very organ- 
 ization of our school and college system, have 
 
 37 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 been one vast engine for shaping the minds of 
 young America in the turn and mold of Uberal- 
 ism. 
 
 But this Hberalism, like most of our educa- 
 tion, was highly traditional. Our subjects and 
 the men who taught them looked prevailingly 
 backward for inspiration, recalled us to the 
 past, warned us of the future. The urge was 
 always the old Roman one — preserve the piety 
 of your ancestors. Preparation for new con- 
 ditions, for a possible new liberty in industry 
 or politics, for a possible new democracy in 
 wealth, there was, we must confess, very little. 
 We were linked to tradition; we were made 
 profoundly and sincerely liberal, at least in our 
 theories of life ; we were implored to stand pat. 
 
 And though education, as the art was prac- 
 tised here in America, has perhaps kept us lib- 
 eral, it has certainly given to liberalism that 
 faint shadow of unreality, that sacrosanctity 
 which belongs to all traditional beliefs. It is 
 the traditional quality of American education 
 
 38 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 that more than anv other single a^encv has 
 petrified .\merican liberalism. 
 
 \\'e plain Americans in our- little red school- 
 houses and our big brick high schools and our 
 spreading imiversities have learned republican- 
 ism and the rights of man and the not-to-be- 
 questioned opportunity of every person to go 
 to the top of the ladder if he wished and were 
 able. This we were taught explicitly and im- 
 plicitly. And we believed these things because 
 we were made to think that aH right-thinking 
 men everywhere believed them: and therefore 
 we recited Gladstone and Lincoln and Tous- 
 saint L'Ouverture and passages from Carlyle's 
 "French Revolution" and ^Irs, Bro\sTiing on 
 the freeing of Italy with confident hearts. 
 Furthermore, we felt that these principles were 
 sincere, because, no matter how poor or how 
 stupid, we found educational opportunities 
 opened on ever}' side. There was no discrimi- 
 nation in the quantity of American education, 
 and but little in its qualit}-. Until we left the 
 
 39 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 school or the campus, our liberal tradition fitted 
 us like a garment. It never occurred to us 
 that it might not always fit. 
 
 Yet as soon as we moved out into America, 
 crossing that bridge from theory to practice, 
 from ideas to application, which in all countries 
 is long and in new countries longest of all, 
 strange contradiction began to be apparent. 
 Republicanism, it appeared, worked out in 
 practice, at least in our town, into boss control 
 and domination by party leaders, acting usu- 
 ally for vested interests. The rights of man, 
 we discovered, had a curious sound when dis- 
 cussed by labor-unions or the unemployed. 
 Opportunities, it became clear, could not be 
 freely oflfered to the man without capital unless 
 we were prepared to change radically an in- 
 dustrial system which our common sense taught 
 us was better — at least for us — than the vision- 
 ary industrial democracies that radicals with- 
 out business experience wished to set up. 
 Were these precious ideals of ours merely bun- 
 
 40 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 combe, then, held only in theory, in practice to 
 be disregarded? Or was democracy good as a 
 half-way measure, but false as a general prin- 
 ciple? Was our education a tradition to be 
 reverenced — and disregarded ? 
 
 Not a few reached the indicated conclusion, 
 though they kept, as a rule, their opinions to 
 themselves. Perhaps as many swung to the 
 other extreme, believed that only more democ- 
 racy would cure us, and also kept out of print, 
 for fear of being associated with radical aliens 
 who held much the same opinions in politics and 
 social affairs, but very different conceptions of 
 cleanliness, morals, and polite conversation. 
 These were our right and left wings merely. 
 The great mass of us, the everyday Americans, 
 took things as they were with a kind of shrewd 
 childish good sense, and pushed ahead, being 
 as democratic as was convenient in this un- 
 equal world, but taking no nonsense from 
 people who would interfere with business in 
 order to make us more so. And that is where 
 
 41 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 we are now — at the end of the war, in the midst 
 of a world revolution so great that no one 
 knows whether it has just begun or is just end- 
 ing. 
 
 But a revolution drives men back upon their 
 principles, makes them scan willingly or un- 
 willingly the things they live by — the preju- 
 dices, enlightenments, interpretations, convic- 
 tions that in the largest sense are their educa- 
 tion. And this is true not only of rapid revolu- 
 tions, like the French and the Russian, but of 
 slow ones, such as that revolution which has 
 been slowly gathering headway in English- 
 speaking countries for three decades or more, 
 that revolution of social and industrial condi- 
 tions now rapidly accelerating. And what 
 have Americans thought of their education ? 
 
 I think they have found it a brake, a stabil- 
 izer, a deterrent alike from violent reaction and 
 dangerous experiment. I think also that they 
 have found it what it is — traditional. They 
 have felt it as a taboo, good on Sundays, but on 
 
 42 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 week-days not to be too closely regarded. 
 Where it has preached restraint to the more 
 radical, they have listened, but grown restless. 
 Was it not John Bright who said that England 
 would be ruined if the hours for labor should 
 be shortened? Did not Cooper, who wrote the 
 epic of frontier freedom, sharpen his pen to 
 defend the unearned increment of the landlord ? 
 Where it speaks of liberty and equality to the 
 more conservative, they have listened, but not 
 taken it too seriously. After all, the world 
 must be governed and dividends paid. While 
 the rights of the citizen should be safeguarded, 
 business is business nevertheless, and politics 
 politics. The Declaration of Independence, 
 they felt, should be kept in its place, which was 
 the Fourth of July. Theory — by which they 
 meant education — has little place in practical 
 affairs. They were liberals of course, but 
 plain and prosperous Americans first of all, and 
 the latter, at least, they intended to remain. 
 And thus, in its noble attempt to shape the 
 
 43 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 minds of Americans to a similitude of their 
 full-blooded ancestors who dared to be radical, 
 American education itself has acquired the 
 sanctity, the reverence, the ghostliness of the 
 dead. Like the dead, it is most influential 
 upon spirits sensitive to the past, and operates 
 through love and veneration and mere habit 
 rather than through immediate compulsion. 
 Like them, it visits the minds of the living only 
 in glimpses of the moon, and its influence, 
 though wide-spread, is partial and easily for- 
 gotten in the noonday glare of active, practical 
 life. Americans respect their education, but 
 too seldom do they Hve by it. 
 
 It is a good tradition, this American ideal of 
 noble and sturdy liberalism. The only detrac- 
 tion to be made is precisely that the education 
 which embodies it is felt to be merely tradi- 
 tional. But this is much the same as to say 
 that last year's hat is a good hat, the only 
 trouble being that when we wear it we invari- 
 ably remember that it is last year's hat. And 
 
 44 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA ' 
 
 at least one unhappy consequence follows. 
 American minds have been coddled in school 
 and college for at least a generation. There 
 are two kinds of mental coddling. The first 
 belongs to the public schools, and is one of the 
 defects of our educational system that we abuse 
 privately and largely keep out of print. It is 
 democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the 
 failure to hold up standards, the willingness to 
 let youth wobble upward, knowing little and 
 that inaccurately, passing nothing well, grad- 
 uating with an education that hits and misses 
 like an old type-writer with a torn ribbon. 
 America is full of ''sloppy thinking," of inac- 
 curacy, of half-baked misinformation, of sen- 
 timentalism, especially sentimentalism, as a re- 
 sult of coddling by schools that cater to an 
 easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per 
 cent of a group of girls, graduates of the pub- 
 lic schools, whose records I once examined, 
 could do simple addition, only twenty-nine per 
 cent simple multiplication correctly; a de- 
 
 45 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 plorable percentage had a very inaccurate 
 knowledge of elementary American geography. 
 
 A dozen causes are responsible for this con- 
 dition, and among them, I suspect, one, which 
 if not major, at least deserves careful ponder- 
 ing. The teacher and the taught have some- 
 how drifted apart. His function in the large 
 has been to teach an ideal, a tradition. He 
 is content, he has to be content, with partial 
 results. It is not for life as it is, it is for what 
 life ought to be, that he is preparing even in 
 arithmetic; he has allowed the faint unreality 
 of a priestcraft to numb him. In the mind of 
 the student a dim conception has entered, that 
 this education — all education — is a garment 
 merely, to be doffed for the struggle with real- 
 ities. The will is dulled. Interest slackens. 
 
 But it is in aristocratic coddling that the ef- 
 fects of our educational attitude gleam out to 
 the least observant understanding. This is the 
 coddling of the preparatory schools and the col- 
 leges, and it is more serious for it is a defect 
 
 46 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 that cannot be explained away by the hundred 
 difficulties that beset good teaching in a public- 
 school system, nation-wide, and conducted for 
 the young of every race in the American men- 
 agerie. The teaching in the best American 
 preparatory schools and colleges is as careful 
 and as conscientious as any in the world. That 
 one gladly asserts. Indeed, an American boy 
 in a good boarding-school is handled like a 
 rare microbe in a research laboratory. He is 
 ticketed; every instant of his time is planned 
 and scrutinized; he is dieted with brain food, 
 predigested, and weighed before application. 
 I sometimes wonder if a moron could not be 
 made into an Abraham Lincoln by such a sys- 
 tem — if the system were sound. 
 
 It is not sound. The boys and girls, espe- 
 cially the boys, are coddled for entrance exam- 
 inations, coddled through freshman year, cod- 
 dled oftentimes for graduation. And they too 
 frequently go out into the world fireproof 
 against anything but intellectual coddling. 
 
 47 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 Such men and women can read only writing 
 especially prepared for brains that will take 
 only selected ideas, simply put. They can 
 think only on simple lines, not too far extended. 
 They can live happily only in a life where ideas 
 never exceed the college sixty per cent of com- 
 plexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic 
 experience lies too far outside the range of 
 their curriculum. A wofld where one reads 
 the news and skips the editorials ; goes to musi- 
 cal comedies, but omits the plays ; looks at illus- 
 trated magazines, but seldom at books; talks 
 business, sports, and politics, but never econom- 
 ics, social welfare, and statesmanship — that is 
 the world for which we coddle the best of our 
 youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by 
 their own innate originality; more bear the 
 marks to the grave. 
 
 The process is simple, and one can see it in 
 the English public schools (where it is being at- 
 tacked vivaciously) quite as commonly as here. 
 You take your boy out of his family and his 
 
 48 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 world. You isolate him except for companion- 
 ship with other nursery transplantings and 
 teachers themselves isolated. And then you 
 feed him, nay, you cram him, with good tradi- 
 tional education, filling up the odd hours with 
 the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. 
 Then you subject him to a special cramming 
 and send him to college, where sometimes he 
 breaks through the net of convention woven 
 about him, and sees the real world as it should 
 appear to the student before he becomes part 
 of it ; but more frequently wraps himself deep 
 and more deeply in conventional opinion, con- 
 ventional practice, until, the limbs of his intel- 
 lect bound tightly, he stumbles into the outer 
 world. 
 
 And there, in the swirl and the vivid practi- 
 calities of American life, is the net loosened? 
 I think not. I think rather that the youth 
 learns to swim clumsily despite his encum- 
 brances of lethargic thinking and tangled ideal- 
 ism. But if they are cut? If he goes on the 
 
 49 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 sharp rocks of experience, finds that hardness, 
 shrewdness, selfish individualism pay best in 
 American life, what has he in his spirit to meet 
 this disillusion? Of what use has been his 
 education in the liberal, idealistic traditions of 
 America? Of some use, undoubtedly, for 
 habit, even a dull habit, is strong; but whether 
 useful enough, whether powerful enough, to 
 save America, to keep us 'Svhite'' in the newer 
 and more colloquial sense, the future will test 
 and test quickly. 
 
 Why do we coddle our aristocracy, who can 
 pay for the best and most efifective education? 
 I think that the explanation again is to be 
 sought in the traditionalism of American edu- 
 cation. If our chief, our ultimate, duty to the 
 boy that we teach is to make him an ''American 
 gentleman," and if by this is meant that we are 
 to instil the essence of the Americanism which 
 made Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt, 
 and let it go at that, and if all our education 
 hovers about this central purpose — ^^why, the 
 
 50 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 stage is set for a problem play that may become 
 tragedy or farce. It is not thinking we teach 
 then so much as what has been taught. It is 
 not life, but what has been lived ; not American 
 liberalism, but a conservatism that never has 
 been characteristically American. The tradi- 
 tion is not at fault, nor the thought of the past, 
 nor the lives of our ancestors; it is when all 
 these things are taught as dead idealism unre- 
 lated to the facts of the present that they be- 
 come merely traditional. 
 
 And the boy and girl are not deceived. 
 They take all that is given them — no youth in 
 the world are so pliable, so receptive as ours — 
 and retain and respect and cherish what they 
 remember of it. But it is clear that for them 
 it is tradition, it is unreal in comparison with 
 their sports, their social aspirations. It will 
 be unreal in comparison with their business and 
 their politics and their household affairs. It 
 will be a venerated tradition of liberal think- 
 ing for them of which they will be highly con- 
 Si 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 servative. But it will not function in their 
 lives — not more at least than the sixty per cent 
 that they sought for in order to get that degree 
 of bachelor of arts which certified that they 
 were versed in the thought of their forefathers. 
 And so they merge in the common American 
 mind that I have called conservative-liberal. 
 
 I know of no better proof of the truth of 
 what I have just written than the history of 
 our college undergraduates in war-time. 
 
 Here is such a demonstration as comes only 
 once in a generation. Of all unpreparedness, 
 the unpreparedness of the undergraduate for 
 war was apparently chief. He knew little 
 about the war, its causes, its manifestations, 
 for he is not an ardent reader of current events 
 outside his college world, nor does he hear 
 much of the talk of the market-place. He 
 knew little about war. The R. O. T. C. had 
 spread some ideas of drill and discipline and 
 the technic of fighting; but he was neither 
 drilled nor disciplined in 1917. And as for 
 
 52 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 the training in accurate obedience and in exact 
 thinking which war is supposed to demand, he 
 simply did not have it, or so we thought. Nor 
 had his particularistic fashion of following his 
 own little contests to the exclusion of loyalties 
 to the world outside, and his indifference to 
 politics beyond fraternity elections, or econom- 
 ics beyond the cost of theater-tickets and beer, 
 led us to assume a ready response to a great 
 moral emergency in national affairs. 
 
 We were utterly deceived. The response of 
 the American undergraduate was immediate 
 and magnificent. He crowded into the most 
 dangerous military professions, and was emi- 
 nent in the most difficult branches of organiza- 
 tion and experiment. He did not, it is true, 
 think very broadly about the war, but he 
 thought intensely. He did not learn accuracy, 
 steadiness, independence overnight, but he 
 learned them. He was wholly admirable. 
 And the women, who in ways not yet suffi- 
 ciently celebrated made it possible for the 
 
 S3 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 country to stiffen to the crisis, were as eager to 
 serve as the men. 
 
 And the reason, I believe, was that for the 
 time the education of the undergraduate ceased 
 being traditional and became a moving force in 
 his experience. The dim liberal idealism in 
 which his mind had been moving for many 
 years suddenly took on color and became fire. 
 Every impulse of his mental training urged 
 him to do just what was asked of him, to 
 struggle for democracy, for justice, for a 
 square deal ; to believe in the rights of man and 
 the permanence of right and the supremacy of 
 a righteous idealism. And his habits of hard, 
 earnest play, where rules were obeyed and vic- 
 tory went to the best player, also were the very 
 stuff the world wanted, also transformed mi- 
 raculously into the very apparatus of war. 
 His traditional education, with its extra-cur- 
 riculum of games that also were traditional in 
 their neglect of the new and special qualities 
 required for success in modern life, precisely 
 
 54 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 fitted the clamorous need of the hour. And the 
 undergraduate for a Httle while silenced his 
 critics, amazed his friends, and was in many 
 respects happier than in those years of peace 
 when he was trying to bridge the gap between 
 his education and life as it was being lived in 
 America. 
 
