Читать книгу Everyday Americans - Henry Seidel Canby - Страница 6

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IN England there developed long ago, perhaps as far back as the days of Shakespeare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and democratic in his sympathies, a curious political animal called the radical-conservative. The radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once said, is a man who would have been a radical outright if radicals had not been dissenters; by which he clearly meant that the species agreed with radical principles, but objected to radicals because they did not have good manners, seldom played cricket, and never belonged to the best clubs. Therefore the radical-conservative stays in his own more congenial class while working for social justice toward all other classes. He is willing to vote with the conservative party in return for concessions in labor laws, inheritance taxes, or the safeguarding of public health.

Thence arises the curious circumstance, most mystifying to foreigners, that a good share of the really progressive legislation in Great Britain of the last half-century has been led by young gentlemen from Oxford and Cambridge who have no more intention of becoming part of the proletariate than of leaving off their collars and going without baths. Bismarck was an out-and-out conservative who for his own nefarious ends furthered what a Rhode Island Republican or an Ulster Tory would call radical measures. But Lord Robert Cecil in our own day is a convinced aristocrat, as befits a son of Lord Salisbury, who is more sincerely effective than many Liberals in various movements which we are accustomed to call reform.

The conservative-liberal is quite a different animal and far commoner, far more familiar to Americans, even if they have never called him by that name. His habitat is America, and thanks to the populousness of this country, he is beginning to have a very important influence outside of his habitat. To define him is difficult, but for purposes of rough classification he may be said to be the man whose native liberal instincts have been crystallized by a combination of interesting circumstances—and sometimes petrified. He is the man who was born a liberal in a liberal country and intends to remain as he was born. He is the man who will fight for the freedom proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence against any later manifestation of the revolutionary spirit. He believes in conserving in unaltered purity the principles of life, government, and industry that his forefathers rightly believed to be liberal. In brief, he is a revolutionary turned policeman, a progressive who stands pat upon his progress, a conservative-liberal. I believe that he is our closest approximation to a typical American mind.

Whether familiar or not, the effects of this political disease—for it is a disease, a hardening of the arteries of the mind—are easily observable all about us in the America of to-day. Indeed, we see them so frequently that they awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in any intellectual sense of the word. They are like our clear atmosphere, our mixture of races, our hurried steps—things we scarcely notice until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an outsider. I am so much a part of America that I find it difficult to detach myself from a mood that is mine in common with many other Americans. And yet, once one sees it plainly, the educated conservatism of liberal America becomes portentous, a unique political phenomenon.

I think that this peculiarity of our political thinking first became evident to me on an ocean voyage in war-time. There were a score or so of Americans on board, members, most of them, of various government missions, picked business men, picked professional men, thoroughly intelligent, intensely practical, and entirely American. They were democratic, too, as we use the word in America; that is, good “mixers,” free from snobbery, and nothing new in action was alien to their sympathies. They could remold you a business or a legal practice in half an hour’s conversation; tear down an organization and build it up again between cigars. Their committee meetings went off like machine-guns, whereas the English officers and trade diplomats, when they got together, snarled themselves in set speeches and motions and took an afternoon to get anywhere. The English, indeed, seemed puzzled and a little dazed by the ease with which the Americans seized upon and put through reorganization of any kind. They seemed positively to leap at change, so long as basic ideas were not involved. “Nothing,” said an Indian colonel, “is sacred to them. They would scrap the empire and build a new one—on paper—at sixty miles an hour.”

He was quite wrong. The system my countrymen lived by permitted change, urged change, up to a certain point. They would demolish a ten-story building to erect one of twenty or scrap thousands of machines in order to adopt a better process, but when it came to principles and institutions they were conservative. The founders of their social and political order had been almost a century ahead of the times. The instruments of life and of government they had provided had served with slight modifications for the free-moving America of the nineteenth century. It had been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, to realize the liberality and democracy possible under the Constitution, to work out the independence available for the common man in a rich and undeveloped country in which his political power guaranteed him every advantage that could be gained in a capitalistic system, including the acquisition of capital. It had been a splendid game, and our wits had been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, our prosperity fortified, our self-confidence enormously increased in playing it. Given our rules, we could play the game more resourcefully than any other people on earth. And they were wise rules, which provided for growth, but not for a different kind of contest. We were so sure that America stood for freedom, independence, and liberality in general that we could not take seriously people who did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that there might be an idea of democracy different from our own.

