Germans As Freemen
If it is so, then the great triumph of America is that in America even the Germans have become good citizens, lovers of liberty, quick to resent dictation. They have fought for good government from the time of Carl Schurz; for freedom of the press since the days of Zenger; they have hated tyranny and corruption since the time of Thomas Nast; they have fought for the oppressed since the time of Altgeld. Of the six million Germans who emigrated, the vast majority were capable of living peaceably and serviceably with their fellowmen. Of these six, one million fled from reactionary governments after the democratic revolution of 1848 had failed, millions of others came to escape the harsh imperialism of victorious Germany after 1870. To them, the Germany of the Kaiser was undesirable, the Germany of Hitler unthinkable. Yet their countrymen, left behind, tolerated one and embraced the other with sickening adulation. It is as if America had drawn off the six million Germans capable of understanding and taking part in a democratic civilization, leaving the materials for Hitlerism behind.
In any case, the Germans in America have proved that Hitler lies to the Germans; they are neither a superior race nor a people incapable of self-government; they will not rule the world, nor be a nation of slaves.
The Brotherhood of the Oppressed
We can say this to the Germans, destroying their illusions and their fears at one stroke. How much more we can say to the great patient peoples whom Germany now enslaves! They have seen the German conquest of Continental Europe; the ascendancy of the Teutonic-Aryan is complete. What can the Norwegian or the Bulgar or the Rumanian believe,except that there is a superior race—and it is not his own?
Fortunately for us, the European has never ceased to believe in America, in us. Not as a military race, not as a race at all; but as people of incredible good fortune in the world. And we can say to every man who has bowed his head, but kept his heart bitter against Hitler, that we have the proof of the equal dignity of every man's soul, a proof which Hitlerism can never destroy. We can say to the Greeks who see the swastika over the Parthenon and the Norwegian whose bed is stripped of its comforters, and to the Serb still fighting in the mountain passes, the one thing Hitler dares not let them believe—that they are as good as other men. We have the proof that under liberty Croats and Finns and Catalans and Norwegians are as good as Germans—because they are men, because under liberty there is no end to what they and their children may accomplish.
If we ever again think that this is oratory, we shall lose our greatest hope of a free world. The orators were too often promising too much because they were betraying America on the side; still they could not falsify the truth which the practical men and the poets both had discovered:America means opportunity. Now we can see the vast implications of the simple assertion. Because America meant opportunity, we can incite riot against Hitler in the streets of Oslo and Prague and even in Vienna; we have proved that given opportunity, freed of artificial impediments, men walk erect, do their work, collaborate to rule over and be ruled by their fellowmen; and that there is no master race, no master class.
This is our address to the people of Europe—that we believe in them, because we know them. We know they can free themselves because they have shown the instincts of free men here; we know they are destined to create a free Europe.
The people of Europe have to know that we are their friends. It will be hard for us to make some of them believe it—as the French did not believe it when we failed to break the British blockade in their favor. But we must persuadethem—we have their brothers and mothers and sons here to speak for us.
It was not easy for Woodrow Wilson to speak to the Germans and the Austrians. He had no radio; his facilities for pamphleteering were limited. But he succeeded. Our task is formidable enough; because the radio is so guarded, it may be harder for us to reach the captured populations. But it can be done and will be, as soon as we see how necessary the job is.
Our First Effective Front
We have a job with Germans and Italians, too. Not with Germany and Italy, which must be defeated; not with their rulers who must be annihilated; but with the people, the simple, ignorant masses of people, the day laborers and the housewives; and with the intelligent section of the middle class which resisted fascism too little and too late, but never accepted it. We have to revive the spirit of moderate liberation which fell so ignominiously between Communism and fascism; and we have to restore communication with the Socialists in Dachau, the Communist cells in Italy and Germany.
I am not trying to predict the form of our propaganda. We shall probably try to scare our enemies and to cajole them; to prove them misled; to promise them security if they revolt. None of these things will be of much use if we forget to tellthe peoplethat their brothers are here with us—and that we are not enemies. It has seemed to us in the past year that we have a quarrel with more of the German people than we had in 1918; we are contemptuous of the Italians; but it is still our business to distinguish between the Storm Troopers and their unfortunate victims, between the lackeys of fascism and the easy-going Italian peasant who never knew what had hit him. There are millions of Germans and Italians in America, who were once exactly like the Germans and Italians in Europe; they have undergone the experience ofliberty while their brothers have been enslaved; but we must be hard-headed enough to know that our greatest potential allies, next to the embittered captives of the Nazi regime, are the Italians and Germans who could not come to America in the past twenty years.