 And with peace he relapses — the American 
 in general relapses into the old discontinuity. 
 The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once 
 more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. 
 As long as the patriotism lit by the war and 
 danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism 
 bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. 
 For peace means that we drop our ardors and 
 face again the insistent reachings of the democ- 
 racy for a greater share in wealth, for a greater 
 control over productivity, for representation in 
 industry as well as in politics. Peace means 
 that we must face not war, with its romantic 
 thrills and its common enemy, but the prosaic 
 causes of war that hide among friends as well 
 
 55 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, 
 self-denial, and humbleness of spirit, a struggle 
 in which the Croix de Guerre is likely to be re- 
 proach and contumely. 
 
 The break between our education and the life 
 we are living again widens, and it is this break 
 which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed 
 alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily 
 defensible ; the hustling vigor of our life is also 
 defensible. The trouble is that in ordinary 
 times they fail somehow or another to connect. 
 Education grows bloodless. Life becomes 
 aimless or merely self-regarding. What we 
 believe grows pallid and fades before it trans- 
 mutes into what we do. Indeed, I would go 
 further and say that Americans, and especially 
 the graduates of universities, are somewhat 
 weakened by their education. They go out 
 into life with an enormous appetite for living 
 and a set of ideals like a row of preserved 
 vegetables canned and hermetically sealed for 
 future contingencies. In 1917 and 1918 we 
 
 S6 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 opened some of those jars and found the con- 
 tents good for a special emergency. But ordi- 
 narily the lids are tight, while we go about our 
 business proud of our stores of education, but 
 inwardly uncertain, like the housewife, as to 
 whether or not those ideas that seemed so good 
 when our teachers packed them away in the 
 season of youth will not be sour to the taste of 
 practical modernity. 
 
 The clamor for vocational education is a pro- 
 test against this ineffectiveness of the merely 
 traditional. But the cure does not lie in such 
 a medicining. Vocational education is well 
 enough, and we need more of it, but training of 
 the hands and of the brain to purely material 
 accomplishments will never save liberalism in 
 America. The strength of vocational educa- 
 tion is that it looks forward and prepares for 
 things as they are. Its weakness, when ad- 
 ministered alone, is that it neglects the direct- 
 ing mind. In any large sense it is aimless, or, 
 rather, it aims at successful slavery quite as 
 
 57 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 much as at successful freedom. Liberal edu- 
 cation also must look forward, must put its tra- 
 ditions to work, must germinate, and become 
 alive in the mind of the American, and then 
 teach him by old principles to attack new prob- 
 lems. 
 
 We must either live by our education or live 
 without it. The alternatives are desiccation 
 and anarchy. If we live by it, education itself 
 stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, 
 adapts itself like an organism to environment. 
 If we live without and beyond and in neglect of 
 education, as many "practical" Americans have 
 always done once they left school or college, 
 education decays, and sooner or later the man 
 decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration 
 of busyness, which is the modern equivalent of 
 barbarism. 
 
 Once before, and far more seriously, a civili- 
 zation was threatened because its education be- 
 came merely traditional and ceased to function 
 
 58 
 
CONSERVATIVE AMERICA 
 
 in practical life. The society of Appolinaris 
 Sidonius in the fifth century, as Dill describes 
 it, was faced with economic disruption, with 
 hordes of aliens, with a rampant individualism 
 that put the acquisition of a secure fortune 
 above everything else. The leaders failed to 
 lead. 'Their academic training only deepened 
 and intensified the deadening conservatism of 
 unassailable wealth." 'Taith in Rome had 
 killed all faith in a wider future for humanity 
 ....'' There was an ^'apparent inability to 
 imagine, even in the presence of tremendous 
 forces of disruption, that society should ever 
 cease to move along the ancient lines." Roman 
 imperialism divorced itself from Roman 
 thought and became a deadening tyranny. 
 Roman thought divorced itself from Roman 
 life and became an empty philosophy. And 
 the sixth century and disaster followed. 
 
 The historical analogy is imperfect. Our 
 civilization is still vigorous where the Roman 
 
 59 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 was tired and weak. No outer barbarians 
 threaten us. Science safeguards us from 
 economic breakdown. 
 
 And yet, like the skeptic who does not believe 
 in God, but refuses to take chances on his 
 death-bed, I should not scoff at the parallel. 
 Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism 
 become an article of faith not an instrument of 
 practice — all these are potential of decay, of ex- 
 plosion. We must look to our education. If 
 it does not grip our life, we must change edu- 
 cation. If life is not gripped, our life needs 
 reforming. And the thing is so extraordi- 
 narily difficult that it is high time we ceased 
 praising for a while the virtues of our fore- 
 fathers or the wealth of our compatriots, and 
 began the task. After all, it means no more 
 than to teach the next generation not merely to 
 preserve, but also to carry on, the traditions of 
 America. 
 
 60 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 IT is with no intention to be paradoxical that 
 I call America a radical nation. I know 
 well by experience, sometimes galling, what 
 an English labor leader or a French socialist 
 thinks of America, as he understands it. A 
 mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground 
 of the bourgeoisie, the birthplace of trusts, 
 where even the labor-unions are capitalistic. 
 If the world is to be saved for democracy, he 
 says, it will not be by America. 
 
 I am not so sure. Being one of those who 
 doubted whether the successful termination of 
 the war would forever make safe democratic 
 ideals, I feel at liberty to doubt whether the 
 triumph of a European proletariate will give us 
 
 6i 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 what we want. It depends much upon what 
 one means by democracy. And correspond- 
 ingly, whether America is fundamentally radi- 
 cal or conservative depends much upon what 
 one means by radicalism. If, like Louis XIV 
 or Napoleon, I had a leash of writers and 
 scholars at my command, I would have them 
 produce nothing but definitions while these 
 critical years of transition lasted. I would 
 make them into an academy whose fiat in gen- 
 eral definition would be as valid as the French 
 Academy's in the meaning of a word. I would 
 make it a legal offense for two men to quarrel 
 over socialism when one means communism 
 and the other state control of the post-office. I 
 would, like the early Quakers, require arbitra- 
 tion for all disputants, especially in politics, 
 knowing that a clear head would quickly dis- 
 cover that arguers on democracy conceivably 
 meant anything from a standard collar for 
 every one to nationalization of women. But 
 the good old days of literary dictatorship are 
 
 62 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 past. The most a writer upon the mind of the 
 everyday American can do is to endeavor hon- 
 estly to make his own definitions as he goes; 
 and I believe that American radicalism needs a 
 good deal of defining. 
 
 It is not the doctrines of Babeuf or Marx or 
 Lenine that have made what seems to be the 
 indigenous variety of American radicalism. 
 Their beliefs, and especially those of Marx, 
 have found acceptance here. There are mo- 
 ments in intellectual or industrial development 
 when men's minds become seeding-grounds for 
 ideas blown from without. There were cent- 
 uries when the mystical ideas of the Christian 
 East were sown and rooted in the barbarian 
 brains of the West. There were the years 
 when the liberal ideas of the French Revolution 
 were blown across Italy, Germany, and the 
 Low Countries. And much that we call radical 
 in America is simply foreign seed, growing 
 vigorously in our soil, but not yet acclimated, 
 as it is growing also in Russia and New Zea- 
 
 63 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 land. And much is not American in any sense, 
 but rather the purely alien ideas of immigrants 
 — individual men among us. It is not for 
 nothing that Trotzky was here, and the Marx- 
 ists, the syndicalists, the nihilists, and the com- 
 munists of half Europe. We have been ex- 
 posed to every germ of radicalism ever hatched 
 in the Old World; yet neither the young pro- 
 fessor, lecturing on the redistribution of 
 wealth, nor the Russian stevedore, who in 
 lower New York awaits the proletariate revo- 
 lution, truly represents American radicalism. 
 These are the ideas and these the men our rest- 
 less youth are borrowing from, but they are not 
 yet, they may never be, American. 
 
 It is fortunately not yet difficult to separate 
 foreign from indigenous radicalism. There is 
 that in both our heredity and our environment 
 which makes the American mind bad soil for 
 the seed of foreign ideologies. They rain upon 
 us, they germinate; but they do not make a 
 crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; 
 
 64 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 our New World has kept us too cheerfully 
 busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned 
 too low over this blessed America for discon- 
 tent which leads to dreaming, oppression which 
 makes revolt, to be common among us. We 
 ''old Americans," at least of this generation, 
 are poor material for Bolshevism; even as 
 socialists we are never more than half con- 
 vinced. Our radicalism has been of a different 
 breed. 
 
 Indeed, radicalism, like religion and sea- 
 water, takes color from the atmosphere in 
 which it is found. The French radical pos- 
 sesses the lucidity and the self-regarding spirit 
 of the modern French mind. He lends ideas, 
 but does not propagate them. The English 
 radical seeks his ends by direct political action 
 in good English fashion. And the native 
 American has his own way also. That its 
 essential quality of radicalism has often been 
 overlooked, while the term has been bandied 
 among soapbox orators and devotees of the 
 
 65 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 bomb, is natural, but unfortunate for clear 
 thinking. 
 
 Our home-bred radicalism has been physical 
 and moral, not intellectual. It has been a 
 genuine attempt to tear down and rebuild, but 
 it has not ordinarily been called radicalism, 
 which term has been usually applied to radi- 
 cal thinking, to the intellectual radicalism of 
 revolutionary organizations and protestants 
 against the social order. Our effective rad- 
 icals have been the leaders, not the oppo- 
 nents, of American society. They have been 
 business men, philanthropists, educators, not 
 strike-leaders, social workers, and philoso- 
 phers. 
 
 I talked recently to the head of a great manu- 
 facturing plant where technical skill both of 
 hand and of brain was exercised upon wood 
 and brass and steel. The modern world, ac- 
 cording to his viewing (which was very ob- 
 viously from the angle of business) is divided 
 into two categories, executives and engineers. 
 
 66 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 Executives are the men who organize and con- 
 trol. They are the ones chiefly rewarded. 
 Engineers invent and carry out. They are the 
 experts. It is the executives who lead ; the ex- 
 perts supply ideas, work out methods, but fol- 
 low. 
 
 This statement may be disputable, and it is 
 certainly a painfully narrow bed in which to 
 tuck American life and American ideals. 
 Nevertheless, it has at least one element of pro- 
 found truth. In the world of physical en- 
 deavor and physical organization it is executive 
 business men who have changed, broken up, re- 
 organized, developed the material world of 
 America. They have fearlessly scrapped the 
 whole machinery of production, transporta- 
 tion, and trade as it existed in the last genera- 
 tion, and in many respects improved upon, or 
 destroyed by competition, the parallel order in 
 the Old World. They have been true radicals 
 of the physical category, and their achieve- 
 ments have been as truly radicalism as the ex- 
 
 ^7 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 periments of Lenine in government ownership. 
 That it is a physical radicahsm, dealing with 
 material values chiefly and without reference 
 to some of the greatest needs of the human 
 spirit, does not mean that intellect of a high, if 
 not the highest, order may not have been re- 
 quired for its successful accomplishment. 
 
 Our other native radicals, the philanthropists 
 and the educators, have also been chiefly execu- 
 tives. Their work has been inspired by the 
 stored-up moral force of America, especially 
 puritan America. But their great achieve- 
 ments, like those of the business men, have been 
 in organization and development rather than in 
 thought. 
 
 In earlier generations our moral radicals 
 were such men as Emerson and Whitman. 
 To-day they are college presidents, organizers 
 of junior high-school systems, or heads of 
 the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations — 
 prime movers all of them in systems of edu- 
 cational or philanthropic practice that uplift 
 
 68 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 millions at a turn of a jack-screw. And these 
 men in any true sense of the word are radi- 
 cals — so radical in their thoroughgoing at- 
 tempts to transform society by making it more 
 intelligent, healthier, more productive that all 
 Europe is protesting or imitating them. Who 
 is exercising a greater pressure for durable 
 change upon the largest number, who is dig- 
 ging most strenuously about the roots of the old 
 order, John Rockefeller, Jr. and his co-workers 
 or Trotzky? It is not easy to say. 
 
 This essay is not propaganda, and I am not 
 particularly concerned as to whether or no the 
 reader accepts my broadening of the term 
 ^'radicalism.'' Time may force him to do so, 
 for no one can tell in a given age just what 
 actions and what theories will lead to the tear- 
 ing up of old institutions and the planting of a 
 new order. Those absolutist kings, Philip 
 Augustus and his successors, who crushed to- 
 gether the provinces of France, were, we see 
 now, radicals, though power and privilege were 
 
 69 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 their motives. I, however, am interested in 
 men rather than in categories, and the philan- 
 thropist radicals, the business radicals, and the 
 educational pioneers of America already in- 
 terest the world strangely. 
 
 What they are in essence is of course more 
 important than the name we give them. And 
 first of all I believe that in a genuine, if nar- 
 row, sense they have been idealistic; indeed, 
 that their American idealism has made them 
 radical. If America at present is actively, 
 practically idealistic (something Europe and 
 the world in general would like to have de- 
 termined) it is due to them. 
 
 Idealism is not a negative virtue. It is not 
 mysticism. It is not meditation, though it may 
 be its fruit. Whatever idealism may be in 
 philosophical definition, in life it is the desire 
 and the attempt to put into practice conceptions 
 of what ought theoretically to be accomplished 
 in this imperfect world; and the quality of the 
 
 70 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 idealism depends upon the quality of the ideal- 
 ist. 
 
 In this sense — a true sense for America, 
 however inapplicable to the Middle Ages — who 
 can doubt that such Americans as I have de- 
 scribed are idealistic? Nowhere in the world 
 are there more visible evidences of the desires 
 of men wreaking themselves upon earth and 
 stone and metal, upon customs and government 
 and morals, than in this new continent. And 
 these desires are predominantly for betterment, 
 for perfection — a low perfection sometimes, it 
 is true — for the ''uplift," physically, morally, 
 intellectually of humanity. 
 
 Of course the quality of American idealism 
 is mixed. Beside the pure ambition of a St. 
 Francis to make men brothers, beside the aspir- 
 ing hope of the cathedral builders to make faith 
 lovely to the eye, the ideal of a chain of five- 
 and-ten cent stores, or a railroad system, or 
 even a democratic method of education, is not 
 
 71 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 a luminous, not a spiritual, idealism. But a 
 working ideal for the benefit of the raQ^ it may 
 be, and often is. 
 
 The truth of this has not seemed obvious to 
 Europeans or to most Americans. Our in- 
 dividualism has been so intense and often so 
 self-seeking, our preoccupation since the Civil 
 War so dominantly with matter rather than 
 with mind or spirit, that it is easy for foreign- 
 ers to call us mere money-grubbers. Yet no 
 one who has ever talked with a "captain of in- 
 dustry" or the director of a great philanthropic 
 enterprise feels doubt as to the unsoundness of 
 this description. Unfair, narrow, material- 
 minded we may have been, but our enterprises 
 have had vision behind them, dreams, perhaps, 
 imposed upon us by the circumstances of a new, 
 raw, continent, by wealth for the seeking, by 
 opportunities for the making, by vast battles 
 with nature to be organized and won. 
 
 Furthermore, behind and beneath all our 
 striving, sets of moral ideas have been active. 
 
 72 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 America has never been blase or cynical. We 
 have never relinquished the ethics of puritan- 
 ism, which are the ethics of the Bible. Even 
 the greedy capitalist has disgorged at last, and 
 devoted his winnings to the improvement of the 
 society he preyed upon. But most American 
 capitalists have not been greedy. They them- 
 selves have been devoured by a consuming de- 
 sire to accomplish, to build up, to put through. 
 When they have broken laws, it is because the 
 laws have held them back from what seemed to 
 them necessary, inevitable development for the 
 greater good of all — because, in a word, they 
 were radical. 
 
 One night in war-time, at a base port in Scot- 
 land far from our own environment and our 
 native prejudices, I heard the self-told tale of 
 an arch-enemy of American "interests," a 
 pugnacious man who had fought and won, with 
 a price on his head, sent millionaires to jail, 
 been calumniated, been trapped by infamous 
 conspiracies, and escaped them — a man better 
 
 73 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 hated, better loved than is the fortune of most 
 of us. My other companion was another 
 American, a young, but celebrated, preacher, a 
 moralist of the breed of the Beechers and the 
 Spurgeons. And the same question rose to our 
 lips when the story was finished. These ene- 
 mies, these magnates who had been jailed and 
 defeated, and yet still fought and often success- 
 fully, were they mere self-seekers, rascals, by 
 any fair definition? And neither of us was 
 satisfied with that answer, nor was the hero of 
 the story. Two of us at least agreed that it 
 was rather a case of ''enterprise" versus ''social 
 justice,'' of individualistic effort versus the 
 rights of a community. The zeal of the cap- 
 italists had burned in their hearts until they 
 broke through morality in an efifort to make 
 good. 
 
