The temper of the American people

Front matter

BY

GEORGE THOMAS SMART

A chield's amang you takin' notes.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Fact, Idea, axd Fkfj.txg rv America ... S n. The Sen'se of History in America .

in. Political Feelings in .America ....

Chapter I Fact, Idea, And Feeling In America

IT is common for the unimaginative but effective man to decry ideas and overestimate action; and never has this been the general temper of the men who constitute the "efficient" more than today. For Atlantic civilization, — which seems a better term than Anglo- Saxon, — is idolatrous of the energy that apphes itself to a new ordering of things. Contemporary civilization, therefore, appears to be material, and to be suspicious of the infatuation with ideas that affected some periods of the Renaissance, or some classes in pre-Revolutionary France. WTiile our own day has outer marks as spectacular as any period of antiquity, it often seems to miss the old concomitant of joy, and this is perhaps due in part to the fact that it is assumed, because of the affirmation of leading persons, to be more material in process and goal than is actually the case.

Moreover, the undisciplined and ineffective masses are subject to this impression. No longer do they remain "mute trainbearers " rotting in the ditch, or fighting for some "glorious victory" of whose origin and end they are ignorant; they have declared for indi\'iduality, and individuality means to them energy self-directed and self-rewarded. So by the side of more ordered spectacles on sea and land set in motion by captains of industry and aiming at material results, there is an uneasy attempt at combined action on the part of the denser masses, often misjudged and sad, even tragic; but inexpressibly moving to the lover of his kind.

This concept of modern civilization as basely material also gains ground in the minds of the cultured few, who, because of the loneliness of luxury, or the diffidence of an over-delicate sensitiveness, stand too far away from human reality to know what it truly means. In England the aristocrat lives in Mayfair, or in a demesne in the country where he can shut out the peeping and pathetic crowd, and where he can be free of the bourgeoisie. To be free of the struggling and partly educated middle class is more the note of English aristocracy than to be free of the peasantry; for the latter are needed as sceneshifters and supporters of the social fabric, while the former are only possible invaders of the holy precincts. The American of the same type goes abroad. He lives in Rome, Paris, Madrid, walking the galleries when they are least troubled with tourists, and stepping into an older society when it is needy or inadvertent. In both cases the real meanings of men are misunderstood, and the social phenomena are as poorly classified as biological particulars would be if these Sybarites should dabble in science.

This impression of the prevalence and domination of material factors in our contemporary life is not surprising when we think of the display of the material side of our civilization, and the slow percolation natural to ideas as they mix with life, and the way history has always heard the "drums and tramplings of conquest" and has been deaf to the inner voices of the spirit. The matter has not been helped either by the emergence of men like

Disraeli in England or Mr. Roosevelt in America, who were "efficient" in the sense dear to the practical man, that is, successful and public, speaking in stentorian tones to be heard by posterity. Nor has it been helped by the laureates of progress, who speak of the mechanical achievements of men and their individualism, represented at one extreme by Whitman, who will allow nothing in the world bigger or better than himseK, and at the other by Mr. Kipling, who sings indifferently the psean of throbbing engines, or of beating hearts set to forward an Imperialistic scheme.

II

It is not uncommon to find in Europe an immense prejudice against American life, that utters itself with a certain superciliousness in the one word "material." And this cue has been followed by some of the finer spirits in America itself, who have spoken almost despairingly of "our material civiUzation." In the end, as a result of this double authority, it is now common to find the less instructed man somewhat apologetic, a little insecure about his own country, and inclined to acquiesce in the word "material" as summing it up.

The true apologist is not the defender so much as the interpreter, and the interpreter tries to see why the word "material" should be so frequently used in connection with American civilization. He surmises that it is material because it is constituted of so many materials. All civilization is material on the instrumental side, and in general it is a higher civilization in proportion to the instruments it has. No civilization can get away from its physical and economic foundations, or even from the instinctive passions of men, though it clothes them in silk to forget them, or transmutes them into the mate-

6 The Temper of the A me r lean People

rials of art. History has discovered at last with astonishment that its most purple pages are due to physical and economic causes. These causes and passions are still present and they may break through the civil order again if provoked, as they did in many a bloody episode of the past, when they were unguided by traditional compromise, or by ideal ends set for the furtherance of the race. Civilization, moreover, creates materials. Its instruments, even on the blank industrial level, testify to the subjugation of nature; and on the higher and freer levels of symbol and constitution they react again on the brooding thoughts of men.