Indeed, on board that ship, a curious experience came to all of us, Englishmen, Americans, and I, the humble observer, when in the course of argument or conference the theories of life upon which we were variously living came momentarily into view. The Americans, it was clear, were certain that they were the most progressive people in the world. This certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman Catholic; it gave them elasticity and daring. Being sure of their principles, so sure as to be almost unaware of them, they ignored precedents, and solved or dismissed problems with equal ease. They made plans for a league of nations, they approved of a temporary autocracy for the President, they put the labor question on a business basis, and so disposed of it; they were afraid of nothing but a failure to act and act quickly. Nevertheless, as they talked and worked with the English, it became increasingly evident that their road ended in a wall.

There were walls on the English road, too—walls of caste thinking and social privilege that seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an office building. Our wall was invisible to most of us, and as a body we never tried to pass it at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas, beyond which, if we thought of it at all, presumably lay socialism, anarchy, chaos.

Just that far the American mind, like some light tank, ran, surmounting everything, taking to the fields if the road was blocked, turning, backing, doing everything but stop; only to halt dead at the invisible barrier, and zigzag away again. By such a free-moving process within the limits of law we had scrambled across a continent in turbulent, individualistic exploitation, and yet had built a sound political system carefully and well. And there we had stopped, convinced that we had solved the problem of democracy and equal opportunity for all. This explains why America is twenty years behind the best of Europe in social and economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed reform more than we did). This is what it is to be a conservative-liberal.

The Englishman is different. He is much more likely to be an obstinate Tory, blocking all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by a system as antiquated as feudalism; or if not a Tory, then an out-and-out radical eager for a legal revolution. But in either case he knows what different-minded men are thinking; and if there is a wall on his road, he looks over it. If he is a Tory, he understands radicalism and fights it because he prefers an inequality that favors him to a more logical system that might be personally disagreeable. If he is a radical, he understands Toryism. But the American conservative-liberal acknowledges no opinion except his own. He insists, in the words of a contemporary statesman, that the American system, as founded by our forefathers, is the best in the world, and he is not interested in others. There are a thousand proofs that it is not the best possible system even for America, and plenty of them are in print—proofs advanced by capitalists as well as labor leaders, by Catholics as well as socialists; but they do not trouble him, because he neither hears nor reads them. It is easier to call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik.

This is the liberal-conservative mind that will not look beyond its own fixed principles and refuses to understand those who differ from it; that suffers a kind of paralysis when confronted by genuine radicalism. The American college undergraduate has it to perfection. Bubbling over with energy, ready for anything in the practical world of struggle or adventure, he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he has inherited as a girl of her reputation. He is armored against new thinking. The American business man fairly professes it. He speculates in material things with an abandon that makes a Frenchman pale; but new principles in the relations of trade to general welfare, questions of unearned increment, first bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him.

And yet the college undergraduates, after hatching, and the American business man have made for us a very comfortable America, just now the safest place in the world to live in, the most prosperous country in the world, the most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way of doing things has its great advantages. America is its product, and the ranter who describes the United States as the home of super-capitalism, a sink of cheaply exploited labor, a dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity, does not seem to be able to persuade even himself that the United States is not the best of all countries for a permanent residence.

And the great Americans of the past have nearly all been conservative-liberals. Washington was a great republican; he was also essentially an aristocrat in social and economic relations, who kept slaves and did not believe in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically, was the greatest of English-speaking democrats, but he let the privileged classes exploit the working-man and the soldier, partly in order to win the war, chiefly because problems of wages and unearned increments and economic privilege generally did not enter into his scheme of democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for the square deal in public and private life, but hesitated and at last turned back when it became evident that a deal that was completely square meant the overturning of social life as he knew and loved it in America.

And these men we feel were right. Their duty was to make possible a good government and a stable society, and they worked not with theories only, but also with facts as they were. The Germans have argued that the first duty of the state is self-preservation, and that rights of individual men and other states may properly be crushed in order to preserve it. We have crushed the Germans and, one hopes, their philosophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of society to preserve itself. No one believes that universal suffrage for all, negroes included, would have been advisable in Washington’s day, when republicanism was still an experiment. No one believes, I fancy, that the minimum wage, the inheritance tax, and coöperative management should have had first place, or indeed any place, in the mind of the Lincoln of 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a socialist would have been as useful to the United States as Roosevelt the Progressive with a back-throw toward the ideals of the aristocratic state; as Roosevelt the conservative-liberal.