 But of course most of our American radicals 
 have not been even illegal in their idealism. 
 Their zeal has encountered only obstinacy, stu- 
 pidity, and the intractable conservatism of ordi- 
 
 74 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 nary life. These men have built up great in- 
 dustries that made life more facile, or extended 
 great educational and health enterprises over 
 States and beyond seas, with little harm to any 
 man and much good to most, unless the source 
 of the wealth expended be questioned, or the 
 effect of a zealot's ideas enforced upon mil- 
 lions. 
 
 Indeed, if strength of purpose, if energy, if 
 a burning desire to change, to better the minds, 
 the bodies, or the tools of men, were all that 
 could be asked of radicalism, then we might 
 well rest content with the achievements of the 
 American idealist-radical. But more has been 
 asked of the reformer, even of the reformer of 
 business methods, than energy and will. The 
 radicalism I have described, based upon com- 
 mon sense and inspired by restless virility, has 
 not always been adequate. The pioneering 
 days are ended when a good shot could always 
 get game, a strong arm always find plowlands. 
 It is time to take thought. And if one com- 
 
 75 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 pares the uprooting energy of Americans with 
 the intellectual radicalism of Europe or with 
 the new radicalism of the incoming American 
 generation, a curious difference appears. Our 
 old radicalism was perhaps healthier, certainly 
 more productive of immediate betterment to 
 those who profited by it ; but it is harder to de- 
 fine, harder to follow into a probable future, be- 
 cause, when all is said, it is relatively aimless. 
 Where do our vast business enterprises lead? 
 Toward a greater production of this world's 
 goods, toward an accumulation of wealth in the 
 hands of the sturdy organizers; but equally 
 toward a vast corporate machine in which the 
 individual man becomes a particle lost in the 
 mass, toward a society which produces wealth 
 without learning to distribute or employ it for 
 the purposes of civilization. I do not say that 
 this latter port is our destination. I say that 
 our business leaders are steering a course 
 which is just as likely to land us there as any- 
 
 76 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 where. Or, rather, they are stoking the en- 
 gines and letting the rudder go free. 
 
 And is our vast educational enterprise any 
 more definitely aimed? Perhaps so, for the 
 increase of intelligence is an end in itself. 
 Nevertheless, for what, let us say, is the Amer- 
 ican high school preparing, a new social order, 
 or the stabilization of the old one? When the 
 aristocrats and the burghers of Europe began 
 to be educated, they tore themselves apart in 
 furious wars over religion. When the West- 
 ern proletariate becomes educated, will it not 
 tear our social fabric in class wars also? Are 
 we educating for this or against it ? For what 
 kind of society are we educating? The social- 
 ist has his answer. Can American school 
 boards say? 
 
 And our organized philanthropists, combat- 
 ing hookworm, tuberculosis, lynching, child la- 
 bor, liquor, slums, and preventable crime? 
 The medieval church, hampered by its lack of 
 
 77 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 science and the waywardness of its world, en- 
 gaged in such a struggle, and from a thousand 
 monasteries, built, like our modern founda- 
 tions, upon the profits of exploitation, strove to 
 uplift Europe. Its aim and end were clear : to 
 practise charity that the souls of workers and 
 donors might be saved ; to clothe the naked and 
 feed the hungry that love might be felt to 
 govern the world. And the church succeeded 
 in its measure until, on the somewhat specious 
 plea that not love, but justice, was demanded, 
 rapacious governments seized the capital of the 
 ecclesiastical corporations and sold the abbeys 
 for building stone and lead. 
 
 Our great organizations are more efficient 
 than the church, because they are more scien- 
 tific. Whether they are more successful de- 
 pends upon one's estimate of success. The 
 modern man, for whom they care, is a cleaner, 
 brighter, more long-lived person than his 
 medieval ancestor. He is probably better ma- 
 terial for civilization, because, if more vulgar- 
 
 78 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 ized, he is more intelligent. That he is happier 
 is not so certain. The church inspired a con- 
 fidence (not always justified) in the friendli- 
 ness of destiny which the Rockefeller Founda- 
 tion has so far failed to equal. Nevertheless, 
 scientific philanthropy, though it promises less, 
 achieves what it does promise more thoroughly 
 and without those terrible by-products of the 
 ecclesiastical system — servility, pauperism, 
 bigotry, and superstition. But what is its aim ? 
 With little more regard to the source of their 
 wealth than the church, the philanthropies of 
 to-day have far less regard for the final results 
 of their benefactions. As with the educators, 
 it is enough for them, so to speak, to improve 
 the breed. The apparent philosophy behind 
 their program is that when the proletariate is 
 bathed, educated, and made healthy, it will be 
 civilized, and therefore competent to take over 
 the world (including universities and steel 
 mills, railroads and hospitals) and run it. But 
 the executives of these great organizations 
 
 79 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 would probably protest against this reading of 
 their expectations almost as quickly as the 
 donors of the funds; certainly they show no 
 readiness to meet the proletariate half-way on 
 its upward path. Clearly, you cannot wash, 
 teach, and invigorate society without power- 
 fully affecting the whole social fabric. The 
 feeble experiments of the nineteenth century in 
 universal education have already proved that. 
 Some transformation the great endowments of 
 our age are laboring to bring about. For the 
 creating of a new race they have a plan, but 
 not for its salvation, even on this side of 
 heaven. Indeed, as the German experience 
 shows, they may even become instruments by 
 which the common man is made a mere tool 
 firmly grasped by the hand of authority. Com- 
 mon sense alone governs them. Their vision 
 is bent upon the immediate, not the ultimate, 
 future. 
 
 A little vague these criticisms may seem to 
 the practical mind; and vague, when philo- 
 
 80 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 sophically considered, are the aims of Ameri- 
 can radicalism. Very different, indeed, they 
 are from the clean-cut programs of the 
 European radical. There is little vagueness in 
 socialism, little vagueness in syndicalism, the 
 very opposite of vagueness, despite the efforts 
 of the American press, in Bolshevism. In all 
 these systems the past is condemned, the 
 present reconstructed, and the future made 
 visible with a lucidity that betrays their origin 
 in efforts of the pure reason. That, of course, 
 is the difficulty — at least to American and most 
 British intelligences. The aim of Bolshevism 
 is so definite as to be almost mathematical. 
 Society as a whole is considered economically, 
 and a program deduced that will fill the most 
 mouths with the least labor. To be sure, 
 stomach-filling is not the sole purpose of Lenine 
 and his followers. They argue, and with more 
 right than our easy-going bourgeois civilization 
 is willing to concede, that idleness, unrest, and 
 crime are more often the result than the cause 
 
 8i 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 of poverty. Nevertheless, the type radical of 
 the European variety does unquestionably rest 
 his case upon the premise that man is merely a 
 tool-using animal. Ask a Bolshevik where 
 civilization is going, and he will answer you 
 with ease and explicitness. Ask the average 
 American, and he will either reply in vague 
 platitudes or deny both knowledge and respon- 
 sibility. Of the two men he is less likely to be 
 wrong. 
 
 And note well that our domesticated social- 
 ists and intelligentzia, though far more in- 
 clined to consider the human factor than the 
 Bolsheviki, have the same advantage of clarity 
 of aim, and the same tendency to confuse ideas 
 with facts. Common sense — not the highest 
 virtue, not the virtue which will save our souls, 
 or even our bodies, in a crisis like war or a 
 turmoil of the spirit — is often lacking in the 
 socialist. Good humor — again not a quality 
 that wins heaven's gates, but a saving grace, 
 nevertheless — is noticeably absent from the 
 
 82 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 columns of our radical weeklies. An admir- 
 able service they are rendering in clarifying the 
 American mind, in forcing it, or some of it, to 
 face issues, to think things through, to be in- 
 telligent as well as sensible; but the logical 
 rigidity of their program inhibits that sense of 
 proportion which recognizes the Falstaffs and 
 the Micawbers of this world, smiles sometimes 
 over miscarriages of idealism, sympathizes 
 with feeble, humorous man, does not always 
 scold. 
 
 And yet the American who dislikes scolding 
 should beware of superciliousness. It is much 
 easier for genial folks to chide the critics with 
 programs than to be critical of themselves. 
 The normal American is a product of Ameri- 
 can education, with its insistence upon liberal 
 progress, upon acceleration toward the vaguest 
 of goals. It has not taught him to be critical 
 of others in any thorough-going fashion, it has 
 not taught him to be critical of himself. The 
 confidence that has carried our business to a 
 
 83 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 maximum, that has flung our schools broadcast, 
 and swept our philanthropies over the world, 
 spelled differently is self-assurance. Nothing 
 disturbs us so much as to be told to stop and 
 think. Nothing angers the business world so 
 much as legislation that ''halts business." 
 Nothing infuriates an educational organizer 
 more than to question the quality, not the 
 quantity, of his product. We have seen clearly 
 what we wished to do with iron and coal and 
 food. We have felt, in education and philan- 
 thropy, sure of our moral bases. Our energy 
 has been concentrated on going ahead. To be 
 radical intellectually, to think it all out in terms 
 of a possible relation of labor and capital, of 
 a possible education, of a possible society for 
 the future — that has not appealed to us. We 
 have shunned philosophical programs by in- 
 stinct, and wilfully built for to-day instead of 
 tomorrow. The American radical has done 
 too little thinking; the European, perhaps too 
 much. 
 
 84 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 But the infection of thought is spreading. I 
 do not believe that the youths who will make 
 the coming generation — the youths that fought 
 the war — are going to be radicals in the sense 
 that I have called European. If the ideas of 
 Marx and Lenine ever take root in America, it 
 will be because social injustice such as we have 
 not yet been cursed with makes a soil for them. 
 If they take root, they transform in the grow- 
 ing, like foreign plants in California weather. 
 But the new generation is not like the old. It 
 is more sensitive to the winds of doctrine. It 
 is less empirical, less optimistic, less self-as- 
 sured. 
 
 Already one can divide into two classes the 
 undergraduates as one finds them in American 
 colleges. The smaller group their elders would 
 call radical. But they are not socialists, not 
 anarchists, not even consistently liberal. More 
 truly, they are critics of things as they are. 
 Their minds are restless ; they are ever seeking 
 for definitions, for solutions, for a cause to en- 
 
 85 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 roll under. They are restless under the push 
 of common sense America that drives them into 
 activity without explanation. They are pain- 
 fully aware of the difference between their 
 ideas and the conditions of life in modern so- 
 ciety, and are determined to test one by the 
 other. Their native idealism has become in- 
 tellectual. 
 
 The other group is far larger, but, if less 
 restless, is no more static. Most of its mem- 
 bers are indifferent to the new ideas scintillat- 
 ing all over the world, if indeed they are not 
 ignorant of them. Nevertheless, their faith in 
 society as it was is curiously weak. If few of 
 them are likely to become socialists, few also 
 will be inspired by the physical and moral ideal- 
 ism of their fathers. The na'ive enthusiasm of 
 those fathers for "movements,'' ''ideals," ''pro- 
 gress" is not (utiless I miss my guess) common 
 among them. They are not likely to overturn 
 America a second time in order to make great 
 fortunes ; philanthropy does not interest them ; 
 
 86 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 education as a missionary endeavor does not 
 seem to attract them. Their moral founda- 
 tions are less solid than in old days ; their ener- 
 gies less boundless; aimless endeavor for the 
 sake of doing something is no longer a lure. 
 Either they will find a program of their own to 
 excite them, or stand pat upon the fortune they 
 expect to inherit. If their future is to be nar- 
 rowed to a choice between pleasure and mere 
 productivity, why, then these men would rather 
 run motor-cars than make them. There is a 
 very real danger that rather than hustle for the 
 sake of hustling, they will prefer to ''lie down" 
 on their job. And thanks to the homogeneity 
 of the current American mind, this analysis, if 
 it is true at all, is true of thousands. 
 
 The American radical in the future, I take it, 
 will still be idealist, but not Bolshevik. That 
 generalization from the needs of poverty is at 
 the same time too material to suit his temper, 
 which is still fundamentally moral, and too rash 
 economically to sit with his practical common 
 
 87 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 sense. He will remain an idealist; but a 
 sharpening of his intellect will give teeth to his 
 idealism, and the practical common sense he 
 will carry over from the days when his kind 
 were pioneers in a new world will steady him. 
 What he will want is not yet clear, except that 
 it will certainly not be the world of Marx or 
 the kaiser (himself in many respects a radical). 
 What he will do I cannot venture to guess. 
 But if one dare not prophesy, one may at least 
 hope. 
 
 And my hope is that a principle now visibly 
 at work among many Americans may guide 
 him also. Principles, if they are sound, have 
 a way of making themselves felt through the 
 padding of mental habit and convention, like 
 knobs in a chair-seat. 
 
 The principle I have in mind is merely this : 
 that a man's character and the ideas upon 
 which, so to speak, he operates must be ap- 
 praised separately. Tenacity of will, honesty 
 of spirit, tenderness of heart — such elements 
 
 88 
 
RADICAL AMERICA 
 
 of character make a man neither conservative 
 nor radical, but they cannot be left out of polit- 
 ical accounting. 
 
 And my hope is that the new generation is 
 going to be forced toward such a weighing and 
 discrimination of character and policies. 
 Their mental padding has worn thin in war- 
 time. The moral conventions that we have ac- 
 cepted almost unhesitatingly here in America 
 no longer protect the youth with certainty from 
 the shrewd blows of rationalism or superstition. 
 
 Therefore ideas and character are both likely 
 to be more closely inspected in the days that are 
 coming. The conservative minded, as in the 
 past, will emphasize character ; and as that is a 
 much better platform to stand on than mere ob- 
 stinacy or self-interest, they will presumably be 
 better conservatives, provided that the intel- 
 lectual unrest of the times forces them to think. 
 The radicals will search for ideas that may 
 transform the future, and if the abundance of 
 ideas in relation to the paucity of accomplish- 
 
 89 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 ment causes them to put a higher value upon 
 character, why, so much for the better radical- 
 ism. 
 
 No future in the history of the world has 
 been so interesting as is the immediate future 
 of America. Our next great political leader, 
 who may be conservative, but is probably radi- 
 cal, is now in college or has but lately been 
 graduated — unless, indeed, he has just been ad- 
 mitted to a labor-union. And he is studying, 
 one hopes, the men who dealt most heavily 
 in character, the amiable McKinley, the fiercely 
 instinctive Roosevelt ; he is studying the careers 
 of the men who have been dominated chiefly by 
 ideas, the moral idealist Wilson, the ruthless 
 thinker Lenine. He is learning, one hopes, 
 when and why each and all failed, each and all 
 in their measure succeeded. Whether he 
 profits, and we profit, from their experience, 
 time alone will discover. 
 
 90 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 IS American idealism a virtue, a disease, or 
 an illusion? The question cannot be 
 answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry 
 with which Tennyson threatened the flower in 
 the crannied wall — what man is, and what God 
 is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can 
 be made ready for answering. The writer, 
 and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer to 
 it ; and that is better than the inner feeling of 
 many an American just now, who, weary of 
 five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly be- 
 lieves that American idealism is first of all a 
 nuisance. 
 
 Yet it was never so easy to make a case for 
 the virtue of idealism as in retrospect of the 
 
 91 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 years 1914-18. What many have never 
 grasped in the confusion of the times is that 
 exactly the same ideaHstic prime motive made 
 us join hearts from the first with Great Britain 
 and France, kept us out of war for two years 
 and a half, and brought us in on that April of 
 191 7. There is always a complex of motives 
 behind every war, but there is also, with few 
 exceptions, a primum mobile, and with us it was 
 the distrust, the fear, the hatred that were the 
 reactions of our idealism against arbitrary vio- 
 lence. The invasion of Belgium settled our 
 will for Belgium and her allies. Our distrust 
 of war, especially European war, as a means by 
 which we could bring about justice and peace, 
 kept us out of the struggle despite clamorous, 
 and perhaps far-sighted, minorities. Our final 
 conviction that violence was a fire loose in the 
 world, which must be stamped out, drove us 
 from easy neutrality into war. And if in the 
 last of these three stages dread of the future 
 and the need of immediate self-defense had 
 
 92 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 their large part, they did iTo more than sharpen 
 the angle of our resolve. Idealism kept us out 
 of war, and idealism drove us into it. 
 