Thus the interpreter does not succumb before the material aspects of American life. The materials are the records and instruments of progTess. They are not always the final records, or the most available instruments in the long run, but they are counters in the game. Even so with the supreme material instrument, the dollar. No one cares for the substantive value of money less than the American. The old Ehzabethan feehng for gold as a substantive good has gone forever. The American worships money, if one will, but only as the "obvious, undeniable, intrusive result" that shows his view of the facts to be right. It comes from the struggle ^-ith actuality. This is the verdict of an English banker and constitutionalist of the first rank, and the man who has lived in America long enough, m the ^'ery midst of the "struggle for the dollar," knows Walter Bagehot is correct. The instrument is of use in transmuting life into the higher values. It merely opens all doors to a man who is otherwise competent and fit to enter in. There is nothing, in the American's mind, to obstruct competence and wealth. ^Ycalth is, at the last analysis, the sign of an inward power, and this is worthy of respect.

Facty Idea, and Feeling in America 7

III

The first stage in the transmuting of material values into the more ideal is the accent that America puts on "the facts." In the literature of caricature, both in America and beyond it, thirty years ago, a phrase was often in the mouths of the characters portrayed, illustrative of this tendency. You could see it issuing out of the mouths of figures in the humorous prints, you could hear it a hundred times a day. "That's a fact," is the phrase in question. It was uttered with a certain finality, as of a matter that could not be disputed, in an acquiescent tone as of a thing beyond any further peradventure.

There seems to be something of necessity In this appetite for facts and the ready digestion of them in American life; for the national life works itself out in the presence of some of the largest facts that the race has ever met, whether we consider the phenomenal world of nature, or the actual world of humanity. The very situation of American life leaves the facts naked and impressive, less mixed with the heightening of history, or hidden by the symbolism of manners and courtesy, and less clothed with the immortality of poetry, than the facts of European civilization, which have been too subdued to the emotional issues of each generation to appear in pristine simplicity.

America, for example, has come closer to a primeval nature than any contemporary European nationality; it is closer to it today. It has come into more familiar contact with "outdoor people," as Whitman calls them, who grew up in these simple conditions, or were imported from peasant ranges of life only one remove from animal stolidity. America has been enamoured of " the passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, . . . seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air."

America has also come closer to the origins of national history than any other state. European nationality begins in obscurity, its early heroes were half or wholly mythical personages, its constitutions as irrational as an unordered \aew of nature, its goals determined afresh in each supervening mood of repression or rebellion. But American history begins in the dry light of a recorded day. Its incipient constitution may be traced back to the earliest word; its personages can be disclosed in detail; its goals perceived from the beginning. Nature, man, and the ideals of society conspire to put Americans in a world of illumination vastly different and far more sincere than the "Illumination" of the Eighteenth Century, because this world is not moved solely by intellectual considerations.

American interest in "the facts" is showTi in several ways. For example, the preponderating studies of American youth are economic and scientific. A young man who gains a degree in science is reasonably sure of employment, and so is a student of economics if he has prepared himseK in a few of the appHed forms of his science. The country needs men to open up its wealth, to improve its agricultural processes, to distribute the harvests, to coordinate the swift development of industry. No country in the world, as a state, organizes institutions for developing science, as America, and she is mlling to pay out of national funds eight million dollars a year for this purpose. Germany begins to acknowledge that American natural history museums are the best furnished in the world, and Professor Lamprecht recently said in Leipsic that "America has left us far behind." Private munificence adds to this eminence by endowing great foundations for research. Colleges once notable as the home of literary studies now add courses in the higher technique of business. Everywhere in education, if humanism prevails at all, it is hkely to be found in the supernumerary regions of college life, as the students, freely living among their fellows, learn how to manage men, or in the indirection of social discourse become aware of the backgrounds of art and letters. The facts supreme in American education are less and less the intangible things of the imaginative life. The stuff of physics and politics is more and more.

It is customary for certain Americans to gird at these utilitarian preoccupations, and for foreigners to find Americans "crude," so that one fair American has been known to meet Europeans with the ironic admission, "Of course we will admit the crudity, and go on to something else in our talk." But the sympathetic onlooker feels the immense pressure put on the American mind by the American facts. They come in on the thoughtful man with the devastating force of Mrs. Partington's Atlantic tide. America is engaged, like this good woman, in keeping its domicile of constitutional and social hfe from being washed away by the flood. The extreme apologist may even go so far as to say that no humanistic culture is available \n hile the disorder is so great, or the development is so rapid; the true man will roll up his sleeves and clear things up.