The golden opportunity of talking to the people of Europe before we went to war has been missed. Now it is harder for us, but it is not impossible. We have to counter the despair of Europe with the hope of America. The desperation of the occupied territories rises from the belief that the Germans are invincible and that they themselves are doomed to servility; to that we reply with the argument of war—but in the first part of our war, the argument will be hard to follow; we shall be pushed back, as the British were, because we are not yet ready for the offensive; so for a year perhaps our very entrance into the war will tend to increase the prestige of our enemies. Therefore, in this time, we must use other powers, our other front, to touch sources of despair: our counter-propaganda must rebuild the self-respect of the Europeans, of those who resisted and were conquered and even of those who failed to resist. We can send them the record of heroism of their fellow-countrymen in our armies; if we can reach them, we should smuggle a sack of flour for every act of sabotage they commit; and we should send them at once a rough sketch, if not a blueprint, of a post-war world in which they will have a part—with our plans for recovering what was stolen from them, rebuilding what was destroyed, and restoring the liberty which in their hearts they never surrendered.
And there is a special reason why we must speak promptly. We have to declare our unity to Europe in order to destroy the antagonisms which our enemies will incite at home. It will be good fascist propaganda to lead us to attack Americans of German and Italian birth or parentage; our enemies will say that the unity of America is a fraud, that we have only welcomed Italians and Germans to make them supportthe Anglo-Saxon upper classes—and that "good Europeans" can never become good Americans. The moment we give any pretext for this propaganda, our communication withallof Europe is lost.
Short Wave to Ourselves
We cannot afford to lose our only immediate weapon. We have to anticipate the Italo-German blow at our national unity by our own attack, led by Italians and Germans who are Americans. We have to remain united so that we can deal effectively with Europe and every time we speak to Europe, we can reinforce the foundations of unity at home. We have not achieved a perfect balance of national elements, and in the past few years we have tolerated fascist enemies, we have seen good Americans being turned into fascists and bundists while our leaders made loans to Mussolini or dined with Goering and came back to talk of peace. It is possible that a true fifth column exists and, more serious, that a deep disaffection has touched many Americans of European birth. We have to watch the dangerous ones; the others have to be re-absorbed into our common society—and we can best take them in by the honesty and the friendliness of our relation with their fellowmen abroad. We have to tell the Italians here what we are saying to the Umbrian peasant and the factory worker in Milan and the clerk in a Roman bank whose movements are watched by a German soldier; the Germans, too. And what we say has to be confident and clear and consistent. For months the quarrel about short wave has continued and Americans returning from Europe have wept at the frivolity and changeableness and lack of imagination in our communications to men who risk their lives to hear what we have to say; it was incredible to them that this vital arm of our attack on Hitler should have been left so long unused, that anyone who could pay could say something to someone in Europe, within the limits of safety, to be sure, but not within the limits of a coordinated policy. One couldadvise the Swedes to declare war or assure them that we understood why they did not; one could do almost as much for France.
Short wave to Europe is a mystery to the average citizen; he does not pick it up, and would be only mildly interested if he did. In his mind, that sort of propaganda should be left to the experts; as it is in other lands. But in our case, there are re-echoes at home. Not a "government in exile" speaks from America, but we have here part of many nations, emigrated and transformed, but still with understanding of all that was left behind. We have to think of the Norwegians in Minnesota when we speak to the Norwegians in the Lofotens; the Germans in Yorkville and the Poles in Pittsburgh should know what we say to Berlin and to Warsaw. Our words have to help win the war, and to begin the reconciliation of Europe without which we are not safe. That reconciliation we have turned into a positive thing, a cooperative life which has made us strong; we have to tell Europe what we have done, how Europe has lived in us. We may have to promise and to threaten, too; but mostly we will want to destroy the myth of America-Against-Europe by showing the reality of Europe-in-America; we will want to destroy the lie of an Anglo-Saxon America by letting all the voices be heard of an American America; we will want to destroy the rumor of a disunited America by uniting all the voices in one declaration of ultimate freedom—for Europe and for ourselves.
Europe will ask, if it can reach us, what freedom will mean, how we will organize it, how far we mean to go. If we want to answer honestly, we will have to take stock quickly of what we have—and can offer.
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 ofthe 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; whatweare 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 weknowall 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 withitsconsequences in the temper of the people, all go back to this mathematicalfact.)
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 fulfilledor 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 takenplace—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 wasrealestate, 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 (orPrinceps) 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 "rapeof 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 theindustryof 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. Thismay 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.
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:
our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war against neighboring states;we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger could find more and better land);the national center of gravity was constantly changing as population moved to take up new land;we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were constantly opening new frontiers;our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and education, for instance) at the same time;we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.
our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war against neighboring states;
we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger could find more and better land);
the national center of gravity was constantly changing as population moved to take up new land;
we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were constantly opening new frontiers;
our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable;
we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and education, for instance) at the same time;
we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of political revolution, known then as the Populist movement.
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 aroundthe 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 thousandsannually, 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 Europeangovernmentssubsidized 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 inhistory, 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 moneyto 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 saveallthe 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 inbusiness, 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 nosystem 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 aconstantin 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 afterallthe 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 ourachievement 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 tolimitenterprise 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.