 The fume and spume of idealism is oratory, 
 sermonizing, talk about morality, duty, patriot- 
 ism, rights, and noble purposes. All such 
 gushing rhetoric is no more the thing itself than 
 foam is the ocean. But, like smoke, there is 
 seldom much of it without cause. Men and 
 women who were abroad in 1918 must reflect 
 curiously on the, shall we say, wearisome pre- 
 valence of the moralistic, idealistic note in 
 American speech and writing in contrast to its 
 restraint and frequent absence in France and 
 England. When an Englishman orated upon 
 the war to stop war he was usually talking for 
 American consumption. This does not mean 
 that Great Britain and France were sordid, we 
 sincere; on the contrary, it is proof of a tinct- 
 ure of the sentimental in our idealism, to which 
 I shall later return. But it is additional testi- 
 mony to the quantity and the popularity of 
 
 93 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 American idealism in those months. The tone 
 of the press at that crucial time was evidence 
 of the tone of the people that read and re- 
 sponded. And while many a sounding speech 
 and impassioned editorial are now, as one reads 
 them, a little faded, faintly absurd, like tattered 
 war posters on a rural bill-aboard, yet no one 
 can doubt the flood of patriotic idealism that 
 created them, few will doubt that our war ideal- 
 ism was a virtue in 1914-1918. 
 
 It seemed a virtue then, but was it not al- 
 ready diseased? When we entered the war, 
 the vast majority of Americans publicly and 
 privately committed themselves to certain gen- 
 eral principles, and, whatever else they fought 
 for, believed that they were fighting for them. 
 A square deal all around was one, the consent 
 of the governed to their government was an- 
 other, a third was the substitution, at all costs, 
 of justice for violence in the ruling of the 
 world. We all assented to these principles, 
 most of us assumed them voluntarily as an 
 
 94 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 article of faith, and the average man took them 
 as seriously as he is able to take abstractions. 
 Peace came, the armistice, the stages of the 
 treaty. Nothing could be clearer or more to be 
 expected than that sometimes in spirit, often in 
 detail, and most seriously in ultimate purpose, 
 the treaty in scores of instances ran counter to 
 the faiths we had accepted and made common- 
 places of speech and thinking. 
 
 I am neither criticizing nor justifying the 
 treaty and its included covenant. No one, I 
 suppose, but a sentimental optimist could have 
 expected a work of logical art in exact con- 
 formity with the principles and conditions of a 
 new epoch that has scarcely begun, no one at 
 least who had ever read history, or studied the 
 politics of Sonnino, Clemenceau, and the 
 Unionist party. It was bound to have incon- 
 sistencies; to reflect as many views as there 
 were strong minds in the conference, to be ex- 
 perimental, to be a compromise. This is not 
 what is astonishing; it is the attitude of the 
 
 95 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 typical American mind toward the treaty ne- 
 gotiations. 
 
 In the winter and spring of 1919, while the 
 world was burning, while the principles we had 
 shouted for were at last in actual settlement, 
 this enormous American idealism slept, forgot 
 its fine phrases, forgot its pledges to see the 
 thing through, was bored because some Amer- 
 icans felt that it was our duty to see the thing 
 through. We are an uncritical nation despite 
 our occasional vehemence of criticism, but we 
 have never been so uncritical of major issues as 
 in 1919, when the terms of world settlement 
 were of acute interest to all but Americans. 
 We are an easy-going nation, but we have 
 never been so easy-going as in 19 19, when not 
 one man in a thousand as much as read the ab- 
 stract of the treaty to see whether the things 
 he had said he fought for were safeguarded in 
 it. The only real fire-spitting fervor struck 
 out in this country since the armistice has been 
 in defense of our right to let Europe stew in 
 
 96 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 her own juice, and our privilege to tell general 
 principles to go hang. And this is an emotion 
 almost too narrow to be attributed, even by 
 the generous minded, to idealism. 
 
 One answers, of course, that such a decline 
 from overheated virtue into indifferentism is 
 only human nature at its old tricks, the collapse 
 after the New Year's resolution, the weariness 
 of being too good, symptoms, in short, of con- 
 tent with having 'licked the Hun,'' and a desire 
 to get back to work. And the reply is, of 
 course this is true. But Europe is not thus 
 functioning. There has been a striking con- 
 trast in the years since the war between British 
 and American attitudes toward treaty negotia- 
 tions. In England, exhausted by war as we 
 never were, deep in the lassitude of rest after 
 struggle, men and women have leaped into criti- 
 cism and defense of the ideals embodied in the 
 settlement. Peace has seemed to them as vital 
 a battle-ground of ideas as war. By and large, 
 the plodding mass of us who make money and 
 
 97 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 public opinion have been cold to the contest, un- 
 interested. The press of Great Britain has 
 fiercely attacked and fiercely defended the mo- 
 rale of the treaty; ours has reported it with 
 little real criticism and little interest except 
 where the league was concerned. Their uni- 
 versities have supplied men and parties to fight 
 through the principles for which we fought; 
 ours have been intent upon how much scholastic 
 credit should be given returned soldiers and 
 who should get an honorary degree. They 
 forced an easy-going premier to stand for a 
 victory that was more than conquest; we 
 grudged our President the attempt to carry 
 through in Paris what in 19 17 we were all 
 agreed upon; let our dislike of his methods 
 outweigh our deep interest in his ends. If it 
 had not been for the great issue of the League 
 of Nations, which, forcing Americans to act, 
 forced them to remember (some with difficulty) 
 what they had believed in and what they had 
 learned in 1917 of the dangers of selfish aloof- 
 
 98 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 ness from world problems, if it had not been for 
 the fight over the league, the politics of 1919 
 would have been as local, as trivial, as weari- 
 some, as in the year after a Presidential elec- 
 tion. Some scholar in the next decade will 
 place side by side the files of a New York daily 
 in its moral-idealistic stage of 191 7 and its 
 cynical back-to-business mood of 1919; will 
 compare the fantastic pledges never again to 
 trade with Germany, which were circulating 
 in 1 9 18, with the export statistics of 1919; will 
 marvel, and perhaps draw conclusions. 
 
 And one wonders, meeting everywhere an 
 interest in world affairs that seems dying, a 
 national morale that is forgetting its moral 
 impulses, a hatred of the professional idealist, 
 a weariness of general principles, and a cynical 
 distrust of ideas — one wonders whether this 
 flaming American idealism so-called was not 
 even in 1918 flushed with disease, a virtue al- 
 ready dying. 
 
 W^ere we indeed ever really idealistic ? Con- 
 99 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 sider the case of the ablest of our manufac- 
 turers, who, when the emotional fit was on him, 
 proposed to increase the production of idealism 
 until every American home should own an ideal 
 of the latest model. He gives the order, draws 
 the checks, and, naively surprised at the dis- 
 covery that you cannot make ideals without 
 understanding them, hangs up philosophy, and 
 goes back to the motor business. Consider 
 the case of our radical papers who fought our 
 entrance into a war where American ideals 
 were not properly safeguarded, and then pre- 
 ferred to risk a treaty without the League of 
 Nations, to a league which, though it expressed 
 American idealism, was not perfect by their 
 judging. Consider the flaming desire to make 
 the universe and one's home safe for democ- 
 racy, in contrast with the current contempt for 
 the ideals of industrial democracy. Perforce 
 one wonders whether American idealism, 
 healthy or diseased, is not a mere emotion, 
 easily roused, never lasting; whether, as a val- 
 
 lOO 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 uable part of our national character, it is not 
 an illusion. 
 
 So much needs to be said by way of charge 
 and speculation in order to clear the air. If I 
 write with some excitement, it is no more than 
 the sight of the tumble from great-worded, 
 great deeded 19 18 to the indifferent, self- 
 regarding, and a little cynical present may ac- 
 count for. Certainly in our national past ideal- 
 ism has not been an illusion, although it was 
 often emotional. Nor, in sober fact, do I doubt 
 the essential idealism of the normal American 
 mind, especially that American mind which in- 
 herits the optimism and the liberal instincts of 
 our forefathers. I am merely curious as to the 
 exact nature of that idealism as it exists, and 
 plays strange tricks, to-day. It seems to be 
 a quality more resembling energy than a moral 
 characteristic like virtue or vice. It seems, as 
 one thinks over these recent manifestations, to 
 be a blend of physical virility and nervous sen- 
 sitiveness, good or bad, active or inactive, ac- 
 
 lOI 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 cording to the condition and environment of 
 the patient. Stir him, and it becomes active, 
 beneficent, altruistic. Stir him further, and it 
 may become sentimental, with symptoms of 
 hysteria. Relax the pressure, and it drops into 
 desuetude. These are the habits of American 
 idealism, and I doubt whether more can be said 
 of them except by way of further descrip- 
 tion. But there must be some thoughts, some 
 ideas behind to account for these vagaries. 
 There must be reasons why Americans idealize 
 more readily than other nations, and why, just 
 now at least, they so easily tire of their ideal- 
 izing. 
 
 Neither the scope of these pages nor my 
 knowledge permits me to trace the history of 
 American thinking and feeling, to say, as the 
 historians some day must, what elements came 
 from Europe, what modifications are due to 
 pioneer environment, racial mixture, and cen- 
 turies of unchecked material development. 
 But tentatively, and with all modesty, one may 
 
 102 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 at least seek for light. I find that two great 
 figures of our national youth and the ways of 
 thinking they represented most help me to un- 
 derstand the strengths and the weaknesses of 
 American idealism, help to an understanding 
 of the phenomena of 1917-20. 
 
 The first is Jonathan Edwards, theologian of 
 international importance, leader of the great 
 spiritual revival of mid-eighteenth century New 
 England, missionary to the Indians, president 
 of Princeton, author of works so widely read 
 that even now no farm-house garret in New 
 England but will yield a sermon or two, a 
 treatise on original sin, or his epochal essay 
 on the freedom of the will. 
 
 Alas for human reputation! This tireless 
 thinker, whose logic built up in entirety an 
 impregnable argument worthy of Aquinas, is 
 now chiefly remembered as a preacher of infant 
 damnation and a thunderer of hell-fire over 
 frightened Northampton congregations. But, 
 as all wiser critics know, the influence of a 
 
 103 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 great mind is distinct and often different from 
 its reputation. What it does, works on and 
 on after death, transmuting, transforming; 
 what it was in popular repute, soon becomes 
 legend and supposed historical fact. Compare 
 the reputation of Machiavelli with his achieve- 
 ments and influence as described in Macaulay's 
 famous essay. 
 
 In actual achievement Edwards, whose mind 
 was of unusual lucidity and endurance, crys- 
 tallized for Americans the Calvinistic ethics of 
 life which were the backbone of Puritan civili- 
 zation. Man, by the unarguable might of God, 
 is born with a will whose nature may be either 
 bad or good. Henceforth his reason is free, 
 his choice is free, within the limits that his char- 
 acter permits. It becomes therefore supremely 
 important that he shall choose and reason virtu- 
 ously, for there is no way to be sure that he 
 has a good will, that he is among the '^elect" 
 except by virtuous action leading to a sense of 
 salvation. Thus in every condition of life, 
 
 104 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 without excuse or palliation, the Christian must 
 daily, hourly strive to prove that he is one of 
 the elect of God, saved from hell-fire by the 
 character God has given him. Good intentions 
 count for nothing. Good works, if unaccom- 
 panied by the sense of spiritual salvation, count 
 for nothing. God, Himself blameless, has 
 willed sin and sinful men. It is for us to 
 prove that we are not among the damned. 
 
 That the system is incredible most moderns 
 now believe ; that it is logical, more logical per- 
 haps than any later attempt to justify the ways 
 of God to man, the student must admit. My 
 desire is naturally not to argue, but to em- 
 phasize, what can never be too much em- 
 phasized, the effect of such thinking upon the 
 intellectual life of America. It was believed 
 in powerfully and well understood by perhaps 
 a majority of one formative generation. Later 
 it was not believed in so powerfully, and it was 
 but little understood, especially outside of New 
 England. But a conviction of the infinite ne- 
 
 105 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 cessity of willing the right became a mental 
 habit in American morality that persists and 
 becomes a trait and a chief factor, as any reader 
 may see, in so-called American idealism. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin was almost the exact con- 
 temporary of Jonathan Edwards, but he had 
 the inestimable advantage of living longer and 
 seeing more; two continents and two ages, in 
 fact, were his familiars, and learned from him 
 as well as taught him. Franklin, it is clear, 
 was strongly influenced by that French eigh- 
 teenth century which he loved, with its praise 
 of reason and its trust in common sense. But 
 he was even more a product of the new Amer- 
 ica. America, as Edwards and Cotton Mather 
 saw it, was an experiment in godliness. When 
 the Puritan scheme should have proved its 
 efficacy by an abnormal increase in the number 
 of earthly saints, the colonies would have served 
 their chief end, and would, so Mather thought, 
 decline. The hell-breathing vehemence of Ed- 
 wards was chiefly due to his fear that the 
 
 1 06 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 3cheme was failing. He was fighting a spirit- 
 ual decline. 
 
 But F.-anklin was a member of the worldly, 
 not the spiritual, body of America; he was a 
 citizen of a country visibly growing in wealth 
 and population. He looked outward, not in- 
 ward; forward, not backward. Like Edwards, 
 he hated sin; but sin for him was not sin be- 
 cause it was forbidden, but forbidden because 
 it was sin. Franklin's was a practical moral- 
 ity, which was cut to fit life, not to compress 
 it. His firm character and the clarity of his 
 reason kept his morals high. His ethics were 
 admirable, but they were based upon the prin- 
 ciple that honesty is the best policy, not upon 
 the fear of God. To be ''reasonable" was his 
 highest good. ''So convenient it is to be a rea- 
 sonable creature," he remarks whimsically, 
 "since it enables one to find or make a reason 
 for everything one has a mind to do." As long 
 as one is a Franklin, with the will to virtue, 
 honesty, industry, and thrift that is bred from 
 
 107 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 a good inheritance, in a new and developing 
 country, such ethics make for idealism. No 
 one was more idealistic in his day than the 
 practical Franklin, who wished to form a league 
 of virtue of all nations to be governed by rules, 
 and supported by the reason of virtuous man- 
 kind. 
 
 And here is another palpable strain of Amer- 
 icanism, differing from that necessity which 
 Edwards trumpeted, but, like it, a stiffener of 
 idealistic impulses. Here one places the love 
 of a square deal, the desire to do what is right 
 because it is ''fair/' the sense of the reasonable- 
 ness of justice that freed the slaves, gave Cuba 
 self-government, determined our policy toward 
 the Philippines, and was horror-struck by the 
 invasion of Belgium. It is the idealism of 
 good common sense, and together with the 
 mental habit of willing the right has been a 
 main cause of American idealism. 
 
 Both of these American characteristics are 
 operative to-day. Both are now factors and 
 
 io8 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 dangerous factors in our idealism, for the 
 strong will of the Calvinists to do right has 
 become erratic and perverted, and the common 
 sense of Franklin's school has degenerated. 
 Here, as I shall endeavor to show, are two chief 
 causes for the vagaries of the American mind 
 in the years that ended the war. 
 