Hence the American interest in statistical presentations of the national life. America is the home of the census, the cash-register, and the calculating machine. Its very phraseology is computative as it "figures out" a probable expense, or how a thing is to be done. While the ten million dollars spent on the census, which is the most complete in the world, indicates the American estimate of the worth of the individual citizen who is there tabulated, it shows no less the national delight in the orderly setting down of the factual details of personal life. The first thing the pupil in the high school is taught to do is to look up the facts and authorities; in college the thesis, so frequent in historical and economic courses, depends on a search of the records for the facts. In men's clubs when a friendly debate is arranged, the participants scour libraries, write to labor and reformatory organizations for printed matter, apply even to European ambassadors for opinions and instruction. And in the women's literary sets where there is any attempt at educational intercourse, the search for facts is the prevailing method. We shall see a little later some of the "peccant humors" of this emphasis; but for the present we remark it as a common attitude of the American mind.

Once again, the persons estimated of worth in the community are generally the "men who have done things," While the humanist laments the indifference to the imaginative learning that after all best interprets the "facts" when found, he is bound to admit that the liking for men who have done something illustrates a broad human feeling, and even he may be inveigled to leave his books to look at the man who is doing the things that he may himself write down in literature. Often the estimate of the thing done is excessive; the hero may have only said that he did something; often the thing he did may have been of little permanent moment; but that he did, or tried to do, something gives him standing among his fellows. So great is this lust of activity in America, that books of the contemplative life are increasingly hard to sell; but books about active people — the efficient — especially when ^T-itten by themselves, swiftly find a public and give a large return to the publishers. The publisher no longer waits for an immortal manuscript to be left anonymously at his door; he goes out into the strident world and finds the man at the center of it, and demands of him that he shall WTite his life and opinions. When he does, it is needless to say that he gets along faster than Tristram Shandy; but his book is not immortal.

This efficient and factual method has its defects; but it also has its worth, and particularly in respect to the disclosures of actual contemporary life. The humanist of today sympathizes with Thomas Love Peacock, who, lamenting a hundred years ago the sweep of the Romantic movement and the desertion of classic ideals, cried "The Dexnl has got all the best fellows." Yet he must acknowledge that the new approach to life has its own value.

A good number of men are engaged in setting forth the underside of national life as well as the upper. It is true that these do not always keep the scientific equilibrium. Sometimes they do, as in the case of a remarkable study of vice in a great American city. But occasionally they grow too vociferous, and would make men think that "shame" is all that cities have, or that rather commonplace men who do a day's duty are of "the giant race before the flood." They often speak unadvisedly, hysterically, almost strangled with indignation, and have yet to learn the withering scorn of cool tones like those of Dean S\snft. These feel that evil is too forward and needs to be fought by a St. George in each generation. And they conceive that the first step to a final \'ictory is to "get the facts before the people."

Thus in varying ranges of her national life does America wait upon facts, and enlarge the lesser half of De

Quincey's classification of literature, — "the literature of knowledge."

IV

And yet the student whose reading of life has only been cursory is obliged to believe that ideas rule the action of our own age, as in other times, and that the immense social phenomena of our day, while confusing the searcher for them, occasionally disclose them, or subtly testify to their existence. Ideas have always lain at the heart of men's actions. The conflict between irreconcilable concepts has been as fierce as that between rival thrones, and the results have been as impressive as the outer spectacles of man's activity that color the field with either gold or blood. From the time of Plato's dialectic up to the lucid panorama of Professor Bergson's philosophy, the world of ideas has been quite as enthralling as the world of action to a certain class of minds, and it has left monuments of itself that outlast the most durable works of man in the world of things. The Acropolis is but a divine fragment; Plato remains nearly whole and perfect.

So, today, ideas are abroad. They are effective even in the older political units and the older forms of society. They have been the makuig of some of the newer entities that hold the scene, of Germany, for example, whose dream of a united empire has come true. France has always been susceptible to ideas. England in spite of aristocratic inertia is awaking to them in the mass of the people.

Once, ideas seemed to be the exclusive prerogative of the Frenchman, who coined hypnotic phrases in the Revolution, and knew how to make madness beautiful; but the Frenchman too often forgets the Infinite in his desire for portable truth, and is too regardless of the penumbra of implication that hangs upon his thesis. Later, ideas were deemed the peculiar property of the German, but here again they grow too abstract and absolute, or too vague and sentimental, ending in "that fearful German tender-heartedness," as M. Rolland calls it, in the midst of which true thought sleeps. In England, social ideas as generally diffused in the higher regions, are partly rudimentary instincts, the dumb feeling of a comfortable security, a sense of surprise that any change should be demanded or that tradition should be interrupted; and among the middle classes there is an obstinate determination to get one's rights, and to get them by victory rather than gift, — to keep both aristocracy and labor in their place.

