Gilbert Seldes

We have two prodigious victories to gain—the war and the world after the war. The chatter about not "defining war aims" because specific aims are bound to disturb us, is dangerously beside the point, because the kind of world we will create depends largely on the kind of war we wage. If we nazify ourselves to win, we will win a nazified world; if we communize ourselves, we will probably share a modified Marxian world with the Soviets; and if we win by intensification of our democracy, we will create the only kind of world in which we can live. And, as noted in discussing the strategy of the war, the chances are that we can only win if we divine the essential nature of our people and create a corresponding strategy.

In addition to the direct military need for knowing what kind of people we are, there is the propaganda need, so that we can create a national unity and put aside the constant irritation of partisanship, the fear of "incidents", the wastage of emotional energy in quarrels among ourselves. And there is a third reason for an exact and candid review of what we are: it is our future.

When this war ends we will make, in one form or another, solemn agreements with the nations of the world, our allies and what is left of our enemies. We know almost nothing about any of them—we, the American people. Our State Department knows little enough; what it knows, it has not communicated to us; and we have never been interested enough to make discoveries of our own. We are about to commit a huge international polygamy, with forty picture brides, each one in a different national costume.

Some conditions of this mass marriage are the subject of the next section of this book. Here I am concerned with the one thing we can do to make the preliminary steps intelligent. We cannot learn all we need to know about all the other nations of the world; but we can reflect on some things within ourselves, we can know ourselves better; and on this knowledge we can erect the framework into which the other nations will fit; or out of which they will remain if they choose not to fit. We can, by knowing a few vital things about ourselves, learn a lot about South America and Europe and Asia and Australia; what we are will determine whom we will marry, whom reject, and whom we will set up, if agreeable, in an unsanctified situation. The laws of man, in many states, require certificates of eligibility to marry, the services of the church inquire if an obstacle exists. Before we enter into compacts full of tragic and noble possibilities, we might also make inquiries. Something in us shies away from the pomp of the old diplomacy—what is that something? We used to like revolutionaries and never understood colonial exploitation—how do these things affect us now? Are we prepared to deal with a government in one country and a people in another? Is it possible for us to ally ourselves to Communists, reformed fascists, variously incomplete democracies, cooperative democratic monarchies, and centralized empires, all at the same time? Is there anything in us which requires us to make terms with Britain about India, with Russia about propaganda, with Sweden about exports, before we make a new world with all of them? Can we, honorably, enter any agreement, with any state or with all states, while they are ignorant of our character—as ignorant, possibly, as we are of theirs?

The difficulty we are in is nicely doubled, because introspection is no happy habit and we say that we know all about America, or we say that America cannot be known—it is too big, too varied, too complicated. And these two opposite statements are in themselves a beginning of a definition. America, by this testimony, is a country, large, varied, complex, inhabited by people who either understand their country perfectly or will not make an effort to understand it. I would not care to rest on this definition—but it shows the need of definition.

Mathematics of Character

By "definition of America" I mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from others. We are, for instance, the only country lying between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 25° 35' and 49° north latitude. This definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact, the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied climate, our resources, our bigness with its consequences in the temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical fact.)

Not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a superiority. Moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other what is exclusively ours—and make a comparison, a guide to international conduct "on scientific principles". We would know how far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or made compromise impossible.

We lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. Yet we can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics can be. It is a fact that millions of people came to America in the hope of a better life—the number who came can be written down, the intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by those which ended in despair. Yet the elation and the disillusion of men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the great complex of our national character.

We are defined by events—immigration was an event. But immigrants came to other countries as well, to Canada and Brazil and England. When they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us. It is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries or has all our habits, because none has had our history—that is the base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with us, but we differ from each relatively—in some degree. This would not be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. The corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are.

The Revolution in Property

When this country was settled the ownership of land was the most important economic factor in the lives of all Western peoples. The ruling class in Europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as in England) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in France). In the thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of land as France and England together and this seemingly immeasurable area was only the fringe, the shore line, of Continental America; the Mississippi Valley had been explored, and the Southwest, so that the French and Spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which unlimited land offered to the dispossessed.

Before the Declaration of Independence had been uttered, a revolution in the deepest instincts of man had taken place—land became a commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. In Europe, land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal Houses were founded on land); land was real estate, everything else was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws, laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the Prince (or Princeps) was often the first man in the land because he was the first owner of the land. Land was the one universal permanent thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur; in it they were buried.

