Henry Seidel Canby

“ It is true that in the mass of American indifferentism [138] the suppressed religious instinct exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional enthusiasm for high things whether in war or in peace. It shows itself, or rather its suppression, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard places. It touches with melancholy many a typical American face in which one would expect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We struggle with our religious emotions in youth, suppress them in the middle years; in old age, deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment us. Old age is proverbially restless in America. ”

“ In the winter and spring of 1919, while the world was burning, while the principles we had shouted for were at last in actual settlement, this enormous American idealism slept, forgot its fine phrases, forgot its pledges to see the thing through, was bored because some Americans felt that it was our duty to see the thing through. We are an uncritical nation despite our occasional vehemence of criticism, but we have never been so uncritical of major issues as in 1919, when the terms of world settlement were of acute interest to all but Americans. ”

“ 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 [28] welcome the good. ”

“ RADICAL AMERICA IT is with no intention to be paradoxical that I call America a radical nation. I know well by experience, sometimes galling, what an English labor leader or a French socialist thinks of America, as he understands it. A mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground of the bourgeoisie, the birthplace of trusts, where even the labor-unions are capitalistic. If the world is to be saved for democracy, he says, it will not be by America. ”

“ I would make them into an academy whose fiat in general definition would be as valid as the French Academy’s in the meaning of a word. I would make it a legal offense for two men to quarrel over socialism when one means communism and the other state control of the post-office. I would, like the early Quakers, require arbitration for all disputants, especially in politics, knowing that a clear head would quickly discover that arguers on democracy conceivably meant anything from a standard collar for every one to nationalization of women. ”

“ And just as at the turn of the eighteenth century enthusiasts were clamoring for a new literature from America, in which freedom and liberty should have their apotheosis, so now the awakened consciousness of Americans of the older stock is clamoring for the expression of what they vaguely denominate, and still more vaguely describe, as Americanism. Like all such terms called forth by a crisis and displayed like a flag or a button, the term is at the same time indefinite and full of significance. Ten men and women will in ten different ways define it. ”

“ There is that in both our heredity and our environment which makes the American mind bad soil for the seed of foreign ideologies. They rain upon us, they germinate; but they do not make a crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; [65] our New World has kept us too cheerfully busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned too low over this blessed America for discontent which leads to dreaming, oppression which makes revolt, to be common among us. We “old Americans,” at least of this generation, are poor material for Bolshevism; even as socialists we are never more than half convinced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And then you feed him, nay, you cram him, with good traditional education, filling up the odd hours with the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. Then you subject him to a special cramming and send him to college, where sometimes he breaks through the net of convention woven about him, and sees the real world as it should appear to the student before he becomes part of it; but more frequently wraps himself deep and more deeply in conventional opinion, conventional practice, until, the limbs of his intellect bound tightly, he stumbles into the outer world. ”

“ Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism become an article of faith not an instrument of practice—all these are potential of decay, of explosion. We must look to our education. If it does not grip our life, we must change education. If life is not gripped, our life needs reforming. And the thing is so extraordinarily difficult that it is high time we ceased praising for a while the virtues of our forefathers or the wealth of our compatriots, and began the task. ”

“ Like them, it visits the minds of the living only in glimpses of the moon, and its influence, though wide-spread, is partial and easily forgotten in the noonday glare of active, practical life. Americans respect their education, but too seldom do they live by it.
It is a good tradition, this American ideal of noble and sturdy liberalism. The only detraction to be made is precisely that the education which embodies it is felt to be merely traditional. ”

“ I think that, while distrusting the economic paradise of the more material socialists, they are closer in sympathy to a thoughtful laborer than to a cynical capitalist. If the religious instinct among them emerges as a disgust for petty emotions, as a passionate interest in humanity, as a willingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for a fuller life more generously shared, if the religion of our democracy finds no more expression than this, the crisis will pass. ”

“ Such a society as a great American city presents has never before been seen in the world, not even in Rome, and the international democracy which it forecasts is worthy already of a great literature, has, indeed, already begun one. But we old Americans, even though our age is of only two generations, are not yet ready for international democracy. Our own racial character has not received its final stamp, come to full self-expression, established itself as the permanent influence upon the world’s development which our career and our opportunities should make it. ”

“ And one wonders, meeting everywhere an interest in world affairs that seems dying, a national morale that is forgetting its moral impulses, a hatred of the professional idealist, a weariness of general principles, and a cynical distrust of ideas—one wonders whether this flaming American idealism so-called was not even in 1918 flushed with disease, a virtue already dying. ”

“ Consider the case of our radical papers who fought our entrance into a war where American ideals were not properly safeguarded, and then preferred to risk a treaty without the League of Nations, to a league which, though it expressed American idealism, was not perfect by their judging. Consider the flaming desire to make the universe and one’s home safe for democracy, in contrast with the current contempt for the ideals of industrial democracy. Perforce one wonders whether American idealism, healthy or diseased, is not a mere emotion, easily roused, never lasting ”

“ Idealism kept us out of war, and idealism drove us into it.
The fume and spume of idealism is oratory, sermonizing, talk about morality, duty, patriotism, rights, and noble purposes. All such gushing rhetoric is no more the thing itself than foam is the ocean. But, like smoke, there is seldom much of it without cause. Men and women who were abroad in 1918 must reflect curiously on the, shall we say, wearisome prevalence of the moralistic, idealistic note in American speech and writing in contrast to its restraint and frequent absence in France and England. ”