 The mental discipline which the Puritans 
 learned from the fear of a wrathful God re- 
 mained a discipline long after it had lost its 
 theological basis, and is responsible in no small 
 measure for the disciplined will of nineteenth- 
 century America to succeed in material en- 
 deavors as well as in philanthropic or moral 
 purpose. But, divorced from the belief in a 
 speedy damnation which had given it cause, 
 it was bound to become, and it did become, a 
 mere mental habit, a kind of aimless necessity 
 of being virtuous. Bolted no longer to a belief 
 in a revengeful God who demanded virtue, 
 loosed, like an engine from its flywheel, this 
 ancestral sense of necessity whirled on by its 
 
 109 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 own momentum. It became will without think- 
 ing behind it, which was driven by material 
 circumstance instead of religious belief. It be- 
 came a restless energy whose aim, as a foreign 
 observer has said, seemed to be "mere accelera- 
 tion." It became unreasonable, often absurd, 
 sometimes hysterical. I find its manifestations 
 in the insistence that America must always be 
 described as sweet, lovely, and virtuous in dis- 
 regard of the facts, in our ''boosting" of pros- 
 perity and success by proclaiming them. I find 
 them in the determination to be good and happy 
 and prosperous immediately and without re- 
 gard to circumstance which has created the 
 American magazine story and brought about 
 national prohibition by constitutional amend- 
 ment. This hand-me-down will is responsible 
 for much progress, good and bad, in America ; 
 it is also responsible for American sentimen- 
 talism. It has been a driving force in our 
 idealism ; but because it is not so much reasoned 
 purpose as a mental habit inherited, it has run 
 
 no 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 wild, become hysterical and erratic. It led us 
 to propose to reform the world and to adver- 
 tise our intention before our brains were ready 
 for the task. It makes our idealism feverish 
 and uncertain. 
 
 As for Franklin's rule of common sense, it 
 has become a positive deterrent to idealism. 
 His idea of conduct reasonably shaped accord- 
 ing to the needs of environment was, and is 
 to-day, the most solid trait of Americans. It 
 is the ethics of modern business, and American 
 business has become, and for a little while yet 
 will remain, the fundamental America. Nev- 
 ertheless, every candid observer will admit, no 
 matter how great his faith in the future of his 
 country, that the reasonable good sense of the 
 Franklin tradition suffered a progressive dilu- 
 tion or degeneration throughout the nineteenth 
 century. Rational ethics became for the most 
 of us materialistic rationalism, still reasonable, 
 still ethical in its way, still backed and re- 
 strained by common sense (our profiteers have 
 
 III 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 also been philanthropists), but an enemy, 
 nevertheless, to all idealism that could not be 
 made from steel, brick, rubber, or oil. We 
 have been too reasonable to be sordid ; too ma- 
 terialistic to remain in the best sense reason- 
 able. Far from advocating a league of the 
 virtues, our business common sense has been 
 fighting a League of Nations. The contrast 
 between our moral code and our business code 
 has already been overwritten in muck-raking 
 literature. Nevertheless, despite exaggeration, 
 it exists. Our national life is dual. We can 
 stand on our moral foot and our business foot, 
 but usually we alternate. In 1918 we rested 
 entirely on one; in 1919 we swung with relief 
 to the other. Franklin's rule of common sense 
 as a stimulus to idealism has broken down. 
 
 What reasonable sense of proportion I my- 
 self possess as a descendant of the compatriots 
 of Franklin urges me to protest instantly that 
 all this is not to be taken as a picture of con- 
 temporary America. Rather it is a plucking 
 
 112 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 out merely of two strains of experience that 
 all must recognize. But these are perilously- 
 interwoven in our national character. They 
 affect the validity of our ideahsm. 
 
 The hysterical will drives us into professions 
 of virtue we cannot make good. It drove us 
 to ''boost" the war; and then, being a restless 
 energy sprung from habit rather than from 
 conviction, left us exhausted in spirit and cyni- 
 cal in mind when the moral profits were ready 
 for the gathering. It stirred a passion for the 
 League of Nations, rights of small countries, 
 democracy, justice, and the rest, and then col- 
 lapsed like the second day of ''clean-up" week. 
 It set the will going and left the brain unmoved. 
 
 And our common sense, diluted through mil- 
 lions, obsessed by the problems of manufacture 
 and construction, is in ever greater danger of 
 losing that basis of character and enlightened 
 reason that alone can make common sense any- 
 thing but common. It dreads ideas, distrusts 
 theories, is made uncomfortable by altruism 
 
 113 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 that extends beyond the home. As a nation, 
 we have not degenerated, for our virile energy, 
 our will, our adaptiveness are all as strong as 
 ever, stronger perhaps than elsewhere in the 
 world. But, as compared with Franklin's, our 
 common sense has lost character. It pulled 
 back in the great moral and intellectual prob- 
 lems of the war; it did not lead. As mani- 
 fested in the present struggle over international 
 policies, it falls below the ethical standards of 
 the nation, whether you tap it in clubs and 
 offices or in Congress. In a time of crisis it 
 rallies to encounter material problems and is 
 invaluable; but morally and intellectually its 
 vision is short, its endurance weak. 
 
 The trouble with the American reformer, as 
 has often been said, is that he has more energy 
 than reason; and this is because he incarnates 
 the instinctive, irrational will of which I have 
 been writing. The trouble with the American 
 materialist is that he has kept his common sense 
 while losing his vision. 
 
 114 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 Both, in short, lack an adequate spiritual and 
 moral basis ; and so does the American idealism 
 that is functioning nobly, but so irregularly, 
 to-day. With an irresponsible will driving it 
 forward and a matter-of-fact common sense 
 holding it back, it suffers too frequently from 
 the weakness of all qualities that spring from 
 custom rather than from conviction. Its leaf- 
 age has spread ; its roots have contracted. 
 
 I am not so unhumorous as to propose that 
 the remedy is once again to believe in Jonathan 
 Edwards's God and infant damnation; but we 
 must go deeper than habit and tradition for 
 the springs of our action. Not since the Civil 
 War have we as a nation explored our souls, 
 sought the channels of our being, tested our 
 ultimate faith. This war has been no test. Its 
 issues were clear. They appealed to principles 
 that we held firmly because we had inherited 
 them. It was easier to go in than to stay out. 
 Even our material prosperity, apparently, 
 stood to gain, not to lose, by entering the con- 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 flict. We made the right choice, but it was 
 not hard to make it. To be ideaHstic was easy. 
 
 I do not beHeve that our inheritance either 
 of virtuous will or of practical common sense 
 will serve us long without renewal. The first 
 is vehement in propaganda, prohibition, and 
 hysteric excess, but flags when a load of stern 
 duty, national or international, is put upon it. 
 The second has no end and aim but the making 
 of a prosperous America where the grubber 
 and the grabber have much and others little. 
 It is useful, nay, indispensable, to the economic 
 state, but beyond economics — and so much is 
 beyond economics! — ^there is little health in it. 
 If our idealism is to remain as robust as our 
 material prosperity, it must gain what Franklin 
 would have described as a basis of enlightened 
 reason, or suffer what Edwards would have 
 called a conversion — and, preferably, both. 
 
 Samuel's mother was a fine, but somewhat 
 rigorous, woman who brought him up in the 
 conviction that he had to do right (by which 
 
 ii6 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 she meant -being honest and moral, and going 
 to church on Sundays) or shame would come 
 upon him. His father was a man whose ''word 
 was as good as his bond." He taught his boy 
 that working hard and saving money were prob- 
 ably the most important things in life, and that 
 if you paid your bills, were true to your word, 
 and kept an eye upon shifty neighbors, you were 
 sure to be happy and successful. 
 
 At the age of fifty the father died from 
 hardening of the arteries, the result of too few 
 vacations, and the mother became a rather 
 morose member of the W. C. T. U. Samuel 
 found himself now possessed of half a million 
 dollars and a prosperous shoe factory. 
 
 As for the factory, he discovered within a 
 year that since the death of his father its suc- 
 cess had been due to a new system of piece 
 work, which ''speeded up" the worker and gave 
 the profits to the proprietor. But there seemed 
 no way of changing the system without ruin- 
 ing the business. As for his wealth, it brought 
 
 117 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 him new and pleasing associates who were more 
 polished and intelligent than he, and whose life 
 was so much more cheerful, instructive, and 
 interesting than his early experience that he 
 could only wish to be like them ; especially when 
 he saw that they were far better citizens than 
 his father, who, to tell the truth, lived very 
 much for his own narrow interests. And yet 
 their ideas of pleasure and even of morality 
 were quite different from what he had been led 
 to suppose were the only proper principles on 
 which to conduct one's life, and they never 
 went to church. He wanted to 'be honest, he 
 wanted to be good ; but neither how to be honest 
 in his factory nor how to be good and yet a 
 "good fellow" were explained by the teachings 
 of his youth. 
 
 For an unhappy year or two he tried to act 
 like his father, believe as his mother, and be 
 like his neighbors. In addition, in order to 
 satisfy a somewhat uneasy conscience, he pre- 
 pared to enter politics on a platform of straight 
 
 iiS 
 
AMERICAN IDEALISM 
 
 Americanism and the full dinner-pail. Then 
 in one eventful week his workmen struck for 
 an eight-hour day and shop committees, his 
 mother announced her intention of bequeathing 
 her share of the estate to the Anti-tobacco 
 League, his best girl refused to marry him un- 
 less he should become an Episcopalian, and 
 he was invited by the local boss to subscribe 
 to a "slush" fund or give up politics. 
 
 Samuel went to the Maine woods to catch 
 trout and think over the situation. What he 
 did finally is not told in the story. What he 
 decided is, however, of some significance. For, 
 brooding over a dark pool in the spruces, he 
 concluded that each generation must search out 
 the foundations for its own morality, and de- 
 termine for itself the worth and power of the 
 ideals it proclaims. And so perhaps will 
 America. 
 
 119 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 THE rarest experience in America is a 
 discussion of morals. You can hear 
 morals preached about, but that is not a discus- 
 sion. You can read about morals in arguments 
 disguised as essays, but these seldom cause dis- 
 cussion. Fully a third of successful American 
 plays and stories turn upon a moral axiom, but 
 one that we accept without argument, like rain 
 in April and the August drouth. One hears 
 very little real discussion of moral questions 
 here because ''old Americans,'' at least, agree 
 in their moral standards as remarkably as did 
 the Victorians. 
 
 In this respect we are, indeed, still Victorians, 
 hough in others already a century beyond them. 
 Some of us may (or did) get drunk, but we 
 
 1 20 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 do not believe in hard drinking; not even the 
 saloon-keepers believed in hard drinking. 
 Some of us make license of our liberty in sex 
 relations ; but the public disapproval of promis- 
 cuity is, to fall into the current phrase, nation 
 wide. Some of us steal in a large and generous 
 fashion, taking from him who hath not business 
 ability for the benefit of him who hath shrewd- 
 ness and its fruits. But if these actions can 
 be described in terms of theft or misappropria- 
 tion, every one will agree that they are wicked, 
 even stock-holders and profiteers. You cannot 
 get up a decent argument on moral questions in 
 America, because, as with small boys in war- 
 time, no one will take the unpopular side. The 
 ethics of America are as definite as a code. 
 
 This accepted and not unlofty moral code, 
 with its extension to justice and the rights of 
 individuals, is the force behind our idealism 
 that has made it an international factor to be 
 reckoned with from the days of Jeffersonian 
 ideology to our own. Like the dissenters' 
 
 121 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 vote in England, it is a dangerous force to 
 oppose. Despite occasional hysteria and sen- 
 timentalism, despite its frequent betrayals by 
 an unlovely common sense, it is strong because 
 it has the momentum of tradition and the 
 tenacity of prejudice. Of its worth I am 
 American enough to be convinced. Of its in- 
 telligence one cannot be so certain. But what 
 really concerns all lovers of our hard-built 
 civilization is how durable under stress is this 
 moral idealism, under such stress as the ap- 
 proaching change in our social order is sure to 
 bring to morals and morale, as well as to rail- 
 road stocks and the Constitution. 
 
 Indeed, the inner fire, the spirit, is not easily 
 discoverable in this American idealism with its 
 moral causes. Historically, it is easy to ex- 
 plain it; habit has carried it on, and common 
 sense must usually approve a moral investment 
 that has been profitable ; but, nevertheless, it is 
 hard to see a continuing raison d'etre for such 
 idealism in America. It seems, as I have sug- 
 
 122 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 gested in an earlier chapter, to lack a definable 
 spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, 
 its dangers, raise constantly the question as to 
 the status of religion in America. 
 
 I remember hearing Graham Wallas — who 
 will not be suspected of bias in this matter 
 — remark that England would not pass out of 
 clouds and darkness until she had made for 
 herself a new and felt interpretation of religion. 
 America, founded by a curious partnership of 
 the religious instinct and economic need and 
 brought up on the moral and material profits 
 of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in 
 need of a fundamental spiritual readjustment. 
 Every socialist and communist, every corpora- 
 tion president and ex-Secretary, every profes- 
 sional intellectual and amateur prophet, is de- 
 claring his mind on the one thing needful to 
 save the world and America. I do not know 
 why we, whose profession it is to teach, whose 
 duty it is to interpret and to sympathize with 
 every motion of the American mind, should 
 
 123 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 hesitate to speak out also in this matter. It is, 
 I think, demonstrable that America needs re- 
 ligion as much as steel and automobiles, as 
 much as a better distribution of wealth and 
 cheaper bread and meat. 
 
 The status of religion in America has been 
 as peculiar as the status of politics. Our re- 
 ligious attitudes have been profoundly affected 
 and from early periods by the separation of 
 church and state. Struggle against a vested 
 institution, dissent from traditional power, con- 
 ciliation with sacred authority, have been burn- 
 ing points in the modern history of Europe. 
 They have made great literature in England 
 from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold 
 and Swinburne. Our first battle against the 
 tyrannical in tradition wherever found was won 
 in the Revolution; our second, in the defeat 
 of the Federalist party in 1800. 
 
 In those contests we were freed, perhaps too 
 early and too easily, from the menace of the 
 church as a function of government. Since 
 
 124 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 then we have been, and we still are, freer than 
 the European to seek religion wherever it may 
 be found. Our great religious literature is 
 creative, not protestant. Woolman of the 
 Quakers was a seeker; Emerson, in greater 
 measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for 
 Americans, and, like Woolman, fanning their 
 moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau 
 were searchers for a new morality; Whitman 
 and William James, in their fashion, searchers 
 also. 
 
 Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a 
 century later than Matthew Arnold. Fed 
 from almost identical intellectual sources, he 
 is the liberated mind seeking new allegiances, 
 Arnold, the rebel not yet free. And in general 
 American religion, without reference to its 
 quality, has had, like American politics, a status 
 some generations ahead of the rest of the world. 
 Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were 
 prophets for Europe. The independent sects 
 of America, none established, all respectable, 
 
 125 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 and the free seekers after new truth which 
 sprang from them, seem to have prefigured a 
 condition that is common in a world growing 
 democratic. 
 
 In truth, we old Americans, who with all 
 our faults still best represent America, gained 
 freedom of conscience at the expense of shat- 
 tering the ideal of a church universal. Re- 
 ligion for us came in general to be a personal 
 matter because the church, separated from the 
 state, lost the visible authority that made it 
 easy — or necessary — to trust to an institution 
 the responsibility for one's soul. We felt, as 
 was to be expected, the need of new authority, 
 new sanctions for our religion. And we were 
 free, freer than others, to seek and to find a re- 
 ligion for democracy. What has been the re- 
 sult? 
 
 The results in bourgeois America, which 
 goes to the theater, wears the commonly ad- 
 vertised collars, sends its children to college, 
 and keeps out of the slums and the police-court, 
 
 126 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 are clearly vlsibl'e and highly significant. Four 
 classes, interlocking, but distinct enough for 
 definition, may be readily described ; and though 
 they do not include the recent immigrant or the 
 fire-new sophists of radicalism, the strongest 
 brains, the most characteristic emotions, and 
 the best character in America belong there with 
 the mass of the mediocre undistinguished who 
 are public opinion and the ultimate America. 
 