The American pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the clearing of the wilderness, before 1776. He moved away, westward, and complained against King George's legal fence around the land beyond the Alleghenies. The European transplanted to America often founded a House, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the Virginia tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed (often legally, often by squatters' right—which is the right of work, not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and went further into the wilderness and made another clearing.

There is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move which overtook men when they came to America. Perhaps the primal instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock, reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of European cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in themselves—or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. Romance has beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his "rape of a continent". I have once before quoted Lewis Mumford's positively Puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed Wordsworth's advice to seek Nature "in a wise passiveness"—advice based on the poet's love for the English Lake district, about as uncivilized then as Northern Vermont is today. The raging pioneer, says Mumford, "raped his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". Our more familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who wasn't aware of the fact that Rousseau and Wordsworth didn't like what he was doing.

He was doing more to undermine the old order than Rousseau ever did. The moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine—which is wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the industry of one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not by land which stands still. The whole concept of aristocracy began to alter—for the worse. If wealth could be made, then wealth became a criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became respectable; presently money itself became respectable. It was divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable—but not responsible.

The Consequences of Free Land

This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the land—in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn, nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. This may be morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result: the American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant class. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant virtues, the peasant sturdiness and all the rest of the good qualities which go with slavery to the soil.

So the physical definition of America leads to these opening social definitions:

we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and power;

we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil;

we were supremely the great wasters of the world;

we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant class.

From this beginning we can go on to other effects:

The effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant psychological factor in America; the obvious effects are that the land invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer—who between them created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of character. In addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at home and peaceful abroad. Once we felt secure within our territorial limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of the Spaniards in Cuba to bring us into our first war against a European nation since 1814. This pacifism was more intense in the more agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific Scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than ours. Pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from Germany and Russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service (for their children, if not for themselves). In revenge for this un-European pacifism we created a purely American lawlessness—and a toleration of it which is the amazement of Nazi Germany, where the leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized Europe, having lived through duels and massacres, is still shocked by our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs.

America on the Move

One more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers struck inland from Plymouth and upland from Jamestown) have not altered us. The voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a generation; but the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon was moving into the Northwest Territory as soon as the Revolution was over; then New England began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails broken by outriders to the western ocean; the Gold Rush pulled men through the wintry passes or around the Horn, and by then our passion for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the Clipper ship; after the Civil War the Homestead Act started a new move to the West, and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular and abundant. If the 1870's were not marked by great migrations of men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of cattle, north from Texas in the summer, south from Wyoming as winter threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to the railheads at Abilene or Kansas City. We were moving a bit more slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in Europe, developed as a common tool for the average family, and America was mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of activity which has not been sufficiently studied—the tin can tourist, the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. This search for the sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was only a new beginning.

The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quantity-production of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities, small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks, busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road. Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside cabin.

"Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car"; that was left for dictators to promise—without fulfilment. The cars made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors, widely remarked. That the motor car could be used—was being used—as a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which had rested there for thirty years—but might still be good for transport.

In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European governments subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two things—making planes in mass production, and getting millions of people to use them. The present war has anticipated normal progress in methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train; but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic American pattern of machines for mobility.

"The Richest Nation on Earth"

From free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast amount of wealth in America. Because land could not be the exclusive base of riches, wealth in America began to take on many meanings and, for the first time in history, a wealthy people began to emerge, instead of a wealthy nation.

We were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. The overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the gods; of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and clothing, we can always have enough; from South America, we can get foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing; except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw materials serviceable to all of us. So that our power to work, our way of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth.

We have a tradition about wealth, too. The Government, to some degree, has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any artificial bar to enterprise.

"Rugged Individuals"

Government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million Americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the Hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first New Deal. Perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real Americans" would reject Federal aid—a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks about Valley Forge. It was forgotten that the men who froze and swore at Valley Forge demanded direct Government aid the moment the Republic was established; and that the Cumberland Road, the artery from Fredericksburg, Maryland to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was built by the Government of the United States for its citizens. Government gave bounties and free land; Government gave enormous sums of money to industry by way of tariff, and gave 200 million acres of land to railroads. There was never a time when the Federal Government was not giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. The outcry when Government attempted to save all the citizens indicated an incomplete knowledge of our history. In particular, the steady reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for them to start again. The country, for all its obedience to financial power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. After the era of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished—and not pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty—the almost universal condition of man throughout the world—was not enough for America.