“ But a revolution drives men back upon their principles, makes them scan willingly or unwillingly the things they live by—the prejudices, enlightenments, interpretations, convictions that in the largest sense are their education. And this is true not only of rapid revolutions, like the French and the Russian, but of slow ones, such as that revolution which has been slowly gathering headway in English-speaking countries for three decades or more, that revolution of social and industrial conditions now rapidly accelerating. ”

“ Every socialist and communist, every corporation president and ex-Secretary, every professional intellectual and amateur prophet, is declaring his mind on the one thing needful to save the world and America. I do not know why we, whose profession it is to teach, whose duty it is to interpret and to sympathize with every motion of the American mind, should [124] hesitate to speak out also in this matter. It is, I think, demonstrable that America needs religion as much as steel and automobiles, as much as a better distribution of wealth and cheaper bread and meat. ”

“ They can live happily only in a life where ideas never exceed the college sixty per cent of complexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic experience lies too far outside the range of their curriculum. A world where one reads the news and skips the editorials; goes to musical comedies, but omits the plays; looks at illustrated magazines, but seldom at books; talks business, sports, and politics, but never economics, social welfare, and statesmanship—that is the world for which we coddle the best of our youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by their own innate originality ”

“ The break between our education and the life we are living again widens, and it is this break which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily defensible; the hustling vigor of our life is also defensible. The trouble is that in ordinary times they fail somehow or another to connect. Education grows bloodless. Life becomes aimless or merely self-regarding. What we believe grows pallid and fades before it transmutes into what we do. ”

“ And neither our churches, which are rigidly bourgeois, nor our universities, which are ponderously bourgeois, and both trading in security, offer leadership that guarantees escape.
Or will we attempt to federalize this world that apparently we have conquered, allowing autonomy for races of ideas, nations of customs, and room enough for plantations of new desires in our fat fields? Will we tolerate fineness, encourage variety, permit heresy, prepare for change? It is said by way of compliment that here in America we have neither aristocrats nor peasants. ”

“ And our common sense, diluted through millions, obsessed by the problems of manufacture and construction, is in ever greater danger of losing that basis of character and enlightened reason that alone can make common sense anything but common. It dreads ideas, distrusts theories, is made uncomfortable by altruism [114] that extends beyond the home. As a nation, we have not degenerated, for our virile energy, our will, our adaptiveness are all as strong as ever, stronger perhaps than elsewhere in the world. But, as compared with Franklin’s, our common sense has lost character. ”

“ If we live by it, education itself stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, adapts itself like an organism to environment. If we live without and beyond and in neglect of education, as many “practical” Americans have always done once they left school or college, education decays, and sooner or later the man decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration of busyness, which is the modern equivalent of barbarism.
Once before, and far more seriously, a civilization was threatened because its education became merely traditional and ceased to function [59] in practical life. ”

“ And here is another palpable strain of Americanism, differing from that necessity which Edwards trumpeted, but, like it, a stiffener of idealistic impulses. Here one places the love of a square deal, the desire to do what is right because it is “fair,” the sense of the reasonableness of justice that freed the slaves, gave Cuba self-government, determined our policy toward the Philippines, and was horror-struck by the invasion of Belgium. It is the idealism of good common sense, and together with the mental habit of willing the right has been a main cause of American idealism. ”

“ With all humbleness, with a full realization of the trivialities of hustle and bustle in which we have sunk our religion, with concern for our escape from easy-going optimism and skeptical content, I, for one, feel too sure of the depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the fundamental religiosity of the American character at its truest, to admit for a moment that conclusion of despair. ”

“ Indeed, if strength of purpose, if energy, if a burning desire to change, to better the minds, the bodies, or the tools of men, were all that could be asked of radicalism, then we might well rest content with the achievements of the American idealist-radical. But more has been asked of the reformer, even of the reformer of business methods, than energy and will. The radicalism I have described, based upon common sense and inspired by restless virility, has not always been adequate. The pioneering days are ended when a good shot could always get game, a strong arm always find plowlands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The responsibility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be personal. It will come to the question of how much religion is possessed by the normal American. When he is aroused by a struggle that sweeps into far wider questions than the tariff or the income tax, when his method of working, his method of living, his method of thinking, are all challenged by a new and militant social order, more dormant idealism, more latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be aroused than one would ever have suspected in that shrewd and easy-going face in the Pullman smoker. Will religion be aroused also? ”

“ They have not been realized; and this is one reason for the prevailing idea that literary America has been a disappointment, that the life of the mind in America has lagged behind its opportunities, that we are a backward race in literature and the arts. We seem children to-day beside the dreams of our ancestors.
It is easy enough to see now that a race which had to construct a nation in a continent in large part scarcely habitable was not ready to sing the epic of freedom. ”

“ Potentially the most ardent supporters of a purely materialistic socialism, in which the individual person counts for nothing aside from his appetites, are precisely the “practical” business men who now curse the new order most loudly because it threatens their accumulations. For them it is civil war between seekers for the dollar; and civil war is always the bitterest, and the soonest healed. Such men have been our leaders. Is the army behind them?
I think that the rank and file of bourgeois America are less concerned with wealth and the struggle for wealth than we suppose. ”