 There are, first, the militant advance-guards 
 of our idealism, the ethical enthusiasts who 
 carry on the moral fervor of America. They 
 range, like colors of the spectrum, from the 
 rarer violet of the philosophical moralists, in- 
 heritors of the New England ethics or the Vir- 
 ginia ideology, through the solid blue of the 
 organizers of great movements in social re- 
 form, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists 
 and the Anti-tobacco League. I do not mean 
 to be flippant. The irony, if there is irony, is 
 bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so 
 various an army all certain that by stopping 
 
 127 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 this and beginning that the world can be saved. 
 It is their certainty that makes them im- 
 pressive — the same certainty which drove our 
 colonials toward republican government and 
 our pioneers to the conquest of a wilderness. 
 Sneers at their banner, ^'Progress," satisfy 
 none but the reactionary. Progress where? 
 Who knows. Progress for whom? It is 
 hard to tell. But only the man who hon- 
 estly believes in civilization for the benefit of 
 the few can doubt the advance that has been 
 made. I should have preferred the twelfth 
 century to the twentieth if I could have lived in 
 the right Benedictine monastery or been count 
 in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Eliza- 
 bethan age more than my own if I could have 
 voyaged — in the cabin — with Raleigh, been 
 Shakespeare's patron, or possessed a manor 
 neither too near nor too far from London. I 
 still think that life in a good English college, 
 with a taste for letters and the proper port, 
 is superior to any mental or physical luxury 
 
 128 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside 
 from the point. Provengal poetry and perfect 
 social intercourse, high adventure, the intellect- 
 ual life in an appropriate physical setting, and 
 even good port, may come again somewhere on 
 the line along which our progress is marching. 
 In the meantime, though the war has been a 
 cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusi- 
 asms of the age have made the opportunities 
 of the average man for most good things in 
 life better, have made him, in the most accurate 
 sense of the word, not nobler, but more civil- 
 ized, and particularly in America, where the 
 fire of opportunity was first set burning. 
 
 The moral enthusiasts whose religion has 
 been transformed into ethical idealism are safe 
 from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, 
 the tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have 
 already reformed out of the brighter parts of 
 the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty 
 are to follow. We can well afford to risk their 
 mistakes anS their excesses, their blind trust in 
 
 129 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere 
 energy of will to make the world better. But 
 what lies behind this will ? What keeps it from 
 decaying? For these men are seldom religious 
 in the sense that their reforming zeal springs 
 from a deep spiritual need. A part of their 
 energy is moral habit ; a part is exactly identical 
 with the energy that builds up a great industrial 
 plant in order to satisfy a craving for laudable 
 action. If the certainty that the community 
 must be bettered, can be bettered, should 
 slacken, where would it find revival ? In faith, 
 hope, and charity? But can hope endure and 
 charity be permanent without faith? x\nd 
 what is their faith? 
 
 The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, 
 I suppose, as that which supported the Stoics 
 or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth 
 century. They believe in the perfectability of 
 man and the pragmatic value of right-doing. 
 This, for a strong man, may be enough; but 
 it is not a religion. It is questionable whether 
 
 130 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 it would stand adversity. It was not shaken 
 in the war, but it is shaking now. If the en- 
 thusiasm of the reformers should be spent or 
 exhausted, they would have little to fall back 
 upon. Their idealism has already shown signs 
 of hysteria, spots of sentimentalism, evidences 
 of a basis in habit and impulse as much as in 
 deep spiritual conviction. 
 
 It has become almost a commonplace to say 
 that the spiritual seekers, the second of our ob- 
 servable classes — more numerous, I believe, 
 in America than elsewhere in the white world 
 since the seventeenth century — are products 
 of reaction against the dry moral will that 
 seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet 
 their importance has not always been grasped. 
 Commercial America has not only been the 
 home of the greatest of modern philanthropies, 
 but also the source of the only powerful re- 
 ligious sect created in the nineteenth century, 
 as well as one of the few new strains in ideal- 
 istic philosophy. They are not happy in our 
 
 131 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 commercialism or content with ethical reform, 
 those more sensitive spirits whose numbers and 
 weight in bourgeois America are evident when- 
 ever an emotional crisis arrives. And the free- 
 dom from ecclesiastical restraint which was 
 won for them by their ancestors has left them 
 free to construct new religions. 
 
 But as it was the earnestness of the moral 
 enthusiasts that seemed more valuable than 
 any reason they had for goodness, so it is the 
 spiritual craving of American seekers that is 
 more impressive than anything they have 
 found. I do not undervalue the hopeful ideal- 
 ism of Emerson or the strong protest of the 
 Christian Scientists against surrender to petty 
 worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may 
 generalize in so vast a matter, the seekers of 
 spirituality have been singularly out of har- 
 mony with the needs of a democracy. They 
 have found religions that solace the optimistic 
 temperament when it has been duly intellect- 
 ualized; they have found medicine for the ills 
 
 132 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 of prosperous people ; but the breadth and often 
 the depth of appeal that must characterize a 
 religion for all men they have missed or failed 
 to seek. The Friends, later called Quakers, 
 began with the will that all the world should 
 become Friends ; it was only in later stages that 
 they regarded themselves as a peculiar people 
 with whom only those fitted by temperament 
 should join. But it is with such an exclusive- 
 ness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate 
 religion commence. One can prophesy in ad- 
 vance who will or will not be Christian Scien- 
 tists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spir- 
 itual adventure exhausts itself in emotional 
 vagaries, or rises into regions of pure mys- 
 ticism where, no matter how noble or how 
 satisfying it may be for individual persons, 
 we shall never find the religion for a democ- 
 racy. 
 
 The third group is again a result of that 
 early freeing of America from ecclesiastical 
 control ; but its members are those whom such 
 
 133 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, 
 if I may call them by that name without offense 
 intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose 
 modern craving for the sanctions of religion 
 leads them back into dependence upon the old 
 rites, the old theologies, the old authority, 
 which many, indeed, never have left. They, 
 in our history, are the Federalists of religion. 
 And, like the seekers, they, also, have put 
 restrictions of temperament upon their faith. 
 For many Americans of the old stock the breach 
 with authority made by the Reformation is 
 permanent. They could not go back without 
 an intellectual debasement that would be de- 
 gradation, not humility. For many others the 
 scientific revolution of the nineteenth century 
 has still further unfitted minds for harmony 
 with the forms and pressures of the ecclesias- 
 tical past. Sheer scientific materialism as an 
 explanation of God and the universe has broken 
 down. The need for religion emerges from the 
 controversy more palpitating than before. 
 
 134 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 Nevertheless, the science of theology has suf- 
 fered from the science of inductive research. 
 Tradition carries many a man to the door of 
 past beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, 
 and he longs to enter. But his way is barred. 
 He leans upon and loves the past. He can- 
 not enter it. The traditionalist, to give him a 
 better and more lovely name, has been a bringer 
 of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help 
 has been partial only. He is a chaplain at- 
 tendant upon the regiments of his own faith. 
 
 But by far the most significant product of 
 our precocious religiosity in America and our 
 early emancipation from ecclesiastical control 
 has been indifferentism — that American in- 
 differentism which has been easy because of 
 our willingness to be responsible for our own 
 evils, wide-spread because of our necessary 
 obsession with material development, defensible 
 in our century of good luck and the easy op- 
 timism that accompanies it. 
 
 Here lies the group by all odds the largest, 
 
 135 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 and certainly worthy of the most anxious 
 study. Here belongs the mass of everyday 
 Americans upon whom rests the outcome of the 
 immediate future. What lies beneath the 
 seeming religious indifference of the American 
 who is not ritualist, reformer, or seeker for 
 spiritual consolation, who is, in short, the av- 
 erage American of office, mill, and law-court? 
 That is the crux of the problem. 
 
 Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of 
 the age, and fashions are always delusive. In 
 a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, 
 like a day of south wind in July, are soggy, un- 
 illumined, one despairs of one's America. The 
 human product of too much selling and buying 
 has never been attractive; our half-education 
 and the semi-intelligence that accompanies it 
 have but defined the ill features, like careful 
 breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel prin- 
 ciple of primitive Christianity that lowliness 
 and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If 
 you followed these men home, saw their minds 
 
 136 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 freed from the pressure of competition and out 
 of the atmosphere of distrust, would your opin- 
 ion alter ? Are their religious instincts hidden 
 by the mask of American commercialism, in- 
 active merely because suppressed by custom 
 and fashion ? Are they lying fallow ? Or are 
 they like seed too long dormant and decaying? 
 
 If only we knew by what ingenious statistics 
 these men might be classified, prophecy would 
 not be difficult. If only we knew how many 
 have become mere traffickers in bodily com- 
 fort, sensualists in fact, whatever they may be 
 in name. If only we knew how many in their 
 hearts were dumb seekers for some spiritual 
 satisfactions that would raise the heart in ad- 
 versity, lift the mind above the necessity for 
 safety, pleasure, success, so that all might be 
 pursued, all enjoyed, without flatness and dis- 
 illusion. But no answer is ready; for there 
 has been no test of the latent religion of 
 America. 
 
 It is true that in the mass of American in- 
 
 137 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 differentism the suppressed religious instinct 
 exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional en- 
 thusiasm for high things whether in war or in 
 peace. It shows itself, or rather its suppres- 
 sion, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard 
 places. It touches with melancholy many a 
 typical American face in which one would ex- 
 pect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We 
 struggle with our religious emotions in youth, 
 suppress them in the middle years ; in old age, 
 deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment 
 us. Old age is proverbially restless in Amer- 
 ica. 
 
 Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how 
 much religion is latent in our democracy has 
 not come yet ; nor have our moral enthusiasms, 
 our spiritual adventures, our reachings for tra- 
 dition, been in our day really tested for the 
 spirit behind them. There is reason to believe 
 that the time is approaching. In a normal evo- 
 lution of the bourgeois society that has made 
 America, some clear revelation must have come 
 
 138 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 of the religious spirit that as a race and a na- 
 tion we are developing. Doubtless we would 
 slowly have found our way to an expression 
 more true to our nature than any of the partial 
 modes so far allowed us. But there will be no 
 normal, or at least no slow, evolution in the 
 religious emotions of the old Americans. A 
 factor from without, a sudden emergency, calls 
 for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual as- 
 sets. All, in every class, who are responsible 
 for the American inheritance of ideals and 
 morale and character are challenged, but espec- 
 ially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the 
 conflict between spirit and matter can stay neu- 
 tral no longer. 
 
 Bourgeois America, which means most of 
 America, is, as every one sees, on the verge of 
 a revolution like the political-social revolution 
 of 1800. For a century we have pursued 
 economics, and now economics is pursuing us. 
 A new class is coming to the front, and yet that, 
 perhaps, is of minor importance in America, 
 
 139 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 where money and a little education extinguish 
 distinctions between classes in two decades. 
 What is coming with more significance is a new 
 social system, wherein a new control of in- 
 dustry and a more equitable distribution of the 
 products thereof is to be substituted for com- 
 petitive individualism. Many are skeptical of 
 the proposed practices by which this revolution 
 is to be accomplished; few now doubt that its 
 theory is correct and will some day be demon- 
 strated. 
 
 But there has never been a revolution of any 
 kind in world history that did not bring with it 
 a revolution of all that tradition had established 
 and custom made familiar. And this revolu- 
 tion, peaceful or otherwise, that is upon us dif- 
 fers from earlier examples in that its economic 
 nature is clearly distinguished and, therefore, 
 its challenge to all that we term esthetic, cul- 
 tural, spiritual, religious, doubly sharp and di- 
 rect. Food, clothing, and recreation, not re- 
 ligious or political liberty, are its legitimate, but 
 
 140 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 also its only expressed, objects. If it gains 
 these at the expense of the soul — of what we all 
 understand by the soul in the ancient warning, 
 ^'What is a man profited, if he shall gain the 
 whole world, and lose his own soul?'' — if it 
 gains material welfare and material welfare 
 only, it will f ai) ; and if it fails, we all go down 
 with it. 
 
 In western Europe, one guesses, the struggle 
 between a socialism always threatening to be- 
 come purely materialistic and our own imper- 
 fect order will be differently conducted. 
 There, and, especially in France and Great 
 Britain, church organizations are powerful 
 politically, socially, and in their grip upon the 
 popular imagination. They will sharpen the 
 conflict and confuse the issues, making the 
 struggle seem to resemble many earlier combats 
 between church and anti-church. But in 
 bourgeois America no such easy and fallacious 
 division will be possible. Here the question as 
 to whether the new order is to satisfy the re- 
 
 141 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 ligious and moral, as well as the economic, 
 needs of society will rest squarely upon the in- 
 dividual person. No church can speak for 
 America, for no church ever has held or ever 
 can hold Americans together. The responsi- 
 bility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be 
 personal. It will come to the question of how 
 much religion is possessed by the normal Amer- 
 ican. When he is aroused by a struggle that 
 sweeps into far wider questions than the tariff 
 or the income tax, when his method of work- 
 ing, his method of living, his method of think- 
 ing, are all challenged by a new and militant 
 social order, more dormant idealism, more 
 latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be 
 aroused than one would ever have suspected in 
 that shrewd and easy-going face in the Pullman 
 smoker. Will religion be aroused also? 
 
 It is essential that we should bring about a 
 better distribution of wealth; that we should 
 give every child the equal opportunity that 
 Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the vague, 
 
 142 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 but magnificent, phrases of the Declaration o£ 
 Independence. Democracy cannot be said to 
 have been tried until we have made an economic 
 democracy, and we are too far on the road of 
 democratic experiment to stop half-way. But 
 it is even more essential that we should carry 
 on into the new community our moral enthu- 
 siasm, our ideals, and also that reverence for 
 the shaping power, and love for its manifesta- 
 tions that lie behind them, and constitute the re- 
 ligious emotion which I shall not here attempt 
 otherwise to define. Many fear that the nice 
 taste, the trained mind, which have been borne 
 upon the crest of civilization, will go down in 
 the welter of indistinguishable breakers. 
 There is little danger of this, since already it 
 is the intellectuals who direct, and will direct, 
 the new movement; and the professional man 
 stands to gain as much as the laborer by a 
 peaceful revolution. But in a sociaHstic world, 
 built on the recovery of the unearned incre- 
 ment, standardized by wages, whose raison 
 
 143 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 d'etre is the distribution of wealth, it is the 
 religious instinct, with all that its free develop- 
 ment implies for democracy, that is in the grav- 
 est danger. If we all become relatively rich — 
 and this is an idea of the earthly paradise that 
 socialism undoubtedly encourages — how many 
 will crawl through the eye of the needle? 
 
 The labor party is not immediately respon- 
 sible for the saving or the freeing of the re- 
 ligious instinct. Its first objectives are the 
 comforts and material opportunities of civili- 
 zation; and until these are reached we have no 
 right to expect religious leadership from the 
 proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the 
 old American, the bourgeois American. He 
 has inherited the spiritual tradition of his an- 
 cestors; he has profited by emancipation from 
 superstition and institutional tyranny; he has 
 lived in a comfortable world with opportunities 
 to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts 
 and education. He is not going to be crushed 
 or driven out of his inheritance; there are too 
 
 144 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 many of him, and he too closely resembles in 
 everything but habit of life the proletariat that 
 is rising. Upon this American rests the 
 burden of spiritualizing as well as educating 
 his new masters — upon the moral enthusiasts, 
 the traditionalists, the seekers, most of all. It 
 is such a task as the church faced in the dark 
 ages, when barbarians had to be not only spirit- 
 ualized, but civilized as well. It is a lesser 
 task, for our new invaders are not barbarians, 
 and their leaders are intellectually the equal of 
 ours. Whether the outlook for success is 
 greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the 
 enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our 
 will that man should make more than a market 
 of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the 
 great wills of earlier centuries ? 
 
 No one can answer ; but of this we can be as- 
 sured, that the solution rests in American in- 
 differentism. If the commercial American is 
 as material as he looks, if common sense is his 
 only good, if his idealism is merely inherited 
 
 145 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 habit, if he responds to two impulses only, rest- 
 lessness and sentimentality, then he will go over 
 to socialism in its most mechanical phase and, 
 instead of saving the new party, he will ruin it. 
 Potentially the most ardent supporters of a 
 purely materialistic socialism, in which the in- 
 dividual person counts for nothing aside from 
 his appetites, are precisely the "practical" busi- 
 ness men who now curse the new order most 
 loudly because it threatens their accumulations. 
 For them it is civil war between seekers for the 
 dollar ; and civil war is always the bitterest, and 
 the soonest healed. Such men have been our 
 leaders. Is the army behind them? 
 