But too great reliance on even a great tradition has its disadvantages. I know an American preparatory school that for many college generations has entered its students at a famous university with the highest of examination records, and a reputation for courtesy and cleanness of mind and soundness of body scarcely paralleled elsewhere. I have watched these boys with much interest, and I have seen them in surprising numbers gradually decline from their position of superiority as they faced the rapid changes of college life, as they settled into a new environment with different demands and more complex standards. They leaned too heavily upon their admirable schooling; they were too confident of the strength and worth of their tradition; they looked backward instead of forward, and stood still while less favored men went on. Their fault was the fault of American liberalism, which stands pat with Washington and Roosevelt and Lincoln.

Perhaps the greatest teacher in nineteenth-century American universities was William Graham Sumner. In his day he was called a radical, and unsuccessful efforts were made to oust him from his professorship because of his advocacy of free trade. Now I hear him cited as a conservative by those who quote his support of individualism against socialism, his distrust of coöperation against the league of nations. His friends forget that an honest radical in one age would be an honest radical in another; and that the facts available having changed, it is certain that his opinions would change also, although just what he would advocate, just how decide, we cannot certainly know. Is it probable that Dante, the great advocate of imperial control in a particularistic medieval world, would have been a pro-German in 1914? The American liberal who proclaims himself of the party of Lincoln, and is content with that definition, might have an unpleasant shock if that great reader of the heart of the common man could resume his short-cut life.

Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same disadvantages as inherited money: all the owner has to do is to learn how to keep it; in other words, to become a conservative. That is what is going on in America. While we were pioneers in liberty and individualism, wealth and opportunity and independence were showered upon us, and although wealth for the average man is harder to come by, and opportunity is more and more limited to the fortunate, and independence belongs only to good incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal keeps the pioneer’s optimism, and is satisfied to take ready-made a system that his ancestors wrought by painful and open-minded experiment. In practice he is still full of initiative and invention; in principle he can conceive of only one dispensation, the ideas of political democracy which were the radicalism of 1861 and 1840 and 1789 and 1776.

Suppose that he could conceive of industrial democracy, of a system where every man began with an equal share of worldly privilege as he begins now with an equal share of worldly rights. Would he not work it out, with his still keen practicality, and test its value precisely as he tests a new factory method or an advertising scheme? But he cannot conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispensation. His liberalism turns conservative at the thought. It was different with political democracy and With religious toleration. The first cannot even now be said to be precisely a perfect system, and the second has left us perilously near to having no religion at all. Nevertheless, the liberal ancestor of our American never doubted that they were his problems, to be worked out to some solution. He followed boldly where they led.

What has happened to the political and economic thinking of many an American much resembles what has happened to his religion. He learns at church a number of ethical principles which would make him very uneasy if put into practice. He learns the virtue of poverty, the duty of self-sacrifice, the necessity of love for his fellow-man. Now, saintly poverty has not become an ideal in America—certainly not in New York or Iowa or Atlantic City—nor is self-sacrifice common among corporations, or love a familiar attribute of the practice of law. Does the American therefore eschew the ethics of Christianity? On the contrary. Religion is accepted at its traditional value. The church grows richer and more influential—within limits. The plain man keeps all his respects for religion as an ideal; but he regards it precisely as an ideal, a formula beautiful in its perfection, not to be sullied by too close an application, not to be worked out into new terms to fit a new life.

And that is just what the conservative-liberal does with the vigorous liberalism of his forefathers. He buries it in his garden, and expects to dig it up after many days, a bond with coupons attached. He has accepted it as the irrevocable word of Jehovah establishing the metes and bounds wherein he shall think. It is his creed; and like the creeds of the church, the further one gets from its origins, the greater the repugnance to change. He stands by the declaration of his forefathers; stands pat, and begs to be relieved of further abstract discussion. Business is pressing; controversy is bad for business; ideas are bad for business; change is bad for business: let well enough alone.