It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing wealth. The Axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is possible that Hitler has already succeeded, for like the Administration in 1931, Hitler can say that no one dies of starvation. Our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived, and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. This may betray a low liking for riches—but it has its good points also. It has helped to keep us free, which is something.

"Ye Shall Live in Plenty"

Wealth—and the prospect of wealth—are positive elements in the American makeup. We differ from large sections of Europe because we take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed in business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness.

The tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to do with forming the American character, because no one took it too seriously; the serious thing was that Americans all believed they could prosper. Those who did not, suffered a double odium—they were disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed the American legend. The legend existed because it corresponded to some of the facts of American life; only it persisted long after the facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the facts. We were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve equality of opportunity was choked off when Wilson had to abandon domestic reform to concentrate on the war.

Social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of America. In spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as Herbert Croly said it was in 1919, "that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy".

Normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. There have been people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have their special kinds of contentment in life. But with minor variations, most Western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the world it is certain that most people will get very little; in America it is assumed that all will get a great deal.

The struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again.

America Invented Prosperity

In this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can now look back on America's "money-madness" with some detachment; without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still is—and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. For it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money is not the beginning of a sound economy. People occasionally talk as if the desire for money is an American invention; actually our invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity.

For prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall.

The economics implied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a prosperous people. The great men who proclaimed liberty in 1776 have often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to run beside their political freedom. Actually they did not create either, leaving it to the separate States to say whether one man with one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it. As for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the country and impossible in the political climate of the time. The people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government; they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing economic controls—a highly concentrated government over a single, not a federated, nation. The men who fought the war of Independence did not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act while Congress was not in session; they erected no system of national courts; and Congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy, could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. When this system of Confederation broke down, the Constitution was carefully built up, to prevent Government from regulating the lives of the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. They did not ask Government to equalize anything but opportunity.

The "rich and well-born" managed to turn the Constitution to their own advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of the Constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time ... the fair prophecy of the Revolutionary era was surprisingly fulfilled."

The intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time; poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the United States was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. That was the reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and Statehood to territories. When the French Revolution began to settle down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a constant in the French character; nor did the upheaval in England in 1832 and under the Chartists leave a permanent hope for better things in the mind of the lower classes. The idea of class and the idea of a "station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted after all the Revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Only in America the Revolution set out to—and did—destroy the principle of natural inevitable poverty. We have not actually destroyed poverty, and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been publicized. But what we intended to do and what we accomplished and what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we failed to do. We created for the first time in history a nation which did not accept poverty as inevitable.

This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world. We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that, for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold, and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.

Our Fifty Years of Class War

From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy—the system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on prosperity.

The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself. Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had begun to limit enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.

We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.

Labor Troubles

The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.

The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of labor too often unfit. Like other organized groups, labor unions did not always consult the public good and criminals were found among them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the labor unions.

The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass, the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country backward in the habits of organized dealing between management and labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled principles—to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.

Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the settlement of all disputes.

Our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly because we shall remain for some time behind the other great industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. In normal times a British contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an American did; and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the future, all have to take this element into consideration. The false unity of December, 1941, resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes, no lockouts"; but within three months the National Labor Relations Board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. So much the more did we have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without self-imposture, act accordingly. The war gave an opportunity for statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities, and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy could be evolved, and we would have to fight the Axis while the Administration destroyed capital and Congress destroyed labor.

The Danger of Godlessness

I am listing certain actualities of American life, with notes on their sources, as a guide to conduct—particularly the conduct of the war (which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our habits. I have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. I come now to items which are no less potent because they are impalpable. Any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of America into play must count also on these.

We are a profoundly irreligious people. We are highly sectarian and we are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. We are not constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to Mankind, to the Universal Principle, to God. We live unaware even of a connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith.

The coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. As for the mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic" itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of God, is now associated with flummery and hoax.

We are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. In our good intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in our stride, we approach a new relation to others. We are capable of cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with God; they seek his will and bow to it. We exalt our own will.