 I think that the rank and file of bourgeois 
 America are less concerned with wealth and the 
 struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think 
 that they are not so much dazzled by millions 
 as in the 'nineties ; more anxious for simplicity 
 of heart, which spells content, and worthiness 
 of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one 
 would guess from Wall Street or Broadway or 
 
 146 
 
RELIGION IN AMERICA 
 
 public life in the Middle West. I think that, 
 while distrusting the economic paradise of the 
 more material socialists, they are closer in sym- 
 pathy to a thoughtful laborer than to a cynical 
 capitalist. If the religious instinct among 
 them emerges as a disgust for petty emotions, 
 as a passionate interest in humanity, as a will- 
 ingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for 
 a fuller life more generously shared, if the re- 
 ligion of our democracy finds no more ex- 
 pression than this, the crisis will pass. If even 
 thus far indifTerentism should yield to active 
 spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie would cease 
 being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the 
 triumph of the proletariate, since, if there was 
 anything good in our old stock, we could con- 
 vert them to it. 
 
 But if the American has lost his religious 
 instincts, if behind his practical common sense 
 and his vigorous idealism and his eager experi- 
 ments in spirituality there is nothing but a rest- 
 less energy working upon the momentum of 
 
 147 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 convictions long dead, then let the new Amer- 
 icans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out. 
 
 With all humbleness, with a full realization 
 of the trivialities of hustle and bustle in which 
 we have sunk our religion, with concern for 
 our escape from easy-going optimism and skep- 
 tical content, I, for one, feel too sure of the 
 depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the 
 fundamental religiosity of the American char- 
 acter at its truest, to admit for a moment that 
 conclusion of despair. 
 
 148 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 **Fix't in sublimest thought behold them rise 
 World after world unfolding to their eyes, 
 Lead, light, allure them thro' the total plan 
 And give new guidance to the paths of man." 
 
 TIESE were the modest aspirations for 
 American genius, and especially Amer- 
 ican literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, 
 the once famous author, in his ''Columbiad" of 
 1807. 
 
 It was not a democratic literature, as we un- 
 derstand the term, that Barlow, and hundreds 
 of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped 
 and expected to see arise in the new republic. 
 It was not a literature that would interpret the 
 homely, though vigorous, personality of a new 
 nation. Nothing so concrete and so common- 
 
 149 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 place as this would have raised their ardor to 
 such a pitch. The excitable critics of that day 
 were concerned with the absolute, the ideal, and 
 the abstract. Liberty, not equality, had at last 
 found a dwelling-place, and the free spirit of 
 man was to expand in an illimitable continent 
 as never before, and create the poetry of 
 freedom and the epic of liberated mankind. 
 But their vast expectations were based upon a 
 misconception and surrounded by fallacies. 
 They have not been realized; and this is one 
 reason for the prevailing idea that literary 
 America has been a disappointment, that the 
 life of the mind in America has lagged be- 
 hind its opportunities, that we are a backward 
 race in literature and the arts. We seem 
 children to-day beside the dreams of our 
 ancestors. 
 
 It is easy enough to see now that a race which 
 had to construct a nation in a continent in large 
 part scarcely habitable was not ready to sing the 
 epic of freedom. Freedom had been won, but 
 
 ISO 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 whether it would be possible to possess and en- 
 joy it depended not upon lyrical interpretation, 
 but upon statecraft, the broadax, toil, transpor- 
 tation, and the rifle. And when the pioneer- 
 ing days were over, political freedom, freedom 
 of conscience and the individual man, belonged 
 as truly to other great nations who were equally 
 entitled to create the literature of the free mind. 
 To expect the ideals of liberty to appear in 
 American literature was legitimate, but to look 
 for a great poetic outburst in nineteenth- 
 century America just because this republic first 
 established a new political order was no more 
 reasonable than to demand a new style in archi- 
 tecture from the erectors of the first capitol in 
 the trans- Alleghany wilderness. 
 
 What should have been asked of us, at least 
 after the defeat of the Federalist party had 
 made certain, what before was only probable, 
 that America would become a democracy, was 
 a literature which should express the ideals per- 
 vading our particular brand of democratic life, 
 
 151 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 a literature which should describe a society in 
 which social distinctions were elastic, oppor- 
 tunity was superabundant, and, for the first 
 time in the modern world, the common people 
 become more powerful than the uncommon. A 
 democratic literature could rightly have been 
 expected from America. But such a literature 
 would never have been termed ''sublimest 
 thought" by our early enthusiasts. It would 
 have to suffer from the tawdriness of the 
 masses, and develop as slowly as they develop. 
 It would have to be more prose than poetry, for 
 American life outwardly was prosaic except 
 upon its borders, and often gross and barbarous 
 there. It would have to struggle upward like 
 a flapping heron, not soar like the eagle of our 
 dreams. And in the earlier period, perhaps in 
 most periods of the republic, few literary 
 dreamers even wished that America should be- 
 come a democracy. 
 
 In many respects we got, and got very soon, 
 such a literature, and much of it has endured. 
 
 152 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 The prose or poetry that took upon itself to let 
 the eagle scream for liberty has quite generally 
 gone into oblivion, and with reason ; it is either 
 crude and blatant, or solemn and hackneyed 
 pretentiousness, like Barlow's ''Columbiad" 
 and much of Dwight's '^Conquest of Canaan/' 
 The ''less enraptured" strains of Irving and 
 Hawthorne and Clemens and Holmes and 
 Bret Harte, in which the hopes, the prejudices, 
 the idiosyncrasies, and the passions of a nascent 
 civilization were expressed in prose as well as 
 poetry, and in humor more frequently than in 
 epic grandeur, have had a thousand times more 
 virility. They have sprung from a social and 
 esthetic need, not a romantic conception, and 
 though not an epoch-making celebration of 
 freedom finally brought to earth, they have been 
 a solid contribution to the literature of the 
 world and a beginning of the literature of the 
 American democracy. 
 
 The real issue of course was not Freedom 
 and Liberty and the other capitalizations of the 
 
 153 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 abstract, but we, the Americans. And the real 
 question is whether American literature has 
 met its proper, not its assumed, specifications. 
 If one considers the past, the answer inclines 
 toward the affirmative. 
 
 There have been two chief strains in Amer- 
 ican literature, not always distinct, but in origin 
 different. In the first belong those writers 
 whose dominant purpose has been to appeal to 
 the best in the many; and by the best I mean 
 the finest or the deepest emotions, and by the 
 many I mean the accessible minds of the de- 
 mocracy. Emerson belongs primarily here, 
 and Hawthorne, and, though he would have 
 denied it. Whitman. Henry James in his 
 earlier stories is a lovable example; and when 
 he pursued his magical art into realms where 
 only the trained appreciation could follow, 
 Mrs. Wharton put on the mantle. In the 
 second have been the more numerous writ- 
 ers whose chief purpose, not always a con- 
 scious one, has been to touch and interest and 
 
 154 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 arouse not so much the best as the commonest, 
 the most universal emotions. Cooper is the 
 most excellent example of great writing in this 
 group. Mark Twain when not misanthropic, 
 Bret Harte in all moods, Whittier and Long- 
 fellow, Riley and O. Henry, and a host of the 
 less distinguished, also belong there. 
 
 But far more important than this division in 
 purpose, which, after all, is hard to make and 
 harder still to keep, is the fact, if one may speak 
 of high esthetic matters in a biological fashion, 
 of constant cross-fertilization between these 
 strains, and especially in the men we call great. 
 Americans who felt impelled to write of the 
 ideal best have not forgotten the needs of a na- 
 tion slowly moving toward democracy. Those 
 who wrote to amuse and interest the populace 
 have felt in a curious fashion their respon- 
 sibility for what they considered American 
 ideals. Tribute has been paid by both sides, 
 though each in its own fashion, to democracy ; 
 and this makes an unexpected congruity be- 
 
 155 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 tween appeals to the best and satisfactions for 
 the many, between Emerson and popular fiction. 
 The scholar presents his idealistic optimism as 
 an attempt to explain where the eager swarm 
 ought to be winging. The story-teller, though 
 inspired not by ideas, but by the chance to in- 
 terest an energetic society absorbed in the con- 
 quest of nature and hot-blooded with the taste 
 of success, yet feels bound to urge what he 
 feels to be American morality and American 
 idealism. 
 
 This common sympathy with democracy is 
 the hope of American literature in the sharp 
 tests of our nationality now almost upon us. 
 Emerson and Cooper, Hawthorne and Mark 
 Twain, are examples of what once it could do. 
 
 Emerson was a man who never courted or 
 obtained popularity, who hitched his readers to 
 a star instead of a plot or a sensation, who 
 wrote always for minds that may have been 
 democratic, but certainly could not have been 
 common. Cooper, like Shakespeare, was an 
 
 156 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 aristocrat in tastes, a democrat by sympathy 
 and conviction, whose stories, even his bad 
 stories, contained that essential adventure, that 
 rapid and unexpected and successful action, 
 which satisfies the universal craving for strug- 
 gle well ended, stories so popular that his ene- 
 mies were entranced by them even while they 
 abused him. 
 
 The contrast is sharp. And yet, if the great- 
 ness of Emerson is the airy strength of his 
 ideology, his permanence in the history of 
 American civilization is determined by the ex- 
 pression he gave to the moral optimism of the 
 typical American. And if the popularity of 
 Cooper was due to the unflagging interest of 
 his adventure and the romance of his actors 
 and his scenes, nevertheless what makes him 
 more than a good story-teller and gives him 
 great place in the social history of America is 
 his incarnation of the ideals and the morality 
 of a native democracy in Deerslayer, whom all 
 Americans could understand and admire. 
 
 157 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 Or consider Hawthorne and Mark Twain. 
 Hawthorne was a moralist romancer whose 
 austere talents forced admiration and a some- 
 what doubtful popularity. Twain touched the 
 universal note of humorous exaggeration so 
 early and so readily that his stern moral basis 
 went unremarked. Men read him for humor 
 as they read Cooper for romance, absorbing 
 the ideas of each as unconsciously as the child 
 takes medicine in a sugared glass. 
 
 Nevertheless, if in Hawthorne the burden of 
 lofty moral ideals is more evident than any ap- 
 peal to the masses, yet the most careless reader 
 feels that his warnings are for a new world that 
 has broken with tradition and must face its 
 problems of sin and sex in a democracy of con- 
 science. And if Mark Twain writes obviously 
 to amuse the democracy, yet he seldom fails to 
 preach to them also. "Huckleberry Finn," to 
 the loving, thoughtful reader, is among other 
 things an epic of the injustice, the inconsistency 
 of sophisticated man and his social system, seen 
 
 158 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 through the eyes of the new world on the 
 Mississippi, where tradition, in the fresh, crude 
 light, showed its seams of decay. There is a 
 tract upon slavery in ''Huckleberry Finn," and 
 another upon dueling, and a third on social dis- 
 tinctions, and a fourth upon conventionalized 
 religion. And readers of Clemens will not 
 forget how the bones of his acrid philosophy 
 wore through the skin of his humor in those 
 later books, especially in 'The Mysterious 
 Stranger," where a hatred of social injustice 
 and the melancholy foreboding which has al- 
 ways accompanied the optimism of American 
 democracy had such full escape that the pub- 
 lishers were led to print it as a fairytale for 
 children that it might be enjoyed by minds too 
 unobservant to trouble with its warnings. 
 
 I do not wish to seem to be docketing all 
 American literature in these brief compari- 
 sons. What I desire is to point to this com- 
 mon interest of our writers in the needs of 
 democracy. Whitman, who wrote always for 
 
 159 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 the most vigorous and sometimes for the best 
 emotions of the many, might continue the ar- 
 gument. Howells, whose zest for the f amihar 
 experience kept his penetrating intellect busy 
 with problems important for democracy, is an- 
 other example. Poe, and Henry James in his 
 later years, fall without both groups, being as 
 indifferent to democracy as they are solicitous 
 for art. That is their distinction. Indeed, it 
 is by such men that the writers who sway the 
 masses are trained in the technique of their 
 craft. 
 
 In short, by and large, our literature is re- 
 markable for its substructure of what might be 
 called democratic idealism — idealism applied to 
 the needs of a growing democracy. If the 
 reader doubts, let him compare Emerson with 
 Carlyle, Cooper with Scott, Hawthorne with 
 Tennyson, Whitman with Browning, and an- 
 swer whether our writers have not been formed 
 by the social needs of America. 
 
 That this is true of so many men, and has 
 i6o 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 led to the cross-fertilization between popular 
 writers and intellectuals of which I have writ- 
 ten above, is perhaps more readily explained 
 when one considers how homogeneous our so- 
 ciety has been, how few and how slight its 
 mental cleavages. Conservative and radical, 
 traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, democrat 
 and aristocrat — such clefts have not gone so 
 deep with us as with other nations. Except for 
 times of stress, as in the decade between 1765 
 and 1775, or in the years just before the Civil 
 War, it would be hard to group, for example, 
 our writers by fundamental differences in their 
 philosophy of living. Whitman one could 
 classify, and Poe and Irving, but the difficulty 
 rapidly increases as the list lengthens. We 
 have been homogeneous by a common tradi- 
 tion of liberalism, by a common environment 
 varying not too greatly between Boston and the 
 newer West. And our literature has re- 
 sembled us. 
 
 And now, when at last our literature, like our 
 161 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 politics and our economics, must at last 
 challenge world scrutiny, this national charac- 
 ter, and all that represents it, has come sud- 
 denly to seem of vast importance. We have 
 become vividly aware of it, and we realize that 
 we are in dire need of self-expression — of self- 
 expression by new literature. The self-con- 
 sciousness of Americans throughout the nine- 
 teenth century, which showed itself keenly in 
 their restlessness under foreign criticism and 
 their irrepressible desire to talk about God's 
 country, was of a different kind. It was due to 
 a nervous uncertainty as to the success of the 
 American experiment. We were more con- 
 cerned with what others thought of our quali- 
 ties than with what we were or had been. But 
 three things have altered our situation radi- 
 cally, and made us think more of character and 
 less of reputation. 
 
 The first is the absolute success, as success is 
 measured by the world's finger, of this Ameri- 
 can experiment. The hope of the founders to 
 
 162 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 establish a stable and prosperous republican 
 government where life, property, conscience, 
 and opinion were safe has been realized. 
 
 The second and more sensational change 
 came from the Great War, which gave us that 
 quiet confidence in our national strength that 
 comes when recognition from without confirms 
 the fact and makes self-assertion unnecessary. 
 
 The third, and probably the most important, 
 has been the rise to intellectual influence and 
 cultural and social power of aliens — Irish, Ger- 
 man, most of all Jews — ^who, unlike the earlier 
 immigrants, do not cherish as their chief wish 
 the desire to become in every sense American. 
 Such phenomena as an Alexander Hamilton or 
 Thomas Paine, becoming almost from the day 
 of their landing more native than the natives, 
 are becoming rarer and rarer. More and 
 more we must count upon cosmopolitans of 
 brains and ability among us who know not Is- 
 rael, though they may love the traditions of 
 their home lands even less. It is this new 
 
 163 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 America, heterogeneous, brilliant, useful, but 
 disturbing, that has more than anything else 
 sharpened the self-consciousness of America, 
 turned us toward introspection, made us sensi- 
 ble of our homogeneity, and the new alignments 
 inevitable for the future. 
 
 And just as at the turn of the eighteenth 
 century enthusiasts were clamoring for a new 
 literature from America, in which freedom and 
 liberty should have their apotheosis, so now the 
 awakened consciousness of Americans of the 
 older stock is clamoring for the expression of 
 what they vaguely denominate, and still more 
 vaguely describe, as Americanism. Like all 
 such terms called forth by a crisis and displayed 
 like a flag or a button, the term is at the same 
 time indefinite and full of significance. Ten 
 men and women will in ten different ways de- 
 fine it. And yet none can doubt that vast feel- 
 ing lies behind the word, and would crystallize, 
 if power were given it, into an expression of our 
 national experience and aspirations and ideals 
 
 164 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 as we have lived with them and seen them de- 
 velop for a century. 
 