All this is evident to the man interested in comparative politics. But there is one country where ideas are diffused most of all. In America, life is fluid enough, tempered enough, to allow ideas to play freely. Sometimes, to be sure, the conceptions are raw, as when incoherencies in religion or politics speedily gain a hearing; but this is more hopeful than intellectual indifference.

There are good reasons why America should be hospitable to ideas. All the great American facts allow ideal formulations.

In the first place, at its beginning, America was a system of ideas, a country of the soul's hope, and nothing more, — that is, so far as the preponderating ideals of New England were concerned. The early settlers were men who were driven on by the ideal. There was nothing for them in aboriginal America but freedom, which

Americans have always conceived in somewhat mystical terms, — a freedom mainly, in the first generation, to suffer and to die. What the earlier settlers brought with them was a choir of heaven rather than a furniture of earth. They had everything to make, a physical foundation for civilization, a political modus vivendi, — nothing was ready-made. To most of them America was an idea, and this early bent has been accentuated in the successive settlements of the national domain as the children of the Puritans took their way westward.

Professor Munsterberg affirms that American patriotism is not bound to the soil, nor to the citizen, but to a system of ideas. What this critic has in mind is the apparent indifference of an American as to where he lives, — the lack of personal affection for some locality where, as in Europe, the family abode has continued for generations. The American changes his residence swiftly and without remorse at the insistence of need. Compared with the German's heimweh the American seems almost heartless. Compared with the Englishman's love of some little stream, or village, or town, the memory of which comes upon him with the force of a visitation when he lives abroad for long, or in another locality, the American seems stoical. He appears impervious to nostalgia.

But he makes up for this territorial indifference by a historical and social fervor that amazes the observer. If he appears to be careless where he lives, he is passionately careful of what system of ideas he lives in, and his first great anxiety for the aliens who come to him is that they shall be indoctrinated at once. Much of the history taught in American schools is childish, some of it is mischievous, and the crying need in the larger internationalism now thrust upon America is a larger concept of her own history; but the American instinct is sure that history should be the American's first country. One finds no parallel in England for this assiduous and reverent study of the smallest matters in the national history. Almost every native American is an archaeologist in respect to the Puritan times. Once a year, in most organizations, there is a return to the forefathers in eulogy and exposition, and as for the Constitution-building period. Independence Day affirms and emphasizes its worth by a public holiday that makes the meanest urchin happy. The English boy studies a history of twenty centuries, entangled x^'ith twenty principalities; the American youth studies a history of barely three hundred years, and of one nation. He can thus travel over it leisurely enough to know admiringly the local demigods and the smaller heroisms.

This simplicity of American history has affected the American mind in two ways. First, it has freed the social body from the heavy and unintelligible weight of tradition that makes other countries live upon the sum-total of past experience. The English constitution broadens down from precedent to precedent and is the precipitate of national experience. Hence England leans on the past and cannot meet the future so open-handedly as America, cannot afford to be so visionary because she has given many hostages to fortune, and because so many cords tie her prophets to the pillars of society. Scarcely can she embrace the gifts of today \^4thout asking the consent of men long since dead to lift their heavy mortmain. This has made a national life with a special glory, — a life of maxim, subUmated and energized, but maxim still.

America, however, was founded on a postulate. The Pilgrims and Puritans had no social experience to fall back upon that they loved enough to introduce in the new world. They wished to forget the oppressive maxims of the mother who mismiderstood them. The httle ships traversing the Atlantic in 1G20 were freighted with few precious wares, but they contained precious lives, and still more precious was the freight of social postulates they carried. So the American is taught that intellectual and spiritual aflSrmation is his heritage, and that no interests vested or invested shall stand in the way. There is, of course, the frequent inconsistency of erecting these early postulates into a verbal tradition that squares awkwardly with present life; but on the whole they have worked fairly well, perhaps because they are few, and more still because they are spiritual.