But by all odds the most important fact as regards this conservative-liberal mind of which I have been writing remains to be stated, and that is its success, for it is now the prevailing mind in America. As our soldiers in France, though bearing Italian names, Irish names, Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet and uniform looked all, or nearly all, like the physical type we call American, so in this confusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, polylingual, built upon fragments of the empires of England and Spain and Russia and France, there is indubitably a mental type which we may call with some confidence American, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its instincts conservative.

Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demonstrable that this American mental type is the most definite national entity to be found anywhere in the Western world. I know that this sounds paradoxical. We have heard much for several years now of the lack of homogeneity in America. We felt in 1914 our German-Americans cleave away from us (to be sure, they came back); we saw in 1918 and 1919 the radical socialist and the I. W. W. and the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms that were certainly not American as the ’nineties knew America. We began to realize that the immigrant changes his language more quickly than his mores, and frequently changes neither. All this is true. And yet, in spite of it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at things which we know so well in America comes nearer to being a definite national psychology that acts in expected fashions, has qualities that you can describe as I have been describing them, and characteristics common to all varieties of it, than either the “British mind” or the “French mind” of which we write glibly.

For the British mind includes the Irish, which is as different from the English as a broncho from a dray-horse. It includes the Tory mind and the Liberal mind, which in England are as dissimilar as were Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. It includes, if we use it loosely, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Asquith and H. G. Wells, each of whom represents a considerable British constituency. And they could no more think alike on any topic on the earth below or the heavens above than a Turk, a Greek, and a Jew. Certain fundamental attitudes would unite all three of these latter if they were civilized: they would all eat with knives and forks. And in the same fashion certain definite racial traits unite the Britons aforementioned. But the differences imposed by social caste or diverging political and social philosophies are far greater than anything to be found in everyday America, which latter I define as lying between the fringe of recent immigrants on the one hand and the excrescences of Boston intellectual aristocrats or New York radical intellectuals on the other.

Is there a “French mind”? Intellectually and esthetically, perhaps yes. Politically and socially, to a less degree of uniformity than can be found in America. From the simple homogeneity of France, as we casuals see it, has crystallized out the aristocracy and much of the church, whose respective parties differ not merely as regards the policy of the Government, but are still opposed to that Government itself.

The United States, far more heterogeneous in race, far less fixed in national character, threatened by its masses of aliens, who are in every sense unabsorbed, is yet much more homogeneous in its thinking. In America weekly magazines for men and women spread everywhere and through every class but the lowest, and so does this conservative-liberalism in politics and social life which I have tried to define. In Connecticut and Kansas and Arizona it is displayed in every conversation, as our best known national weekly (itself conservative-liberal) is displayed on every news-stand. Irrespective of racial or financial differences, everywhere in America, between the boundaries I have already indicated—the alien immigrant on one hand, the advanced intellectual on the other—nine out of ten of us are conservative-liberals; everywhere, indeed, throughout the American bourgeoisie, which with us includes skilled laborer and farmer, professional man and millionaire.

And the mental habits of this contemporary American are of more than local importance. We who are just now so afraid of internationalism are more likely than any other single agency to bring it about. Our habits of travel, our traverse of class lines, our American way of doing things, are perhaps the nearest approximation of what the world seems likely to adopt as a modern habit if the old aristocracies break down everywhere, if easy transportation becomes general, if there is wide-spread education, if Bolshevism does not first turn our whole Western system upside down. Already in newspapers and books, in theaters and politics, in social intercourse and in forms of music and language, one sees all through Western Europe (and, they say, also in the East) the American mode creeping in, to be welcomed or cursed according to circumstances. And those great international levelers, the movies, are American in plot and scene and idea and manners from one end to the other of a film that stretches round the world.

Thus the American mind is worth troubling about; and if politically, socially, economically the spirit that we and the foreigners call American has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is time to awake. In liberalism inheres our vitality, our initiative, our strength. Its stagnation, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves of freedom sweeping upward from the masses and on in broken and muddy torrents through the world are poignant dangers. We must open eyes; we must change our ground; we must fight the evil in the new revolution, but welcome the good. Our own revolution lies before the deluge; it is no longer enough to go on; it is not now the sufficing document of a political philosophy. We must not stop with Washington and Lincoln. We must go on where the conservative Washington and the radical Lincoln would lead if they were our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism is good, and Toryism or radicalism have their uses; but conservative-liberalism, preserved, desiccated, museum liberalism, long continued in, is death to the minds that maintain it.