 And opposed to this clamor for a literature 
 of Americanism is another call, not loud yet, 
 but rising — a demand for a different literature, 
 mordant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, which 
 will cut at the sentimentalities in which our 
 idealism has involved us, strike at the moribund 
 liberalism which we still regard as our basis of 
 action, take issue with the moral standards that 
 have been received as irrevocable because they 
 were American. Keenly aware of the need for 
 a more honest and more vigorous expression of 
 what America means to-day, and sensitive to 
 these caustic attacks upon all that we have 
 called American, the thoughtful mind finds 
 little to console it in the clever, sentimental writ- 
 ing which, with sewing-machines, dental pastes, 
 ready-made clothes, and cheap motor-cars, has 
 become one of the standarized products of 
 America. 
 
 There has been one response already to the 
 
 165 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 awakening national consciousness, and this, 
 curiously enough, has been almost identical 
 with the reaction of the new republic a century 
 and more ago to its responsibilities. Then the 
 first writing which commanded attention here 
 and abroad was to be found in so-called state 
 papers, declarations of Congress and legisla- 
 tures, pamphlets by Adams and Hamilton and 
 Jefferson. And the first response to our 
 modern clamor for Americanism has also been 
 in state papers, beginning perhaps with Roose- 
 velt's administration and continuing through 
 Wilson's messages and the many documents on 
 the war. The worth and significance of many 
 of these public utterances have commanded 
 world-wide respect, and possible permanence in 
 literature. 
 
 Yet it is rarely that state papers can satisfy 
 a national need for literature. They are too 
 restricted in their interests and too occasional 
 in their provenance. It is only once in a 
 century that a Gettysburg Address sums up the 
 
 i66 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 political and moral philosophy of millions or a 
 discourse on the needs and obligations of de- 
 mocracy unites public opinion in America and 
 Europe. The emotions of the race seek outlet 
 and interpretation in pure literature, and here 
 the American response is more doubtful. 
 
 None of the more popular brands of con- 
 temporary writing seems to satisfy the craving 
 for national self-expression. It is true that we 
 are going in for universals. Our books reach 
 the hundred thousands, and our magazines the 
 millions. The successful writer of plays, 
 stories, or special articles trades in the thoughts 
 that circulate through a vast community of 
 common education, experience, and environ- 
 ment. The result is to spread and perpetuate 
 the ideals and the liberal hopes that we call 
 American, but also to stereotype and thus 
 weaken their influence. They become counters 
 in a game, or, better still, standardized foods 
 for the imagination, whose popularity is certain 
 until the fashion wears out. The writer of ad- 
 
 167 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 venturous fiction to-day uses the same formulas 
 as did Cooper, because he writes for a people 
 still true to the mold of that America which 
 they have inherited directly in family life, or 
 indirectly in the schools. But his idealism is 
 faint beside Cooper's; his ''strong, simple 
 Americans'' too often mere fabrications when 
 compared with Deerslayer, or crude, vulgar- 
 ized approximations, like sculptures of the 
 decadent fourth century. Vulgarization is the 
 menace of democratic literature — vulgarization 
 by smart and cheap short stories, by plays 
 where the wit is raw, the sentiment mushy, the 
 characters, like their language, cheap and mean. 
 Slang can be racy; colloquialism belongs to a 
 literature of the people; to be homely is often 
 to be lovable and true : but a literature, no mat- 
 ter how moral, which in its lack of clarity and 
 sweetness is like a glass of dirty water, is a 
 heavy price to pay for mere circulation. The 
 appeal to universals is essential in a democracy, 
 but unless clarified by love and hope and con- 
 
 i68 
 
LITEIL\TURE IX AMERICA 
 
 viction. It leads toward universal vulgarity. 
 Xor does the prospect cheer if one looks to 
 the contemporary Brahmins, who seek not the 
 universal, but the particular; who write for the 
 best, not the broadest, emotions of democracy. 
 Lowells and Emersons have not yet reappeared 
 in our society. Xo Emerson has philosophized 
 the reactions of America to international obli- 
 gation; no Lowell assailed militarist and pacif- 
 ist alike in the war : no Whitman even has sung 
 commonplace America become momentarily 
 heroic in the cause of a half -imder stood democ- 
 racy. We have had an abundance of writing 
 directed to line minds and fine souls, but it has 
 lacked the authentic note of national inspira- 
 tion. 
 
 •Perhaps the coldness of our intellectual 
 literature has been due to the specialization of 
 the age. A Lowell, an Emerson, even a Long- 
 fellow, has been dimcult for the last three 
 decades. Learned men, like these, have been 
 driven by the public opinion of their world 
 
 169 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 toward investigation and scientific research. 
 They have been weighted with a frightful re- 
 sponsibihty for facts; they have been better 
 scholars than their predecessors, but less effec- 
 tive citizens. The tool-cutter nowadays knows 
 only his own operation. The scholar and 
 philosopher have a lifetime of labor assigned 
 them, with no time to become acquainted with 
 their United States. In nineteenth-century 
 America there was little place for the scholar. 
 He was driven into the world, and if scholar- 
 ship lost, we profited. Now his corner is built 
 for him, and he has gone into it. 
 
 As a result of all this we face a very real 
 danger. American literature, with its burden 
 of ideals and experience, being cheapened 
 by writers for the mob and deserted by the 
 academician, may lose its virility and pale be- 
 fore a new literature of cosmopolitanism, which 
 could find no better breeding-place than Chi- 
 cago or New York. 
 
 Artistically, this might be no calamity. 
 170 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 Such a society as a great American city 
 presents has never before been seen in the 
 world, not even in Rome, and the international 
 democracy which it forecasts is worthy already 
 of a great literature, has, indeed, already begun 
 one. But we old Americans, even though our 
 age is of only two generations, are not yet ready 
 for international democracy. Our own racial 
 character has not received its final stamp, come 
 to full self-expression, established itself as the 
 permanent influence upon the world's develop- 
 ment which our career and our opportunities 
 should make it. To rush into literary interna- 
 tionalism before the long American experience 
 has ripened into a national democracy would be 
 to skip a step. It is to commit again the error 
 of our forefathers, who proposed an epic of 
 liberty before we had freed ourselves from the 
 burden of economic development. 
 
 And what we need is precisely such a cross- 
 fertilization between the mind that reaches for 
 the best and the imagination which feels for 
 
 171 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 the many, as one finds in varying measures in 
 Mark Twain and Holmes, in Cooper and Whit- 
 man and Emerson. It must be a different and 
 perhaps a more mature product, but nothing 
 else can make American ideals worth saving in 
 literature, for nothing else can grasp the 
 shrewd native quality of this people, which is 
 still pervasive through all our alien swarms. 
 
 For three centuries now we have been at our 
 experiment in democracy. We have been 
 sordid and we have been magnificent. We 
 have been timorous and we have set examples 
 for hardihood in man. We have stumbled 
 blindly on our road, and we have had great 
 moments of illumination. We have not made 
 a perfect democracy, but perhaps more men, 
 women, and children have been happy in 
 America than elsewhere in world history. 
 And on the whole our course has been consist- 
 ently onward. No purpose of the founders has 
 failed to continue ; no valuable element of char- 
 acter has yet been lost by the way. We are no 
 
 172 
 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 
 
 worse men, by and large, than our forefathers. 
 And either this great experiment is worth some- 
 thing or it is not. 
 
 If it is worth something, it must pass into 
 literature, and find men to make it pass. And 
 these men and women must be lovers of what 
 we have done here and what we are, as the 
 young poets of England at war were above all 
 lovers of their blessed England. They cannot 
 be scoffers at our loose-held ideals and our 
 nervous commercialism, who scold, which is 
 easy, a great, though uneven, nation, but do not 
 search out the cause of its greatness and pro- 
 claim its hope. Nor can they be recluses con- 
 temptuous of that public in whose progressive 
 refinement lies the only chance for democracy. 
 Nor mere buyers and sellers of emotion who 
 have learned the speech of the great beast, as 
 Hamilton called the common people, only to 
 make profit by it. 
 
 But you cannot summon a literature from 
 the vasty deep by calling for it in oratorical 
 
 173 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 vein. Perhaps, even now as I write, some wise 
 youth, who takes his task more seriously than 
 himself, has begun in humor a poem that is 
 meant for some newspaper column, but will be- 
 come a better description than an essay can 
 give of the American who has been doing so 
 much, but thinking also, who still knows how 
 to grin at misfortune, and is not yet ready to 
 declare himself bankrupt in ideas, deficient in 
 character, or pallid in imaginative faith. As 
 a nation we did our boasting early and got it 
 out of our system; but the confidence and the 
 strength and the hope that inspired that boast- 
 ing remain, and approach fruition. 
 
 174 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 
 
 IN the preceding chapters there has been 
 much said of conservatism and radicahsm, 
 of ideahsm and the reUgious instinct, of Htera- 
 ture that expresses the soul of a race. Never- 
 theless, when we look about in this our Amer- 
 ica, it is painfully clear that not these absolutes 
 but man who makes and possesses them must 
 chiefly concern us. It is the American who will 
 make or break his religion, his literature, his 
 poHtics. He is the entity. He is our destiny. 
 And therefore one comes back after a survey 
 of American traits, their strengths, and their 
 weaknesses, to the man himself. Can we name 
 him in this hive of millions? Can we find an 
 everyday American that will be accepted here 
 as typical, and be recognized abroad ? If there 
 
 175 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 is such a type, it will be among the middle class, 
 the bourgeois Americans, that we shall discover 
 it. The landholding aristocracy has passed. 
 The moneyed aristocracy is in the best (and 
 sometimes in the worst) sense bourgeois. Cos- 
 mopolitans are few. The intellectual aristoc- 
 racy is but half emerged, like a statue of 
 Rodin's, from the common clay. 
 
 What we find now is the middle class incar- 
 nate. What we may expect soon is the 
 finished product of bourgeois life in America. 
 For it is clear that this life is now in full career. 
 We exult in it, and its characteristic virtues. 
 We deprecate aristocracy. We heap scorn 
 upon the proletariat and persecute its prophets. 
 Better evidence still, no sooner does a new 
 group rise to security in our social system than 
 it becomes visibly bourgeois, and, what is more 
 important, mentally bourgeois. This has been 
 true of the railway employees, the carpenters, 
 the plumbers, the tenant farmers, and many 
 others. It has been also true of the "aristoc- 
 
 176 
 
THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 
 
 racy" in the old sense of the word, whether na- 
 tive or European. They have come into the 
 fold, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes at a run 
 with poverty barking behind them. All these 
 groups have been captured by the dominant 
 class. And if the nature of our industrial 
 system still keeps them in alignment against the 
 capitalist (who is the soul of bourgeoisie) or 
 dependent upon him, nevertheless they think as 
 he does on all questions not involving work and 
 wages, and especially in religion, politics, and 
 morality. They act as he does; and the labor 
 groups are coming to fight as he does, and for 
 the same ends. 
 
 All major influences in our American life 
 seem to be directed toward this consummation, 
 which is triumphant, or dismal, according to 
 your point of view. The racial factor may 
 seem to be an exception, but is not. It is true 
 that as the old American assimilates more and 
 more non-Teutonic and non-Latin races to his 
 way of living, his psychology alters, and his 
 
 177 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 habits are likely to follow. It is also true that 
 the immigrant belongs prevailingly to the 
 peasantry or the proletariat. But the immi- 
 grant has substantially no influence upon the 
 dominant class until he is Americanized. And 
 he is not Americanized in any true sense until 
 he leaves his quarter and begins to read the 
 papers, go to the theatres, eat the food, talk 
 the talk, and think the thoughts of the Amer- 
 ican; in a word, until he becomes bourgeois. 
 And in the majority of cases this takes at least 
 one generation. 
 
 Economic conditions, on the other hand, 
 favor this triumph of the bourgeoisie. We 
 seem to be entering upon a period when a vastly 
 greater number of men and women will have 
 reasonable security of moderate income. But 
 security of a moderate income, which means a 
 guaranteed mediocrity, is the mainstay, is al- 
 most the cause, of the bourgeois spirit, just as 
 privilege was the support of the aristocracy. 
 And if in the next generation ten times as many 
 
 178 
 
THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 
 
 families can count on a cost plus basis of living, 
 this will but increase the middle class. It will 
 makfe, to be sure, more education, more refine- 
 ment, and perhaps more cerebration possible; 
 but such a circumstance will not radically affect 
 the character of the typical American. 
 
 Culturally, we already see the results of the 
 many influences which are making the United 
 States bourgeois in warp and woof. Our traits 
 are not the fine exclusiveness, the discrimina- 
 tion, the selfishness of an aristocracy. Nor are 
 they the social solidarity, the intellectual de- 
 mocracy, the intolerance of a proletariat. One 
 finds rather individualism in opinion and unity 
 in thought. One finds conservatism in insti- 
 tutions and radicalism in personal ambitions. 
 One finds a solid, though dull morality, a dis- 
 trust of ideas, a plentiful lack of taste, an 
 abundance of the homely virtues of industry, 
 truth telling, optimism, idealism, and charity, 
 which, in an age that suits such talents, make a 
 man healthy, wealthy, and, in his own genera- 
 
 179 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 tion, wise. Such a cultural level, and such a 
 national character are becoming more and more 
 familiar in America. 
 
 There must be some peak ahead; some top 
 of the curve when the bourgeois spirit, even in 
 the United States, will have reached the climax 
 of its power, and the height of its vigor, and 
 will begin to lose its sharpness of outline, and 
 to give way to the spirit of the next age, be 
 that what it may. 
 
 This peak is perhaps nearer than we suppose. 
 What will happen afterwards lies in darkness, 
 but must depend in some measure upon the 
 temper of the bourgeoisie ; and as America bids 
 fair to be the capital of Bourgeoisia, upon the 
 temper of America. The question may be 
 posed this way. Are we, who are no longer 
 the middle class, since there is no power other 
 than spiritual or intellectual above us, are we 
 proposing to imperialize, or to federalize the 
 world which we dominate? 
 
 Is the bourgeois conception of security for 
 i8o 
 
THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 
 
 all, and superiority (other than economic) for 
 none, to be forced upon the years ahead? Is 
 our democracy, as Brooks Adams thinks, a 
 democracy of degradation, a level to which all 
 must be either lifted, or lowered? Will we 
 hold back, as long as our power lasts, the pro- 
 letariat, feeding them, clothing them, convert- 
 ing them, but suppressing them, so that we may 
 be secure? Will we tyrannize the exceptional 
 in art, in literature, in statesmanship, in pure 
 thinking, freezing it by distrust, or exploiting 
 it for sensation and reducing its fruits to vul- 
 garity? Will we resolve religion into a social 
 emotion and poetry to rhythmic prose? Must 
 the poor fragments of the privileged classes 
 that still remain, and the little shopkeepers, and 
 the teachers with their hankerings after an in- 
 tellectual aristocracy, and the skilled workman 
 with the feverish zeal of a new convert to secur- 
 ity still upon him — must they all unite with the 
 industrial magnate in a holy alliance of things 
 as they are to crush into uniformity a humanity 
 
 i8i 
 
EVERYDAY AMERICANS 
 
 where only rebels against our authority and the 
 uncivilized remain? 
 
 This would be the imperialism of the bour- 
 geoisie. And neither our churches, which are 
 rigidly bourgeois, nor our universities, which 
 are ponderously bourgeois, and both trading in 
 security, offer leadership that guarantees 
 escape. 
 
 Or will we attempt to federalize this world 
 that apparently we have conquered, allowing 
 autonomy for races of ideas, nations of cus- 
 toms, and room enough for plantations of new 
 desires in our fat fields ? Will we tolerate fine- 
 ness, encourage variety, permit heresy, prepare 
 for change ? It is said by way of compliment 
 that here in America we have neither aristo- 
 crats nor peasants. Will we preserve, or de- 
 stroy, the peasant virtues, the ideas of the 
 aristocrat, the desires of the intellectual. Will 
 we make possible a nation where to be average 
 is not the highest good ? 
 
 I have no answer, naturally. There is no 
 182 
 
THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN 
 
 reply that can now be formulated. But the so- 
 lution is already present in the problem itself. 
 It is to be found in men and women, in boys 
 and girls especially, who will belong to the new 
 order and who will answer in their time. If 
 you wish to speculate upon what will become 
 of the post-bellum American, whose traits as 
 they exist to-day have been the subject of this 
 book, study, on the one hand, the younger 
 leaders in the labor parties, and on the other, 
 the college undergraduates. In them lies the 
 future. 
 
 THE END 
 
 183 
 
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