This has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a practical unity difficult. If we had felt ourselves linked through God with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any job we had to do. I do not know whether any of the western democratic countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to the "blood" and the "race" of both Japan and Germany, the appeal to universal brotherhood in both China and Soviet Russia, indicate what a deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to abandon himself. And as this is the fundamental demand of the State in war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep universally shared feeling in America. We shall not find a substitute for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious actions and emotions which bring men together. Common fears we already have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (Fear and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of religious feeling; and point toward the center.) But I doubt whether the American people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling" which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as vain as our hope for better.

The Alger Factor

The end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the departure from Europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our Horatio Alger substitute for religious faith. The cool realistic appraisal of man's fate which an average Frenchman makes, the trust of the Englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference of the Russian peasant, the resignation of the Orient, are matched in America by an intense and confident appeal to action, in the faith that action will bring far better things than have been known. The vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. We have rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other peoples, the arts of Europe, the Asiatic life of contemplation, the wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints—but we have also rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to which they tend.

The "materialism" of America is not as terrible as it looks; and it must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. What aristocratic Europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. In the scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine covers were not equal to the Mona Lisa; within fifty years the Mona Lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. The first music popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible that on one Saturday or Sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire year. And both of these instances have another special point of interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio.

I shall return to the special field of creative work presently. On a "lower" level, note that some (not all) Europeans and all American expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. We multiply by twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably, without servants hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't think constantly of plumbing. The truth is that the few can buy themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand.

The Morals of Plenty

We have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those who do not try too hard to gain wealth. This was not good morality for a pioneering country, so Poor Richard preached the gospel of industry and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (Industry clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation; Franklin was economically right for his time; in 1920 we were preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and living on less than we needed.) The morals of plenty, by which we are usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (Like most moralities, this one has several faces; like most American products it adapts itself to a variety of needs.) In a broader field our morality denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be made by mass production). Mass production put an end to the old complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub—mass production of tubs and central heating in apartments. The morality of scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the chosen), the "civilized minority". Democracy began by declaring men born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create equality because it needed every man as a customer. Incomplete this was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the practical application of the Declaration, by way of the system of mass production; it was a working morality.

Merchant Prince to 5-and-Dime

We came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse; cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate time. We may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time when the American will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully as the Guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that substituted the goods of the many for the good of the few.

The five-and-ten had its parallels in Europe before the war, but it remains a distinguishing mark of America, and whoever wants to enlist us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. It is as near to a universal as we possess; I have known people who have never listened to the radio (until 1939) and never went to the movies, but I have never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the five-and-ten. It is a combination of good value and attractive presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. One finds cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the five-and-ten trade. The chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business.

In all these things the five-and-ten is a great American phenomenon; characteristic of the twentieth century as the crossroads general store was of the nineteenth. The hominess of the country store is gone and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. It is impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of American methods and enterprise and satisfactions. Small commerce is not universally held in esteem. When one remembers the fussiness of the average French bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in England, the five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective.

Prosperity and Politics

Our persistent intention is to make good the Declaration of Independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in conflict with ourselves. We attempted equal opportunity (with free land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to emancipate the Negro and we created an abominable factory system in the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers; sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political party, or a generation—but America did not forget. Each time we forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come back to create a free America. There was reason always for the years when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing; and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that America could create the materials for a high standard of life, although we could not put them into the proper hands. We justified supremely Stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made Society wealthy"; and we did it so handsomely as to leave questionable his further statement that Socialism will displace capitalism "because it can furnish Society with more products and make Society wealthier than the capitalist system can."

We planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and immigration policy, from the day Eli Whitney put the quantity system into action; and all of them required the same thing—equality of political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of education, the maximum of civil freedom. Our factories wanted free speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people, aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future, capable of earning and not afraid to spend—these are the customers required by mass production. And the same freedom, the same intention to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the future, are the marks of a free man. Our economic system with all its iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. The fact that individual producers were afraid of Debs in 1890 and whimpered for Mussolini in 1931 is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their prosperity. Only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest spenders.

The consequences of the Declaration are now beginning to be understood. The way we took the land and left it, or held it until it failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen, our State, and our God; our wealth and our endless optimism and our fulfilment of Democracy by technology are some of the basic elements in our lives. Whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts with these, among other, clues to discover what America is, will at least be on the right way. All we have to do in the war will rise out of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are.

CHAPTER XToC