The other great effect of the simplicity of the national history has been the explicitness of its postulates. No history is as explicit as that of America. The sources lie nearly within the critical period, and they are numerous and self-explanatory. The nation-builders not only built, but they talked of what they were doing. American history is thus declaratory. This means that it is a history of political ideas, rather than a recital of expedients; for if it should happen that the acts were expedients, as was sometimes the case, the moment they are declared they take on conceptual form. The same thing goes on today. If America "means its creeds much more literally" than England, it is because it has said its creed so often that it is sharply wrought into the national mind, and affords a clear and definite starting-point for thinking about the national life.

This conceptual and declaratory attitude of America to its own history, indicating an interest in ideas, is supported by the situation of American life.

The geography of America ministers to the primacy of ideas in the national life. Physical environment tends to set ideas free in America. The apathy of the EngHsh rustic, before the national schools had worn down a little of his stolidity, was not altogether due to the fear of giving himself away to his superiors, nor was it wholly due to ignorance. It sprang partly from a dull and inwrought fatalism that learned to be over-patient with a Nature that always brought forth painfully, and sometimes not at all. Many years of sowing and few of reaping take the heart out of a man, and he begins to trust to luck or laziness. But the American agriculturist faces another climate and soil. While it is greater in the range of its extremes of changeability, it is more predictable than in England, and more uniform in results upon agriculture. The western continent also has a far greater diversity of products. On the one side there results for the laborer a more secure procedure following axioms that generally work, and on the other a mixture of diverse experiences leading to an inrush of ideas. If the environment be complex the brain is likely to grow reactively powerful; and the powerful brain is likely to become the instrument of general ideas.

The diverse population has further emphasized the matter under discussion. The incoming alien has led to questions whether he should come, and when here he has asked questions and got his answers in affirmative postulates. He has brought, what Americans often forget, liis old ways of doing things, to a new environment, leading to results on both. He has, by very ignorance, opened the eyes of his predecessors to certain values. Meanwhile the native, who, until forty years ago, was a frontiersman in no small number, and by virtue of the needs of that life was a man of many trades, developed ideas as a result of change from one avocation to another. And when he became a transposed agriculturist who applied his independent way of life and thought to industrial processes, ideas where let loose in the end. The inrush of new thoughts is hardly to be exceeded when a man undertakes a new kind of work, or handles a new instrument, and this occurs much more in America than elsewhere. The lives of leading Americans have often been an Odyssey of varied labors. They have done many things and learned much from each. Added to this is the frequency with which collegians turn to manual tasks while going through the schools, or the other frequency of the worker gaining a college education, and we see the open ground for new conceptions, and the probable hospitality to them when they come.

This introduces a potent factor in American conceptual life, — the college man. There is no need to recite the immense number of American youths who proceed to a degree. Some of these degrees are admittedly poor designations and somewhat too loudly profess the evidence of culture when it is hardly begun. But on the whole, for the purposes of American life, though the work done in many cases is not as thorough as could be wished, education is yet in closer contact with the outside life than is the languorous ease of the older English foundations, and it is certainly more human than the discipline that turns out the spectacled German scholar.

Fascinated by the strictly social studies of history, economics, and law, when he can ignore the invitations of physical science, the American student takes his place in life on graduation, at the heart of it, to do his work, which is not only to seek a career for himself, but also to say what he thinks of life while living it. He is often described as "theoretical" by the "efficient" Philistines who traveled over the road before him in a more primii live time and achieved their measure of success; but the narrowly practical day is nearly done. The future is in the hands of the collegians, who wrest the prizes in a short term of years, mainly by the breadth of the ideas they have. And though for a few years, — the "four years of hell," as collegians describe them, — that ensue on graduation, while the struggle for a footing is keenest and most uncertain, the college man fails a little in connecting with life, when he finds his place he persistently ventilates social questions, governed by the forces that make for tomorrow, and when occasion offers he is likely "to make reason and the will of God prevail."

This emergence of ideas in America has led to a rapid and serviceable organization of the national life both in its federal and local relations. The American is apt to see what he wants and to fit his instruments to do the work. But sometimes, because they worked so well, or because the citizen has been too heedless to change, old principles have been erected into a sacred political philosophy. Because of its clarity the idea has been accepted as absolute, carried on to the next generation with advantage perhaps, as when there is a recurrence to "the principles of the Founders"; but sometimes it has been obstructive, preempting the place of something better, and thwarting the generous proposals of a more understanding life. So that America, in spite of its materialistic phenomena, is as doctrinaire as can be imagined, and in an idealistic way; for it insists on an overpowering emphasis of early foundations of the national meaning, and then insists on these principles being carried out with a symmetry that is more logical than vital.